Friends, we have all seen the garish images created with high dynamic range tool in photoshop, but here is a real life situation where this tool was necessary to achieve my goals.  The water is high key and has some details and the rocks are very dark but contain some details and i wanted to retain both sets of details in the same image.  Enter high dynamic range tool.  First of all one needs to plan ahead while in the field, and shoot three exposures of this scene.  One exposure is 1 stop over-exposed and one shot in under- exposed 1 stop, and a third image is shot with exposure compensation at zero.  So three exposures, bracketed around zero by 1-2 stops.  Now to photoshop where the three images are combined with the HDR tool.  Now the image has retained details in both the water and the rocks in a single image.  til Tomorrow MJ