To further discuss the bracketing techniques I left hanging last week, let me first explain why we should practice bracketing in photo contests. Bracketing is the general technique of taking several shots of the same subject using different or the same camera settings. In photo contests, bracketing is useful and often recommended in situations that make it difficult to obtain satisfactory image with a single shot, especially when small variation in exposure parameters has a comparatively large effect on the resulting image.
In photo competitions, learning exposure can be tricky. Some people make use of bracketing, or taking shots exposed slightly above and below the metered exposure, to increase their odds of getting a good shot. Its simple, don’t bracket when you are sure of your exposure, and bracket more when you are not. If you find that you are missing shots due to exposure problems, either work on your procedures for determining correct exposure, or bracket more to make up the slack. In photo competitions, if you find you are bracketing when you don’t really need to, do so less the next time you are in that situation.
To continue where we left last week, here are the continuation of the bracketing techniques.
Saturation Bracketing
Saturation bracketing is another type of auto bracketing that is available with some cameras. With it, the camera will automatically increase or decrease the colour saturation of the image. While often the effect is subtle, it can be quite noticeable, particularly when there is a lot of blue sky in the photo.
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Normal Saturation
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Increased Saturation
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Decreased Saturation
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White Balance Bracketing
Auto bracketing of the white balance is once again a type of feature that can only be had with a digital camera. Unlike saturation bracketing, which uniformly affects the strength of all colours, cameras that offer the white balance bracketing feature will generally capture one image as their auto white balance determines it should be, followed by one image with heightened blue tones, and one with heightened red tones, as depicted in the example below:
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Normal White Balance
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Increased Blue Tones
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Increased Red Tones
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Sharpness Bracketing
Auto Sharpness Bracketing is becoming more common. As photos are captured, the internal image processing of the camera often performs sharpening. Indeed, many cameras currently offer an option to increase or decrease the sharpening applied to the photo when the camera processes the image prior to saving it.
With auto bracketing for sharpness, three images are saved: one with the default sharpness of the camera, the next with a softer sharpness, the third with increased sharpness. To show the variations, we’ve selected a small part of the entire subject shown at left, and that section is shown below at the different levels of sharpness recorded by the camera.
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Normal
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Softer
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Sharper
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This type of control over sharpness is very useful with portrait photography. A sharp image tends to emphasize small details that would not be normally visible, so a softer focus tends to create a more natural looking image.
Focus Bracketing:
Focus bracketing is a new development, and at this time not wide spread. Currently the system is employed on digital images that are manually focused using an LCD monitor.
The examples below illustrate the system:
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| Selected focus point (centre) | 2nd frame focused behind | 2nd frame focused in front |
In photography contests, focus bracketing works by capturing the first image as it has been focused by the user, then one in which the focus point is a little bit behind the point selected by the user, followed by another image in which the focus point is a bit in front of the user’s focus point.
The resolution of monitors is relatively low , however nice an image they have , and manually focusing a subject based on the image they show is often difficult. This technique can be very useful in any photography contest you might join in the future.
Many cameras provide a magnification of the central part of the image to assist manual focus during picture contests, but even that is not very precise. Focus bracketing is an attempt to overcome that lack of precision. I encourage you to to shoot photographs with diverse bracketing mode in order to experiment. Goodluck on your upcoming picture contests and hope this post can give you enough knowledge about photo bracketing.
To see how John Warton, senior photo editor at Photo Laureates reviews photographs and meet, go to www.thephotochallenge.com
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