On the last leg of our road trip around the American West, we made our way from Montana down to Southern California along I-15 over a period of days. The time was passed mostly driving or tending to camp. But at one stop in Dillon, MT, where we camped for the night along a river, I set up and took a few photos before the rain came in, right around sunset.
The photos were largely not noteworthy, except in one case I tried taking the same photo a few times with different exposures, just to see what might work. The clouds were glowing in the sunset, but the foreground was not directly illuminated, so as I expected, I was either going to be over exposed for the sky or under exposed for the foliage.
However, since I was taking these photos from a tripod, they were otherwise identical, and so I had some fun merging them in post processing (with a little brightening and a saturation bump). This is one form of HDR, or high dynamic range photography, where you extract more from a scene than the ambient light would normally allow for, given the limitations of image sensors.
Three images are shown in the gallery: the two partially incorrectly exposed photos, and then the final merged product using the good parts of the two originals.
This is not the greatest composition in the world, but it was instructive for me to try this technique that I had only previously read about, and to see how this might work in the future in tough lighting conditions.
Yo man, this is pretty awesome after taking a closer look at your post. Very cool pic.