bracketing question

[bayonic]

... from a newbie ...

when do you need to use Automatic Exposure Bracketing and White Balance Bracketing ?
and how often ?

appreciate some specific examples .


thanks

[Jesper]

Bracketing means you take three photos quickly after another. With exposure bracketing, it means you take one correctly exposed, one overexposed and one underexposed photo.

This could be useful in difficult lighting conditions, for example very high-contast scenes. The sensor in your camera can only handle a certain contrast range - if there are very dark and very bright things in the scene (more than the sensor can handle) either the dark things will become completely black or the light things will become completely white.

If you have three bracketed images, you could combine them on the computer - take the dark parts from the overexposed image and the light parts from the underexposed image - to get an image with detail in both the shadows and the highlights. More info on blending exposures: Understanding Digital Blending (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml).

I guess you already know what white balance is. If you're not sure about the color of the light you're photographing under, you could use auto white balance bracketing to make the same photo with different white balance settings, to increase your chances that you get a photo with the correct color.