For a long while, I've wanted to use Photomatix, a program that helps to make great 'HDR' (High Dynamic Range) pictures, but couldn't afford to spend $100 on it. I finally found out that students and educational customers can get the whole program for $30, so I bought it. I take a lot of outdoor and indoor pictures that have very bright and very dark areas, and HDR can make those pictures look spectacular!
What is HDR? Basically, it goes like this: no digital camera or computer display can record and show every level of brightness and darkness in some situations (like when you're taking a picture of the shady side of a building with the super-bright sky in the background). So you can either (a) take a 'RAW' picture with your camera (as I do in my example below) and make multiple exposures from it, or you can take a series of pictures, each one a certain amount brighter or darker than the first. Then you use a program (like Photomatix) to combine the differently-exposed pictures into one picture with all the shadow and bright areas exposed correctly.
I went outside a few days ago on a beautiful spring day, with a lot of ominous clouds in the sky, and switched my D40 over to RAW mode and took a quick snapshot of the seminary from the back baseball field. Without Photomatix, I could make the picture look pretty good by simply adjusting it in Photoshop (I have CS, but hope to get CS3 sometime soon...), using Levels and the 'Shadow/Highlight' adjustments:
But you can make the picture look much better by taking the RAW file and making a few files out of it (one that exposes for the Seminary building, and the other that exposes for the bright clouds in the background), then combining these files using Photomatix:
Notice how smooth all the textures are, and how the picture is completely well-exposed, without any very bright or very dark areas? That's the power of HDR. There are tons of examples of HDR photography on the Internet, and I hope to make some more HDR photos in the next few years (and not only of areas around the Seminary...). There are more than a few chapels and churches in St. Louis that would look absolutely amazing with some HDR work!