Rule: Don't bother trying to capture a dark image against a highly bright image. You must make a choice to either expose for one or the other or make several photographs and try to combine them later.
This image had a very bright sun shade and a very dark curtain but this image was still possible with out having to sacrifice either. You can capture a dark image against a highly bright image by capturing your CCD values in a RAW file and later process the RAW file to get two or more "negatives" (positives) that you can stack in Photoshop. This is not an HDR and it is not bracketed. See further explanation starting from the bottom of Comments below.
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