Exploring HDR

I am going to preface this by saying I notoriously dislike HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. I find it to be overdone and fake looking, with people typically using it as a crutch, hoping their audience will be so fascinated by the effect that they will forget to look at the composition. However, I needed to try it out for myself to really understand it. So I did. It wasn’t quite as bad as I thought. However, it is not something you are going to see me trying a lot. Wil and I got up super early one day (and by “got up” I mean that he just came and picked me up when he got off work- which is at 6:30am) and he very kindly drove my groggy butt all around the Corvallis countryside in search of some sort of interesting subject matter. We found a cool church which proved to be somewhat interesting, and then went to this weird meth lab and abandoned chicken farm that I knew about. This structure was far more fascinating (hah). Anyways, here are my HDR shots from the outing, as well as some of the photos that are not processed in HDR, but were taken that same day.