The benefits of bracketing

Do you ever get a location and the object of your obsession is badly lit? Blown out highlights and crushed black shadows? Sure, you can wing it and hope for the best. But a bit of planning can go a long way to making a great shot.

Why bracket at all?

Bracketing can save the day when faced with a difficult shot. Taking what the camera considers to be a correct exposure will have blown highlights and lost shadows. Or if you expose for the highlights, you can completely lose all details in the mid to dark shadows. And if you expose the shadows, you lose all detail in the sky!

Take a mid-level exposure and use bracketing you end up with several different exposures of the same image. Turn these into a High Dynamic Range (HDR) merge in your chosen editing program. This allows you to keep ALL the details in your highlight and shadow areas.

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How to bracket your image

You can choose to manually bracket. One middle exposure, one-stop under and one stopover, which is fine. Many modern cameras make quick work of settings things up, with various bracketing functions. See the setup for the Sony a7R III.

How to edit your images

There are a lot of different ways to edit your images and merge them together into one single HDR image. You can use Photoshop or Lightroom, and perhaps even try the new features of Capture One 22.

The benefits

You will have a great image, properly exposed in all areas, with terrific detail in highlights and shadows. Like in the image above.