Friday, May 09, 2014

The Benefits of Bracketing for High Contrast Subjects

The set of Bracketed Ev values
The Photographic opportunities at the Alfred Nicholas Gardens was pretty amazing but the sunny autumn day produced strong contrast in the pools of coloured light in the shade of the tall trees. This definitely a situation that gives a hard time for the in camera light meter to get a viable exposure. I have learned to trust my instincts in situations like this and go for slight under exposure to avoid burning out the highlights. If you are shooting raw you will usually be able to get a bit of detail in the shadows, whereas it is hard to fix the highlights when they are burnt out.Histogram from the EV=-0.5 photo I have also learn that this is also the time to run a bracketed set. In this case I cranked up the EV steps of 1.5 and run five exposures. Just looking at the back of the camera I was able to conform that I was approximately right in my choice, The histogram starts to rise up on the right hand edge when the highlights get blown out, In lightroom this is refered to as tonal clipping and when a number of pixel beloe just white (or truely In the case of this series I selected the EV=2.0 photo to post on flickr. Just in case I did run a few more bracketing exposures are I walked around and took different views. So I have a few over and under expose images but most turned out fine. IMGP0322.jpg

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