Travel Archives - Page 21 of 43 - TimeLine Media Blog

January 30, 2014

Photography, Technology, Travel | 0 comment

Tools for Bracketing Exposures – Part 2 – Tech Thursday

HDR photos of National Cathedral, Washington, DC - ©TimeLine Media

In the menus for Nikon cameras that have a bracketing feature. With this feature you can specify the order that the bracketed exposures are created. In this menu, it shows that the exposures start from underexposed frames first. Then the metered exposure (MTR), and finally the overexposed frames.

Bracketing Setup

After that is all setup, go back and put your camera in Aperture priority. In this semi-automated mode, you can ensure that the aperture will not change as you make the bracketed exposures. The camera will then change the exposures from under to over. It does this changing the shutter speed after each time the shutter is fired. You can tell that your camera is set to make bracketed exposures by the tick marks along the exposure scale. This is an important indicator as you may setup your camera to make bracketed exposures, then forget, then wonder why your camera seems to have gone crazy with all these strange settings.

Nikon LCD screen setup for bracketing - ©TimeLine Media — Nikon LCD screen setup for bracketing – ©TimeLine Media

Camera Setup

Once you have the camera setup for bracketing exposures, change the motor drive mode for the camera to the highest frame rate that is can shoot. On some cameras like this D4, you will be able to shoot a bracket of photos very quickly! In this case, if you have the bracket setup as above going from the underexposed to the overexposed frames, you will be able to hear the shutter slow as you go through the series. It is an especially nice audible check to know that the bracket was setup directly. Having a shutter release remote like the MC-30 for Nikon DSLRs will take your hands off of the camera body making the exposure even sharper by avoiding the camera shake from pressing the shutter button.

Just click and hold the big button on top until you hear the camera make all of the exposure that you had setup. In this case, it was setup to make 9 exposures, so I just held it down until it was done. Very easy! Now you will have all the exposures you need, that are easily brought into your favorite HDR program for processing.

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January 29, 2014

Event, Photography, Travel | 0 comment

National Cathedral – Interior

It has seemed like a long time since I have written a post! There is a nice backlog of things that I want to post about, but there are lots of things going on outside of photography that I am taking care of before I can get to them. Back to the photos – these were from an open shoot. The National Cathedral moved all of the chairs out of the nave which allowed you to view the expanse of the main worship space. Having an unobstructed view of the cathedral was a unique experience, and one that is difficult to capture in photos.

Empty Cathedral

With the repairs being done to the structure from the earthquake of August 2011, some of the stained glass windows were hidden from view. But there was still so much to photograph in the space. It took me 15 minutes just to get my bearings. It was nice to see so many photographers take the opportunity to come early on these two mornings to make some uncommon photos of this landmark.

I tried to stay out of the way as much as I could, but it was difficult. The other photographers were also very kind to gauge where each person was lining up a photo so as not to be in each other’s frame. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to setup my big camera gear. With the DC traffic, I was already late and had lost some time to shoot.

So all of these photos were taken with the Fuji X100s. In every situation I bring this small camera, I am impressed by the capabilities. The noise performance, and the low light capture ability with the f/2.0 lens is impressive. If you need to make bracketed exposures for HDR, there is a drive mode that will create 3 very quick frames with 3 different exposures with one click of the shutter button. It came in handy in conjunction with the self-timer to get sharp photos in such a dark space!

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January 24, 2014

Photography, Technology, Travel | 0 comment

Tools for Bracketing Exposures – Tech Thursday

Air Force Memorial morning HDR - ©TimeLine Media

When creating high dynamic range or HDR photos, you need to make multiple exposures of the same scene. However, the images need to be made at difference exposure values. Between each time you fire the shutter, you only change the shutter speed. Afterwards you have a set of photos that have the same composition, but differ in the amount of exposure. In this case half will be under exposed, half will be over exposed. One will have the exposure set by the meter.

Bracketing Exposures

Air Force Memorial multiple exposures - ©TimeLine Media — Air Force Memorial multiple exposures – ©TimeLine Media

These three images were exposed (from left to right) for 1/3200th second, 1/400th second, 1/100th second, at an aperture of f/5.6 for all. For the final image, I had a total of 9 exposures that were combined to make the HDR file. To ensure you have good images to work with, it helps to make these exposures as fast as you can. If your position moves, or elementes in the frame move between each exposure, it will be more post work. In software you need to correct these, It adds to the long post processing of these files. Many modern DSLRs have functions and tools that will help.

Bracketing and motor drive settings on Nikon DSLR - ©TimeLine Media — Bracketing and motor drive settings on Nikon DSLR – ©TimeLine Media

In my Nikon camera, I can use the “Bracketing” function to set the camera to take a series of exposures that vary in shutter speed. Holding this BKT button, and moving the main command dial will bring up this dialog box in the mail LCD screen:

What this screen is showing it that the camera will take 9 frames with 1.0 stops of light between each exposure. You can change this to be 7, 5, or 3 frames, and you can change the differences of stops between each to be 0.3, 0.7, 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0 (!) stops of light difference between each. From my experience, having 9 frames with a stop between each frame will cover more than an adequate amount for most situations. You may have to change depending on your particular subject, but this has worked for me very well in both indoor and outdoor photos.

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Bracketing Setup

Camera Setup

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Bracketing Exposures

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