How To BRACKET For PERFECTLY EXPOSED Landscape Photos

probably one of the most difficult aspects of outdoor and landscape photography is trying to determine the best way to properly expose a scene under difficult lighting situations which is pretty common when it comes to landscape photography it's often that you get to a scene like this where the sky is bright your subject might be a little bit darker your foreground is even darker than that and trying to determine the best way to properly expose your entire scene from the foreground to the mid-ground of the background that's the real challenge and also the topic of this week's video is to discuss how to bracket your images for those perfectly exposed landscape shots now I know bracketing can be somewhat of an intimidating topic if you've never done it before but the concept is super simple to do in the process of actually doing it's probably even easier than that and I'm hoping by the end of this video you'll feel super comfortable testing it out on your own but the overall concept of bracketing is very simple you just take multiple different images at different exposure levels I always shoot usually three three brackets my first bracket will be for a properly exposed image the next bracket will be for or the next image will be an underexposed version and then the third image will be an overexposed version and then you basically blend everything together in post-processing thus creating that that perfectly exposed landscape image now perhaps one of the coolest things about bracketing is that any camera out there can do it it doesn't have to be the latest and greatest camera model it doesn't have to be a camera body that's 2000 or $3000 and higher literally every camera can do it one way or the other now many cameras today have an auto exposure bracketing feature aiibi which will automatically do this for you if it doesn't have that you can definitely do it manually but if you can if you camera has an auto exposure bracketing setting you can actually tell the camera how many images you want to take in your bracket so you can have a three shot bracket maybe a five or a nine shot bracket and then you determine how many stops of light are in between each one's of those brackets I always shoot a three-stop bracket with the properly exposed image and then one image that's usually two stops under expose in another image that's two stops overexposed but you can really set it up however you like so just to show you what I'm talking about if I were to try and capture this image of this single photo I would probably just dial in settings right around there 120 of a second f8 ISO 50 and if I wanted to adjust the auto exposure bracketing over here to the drive mode this is the area where it has things like single shooting continuous shooting or your self timers there and if I come over here this is the auto exposure bracketing I always like to do it on continuous bracket so it'll take the images really quickly and you'll see right here that I have that set for three images two stops of light in between if I just toggle to the right you'll see that it's now set at five images two stops have light in-between three images three stops that light in between and you can just toggle through this until you get the setting that you would like and I always do two stops of light three images or yep over three images and then I'm going to focus on the subject so hit the shutter two second timer and it'll take the three images perfect and now I can review the three images right here and this one of course is the overexposed version this is two stops overexposed my proper exposure and you can see that the the skies completely blown out it looks everything in the foreground is properly exposed the tree is properly exposed this is the image that I deemed a proper exposure and then this is the one that's underexposed and you can see actually did a little bit of detail in the sky little the colors coming through but the foreground and the tree is completely silhouetted now if your camera doesn't have auto exposure bracketing it's no problem at all this is very simple to do manually and a lot of times I'll do this manually anyway but you want to use shutter speed as a way to impact your exposure levels you don't want to adjust your aperture your ISO you want to use your shutter speed so what you would do is you would take your properly exposed image and then you would increase your shutter speed to stops and that's gonna be for your overexposed image and since you went two stops above your proper exposure you now need to go for stops below to get to two stops below your proper exposure and you would do all of that by using your shutter speed and I'll show you real quick what I mean so if I were to do this manually what I would do is I would come over here and dial in what I would believe to be proper exposure for a single image which would probably maybe somewhere right around here and then I take that photo and definitely looking at the histogram is a great way to to do this take that image and then I would adjust my shutter speed and I'm gonna reduce it now because this is going to be the version for the sky and once the sky looks good to where you can see a little bit of detail a little bit of color you can take that image and then I'm going to adjust for my third image this is going to be the overexposed version and I'm just basically lengthening my shutter speed here now and I just want to make sure that the tree is more properly exposed in the foreground so I want to be able to capture a lot of that color the sky being blown out is really irrelevant right here this is just for the foreground and take that image right there now you might be asking yourself mark why don't you just use a graduated neutral density filter to kind of bring down the harshness of the sky thus allowing you to still properly expose your foreground and yes that's absolutely a very popular route to go in it's something that I used to do as well I don't do it too much anymore I usually despit stick with exposure bracketing mainly because I think using graduated neutral density filters is kind of a destructive workflow because its effects cannot be removed or altered in any way in post-processing so if your filter isn't in straight or if you bring it down to low and it's darkening down the tops of a tree or darkening down the top of a mountain and it just kind of creates a very unnatural look and when you get that back in post-processing you really can't alter at all so I usually stick with auto exposure bracketing or manual exposure bracketing I've just found that the dynamic range in cameras is so good and post-processing software is so good nowadays that you can just use those graduated filters in post and get a very similar effect now a couple quick tips you want to make sure you're using a tripod a remote shutter release or a self timer on your camera you just want to make sure that there's no camera shake in between exposures you want to make sure that every one of your images for your bracket is exactly the same it's just gonna make your life so much easier when you go to post process these image it's gonna make them all blend together and stitch together better and just gonna make the overall editing process much more seamless so I'm gonna pack things up here head back to my house and I'll show you exactly how I blend these together and edit the final image now something I forgot to mention earlier has to do with knowing when you should use exposure bracketing when I first started doing this and I became comfortable with the concept and I really understood exactly why I was doing this I just started shooting everything with brackets and it was a little bit of an overkill you two really don't need to do that a lot of times your camera can capture the scene in a single image but understanding when the bracket and when not to bracket is something that puzzled me and there's something called the one stop rule that really helped me out and what that is is when you get to your scene and you get all set up and if you put your camera in manual mode pick your aperture pick your ISO level and start adjusting your shutter speed until the light meter at the bottom of your camera at the bottom of your LCD indicates zero or a proper exposure and then if you notice your foreground is dark and the sky is very bright which is more than likely the case if you start to increase your shutter speed to allow more light into your camera to more brightly expose the foreground and once you get your foreground looking good if you look at that light meter and it's indicating a value more than +1 which means you added more than a full stop of exposure that might be a sign that you should bracket that shot in the same thing with the sky at the skies too bright you start to dial in a faster shutter speed letting less light into the camera and if you look at your light meter once the sky looks good and you notice that that's it has a value of more than negative 1 so more than negative 1 stop of exposure for the sky or for your overall scene that's the same sign you should probably bracket that shot but if your adjustments are less than a full stop if you're you know 3/4 of a stop underexposed or a half a stop overexposed that's fine you can you can definitely capture that in a single image the dynamic range of your camera will more than likely suffice for that so once you get your photos home and you get them loaded in your computer there's multiple different ways to blend these together you can use capture one I'm going to do them in Lightroom for this video you can also use Photoshop or you can manually paint in the different exposures or use a luminosity mask but I find Lightroom does a really good job and it's definitely easiest as well so this is an exposure series that I took while in Yosemite this is the image that is two stops underexposed this is the image that is deemed the proper exposure and then this is the image that is two stops overexposed so as you can see this scene is a perfect candidate with a very bright sky and a rather dark foreground area so to merge them together I'm just gonna hold on the show key select all three images right click and I'm going to come down here to photo merge and I'm going to select HDR now when HDR pulls up it's going to go ahead and show a preview right here I always leave Auto align selected just in case your tripod was bumped or something in the images might not match up perfectly and in Auto settings basically is just telling Lightroom to put it real quick edit on the basic panel just to kind of help you get started with your edit and I always leave that as well and then the D ghost amount I always leave at none that just has to do if you have something moving in your scene and there might be a little bit of ghosting that you need to resolve but I usually just leave it at none and then hit merge now this usually takes a couple seconds and I know HDR it kind of has a bad rap these days but I think HDR software has definitely come a long way and I think there's a way to shoot exposure bracketed series that will create a very natural-looking HDR image so if you shoot a series of say I don't know five or six images and every single one of those images is two stops apart and for a total of 10 or 12 stops of dynamic range or entire scene I think those are the types of situations where you kind of get that HDR edge look but in this situation where I only have three images two stops apart for a total dynamic range of six stops I think that's a good scenario ticket to really create a very high dynamic but natural-looking image so here is the the final image right here and as you'll be able to see light we put a real quick edit on it but I won't even notice something here so if we come back to this is the image that we deemed was proper exposure so let's say this is all that all that I had to work with and I wanted to bring up the shadows so let's bring them up quite a bit so I can see them I'm going to compare this to the HDR version right here I don't want you to see something I found this very interesting look at the greens in the trees see how much more saturated enricher the greens look in the trees in the same thing with the the granite of the mountains too so if we pull up el capitan here see how much is richer and deeper and more vibrant the colors are that's one of the reasons one of the big benefits have used in an HDR type of an image and using the exposure brackets to to create that photograph because the images that were captured with a little bit brighter exposure those are usually going to a render deeper and more vibrant colors now what else is really cool is if we come back here and look at this is the properly exposed image again reduce the shadows back and let's bring the highlights all the way down so this is as good as I could get just bringing the highlights to negative 100 on the sky and let's compare this to the HDR version at that and compare see the difference in the sky that like look at this entire area here there's so much more detail in the actual HDR version compared to the single-shot version and then of course if you look up here at the sky see how much more blue that area is so the sky drastically looks better in this area right through here as well when the Sun is kind of peeking through hitting Half Dome there so those are just kind of some it I thought it was pretty interesting looking at a single version versus the the blended version as to what those types of differences are so once you have the the the photo merged together now you can go in and edit just that final version so I'm gonna come up here go back to our HDR version I think Lightroom made it a little bit too bright for my taste I'm definitely gonna bring it down some you can really see the detail in the sky come out that way and maybe reduce the shadows just a little bit more time with them to bright but yeah I think that looks very good right there so that's just a real quick edit you could definitely go through and go through all the panels and add a little you know clarity and sharpening maybe a little bit of vibrance or additional saturation if you like but that's just kind of a real quick walk through of how do you actually blend an HDR image or how you create an HDR image based off a bracketed series in Lightroom so I hope you enjoy the this week's video if you have any questions as always please leave those in the comments section below and I guarantee I will get back in touch with you and if you did enjoy this week's video if you could give it a thumbs up it definitely helps it helps out the channel and subscribe if you're not subscribed already and as always I really do appreciate you watching this week's video and next week bye [Music]

Channel: Mark Denney

Views: 151,634

Keywords: bracketing photography, how to exposure bracket, bracketing exposure, exposure bracketing, what is bracketing in photography, bracketing definition, bracketing in photography, photo bracketing, bracketing, exposure bracketing camera, bracketing camera, exposure bracketing photography, automatic exposure bracketing, aeb, brackets, bracketing sony, hdr photo, photography for beginner, landscape photography tutorial, landscape photography tips, landscape photography, mark denney

Id: wsg7wGGz64g

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019