HDR? What is that?

HDR or High Dynamic Range, is a way to get more into a picture than the camera can capture in one shot.

Let's take a metaphor to see the need for this. You sit at a sunny beach with almost white sand. Next to the beach is a dark cave, where you put your Perrier to keep it cool. You can look into the cave and see the water bottles. You can move your eyes and watch the sunlit sand next to it, and you will clearly see it - perhaps after having adjusted your eyes for a few seconds.

The camera, however, cannot be adjusted at the same time to capture both the cave and the sand. Everything has to go into the same picture.

With HDR one takes several pictures of the same motive with different settings. One then mixes them to cover a larger range of exposures than the camera was able to handle.

The result often looks unnatural and strange - sometimes natural and sometimes enchanting.

There are different programs in the market to handle HDR. To get a really good dedicated program, you need to pay quite a lot. However, some basic HDR can be done in Photoshop (which you already may have) or the gimp, which is free.

Wikipedia has more information of course.