High Dynamic Range Gronk

As someone who does a lot of railway HDR shots, I can say that there is defainately a lot to enjoy about this shot of yours. For your first HDR, I'd say that you're off to a great start.

The realism is great. While some go over the top with their HDR shots in terms of over processing or color saturation, this one looks as it is life intended us to see it: it's not over saturated, "cartoony", or otherwise too video game looking. It looks great.

The biggest paradox with this shot is that the colors are not very inspiring, which is just the location more than anything else. You can't really bring the colors up without making it look too bizarre but you keep them down too far and the picture loses some interest factor. The job is pretty well done here, but a blue sky and some better light would have made it a much more interesting shot. Not exactly your fault, but it does matter to a point.

Great work by using real exposures instead of just a single RAW image as it's not always easy. What I would encourage you to do is to always shoot in RAW and make your HDRs the way you normally do with the different bracketed exposures, and make one out of the single RAW file and do a comparison to see how different they turn out. You'll see in some instances it makes all the difference in the world and other times it will be exactly the same. So experiment, learn your camera and your lighting and how they interact.

The reason I bring this up is that while the background foliage looks great, the numbers on the train have a little bit of a shadow, and you want to do what you can to avoid that.

Along those lines, doing some photoshop cleanup also helps. Photomatix should be the 2nd to last step before Photoshop retouching, not the final product, and can help you to eliminate ghosting and whatnot. You'll also want to carry a tripod as often as you can, and in times when you can't, improvise and make sure that if it's handheld that your shutterspeed is as high as possible while still maintaining white balance (ie. the original isn't too dark) to reduce shakiness. I've found personally that having a tripod is the difference between having a good shot that I like and a great shot that I can try and sell to people. Things like little blurry numbers and whatnot can be easily eliminated this way, and you can trust your camera a little more to shoot in Aperture priority mode when you have a tripod to stabilize.

Overall, it's a fantastic shot and you've got some great talent in the HDR area. The train strikes me with a powerful realism that really brings me into the shot, but you can tell that you're still getting the hang of this whole HDR thing.

I'll be adding you to my watch and looking forward to how you progress, keep up the great work!