Christmas lighting in HDR

Yeah I know, its a little too late to be posting pictures related to Christmas in Jan. Still better late than never. Not too long ago I stumbled upon the whole phenomenon of HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography. It was a huge discovery for me.
If I were to explain HDR to a layman, I would say with a it comes close to resembling the nuances in shades of light that we see with our naked eyes. Where as a single photograph reproduced by a camera can see a small range of shade.
HDR Photograph is a result of digital post processing using a photo editing software such as photomatix or adobe photoshop cs2 or cs3.
In a nutshell (slightly bigger nutshell, bare with me), The process of producing a HDR image from any conventional camera involves merging a series of pictures shot in different exposures (preferably raw) or using a single raw image saved in different exposures using a photo editing program and merging them using blending modes in any software that supports an HDR merge.
Here is an article that explains how such a merge could be performed using photoshop CS2 or higher. Check out some cool HDR pictures in Trey Ratcliff's site.

To try out my first experiment with shooting a high contrast scene in HDR, I headed to La Centerra a retail shopping center in the quaint neighborhood of Cinco Ranch. Christmas decoration were pretty decent and not overly done. Since it was a cold foggy night there was hardly anybody around.

The two pictures above show the opposite end of the perspective in each. The picture with the tree in the foreground reveals all the lights including the bright light on the bow from a powerful overhead light while revealing the fog in the background. Such a contrast tends to be blown out or underexposed in any conventional photograph.
I shot a total of 5 exposures of each scene above at exposures 0ev +1ev +2ev -1ev -2ev. Merged them in Photoshop CS2 as explained in luminous light website.