Setting bracketing exposures – shutter priority

As promised yesterday, today I will be talking about bracketing your exposures based on shutter priority.  After a couple comments yesterday that it seemed unusual to bracket on aperture rather than shutter speed, I felt that in this companion post I should acknowledge that, it is.  The reason for the post?  One of the downsides I mentioned is that your depth of field will change considerably from a wide open setting to that of, say, f22.  That can also be an upside though because as you merge bracketed exposures into an HDR image, you can also add depth of field if you make the adjustments in aperture priority over shutter priority.

Additionally, I led off with aperture priority because it’s not the norm, and as most readers will know – I try to approach things from a new perspective when possible.  Finally, as I followed up with in the comments section, the simple fact of the matter was that I could not remember whether 250 or 200 was the absolute middle point for shutter speeds (this is the risk of adding gray above the brain, rather than to the brain! *grin*).  So, I led off with the post where I knew the numbers rote! 🙂

So, in the interests of full disclosure, shutter speed is a more common way to go when making bracketed exposures.  After verifying my numbers in camera, here’s how it breaks down using shutter speed to bracket multiple times:

fstopshutter

I also realized that I did not give the step-by-step yesterday, so here’s the process I would follow:

  1. First, meter the scene, set your camera to ISO 100 and exposure priority and adjust to 1/250th of a second.  Check where your f-stop is.
  2. Second, switch to manual, and adjust all settings to match that metering.
  3. Third, adjust the shutter speed down to 1/30th of a second, and fire off 3 exposures and the camera will bracket over and under one stop.
  4. Fourth, adjust the shutter speed up to 1/250th of a second, and fire off a second set of three exposures (the camera will bracket over and under one stop).
  5. Finally, adjust the shutter speed up to 1/2000th of a second and fire off your last set of three exposures.

Voila!  You now have 9 exposures to merge together for a bracketed workup to take advantage of a high dynamic range, or for exposure blending, as desired.  Of course the same rules from yesterday also apply:

  • Be shooting on a tripod
  • Be using a remote release (or timer)
  • Be using mirror lockup
  • All other settings remain constant
  • and that lighting conditions aren’t changing appreciably
  • You are set to manual focus
  • Your lens is set to its hyperfocal distance

Any final thoughts to share on how to bracket exposures?  Anything I missed or additional tips to share?  Feel free to sound off in the comments section!  In the meantime, Happy Shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!

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