HDR Coconut

big coconut
Originally uploaded by Haiku Garry.

I stumbled across this surreal photo of a coconut and was intrigued by the tag "HDR". What is "HDR" I thought? It turns out that HDR means high dynamic range. This is more than merely 32bits per color channel per pixel, it usually means capturing the full dynamic range. Most cameras can't do that, so the trick is to take three or more exposures and blend them together - called tone mapping or exposure mapping. Flickr is full of amazingly artistic photos with rich and deep colors. Many looks not quite right, almost as if they are a bit - but only a little bit - beyond current capabilities of computer graphics lighting models.
The HDR pools on Flickr have a lot of abandoned heavy iron cars from America's motor past, many photos of solitary houses, of disorderly mechanical/industrial buildings and one photo stream of an apparently abandoned castle.