Why use digital exposure bracketing?
Many of today’s digital camera have a feature called automatic exposure bracketing. The idea is a holdover from the film-camera era, but the technique has lost none of its charm and utility.
Some of us were inordinately proud of our exposure bracketing techniques with film cameras: how smoothly and quickly we could take 3 or five successive shots of the same scene or object, each with a slightly different exposure. The purpose for all of this effort was taking several shots of the same subject using different camera settings. Bracketing is useful and often recommended in situations that make it difficult to obtain a satisfactory image with a single shot, especially when a small variation in exposure parameters has a comparatively large effect on the resulting image.
Auto-bracketing, the modern digital equivalent, is automatic bracketing by using a setting on the camera to take several bracketed shots (rather than requiring the photographer to altering the settings by hand between shots. It is not a feature that is available on all cameras, but it is not exactly rare, either. Although white balance bracketing and focus bracketing are available much more rarely, exposure and depth of field bracketing are more generally found, especially the former, and that is the sort of bracketing that we are talking about here. Here is an exposure-bracketed set of shots of the moon:
Check your manual to see if your camera has an exposure bracketing feature. If so, you’re in luck. Study the manual to see what the settings are and play with them. Since it is fairly automatic, there is very little to go wrong, and since the camera is digital, it does not really cost any more to take bracketed shots than single shots. And as you can see from the moon captures above, having a selection of bracketed exposures to choose from can make a big difference in the end result. Although the shots above were hand-held, bear in mind that you can also use a tripod with bracketing to avoid any camera movement while the bracketed shots are taken.
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October 27th, 2010
I think you failed to mention the obvious perks that this feature would have on someone who is shooting for HDR photos.
Set the AES bracketing area to max while shooting on a tripod for fantastic results.