Danke, danke!

Well, High Dynamic Range photography (HDR) is a somewhat bothersome technique, but can create great, sometimes downright surreal ("hyperreal") effects.
The principle is simple: Get a tripod and shoot several pictures of the exact same scene with identical focus, identical aperture, identical ISO speed and white balance (if you can) but varying exposure times.
The brightest picture should be just bright enough that the shadowy areas of the scene are no longer black and the darkest picture should be dark enough that only the brightest highlights are still white.
Then feed the images into a special HDR software which will examine the EXIF information in the pictures about the lighting used in each image and then create a single file that more or less reflects the exact lighting situation of the scene. These files can not be directly displayed on an ordinary screen because even the best TFTs don't have a contrast ratio of significantly more than maybe 900:1 while these images can have several million to one if you have both the bright sun and a shadowed area in your scene. To get a displayable version of the file, it has to be "tonemapped" which is similar to picking the lighting on your camera when taking a real picture but these programs try to adjust the different levels of brightness in an optimized way so that both the brightest and the darkest areas of the final picture still have visible structure.
This is kind of voodoo and hard to explain.
There's a bunch of programs for HDR imaging out there that you can try. Some are freeware ("FDRtools", "easyHDR") and others have at least free trial ("Photomatix"). The latter one is a really great program. The friend of mine who was out there with me taking these pictures has it and we used it for most pictures. I'll probably buy it too. I've also used FDRtools for some pictures but you have to get used to the interface of the program and it's not quite as powerful. It's free though.
The trickiest bit when taking pictures for HDR though is that the scene must not change while you are taking the pictures. Depending on the situation, you need 3 to 5 images and sometimes exposure times of more than 10 seconds. Rustling tree leaves or even a prominently visible blade of grass that's moving in the wind can create weird looking ghostly artifacts in the final image. Moving clouds are a real pain too.

What made me dive into HDR was the fact that my current digital camera has serious problems when dealing with bright sunlit outdoor scenes with a bright blue sky and a somewhat dark landscape (e.g. dark green trees) below. I often either get a 100% white sky where there should be blue and a decent landscape or a beautiful looking sky but with a dull and shadowy-grey landscape underneath.
This is a problem many digital cameras still have but it's driving me nuts because any old classic SLR camera with ordinary 200 or 400 ISO 35mm film will do better.
Technically any jpeg file can only have 256 levels of brightness while a 35mm slide film easily deals with levels of 10.000:1 so even if current cameras can tell apart about 4096 levels of brightness (12 bit analog-to-digital converters), the chip inside still has to pick a "window" of 256 levels to cram into the final image. How cleverly this is done has great impact on the visible quality of the file in the end.
My camera and it's chip inside is now 3 years old and it shows. While 8 megapixels still sound great, the image processing capabilities are not that great. Definitely have to research for new gear.
If you haven't understood half of the stuff I wrote: Don't worry
Just be assured that more megapixel do not make the better camera. *g*