H is for HDR

When faced with high-contrast conditions with very bright highlights and dark shadows, your camera won’t be able to capture the whole gamut of tones in a single exposure. Rather than decide what detail will be lost to blown highlights or blacked-out shadows, take an HDR sequence that covers the entire tonal range in a succession of shots. This can be done quickly and easily using your camera’s Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) feature; in most cases, setting it to a three-exposure bracket of -2, 0 and +2 will give enough coverage to get all the variation you need.

You can shoot handheld if you don’t have a tripod, as HDR software will automatically align the frames when you process the files.

An important final step in shooting an HDR sequence is to remember to switch off the AEB function after you’ve used it. Failure to do this will result in poorly exposed shots, so check carefully that AEB is disabled after using it.