HDR
I shot it in HDR (High Dynamic Range), which means it was originally three separate images. Maybe you've heard already of HDR, it is a technique which allows you to squeeze every little detail out of your scenery by merging different photos of the exact same frame with different exposures. Usually, you take one photo with correct exposure, one under- and one overexposed.
This is the beautiful little church of Glurns, a little yet famous village in Val Venosta.
Shoot at a constant aperture
The Exif-data for this image were an aperture of f.5 with a focal length of 18mm. I would have liked to even go up to f.11 to get more natural depth of field, but since I had no tripod with me, the lighting conditions forced me to go down. Now, the very important part is to shoot each of the three images with a constant aperture. Otherwise your images will have a different depth of field, which means you cannot merge them together accurately. This also implies that for HDR you cannot use the automatic mode or the "P"-mode on your camera, because the camera would of course decide to change the aperture in order to avoid very low shutterspeeds.
Which camera mode?
You can do it in manual mode ("M"), but i prefer to shoot in aperture priority mode ("Av" for Canon, "A" for Nikon) because it is less work. In aperture priority mode you only tell the camera to shoot at a certain aperture and let it balance itself the rest of the settings for a correct exposure. Furthermore, you can rely on your camera to adapt also the ISO (when set to auto) and save you some shutter-time.
How?
Most modern DSRL-cameras have a so called "auto-bracketing"-mode which alters the shutterspeed settings automatically for you (once you've definded them in the program), if you just press the shutterbutton long enough. The camera then takes 3 to 5 images directly after one another, so that these kind of shots can also be done hand hold if the lighting conditions are somewhat fair.
So for this image, the shutterspeed of course varied in all three pictures, so that I could shoot one image with correct exposure, one underexposed with -2 and one overexposed with +2.
Reveal details
The underexposed picture reveals all the details in the highlights that otherwise would be blown out at a normal exposure (which didn't exist in this case, because it was quite dark). The overexposed picture does exactly the opposite and reveals structure in the shadows.
Software
The three pictures were processed in Google's HDR Efex Pro (former Nik Software) which is a Photoshop plugin, but there are many more programs (also standalone) that can do this. I think the softwares which are used the most are Photomatix and HDR Efex Pro. For this final look, I reduced the noise and pumped up colors and contrast in Photoshop - and Voilà!
When to shoot HDR?
Predestined HDR-Situations are relatively easy to define. It's exactly those situations in which you normally wouldn't shoot, because the light is too dark, too bright, too sunny, too contrasty - so every situation in which you know your camera reaches its limits. In those cases you can always "cheat" by shooting 3 instead of 1 image!
HDR-Look
This is always a hot discussed topic, but i personally think that HDR is a great technique to get even more control over the look of your pictures. Sure, in the web there are also a lot of overdone examples, just google "hdr" ;), but I personally think that it can get you a great look, if you know how to balance it!
We all get a little crazy at first, don't we? ;)