What is bracketing in photography and How to take photos using it

For those who might not know what is bracketing in photography, this article is made just for you
Exposure Bracketing in the camera is the technology that enables you to take three (or more) images that are slightly different in exposure (the amount of light that is allowed to be projected onto the photographic medium, whether it is the photographic film in conventional cameras or the optical sensor in digital cameras) from one another .

Also read: what is white balance in photography and how its used in a camera

One of these images is at the correct exposure, as for the remaining images, one of them is under the influence of overexposed and the other is slightly less than the correct exposure, so how can these images be obtained?

Exposure Bracketing Technology Basics:

Getting the correct exposure for images is relatively complicated, as there are a lot of things to balance, such as how the camera measures a scene, the camera’s dynamic range, and of course, the settings it uses.

What is bracketing in photography

With all these considerations, exposure correction technology is the best way to make sure you get the perfect exposure for an image, so if you mis-set the camera values ​​for your shot and get an incorrect exposure image, you have two additional photos.

One is overexposed (one or two stops from the original exposure), and the second is underexposed, which is why many landscape photographers refer to exposure-correction technology shots as Safety Shots !!

This technology also has additional benefits: it enables you to create HDR images, so that you can merge different parts of the image if you want to, and if there is an object moving in the image, you can replace it using the original image data instead of editing using Photoshop tools, for example.

However, exposure bracketing technology can only be used well in certain situations, such as landscape and architecture photography.

If you are photographing people moving, for example, or any other object moving within the scene, you will not be able to take pictures with the correct exposure technique, instead you can take multiple shots using different exposure values.

How to take photos with exposure bracketing technology:

There are two ways to capture images using this technology: manual and automatic.

In the manual method, you will set up your camera to take pictures as you normally would, and of course you will get better results if you use a tripod. When you take the first photo, then adjust the Exposure Compensation, Shutter Speed, or ISO. One stop.

Take the second photo, then adjust the shutter speed or ISO value by two stops in the opposite direction and take the third photo, and with that, you will have three perfect photos, one of them with overexposure, the other with less exposure, and the third with the correct exposure.

What is bracketing in photography

To get the automatic Exposure Bracketing technology, you will need to search within the settings of your camera, as the settings differ depending on the type of camera you are using.

For the Canon 5D Mark III camera, the setting is called Exposure Comp./AEB Setting, for your camera, look for a setting called Bracketing, Exposure Bracketing, EB, or something like that.

What is bracketing in photography

Then you can adjust the exposure compensation for the shots that you will take, as in the image above, where there are three indications of the exposure values ​​that will be used.

One is for the image that will be Overexposure, the middle is for the base exposure, and the third is for the Underexposure image.

There may be other options – depending on the type of camera you use – to determine the order in which the pictures will be taken, or whether there are three, five, or even seven shots …

When you finish setting up the camera, you just have to press the capture button, then the camera will capture a batch of pictures in succession while changing the shutter speed value for each photo automatically.

The benefit of manual setting of Exposure Bracketing is that you can adjust either the shutter speed value or the ISO value – adjusting the aperature may change the appearance of the resulting image a lot. As for the automatic setting for Exposure Bracketing, it adjusts the shutter speed value only, but it is faster and works automatically when you set it. It is up to you to choose the method that you deem appropriate.