Still doing bracketing?
As you may have noticed, a lot of my recent photos are no longer created from multiple exposures. So you may wonder if I still bracket my shots. And the answer is simple. Yes I do. Even if I don’t use them in the end, the storage is cheap, and it’s always better to be safe than sorry. I rather have an extra exposure I don’t need, than having a situation where I need one and I don’t have it.
So why I don’t use them? I mostly don’t need to. I still could blend multiple exposures for every image, but with the recent sensors, I get enough from a single exposure. I just don’t feel the need to do blend anymore. Cameras and editing software are good enough for the results I want :)
The huge sun at the horizon
And today’s photo shows what I mean. It’s a sunrise shot, with the sun in it, and still I used only one exposure. You can check out the original shot on the side here and yes, it is very dark.
There are multiple reasons to do it this was. First, I was taking this shot handheld. I would prefer to not, but if you ever been on the Burj Khalifa observatory, you would have seen that the slits in the windows are very slim. And since I used the 12mm lens, I could not get close enough to the glass with the tripod. So having the shot dark, makes it much easier to handhold it, as I used a shorter exposure here.
Secondly, you can recover much more from shadows than from highlights in RAW files. So keeping a shot like this darker makes it easier to post-process.
But as you can see, I could recover the detail from the shadows and I did not need a second exposure here. But, if I had one, I would use it, as that would result in a bit cleaner image.
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