Rusty, What really surprised me about this photo is that I only used 3 exposures to create it. -1 0 +1. I really wish that Nikon could have expanded the bracketing to at least 5 exposures. Thanks for the kind words. Chas
My last issue of Outdoor Photographer had several articles on HDR. One discussion of methods to obtain the "starting images" struck me by its simplicity.
Set your 3-bracket set for 1-stop. Set exposure compensation for +1 and take your three shots. Change EV to -1 and take three shots. You'll have one duplicate to discard; the remaining five will spread from -2 to +2
I tried this and didn't get what I was expecting so I figured out that I had to turn off things like Auto-ISO and I may have finally decided to use "M" to keep Nikon from "helping me".
Rusty
There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness" - Dave Barry
If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. - Robert Capa
I found out that you can actually get a nine exposure spread with the Nikon D7000. You use the usual +1 0 -1. Then you put -4,-3,-2 and +2,+3,+4 into the U1 and U2 user setting modes. I haven't quite figured out how to do this as yet. Chas