HDR, RAW, NEF... Hu, say what?

Oh! I discovered something amazing - it's called HDR Photography. LOVE IT! Wonderful effects in skies and landscapes, and more, much more, but the skies are what I'm drawn to at the moment. The photos are almost surreal. Not real. But more real that some photos turn out. Check out the HDR Flickr pool for some great examples.

So I went and downloaded the trial version of Photomatrix. And I needed some RAW file images. So I figured out how to do that with my camera, except since it's a Nikon, it's called NEF (RAW) Format, but the extension is .nef. So, ok. I have my new RAW photos, but I can't get it to work because obviously I don't know what I'm doing.

So now what? I guess more research... BOO.

Here's a jpeg from a raw/nef file. Kinda nice eye candy.