High dynamic range imaging is a technique, or several techniques rather, that provides a much wider range of exposures compared to normal digital imaging. Charles Wyckoff is the original creator of this technique and introduced it to the world sometime in the 1930’s and in the 1940’s, he had several of these images published in Life magazine.
Later, in 1997, Paul Debevec used dynamic range imaging to produce a single HDR image for use in the computer graphics industry. This is the technique most often used today since everyone has a computer and digital camera these days.
Ok, thats enough of the history lesson. If you want to see some wonderful examples of this imagery, check out this HDR gallery from Ásmundur Þorkelsson. There are so many awesome photos here and what’s even better is that Ásmundur even provides a great description with each one of his images.
If you want to create your own, you can check out this HDR tutorial, which shows you the steps using Photomatix or Photoshop. Keep in mind, this stuff is kinda confusing and somewhat more advanced, so prepare to spend some time figuring it out, but if you have a higher end camera and understand a little Photoshop, you should have no problem at all. Get to it!