My First HDR Attempt

Ok, no laughing. But the above image is my first attempt at an HDR image. I think gaz first introduced me to this technique by providing a link over a year ago, but it's taken me a really long time to try it myself. The image is created from seven different exposures (all 1 ev apart centered around 0). In case you're wondering why everything is so green, I took the photos a long time ago back in the beginning of May, it's just taken me this long to get around to trying to process them as an HDR image. The original images weren't raw files, but just jpg files, so I'm probably losing some information there. Since this was my first attempt I also just went through the basic steps and didn't change any of the many preferences, so that's probably why the image looks a bit lackluster. That and I'm using the lowend (read: free) version of Photomatix Basic 1.2. I tried some of the other free tools, but some of them simply didn't seem to work (either that or my poor laptop simply doesn't have the system resources necessary to run them). It's interesting enough that I at least plan on trying some other shots. I suspect it will work better taking shots of things that won't be affected by wind (like, let's say leaves in trees). Now that I've actually looked at the image for a while, I have to say I'm not that impressed. For comparison purposes I've included the middle exposure shot below.