Nice shot!
New? But you know a lot already.
Thank you! I actually started any sort of camera work with making YouTube videos. Plus, I can never know enough!
So why did you feel HDR was necessary on this image? How many images?
I couldn't quite figure out how to do the lighting so I used two LED flashlights to try to brighten the subject. It still seemed a little dark in places so I figured HDR might be able to bring out some of that detail. Maybe that was a poor use of HDR in retrospect. This was with 5 images though at 0.5 EV increments.