Steps

1.- Tripod, this is not entirely necessary but makes everything much easier.  Set your camera for the shot using manual focus. Modern Digital SLRs change the focus sometimes even in multishot settings and what we need is to have all the trajectory of our subject sharp in focus.

2.- Set your camera in Multishot mode. When i want to take sequences of photographs i set my camera to Aperture mode and open up as much as possible, this way my camera will give me super fast shutter speeds, depending on the available light i would use different ISOs. Check your depth of field before start shooting, as I mentioned on the point Number 1, the subject has be in focus all along it’s trajectory. When doing multishots, the subject will always be in motion, so you have to be sure while it crosses your frame that it will always be in focus.

3.- Once you have your camera on your tripod, take few shots until you’re happy with the aperture, speed and ISO, then is time to start.

4.- Take a picture of the background, you’ll need this photo clean. Remember to have your camera on manual focus. Also if your camera has a remote control, use it.

5.- Time to Multishot. Take many sets of photos until you’re happy with the results. If you notice that the quality or intensity of light changes, adjust settings and take another shot of the background without your subject. You need the empty background to have exactly the same settings as your sequence shots for posterior manipulation.

6.- Assuming you’re back at your office/home… Turn your Mac on!!

7.- Open the first photograph you took, the one without the subject. That’s going to be your “White Canvas”

7.- Open the photos from your selected set.

8.- Align the set of photos in relation to the background and start removing the subjects from their original pictures.

9.- In theory, you took all the photos with exactly the same settings at pretty much the same time, thus the same quality of light. Start extracting your subject from their respective photographs and place them into the Background.

10.- By now, you could see how the images match the background. Just for style make a copy of your empty background layer and apply a blur filter to it. Be gentle with it, if you blur too much the background the photo will look unreal… Unless you want to achieve a more dramatic effect, i’d suggest to use a mild blur effect.

11.- Mask the blur image, the transition of the mask should be placed just above the subjects. This will give the shot some depth of field enhancing the subject. Play with the mask placing it in different positions until you’re happy with the result.

Your picture is almost finished!

12.- Do the necessary colour correction to your shot. In this case, I added some brightness to the background masking out the clouds area. Then added some contrast to the clouds. And this is the final Picture.

This is a pretty basic way of doing a multishot, find your own variations and have fun!

Set your camera to take RAW format pictures. RAW is very handy for this specific porpoise, when processing the photos you can make the most of each one.

Set the bracketing of your camera to take the right exposures for your subject, the point is to get as much details as possible using different expositions from the same subject.

You will need to need to take at least 2 photos with different exposures, in this case I took three. The pics need to be exactly the same in terms of composition, and for this you’d need a tripod. Some software can help you adjust little details and differences between the photos but I believe the best way is to use a steady tripod.

Take your pictures until you are happy with the details of your subject using different expositions.

Turn your Mac on

Process your RAW files and export them in 32 bits TIFs. The files might result quite big, but is always better to work with rich info files of 32 bits.

Open your HDR software, for this picture I used Photomatix Pro. Play with different settings until you’re satisfied with the results, then proceed to tonemap your hdr.

By now you’re probably very excited with the resulting image, take your photograph into photoshop for the last details and enjoy.

For this shot I took something like 10 sets of pictures until i was happy with the shots but then it took me a whole morning to get a decent result, the secret for HDR’s is definitely practice and patience.