Digital BW, The Print

>... compensating for the limited dynamic range of the camera
> using multiple exposures. ...

I assume that is the main point of HDR.  I suppose reducing noise in the shadows even if they are nominally within range has some value.  Are there other uses of HDR?

With film I often using a tripod and simply took 2 exposures -- one for the highlights and one for the shadows.  Since they were on roll film and scanned together, the images were rotationally aligned and easy to deal with manually.  Shots like my Grand Teton used this approach and were easy.  See http://www.paulroark.com/GrandTeton.html

I tried this approach with the Canon 5D2, but with hand holding the camera, and the approach failed.  Neither the HDR or auto-aligning of layers could be done in Photoshop CS4.  I suspect there are insufficient details that match in the 2 frames.  I take if from this that, at a minimum, more frames are needed.  I suspect with a tripod my manually merging the frames would work, but, frankly, the quality of image with strong back-lighting is not close to the film quality I'm accustomed to.  So, I suspect even with a tripod I'd want more frames.

I've noticed some third party HDR software is often recommended.  Do these (or even PS) have a way to assist the alignment by telling the software some points that do match and having it then so the rest?

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com