Before digital photography came to be, exposure bracketing was basically used as an insurance policy and still is when shooting on actual film. It was a technique used by the pros when shooting in tough lighting situations. Exposure bracketing or simply “bracketing” the shot made sure that when they got to the darkroom they were pretty much guaranteed to come out with at least one image that “captured the moment”.
What Is Bracketing?
Bracketing is a method where you take a meter reading, and then take a few (two or more) shots above the meter reading and then a few below the meter reading. One of the resulting images would be the “money shot”. Another way to do this was by using various shutter speeds so you could keep your f/stop and have your depth of field remain constant.
A bracketed series of 3 images.
Although the digital revolution has pretty much taken over the world of photography, bracketing is still a very useful tool. This is evidenced by the availability of an “Automatic Exposure Bracketing” or AEB selection on most digital cameras currently available.
Reasons For Bracketing
The technical reason behind the use of bracketing is that your digital camera’s meter might have been tricked by your lighting situation. The amount of ambient light might have your main subject under or over exposed so by taking multiple shots at different exposure levels then you’re sure to have properly compensated for your lighting issues. The personal, and professional reason for some, behind bracketing is to guarantee that you don’t miss those “once in a lifetime” shots.
There are a few other reasons beyond the basics I just mentioned. First, is because of time! Eventually you’ll find yourself in a situation where you’l have to be shooting fast and you just won’t have the time to check the results of each image taken in order to make any adjustments.
A second reason is that most cameras today also allow the bracketing of flash and consequently the white balance. Flash bracketing automatically brackets the output of a digital camera’s speedlight while maintaining the rest of the camera’s settings. Bracketing here would be to compensate for too many shadows or what you might think are an excess of dark areas.
A third reason to use bracketing is to be able to exercise more creativity. When bracketing, you might actually take seven, or eight exposures and out of all of that, your best image may be one of those that were over or under exposed. These other “left over” images may prove useful for other projects. Your imagination is the limit!
Other Uses For Bracketing
Most every digital camera today has an auto exposure bracketing (AEB) feature. With the AEB feature on, your camera will automatically take three shots for you. The first one at its determined exposure settings; a second, which will be sightly under-exposed; and a third one that will be slightly over-exposed. It’s recommended by some to check your cameras default settings for the preset amount of over and under exposure. Some avid photographers would suggest using -1EV and +1EV instead of the defaults which are frequently 1/3EV over and under.
After your shoot, don’t dump all of those images that you initially think “didn’t make the cut”. If you have the space on your memory card and have access to some image editing software on your PC or laptop, then by all means keep those “wasted” images. When you have the time you can use the layering feature of your editing software to manipulate all of your images to see what you can come up with. This is how you can combine your PC and your camera’s bracketing feature to create some seriously dramatic images using a photographic technique called HDR or High Dynamic Range.
