I have used two different methods. The first is to change the light level in steps of about 1/3rd from as low as your camera can go to as high as it can go. Make sure that this all uses the same ISO and that the flash is off. Take a picture at each light level. Then find a com positing software (I think that Photoshop has this function), and tell it to composite them as an HDR image. Voila!
I used photoshop for this pic and i downloaded also photomatix to give it a try what do you mean by "change the light level in steps of about 1/3rd"?
You may know the setting as Exposure level. It is usually zero, but it is an adjustment to tell your camera to over- or under-expose your image. On Cannon DSLR's it is a front screen setting. It's symbol is usually a plus and minus on half white and half black square.
I took a photography class in high school. Using manual settings, not automatic, we took one under-exposed photo, one proper photo, then one over-exposed photo, then merged them on Photoshop. You can get the under or over exposed photo by either adjusting either the aperture or shutter speed, not both, or else it gets too confusing to create equal differences in exposure between the images. I can't remember which version of photoshop we used, but it's one of the recent ones. It had several options under the HDR category, and we used the "surreal" option. This is a lot more vague than I wanted it to be, since this class was a few years ago, so I'm not sure if it was helpful. HDR was hard to be to get the hang of - I still have trouble with it. The trick it to photograph something that has bright brights and dark darks, so that they can be combined and create that really neat surreal HDR effect. Looks like you did a pretty good job, though!
