Exposure Bracketing for Tricky Lighting

Many times you may have had to take pictures in places where you were not sure whether the light conditions are good or bad for the shot. In these conditions a camera’s light meter automatically determines the exposure values (Aperture/Shutter) for the shot. In challenging lighting conditions this auto determination may not get you the effect that you desired.

Here you have a couple of options. You can go manual and adjust the shutter values while using an aperture priority mode or use different aperture values in shutter priority mode. If you not a professional photographer (like me) and your livelihood doesn’t depend upon the pictures that you take, then this manual approach can be a tedious exercise. Luckily for me and people like me, most DSLR cameras today have an Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) function and they may also have an Exposure Compensation function. Both these are very useful to painlessly adjust the exposure of your shots in challenging light conditions.

I use a the Sony A300 DSLR and it has both these functions available. You can see them in the image below. Both the AEL and the Exposure Compensation buttons are to the right of the view finder.

The Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) function takes 3 shots in succession, the first at base exposure, the second at a level less than base and the third at a level higher than base. This can give you a good idea of whether the shot you want to use can look better at other exposure levels. The Exposure Compensation function lets you specify the level of exposure on a scale and you can take single shots at each exposure level and compare to the auto exposure shot to get your best shot. Both these are very useful if you are taking some pictures with more light or less light or shooting in areas with lots of shadow or areas of brightness.

I have found this useful especially while taking portraits in low light where the camera tends to overcompensate and the subject appears unnaturally bright or stands out too much. Here you can actually reduce the exposure by a level or two to get a more natural color to the whole scene.

To go slightly more advanced, you can use bracketing in either shutter priority or aperture priority mode. In shutter priority mode the shutter speed will be constant and AEB will only change the aperture to get different levels of exposure. Similarly in aperture priority mode, AEB will adjust the shutter speed to get different levels of exposure.

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