A quick test of manual exposure bracketing. The D60 does not do bracketing so I wanted to see how well the images lined up if I manually changed the shutter speed. This image was quickly put together from 9 photos. The results were good but I still want to find a hands-free solution.
I have bracketing option on mine, but don't know what it's for, can you explain to me what is it used for? :)
ReplyDeleteTypicaly it is used for exposure bracketing. You take three pictures of the same scene - one normal, one over exposed and one under exposed. These can then be combined to form an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image. This gives you much more color information than the camera sensor (or film) could normally record.
ReplyDeleteThink of it this way: If you want to take a picture of a mountain on a sunny day there are a few issues. If you set the exposure to perfectly image the mountainside then the sky and clouds will be blown out. If you correctly expose coulds then the mountain will be under exposed. One solution is to use a neutral density half filter to stop down the sky some. You can also take multiple exposures and combine them in the darkroom or in software.
With your camera doing the bracketing then you can set it up on a tripod and use a remote shutter release. This allows you to take all three pictures without touching the camera and possibly shifting the focus. I used this technique on the Montezuma's Well and Hoover Dam pictures.
The test I was doing with this image was to see if I could manually change the settings without disturbing the camera too much. It seems to work OK even though I didn't spend much time working on the image. I was just doing a proof of concept test. (This picture was taken about 2am and the gondolas were in shadow. I would never have been able to capture the lights and the boats in a single exposure.)
When I use the D70 I set the braketing to use steps of two full stops. I set the camera to manual mode with the aperature and shutter set to take the under exposed image. Then I can just use my remote to trigger three frames (-2, 0, +2).
You can also use bracketing if you are in shutter priority (S) or aperature priority (A). S should behave the same as manual (M) but A will change the aperature size instead of the shutter speed. This will cause each of the three images to be slightly different. That may be useful for special effects but in general it will make the images harder to process.
On this test I took nine images. The first was about 2 stops under exposed. Then for each of the next photos I clicked shutter speed two steps slower. This gave me about the same +/- 2 stop range but with nine images instead of three.
Once you have your series of images you need to combine them. You can stack them up in Photoshop and blend the layers but this would be a chore. I use a program called Photomatix that does a lot of the work automatically. It will even adjust for shifts in the camera position. Then it has several controls to adjust how it blends the whole thing together. Once you are done it will save out a 16-bit TIFF to allow you to keep as much definition as possible. Photoshop CS3 and CS4 also work with HDR images but so far I haven't tried that route. When I purchased Photomatix I only had Photoshop 7.
You can download Photomatix (http://www.hdrsoft.com) for free and try it out. The demo is fully functional and they have some nice tutorials. The only difference is the demo will watermark your output images. While you can't make prints from them you can at least get a handle on what it can do.
The very best thing about digital photography is that you can shoot 1000s of images and not have to worry about the cost of developing all those pictures. Play around with bracketing and download Photomatix and see if it works for you. Find your style and have fun. :^)