Recently I discovered that I could take bracketed shots with my camera.  It does it automatically for you.  I can select 3, 5, 7 or 9 shots.  I have only done the 9 once.  It is interesting, it does the first shot at the right exposure and then does a series of images from darkest to lightest.

I usually do them for HDR’s, though I do remember doing bracketed shots when I was working with film.  It was a good practice incase your camera doesn’t expose an image properly.  It has happened to us all, where we have taken images and then looked at them and realised they were either overexposed or underexposed.  It doesn’t happen so much now because you can see straight away with digital.  Or does it?

This image was taken last weekend when I went Arthurs Creek.  I was bracketing shots because I thought I was going to use them for HDR’s, which of course I did.  But one of the things I noticed when I got home and put the images on my computer is that the first shot in each set was overexposed.  So the shot above is the first shot in the set.  Here is the fourth shot in the series.

To me this is the right exposure.  It is the fourth exposure so it shouldn’t be right.  This is one of those times where I am glad I took bracketed shots. One of the things you might have noticed is that the trees in the background of the first one are really washed out, whereas in the second they are all there.  I have used curves in both of them to even them out, nothing else.  As you can see in the first the trees don’t come back, if they aren’t there you can’t make them there.

This can happen a lot.  I would recommend that using bracketed shots can be a worthwhile thing to do.  You don’t need to use 9, but using 3 is good, one above, one below and one at the suggested settings.  With digital you aren’t wasting shots or paying for images that don’t work, but you might find it interesting to see how your camera takes images.