As landscape photographers, we know exposure bracketing is our friend when we face a high-dynamic-range scene with bright highlights and dark shadows. But are you making this mistake when you set your camera up for bracketing?
Exposure bracketing is an essential tool for landscape photographers to be familiar with. In this video, Mark Denney talks about exposure bracketing and a common mistake he sees people making when they have their cameras set to auto-bracket.
Denney first reviews what makes a scene high-dynamic and how the histogram helps show when a photographer should consider bracketing the scene. He also demonstrates how to use Adobe Lightroom to see which parts of an image are too dark or too bright.
Discussing both manual exposure bracketing and auto bracketing, Denney moves on to talk more about standard settings for auto bracketing. He covers how many photos the auto bracket should take and how many stops there should be between each of the images taken. During this, Denney goes into more detail on how to evaluate the scene and what to watch for after the bracket is complete to ensure your settings are correct.
Finally, Denney discusses the common mistake he sees with photographers he works with in the field. While many of us are likely familiar with configuring auto bracketing, even Denney admits he went several years using less-than-optimal settings.
My lesson learned from the video is that there really isn’t a one-setting magic solution to auto bracketing. How about you? Are you making the same mistake Denney describes in the video?
