Bracketing Different Exposures . . .
Saturday, December 15th, 2012
Let’s talk about the art of bracketing. Bracketing is taking the same image at several different exposures so you are sure to get the detail you desire in your images during digital post-production. You may want to use high dynamic range (HDR) features in your computer software or camera to combine the exposures into one homogenous image, preserving both shadow and highlight detail from all the different exposures. Or, if you prefer, you can use editing program masking techniques which allow the use of layers to achieve the same goal, but with more of a standard photographic look to your work. HDR is sometimes difficult to work with to get an image that looks like what we have come to accept as “a photographic look,” and instead seems to have the feel of an illustration.
You can bracket manually, or some cameras will allow automatic bracketing in their menus. My work cameras will allow 3, 5, 7, or 9 images to be taken automatically at a set rate of exposure variance, which I can specify (generally for me at 2/3 of a stop). Using this method, I usually set the camera to alter the shutter speed from overexposed to underexposed. I recommend shooting in aperture priority and altering the shutter speed as it keeps the aperture the same. If you bracket by changing the aperture, sizes of things in the resulting images will be slightly larger or smaller in each exposure depending on the aperture dimension. This will make it difficult to properly align each image. I don’t recommend hand-holding the camera as it introduces camera shake and misalignment and, therefore, I usually use a tripod for bracketing.
In future posts, I will be touching more on bracketing and working with strobes, and hot lights, and how you can work on these in an editing program.
-Gary Silverstein
