HDR Photography By Thomas Wuhrer

The desirability of HDR has been recognized for decades, but its wider usage was, until quite recently, precluded by the limitations imposed by the available computer processing power. Probably the first practical application of HDRI was by the movie industry in late 1980s and, in 1985, Gregory Ward created the Radiance RGBE image file format which was the first (and still the most commonly used) HDR imaging file format.
Wyckoff's concept of neighborhood tone mapping was applied to video cameras by a group from the Technion in Israel led by Prof. Y.Y.Zeevi who filed for a patent on this concept in 1988. In 1993 the first commercial medical camera was introduced that performed real time capturing of multiple images with different exposures, and producing an HDR video image, by the same group.
Modern HDR imaging uses a completely different approach, based on making a high dynamic range luminance or light map using only global image operations (across the entire image), and then tone mapping this result. Global HDR was first introduced in 1993 resulting in a mathematical theory of differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter that was published in 1995 by Steve Mann and Rosalind Picard.
This method was developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term HDR is now popularly used to refer to this process. This composite technique is different from (and may be of lesser or greater quality than) the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.