San Francisco evening

The darkroom may be a fading element of the rapidly vanishing world of film photography, but all of you out there with digital cameras do have options for manipulating and enhancing your pictures. One of those is known as high dynamic range, or HDR, photography. This technique can help make up for a digital sensor's lack of sensitivity to scenes with a wide range of brightness values.

Photographer Mathew Spolin explains how he took this HDR photo of San Francisco (posted on the Wikimedia Commons): "Another HDR - made from three exposures. To get these I hung the camera out of the eighth floor of the Mark Hopkins and braced it against the exterior of the building. The windows in the rooms open just enough to get the camera outside. I held onto the camera strap with my teeth just in case it slipped. Like many HDRs this one looks a lot better at the larger sizes."

August 6, 2006 5:45 AM PDT

Photo by: Mathew Spolin