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Exposure Bracketing

So exposure bracketing is another way of making sure that you get the right exposure. And so most cameras are gonna have the option that allows you to shoot multiple photos over a wide variety of exposures to make sure that you got the right exposure. Now the standard bracketing that has been around for a long time has been three exposure bracketing. The most common of those would be one, at minus one EV, remember EV's, back from exposure value? And plus one EV. This give us three options. A little darker, and a little lighter, and that usually solves most of the problems. Most cameras will have the ability to change the number of exposures you shoot, anywhere from two, three, five, seven or nine. Those are the most common numbers. You may see different numbers, but those are the most common ones. And so that's the first thing that it's controlling is how many photos does it shoot. And now with digital and the cost being a little bit easier, you're not just wasting film in these cases.

We can go all the way up to nine exposures. And this is very common for people shooting HDR photography, which is something we'll talk about a little bit later. But when doing this myself, I'm often choosing five because I can really grab a large section and get a lot of good different possibilities in here. The second most important component in exposure bracketing is the amount you're changing between one photo and the next. It's very common to do a one stop EV, cause one stop is a pretty clear step difference in bright cause it's twice as bright or it's twice as dark. But if you want to make it smaller you can do half stops and third stops. If you wanna make it greater you can go up to three stops, on some cameras. Some cameras have more options than others when it comes to the number of exposures and the increment amount that you can change. There's other important settings that you should be aware of. Which shooting mode should you be in? Most of the time, aperture priority is gonna be the best mode, because once you chose an aperture the camera will change the shutter speed. And typically, in an exposure bracketing situation, depth of field is typically more important than shutter speed, because the exposure bracketing does not work well with subjects that are moving. This not how you would shoot sports photography for instance, because the subject is gonna be different in every single photograph. This usually works best also from a tripod. And so most people will use aperture priority but it is available using the other modes as well. You can use exposure compensation on top of this, if you remember exposure compensation from before, we move the exposure just for one shot. Well we can move, in this example that we have on screen, EB zero is the middle one. If I wanted to, I could choose EB plus two and I could shoot one that's a little darker and one that's a little brighter and I'd have a three stock exposure, that has shifted over to the bright side. Or I could do it to the left side. So you could use exposure compensation on top of exposure bracketing if you wanted to have everything, geared to one side or the other. The drive mode on your camera will also have a little bit of control of what's going on. In the single mode, you will press the shudder release, one click for each picture. On most all cameras that I've ever seen, if you put the camera in the continuous mode, if you hold down on the shutter release, it will fire through all the pictures in the bracketing, and then stop automatically. And that can be real nice when you're shooting more than three photos, because sometimes, when you're taking photos, you're paying attention, you're thinking about other things, you're like, wait, was that four or five? Or should I take one more? And so with the continuous setting, you just go, click click click click click click, and it stops on its own, which can be very convenient. Another setting is auto cancel. So when you put it in the exposure bracketing mode, to shoot a three-stop exposure bracket, you might want to do this just once, or you might be doing something where you need to do it every single shot you want. And so this is something you might just wanna play around with every once in a while. You would put it on auto cancel on, so it automatically cancels once you've shot your three-stop with bracket. But if this is something you know you're gonna do on a repetitive basis, shot after shot after shot, then you could turn that feature off so that it always stays in the bracketing mode, and it just goes back to the beginning of the next bracket mode. The final thing, and this is usually buried pretty deep, in the custom functions of your camera, is the order of the images in which they are shot. And there is usually a normal, and then a light to dark, or a dark to light option. And this varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, and some camera companies are a little bit more normal about it, but typically, if you're gonna shoot a three-stock bracket, what it does, is it shoots the zero EV image first, and then it shoots the minus one, and then in shoots the plus one. When you get those back, on your computer, and you look at them, you'll see zero, minus one and plus one, and some people kind of get thrown off on that, and I'll have to admit that I sometimes get thrown off on that, and I've changed that from light, excuse me, from dark to light. And so it starts dark, and then it goes lighter, and if you prefer light to dark, that might be a good one as well, and so not all cameras have this customization, but it might be a part of it, and if you do very much of this, it's kind of nice to go in and tweak it. And so, my recommendations, at least what I do a lot of the time, is I do a five-stop bracket, I usually do a one-stop so I do two over and two under, I'm usually using aperture priority, I tend not to use exposure compensation but I will use it if necessary. I like to leave it in continuous because I just hold down, and the camera stops when it's all done. And I don't do this very often, which is why I leave it on automatic canceling, I usually shoot one exposure bracket, then I'm usually off to something else, because when you do an exposure bracket, you used to bracket when you weren't sure of the exposure, and now it's so much easier to tell with the histogram. And then I usually go dark to light on this. And so the other reason that people use this is I say that an HDR photography: High Dynamic Range, where they're shooting a number of photos and then using software program to combine the best elements of all of those photos. And that's why you might want to shoot nine, as if you have an extremely wide latitude and you're trying to capture the best total information from each of the highlight to shadow areas. So that's what I do, and the parameters and settings to look for in your camera. Alright, let's kind of bring this section to a close here, as far as the recommendations on your camera, so your camera has all these different modes on it, let's look real quickly at what's good and what's bad, so the auto mode, it's fast and easy, that's really nice, but there's really no adjustments, and that flash pops up all the time. The scene modes, well they're a little more specific than the auto, and so that can be kind of good. You know, if you're gonna do the city triathlon, and you're gonna hand your camera to a friend, put it in the sports mode, and you don't have to explain anything, it's generally gonna do an OK job. Now this is also a good cheater mode, and when I say a cheater mode, what that means is you can put the camera in that mode, and look at the settings that the camera is giving you, and then you can go manually, using that same mode, so you can use that as kind of look over their shoulder and see what they're doing. Alright, next up: we have our program mode, which is very fast and easy, and we can do that exposure shift for better exposure, downside is that either they reset, or it doesn't reset all the time, and you may need to go in and do some exposure compensation, depending on how bright your subject is. Next up is the shutter priority mode. You get the exact shutter speed which is really nice. But you may need exposure compensation, and it can be very easy to exceed the exposure range that your camera has available to it, and that's just because there's so many more shutter speeds, than there are apertures. Aperture priority, kind of like this one, it's very fast, and it's pretty safe to use; you're unlikely to get a really bad exposure with aperture priority. But you may need to go in and do a little bit of exposure compensation. In the full manual mode, I like it because you get to set exact shutter speeds, and they don't change on you, I hate it when the camera goes and changes something that you really wanted to set there. And what's bad about that is it takes a little bit more time and a little bit of thinking in order to set up, and so this is something that I usually save for situations that I'm going to be shooting multiple photographs, that I have a few seconds to really think about what I'm doing. And so if I was to really narrow down what I like, I like using manual exposure, aperture priority's pretty good, and from time to time, I'll throw in a program when I need a quick picture. So hopefully this kind of simplifies, clarifies what's going on here. So, here we are, Alright, Don. Well let me know if you have any questions here in the studio audience. We will hit the internet up, this is from CMYK Eia, who says, "Why use exposure compensation, "instead of just changing the exposure ourselves, "after looking at the image and the histogram?" So can you just reiterate sort of the value there? Well the exposure histogram is something that, I don't want to say you would never use in manual, but most people don't have the option doesn't work, it works on Nikon cameras and basically what it does is it resets light leader, might I drift off to far to the side, but the exposure compensation is just to kind of fix the situation in a temporary system, so if you're out skiing with your friends, and it's all white everywhere, and you just want to take some quick pictures you can put in aperture priority, and snow is white, so we need to go to the plus side, so you dial in a plus one or something like that, and then you can just snap away, in a mostly white environment. If you have a little bit more time, then you can go back in manually, and you could start setting the shutter speeds and apertures yourself. But the exposure compensation, in my mind, is just a short-term quick-fix, for subjects that are either too dark or too bright.