[pod]

It's not resolution, it's dynamic range.

Essentially what this guy is doing is setting his gear on a rock-solid tripod, and taking multiple exposures of a scene in a sequence. A few underexposed, by say 3 stops, 2 stops, 1 stop. Then 1 right on the money. Then a few over exposed by 1 stop, 2 stops, 3 stops respectively.

Basically, what he or she is doing, is capturing the entire scene's 'dynamic range', from the deep shadows to the bursting highlights. Normally, if you take an image, you're metering for say, a person, or a tree. The tree might look fine, but the sky behind it might be blown out, and you only see white. It's a limitation of film and digital cameras. They don't "see" as much as the human eye does.

Then, after you're done capturing all this, Photoshop has a handy function called "Merge HDR" which allows you to merge all those photos you just took, so the shadows, mids, and highlights all come out properly exposed in one image. Now, we're not used to seeing images like this, so it's rather surreal. In essence, it's an automation of the old burning and dodging tricks in the darkroom.

HDR for social pics would be very difficult.