Hi Patrick,
I have tried several techniques and have found that HDR is the best.
1. Set your camera to spot metering mode and check what the dynamic range of the composition is. I just take a reading of the darkest shadow inside and one of the bright light coming in the window.
2. Place your camera on a tripod and set up your composition, your lens at 17 mm will probably be best. Try to keep your walls vertical. Setting your tripod height at approx half room height can help with this.
3. Adjust your aperture and or iso so that you can accommodate this exposure range by changing shutter speed only. ie. you are aiming to correctly expose the brightest and darkest areas while taking a series of exposures in between (depending on the DR whole stop steps are fine). You may need to shoot iso 200 f8-11 and a a range of shutter speeds from 4 sec through to 125th (just a guess).
4. Shoot RAW and use a cable release or self timer mode. Be very careful not to move the camera as you adjust your shuttter speed to take your range of shots.
5. Use CS3 or one of many available HDR programs to merge your exposure ranges.
6. You will usually need to open this image up again i PS or LR to adjust the contrast, saturation etc.
Here are a couple of quick examples. Note the window light is still overexposed so the range of exposures that I took was not quite sufficient.
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5dmkII, 50mm f1.4, 24-105 f4, 17-40 f4, 70-200 mkI f2.8, 580exII, 430ex, 2 x sunpak 383's, elinchrom skyports, ste2 etc.
