Originally Posted by spearfish25

People miss the point of HDR. It's not a feature you want to use for every single photo. Nor is it intended to make artistic, weird photos (though people use it for that).

HDR is high dynamic range photography. The utility is that the camera's sensor has a limited range of EV or light exposure values that it can capture in a single frame. In contrast, the human eye can see about 7-9x the EV range of a DSLR. So HDR became popularized to maintain detail in the blackest and whitest areas of a photo (areas where a single exposure would have elements that are grossly underexposed and/or overexposed). By combining multiple varying exposures of a scene (an HDR image is made up of at least two and usually 5+ photos), one can maintain detail in both underexposed black and overexposed white areas. Although HDR has been used for an element of artistic rendition, some of the best HDR images are those where you can't tell it's in use.

Attached is an HDR I took using 5 exposures from Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone. And yes, to do this properly you need a tripod. Subjects with motion will also ruin an HDR. You can sometimes get away with using fast shutter bursts while shooting in auto-bracket mode on a high-end DSLR in well lit situations, but that's not the norm for most HDR shots (ie, you need a tripod).