From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

Autoexposure bracketing

From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

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Autoexposure bracketing

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- There are a variety of photographic situations where you may want to bracket your exposures. They fall into two different categories, I think. One would be High Dynamic Range Imaging, or HDR, where you need to capture multiple exposures in order to blend all of that information together into an HDR image in post processing. The other category would be nervousness where you're just not sure about the proper exposure so you want to give yourself a little bit of insurance. A shot that's brighter than you think it needs to be and a shot that's darker than it needs to be and a shot that is based on the metering, for example, so that hopefully one of those three will come out good. Of course, you can bracket by simply shooting in manual mode and adjusting the exposure between shots or in a semiautomatic mode by adjusting the amount of exposure compensation. But in most cases, your camera will probably enable you to automate that process with automatic exposure bracketing. There are typically two basic steps to help make the most of automatic exposure bracketing. The first is to configure the actual bracketing itself for those exposures. Many cameras now enable you to choose how many shots you want to bracket. Do you want just the single shot? Do you want to bracket by three shots? Five shots, seven shots? In some cases, even nine exposures that you can bracket by. And then you can choose how to configure that bracketing, so how much separation between the individual exposures. If it's a case of nervousness for example, then you might separate in one-stop increments. For HDR you might separate by two-stop increments. And you can even adjust the compensation, shift that scale upward or downward as appropriate based on the circumstances. So that is essentially the first step. Configure the bracketing itself in the camera. And then step two in most cases is to set a timed exposure. With most cameras, if you use automatic exposure bracketing, it's not exactly completely automatic. You'll take a shot, then press the button again, then press the button again for each of those exposures in the bracket with the camera adjusting the exposure for each. But if you set a timed exposure, then typically, once you trigger the exposure, then the camera will capture all of the frames in your bracket as quickly as possible. So here I have a two-second timer. (rapid shutter clicking) and seven shots in my bracket captured as quickly as the camera is able to because I performed those two steps, not just configuring the bracketing itself but also setting a timed exposure mode so then the camera will trigger all of the exposures automatically as quickly as possible.

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