Exposure Bracketing for beginners - Photography tips and tutorials

in this video i'm going to be talking about exposure bracketing what it is how to set it up and how we can use it to make our photos even better hi paul here from photogenius welcome to my channel where i do photography tutorials i share tips tricks do occasional gear reviews as well if you're new here please consider subscribing this video is all about a technique called bracketing now what is meant by bracketing well this is a very useful technique where we take multiple exposures of the same subject using different camera settings now this is very useful when it's difficult to get a really good balanced exposure with just one image or when the lighting is very tricky it's very popular with landscape photographers and also photographers who like to blend multiple images or create maybe hdr images using software like photoshop or lightroom and we're going to take a look at that as well later in the video so in this video i'm going to be featuring the canon t7 or 1500d i'm also going to be featuring a nikon dslr later in the video but it doesn't matter what camera you have as long as it's got manual functions then the things we're going to talk about in this video should apply to your camera as well the key thing here is that we're getting out of auto which is what this channel is all about the photogenius channel is all about taking control of the camera so you can take better photos now bracketing is a technique that was often used by film photographers as a way of trying to ensure that they nailed the shot now what do i mean by this well some of you may be too young to have ever used a film camera but i've got one here this is a film camera these of course are digital cameras and there are some big differences between these cameras and one of the most obvious ones is there's no lcd screen so with a film camera when you take a picture you don't get to see the results straight away in fact you don't get to see them until the images are printed out at a later date so let's just imagine for a moment the pressure of being maybe a wedding photographer whose job it is is to capture amazing moments those one-off moments he's got to nail it every time but there's no way of checking your images on the go so to ensure you nail the shot as a film photographer you would often use the bracketing technique and this involves taking three separate exposures usually used in a light meter like this one the first exposure or the first image the idea is for this image to be balanced for the second image we would go slightly overexposed for a brighter image and with the third image we would aim for a slightly underexposed image or a darker image now the idea is between these three images one of them is gonna nail the exposure so bracketing for film photographers was a bit like an insurance policy now most digital cameras have automatic exposure bracketing built into them and in a moment i'm going to show you how to set this up don't worry if your camera doesn't offer this function because as long as you have manual controls on your camera you can do this too and i'll show you how to do this later in the video okay so let's start with this canon eos 1500d or t7 i'm going to show you where the bracketing feature is on this camera to set up auto exposure bracketing on this canon camera i start by pressing the menu button you want to select the second red camera tab exposure comp auto exposure bracketing is top of the list so i'm going to press set and now by dialing the dial on the top of the camera i can select to what degree i want my second and third image to be over or underexposed so one click to the right with the dial would give me one third exposure over and under another click two thirds and three clicks is one stop brighter or overexposed and one stop darker or underexposed so i press set i'm then going to clear the menu and you will now see these three markers appear on the light meter indicating that we will get three exposures one regular one one stop over and one one stop under so let's take the three images focus picture one picture two and picture three and if we play back the images you will see this is the third image which is one stop overexposed the second is one stop underexposed and this is our normal well balanced exposure now auto exposure bracketing will remain on until you turn it off so when you're done press menu press set to select move the dial to the left this time and press ok to set and now we are done to put this feature to the test i took the camera down to wellington point to get some bracketed shots of the jetty on what was a beautiful sunny brisbane afternoon and because i want to blend multiple images together i'm using a tripod so the camera doesn't move between shots so with the camera in aperture priority mode i selected auto exposure bracketing and set it to give me a one stop over and one stop under exposed image now here's another cool tip if you select continuous shooting you only need to press and hold the shutter button down for the camera to automatically take three images in quick succession and here's the three images now if you choose to use a different camera mode here i'm selecting shutter priority you will see aeb still remains on so with my images taken it's back to the office to put them into lightroom and let's take a look at our three images this first one is the original balanced shot this is the underexposed image and of course this is the overexposed image now let's go back to the first image which i think is a pretty good shot the only thing it's lacking is some detail in the shadows now the underexposed image is of course dark but what it does is it retains the detail in the sky you get this lovely blue sky whereas the overexposed image blows out the sky the sky is overexposed but what it gives us is the shadow detail we don't see in the other two images now of course whilst i could edit these images independently what i want to do is show you how easy it is to merge all three images to create an hdr or high dynamic range image so i begin by selecting the images i want to merge i go up and choose the photo option select photo merge and then select hdr so lightroom gets straight to it and provides us after a few moments with a preview image so i'm happy with the preview so i click on merge and after a few moments a brand new hdr image is created and added to the lightroom library and once again let's take a look and compare all the images this is the original balanced image this of course is the underexposed this is the overexposed and this is the hdr now of course you don't have to do hdr if you don't want to you can edit your images individually you might decide to put them into photoshop and merge the images together it's entirely up to you now earlier in the video i mentioned that even if your camera doesn't have automatic exposure bracketing this doesn't stop you from taking bracketed shots i'm going to show you how it's done now if like this nikon d3500 your camera doesn't have automatic exposure bracketing you can still do it yourself only manually now i have the camera in the aperture priority mode i'm going to start by taking one standard shot there it is and now what i'm going to do is my bracketed shots now to do this i'm going to hold down the exposure compensation button on the top of the camera and dial to the right one two three clicks will take me to plus one which is one stop overexposed now if i go back hold the exposure compensation button down dial left three clicks takes us back to zero another three clicks to the left will give me minus one which is one stop underexposed also shown on the light meter here we now have our three images so for press playback here is image three this is underexposed this is our plus one overexposed and this is our standard exposure and here's another two images i took earlier today on the nikon d3500 using the bracketing technique and merging the images in lightroom so i really hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a thumbs up because it really helps the channel you can leave your comments below you can share the video with others and if you're not already subscribed and you want to learn how to take better photos of your digital camera please consider subscribing because i put out new videos every single week you can also follow us on instagram thanks for watching see you next time bye you

Channel: Photo Genius

Views: 67,213

Keywords: bracketing photography tutorial, bracketing photoshop, bracketing lightroom, bracketing photography, photography tutorials, bracketing photography tutorial nikon, how to bracket, what is bracketing photography, bracketing for hdr, bracketing for landscape photography, aeb, what is aeb, what is auto exposure bracketing, nikon d3500, canon t7, canon eos1500d, photography tips for beginners, exposure bracketing, how to hdr, HDR photography tips, best camera settings for nikon

Id: RrVeYNs_biw

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020