The process of using Bracketing

14 Jan

I am an interior photographer and I have been taking landscape and now property photographs for years. My process is used to take these types of images, which is called bracketing. This means that I take three images per view and then use the HDR feature on either Lightroom or Photoshop to combine the three photographs together.

HDR - The letters stand for High Dynamic Range

It means that your camera will process photos slightly differently than normal in order to capture greater detail from bright and dark areas in your photo.

See below for an example of the HDR of Brighten Pier.

I have practised using bracketing and the HDR technique when shooting landscape photographs. Recently for my business, I have developed my own style of interior shoots, showing the rooms to be bright and airy. In the above photograph, I have enhanced the darker areas and brought in the heavily clouded sky.

Bracketing

The process I use when taking the photographs is bracketing, as bracketing is when you take several photos with different settings between the brackets. Exposure bracketing is when each picture is taken with different exposure settings.

These are the settings I use when exposure bracketing:

1. -5 exposure compensation

2. camera exposed

3. +5 image exposure compensation.

You can use the exposure compensation tool on your camera, see the image below.

When taking these three photographs please make sure that you use a tripod and let’s not forget that each photo needs to be identical. You will also need to keep your tripod level. I use this aspect on my Live View option at the back of my camera to make sure I am level with both horizontal and vertical lines in each photograph.

Once you have taken each photograph you should check the histogram data on your camera to see the quality of the highlights in each photograph. The highlights will indicate the strength of the light source and show if you have areas of overexposure and lost detail.

Here are a couple of ways that you can check this and possible re-take it.