Bracketing in Photography
Use bracketing on your DSLR for great exposures
Due to the nature of what it means, bracketing has in the past been reserved for the professional photographer who could afford to and found it necessary to “burn” a lot of emulsion film to get the shot spot on.
Now with the introduction of “almost” in-exhaustive and cheap to run digital photography, we can all practice with and learn from bracketing techniques using your cameras exposure settings, white balance settings and flash photography settings.
So what is bracketing in photography?
It means you have the ability to be able to take three or more shots of the same scene each with differing exposure, white balance or flash values. One is taken with a correct exposure according to the metering setting on your camera, one is underexposed and one is overexposed.
The under and over exposed shots can be taken within a range of + or – 3 stops either way with half or third stop increments.
By doing this, you can asses which of each represents the closest and most accurate exposure. By taking multiple exposures of the same this, you are also able to make some creative and useful HDR Images.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Bracketing
HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range” and it is the process whereby multiple images are taken or multiple exposure versions of the same shot (taken from the same RAW file) are layered onto each other to create the perfect exposure. When done subtly, this effect is excellent for guaranteeing that you get the correct exposure every time.
However, push this process a little further and you start to get some really wacky effects which is currently proving to be quite popular. Do a Google search for HDR imaging and check out some of the results.
There are various ways and means to bracket the exposure for images including exposure-bracketing and white-balance-bracketing. Learn how to use both of these using your current DSLR as it is a sure fire way of teaching yourself a deeper understanding of correct exposure.
So, let’s look at how it can affect Exposure and White balance.