Just after the storm passed by...

If you are shooting into the sun and want to get a similar photo such as this, HDR is pretty much the way to go if you want to ensure that you capture the entire dynamic range of a scene. Given the amount of contrast in this particular case, one exposure would not have been enough as I would have had to either expose for the highlights while crushing the shadows or expose for the shadows and blowout my highlights.

I will admit that my HDR workflow is a bit convoluted and tedious but at the end of the day, I enjoy creating something that shows what I was able to see and feel in the photograph. In this HDR, I used a total of (3) HDR programs to create the photo you see here which to most, can be considered a bit overboard. My HDR workflow in a nutshell is to run my brackets through various HDR programs and the outputs are brought into photoshop where I mask each part of the photo I like from each output to get the final result. Now if I remember correctly, I used HDR Efex Pro for the sky since I really loved how the algorithm brought the blues and oranges in the clouds. I then used the 16 bit tonemapper in Photomatix to bring out the texture/detail in wood on the bridge and for everything else, I used the 32bit Photomatix plugin for Lightroom since I find that the greens with other HDR software can be a bit too "electric" for my tastes.

I think I will make a video tutorial using this HDR at some point so I can better explain my HDR workflow. Stay tuned....