Handling bright sunlight

The only to handle the extreme contrast that results from shooting in the middle of the day under bright sunlight is with HDR.  This is a picture of the French House at Louisiana State University, and I took the shot just after noon.  I used three frames with a 3-f/stop increment in exposure.  The reason why you can see all the detail in both the shadows and the highlights is because I used HDR. The challenge for many photographers is that we can see detail like this with our eyes, but because digital sensors are not as sophisticated as our eye/brain combination, they can't capture the dynamic range needed.  Instead, with a single exposure the shadows go very dark or black and highlights often blow out.   I chose aperture priority and f/8, and I raised the ISO to 1000 even though the sun was out.  I did that because with the three f/stop difference between the shots, I didn't want to run into a problem with a shutter speed that was too slow.  I hand held this picture and used a 24-105mm lens and processed the composite image with Nik HDR Pro Efex 2.