Bracketing shots

[arnica]

Hi All,

I wanted a little help in taking bracketed shots and manually blending them afterwards to get a wider dynamic range in the picture.
I know it's too late to this this now, but let's use the following shot as an example. I understand that in order to take bracketed shorts, you keep generally keep the aperture constant and change the shutter speed by a stop, or however many depending of your desire, and keep on taking a shot with the altered shutter difference.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7441/9419487408_7cab5979e1_b.jpg

My question is how to you expose for the brightest and darkest areas of the frame? I take it the brightest part of the frame would be the bright yellow/orangey bits on the far right, and the darkest part of the frame would be the silhouettes.

In the example above what would you do? it's a learning curve for me, so please forgive me if I ask silly questions.

[ameerat42]

Your camera should have (adjustable) bracketing controls. Actually, mine varies the f-stop, even in manual mode (when I accidentally fumble it on).
Am.

[arnica]

Your camera should have (adjustable) bracketing controls. Actually, mine varies the f-stop, even in manual mode (when I accidentally fumble it on).
Am.

Hi Am,

Thanks for the reply. Yes it's the BKT function. However i wanted to do this manually so I could learn it without having to reply on the automation.

[ameerat42]

I see. You can change the shutter speed, though I used to change the aperture. Yes, a stop either way is a fairly good rule of thumb. You could practise on a greyscale card, or some extreme scene lighting that you might set up. Even go past 1 stop if you're only shooting in jpeg.

I have found (and this sounds repetitive) that even by differential processing of a single raw image you can get a fair bit of DR in resulting jpegs. These you can then blend.

Am.

[CarlR]

The Bracket function varies the shutter speed, as changing the aperture will affect the DOF. For a given exposure meter value, adjusting Exposure compensation will have a similar effect.

However, the question is what are you going to do with the bracketed exposures?

As a technique, HDR requires blending of the three or more bracketed exposures. The HDR plug ins blend and manipulate the image to provide detail in the dark areas whilst maintaining the highlights.

Of course, if you shoot in RAW, there is the ability to selectively recover blacks / shadows / highlights using LR, PS or another image editing program without blending those bracketed exposures. In this case, you are using bracketing to minimise the risk of incorrectly exposing the image and picking the image with the optimum exposure to work on.

[Mark L]

I understand that in order to take bracketed shorts, you keep generally keep the aperture constant and change the shutter speed by a stop, or however many depending of your desire, and keep on taking a shot with the altered shutter difference.

I think you understand.

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My question is how to you expose for the brightest and darkest areas of the frame?

Choose an exposure mid way between the brightest and darkest areas and take your bracketed photos. You may need to go to more than one stop if there is a wide light variation.

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In the example above what would you do?

It depends. Do you want the shrub thing and it's reflection showing detail or silhouetted?
And if you bracket using RAW it gives you even more to work with than just one RAW photo adjusted and blended.
Just a few thoughts from someone that's not an expert with this.