WOW janna you're 15 and this accomplished and driven!!! CRAZY. so impressed.
anyway (lol), to answer your question, you need a tripod but you just take a shot over-exposed, a shot under-exposed and a correctly exposed shot and then drag/drop all three into this program called Photomatix and it produces the HDR image. you can then change some stuff within that program and export it to further edit in photoshop. sometimes certain parts come out bad but you can mask from one of the three images on top of the weird part.
hope this helps a bit!!! keep in touch if you would!