I was recently hired to take some shots of the interior and exterior of 6 medical office buildings around Nashville. This is sort of an unusual type of shoot for me but I really enjoyed it! That is, all except for the getting up super early to get buildings before cars showed up. I used the HDR process in the examples below.
HDR or High Dynamic Ratio is a process that works especially well with buildings. To get an HDR image, you need to use a tripod and take multiple photos while bracketing to get different exposures. I set the shutter speed and aperture and change the ISO to get a perfect exposure and then overexpose a shot and then underexpose a shot. Then you layer the 3 shots using a script in Photoshop or any number of plug-ins such as Photomatix. They usually come out sort of smoky looking so it helps to raise the contrast afterwards and then you get images that look like the examples below. You can vary a number of settings to control how cartoonish the images come out.
I've tried this with portraits and it usually makes people look bruised or dead but if you are willing to spend the time in Photoshop, you can make a background look like this and then cut the person out of the shot with the best exposure and lay them over the HDR image so the background looks cool and the subject doesn't look like they were boxing before the shoot. That is always something fun to try to mix things up a little and give your clients a little variety!
