AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing)

I know I mentioned this yesterday but I just want to run through Auto Exposure Bracketing pre-HDR (High Dynamic Range Photography).

When we move onto HDR things get quite complicated with the SX40 so I want to just run through the reasons for exposure bracketing first.

The idea of exposure bracketing is that you can guarantee that you get the right exposure for your image, especially if you don't have the time to keep reviewing back through your photos.

Exposure is essentially how bright your images are coming out. Over exposed images are often too bright and too much light is affecting the image. Vice Versa, under exposed images are too dark and not enough detail can be seen.

Imagine you are at an event, you have your images set up perfectly so you start snapping away. However, as the light changes and as you move indoors and outdoors, that lighting is going to change, and if you don't keep an eye on your settings, some of your pictures are going to come out too dark or too light because you haven't been paying attention to the light changing around you.

However at events, we don't have time to sit there reviewing every picture we take. The same with taking pictures of family gatherings or pets or when we are going around on a tour of a building, there's not always time to check our pictures came out OK. With bracketing, we can tell the camera to automatically take three pictures every time we take a shot. This means that, if our original settings come out badly, we have one picture that is brighter and one picture that is darker, and if we did have a moment where our original settings weren't right, likeliness is that one of the other pictures came out OK instead.

Obviously, you will need to take into consideration that you will now have 3x the amount of pictures to look through and also 3x less space on our memory card so really this isn't ideal to use every day, all the time. But it certainly helps when we are photographing something important.


So just to show you, these three pictures were taken with bracketing this morning...



Original:

Under Exposed:

Over Exposed:

So you can imagine, had the sun gone in, and I was still using these settings, the over exposed image would have come out bright enough and the original may have been a little bit too dark. The under exposed would have been way too dark but at least by have bracketing switched on, the over exposed image would have redeemed the bad settings on the original.