Making high dynamic range pictures from one photograph

I’ve always liked making High Dynamic Range photographs. These are created by merging several different pictures with different exposures. The idea is that the combined picture has a great range of light and dark. However, making the images can be a bit of a pain. You have to take three or more shots and then use a program to combine them. And if things in the picture move, for example a tree blown by the wind, you can get some annoying artefacts.

So yesterday I tried a simpler approach. I deliberately under exposed each picture to make sure that I captured the sky detail and then made the dark parts of the picture lighter using Lightroom. I’m quite pleased with the results.