HDR Photography By Thomas Wuhrer

• 1930
High dynamic range imaging was originally developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Charles Wyckoff. Wyckoff's detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared on the cover of Life magazine in the mid 1950s. Wyckoff implemented local neighborhood tone remapping to combine differently exposed film layers into one single image of greater dynamic range.
• Mid-century
Mid-century, manual tone mapping was particularly done using dodging and burning – selectively increasing or decreasing the exposure of regions of the photograph to yield better tonality reproduction. An excellent example is the photograph "Schweitzer at the Lamp" by W. Eugene Smith, from his 1954 photo essay A Man of Mercy on Dr. Albert Schweitzer and his humanitarian work in French Equatorial Africa. The image took 5 days to produce, in order to reproduce the tonal range of the scene, which ranges from a bright lamp (relative to the scene) to a dark shadow.