A Small Tech Tip

Yesterday I was standing in a crowd waiting for an as then unspecified protest to occur, and having taken a few pictures was passing the time of day with one of my most experienced (and talented) colleagues. Who was saying that he didn’t know what was wrong with his Nikon, it just seemed to be all over the place with exposures, and he showed me a few.  I’ve been there and done that and was able to tell him that somehow he had managed to turn the camera’s auto-bracketing feature on.  Fortunately it was only giving plus or minus one stop, so the results were at least largely salvageable.

Life is generally too short for bracketing, and much of the stuff I take there isn’t a chance of a second or third shot. I can just about think of situations where I’ve found bracketing useful – long ago when I was shooting Christmas illuminations for example, and it was really very necessary to combine separate exposures of the same scene because of the extreme dynamic range in making images like the one above (which would have been a lot easier if HDR software had been around.) But mostly ‘HDR’ in photography seems just a way to mess up the tonal range and sometimes I think is only needed for people who don’t know how to use Lightroom on their RAW files. I very rarely find a scene that the D700 can’t cope with with a little help in post.

So just in case the elves in my camera decide to switch on bracketing when my back is turned (usually they just think it’s fun to set silly shutter speeds) I use the Custom Setting  – its e5 on the D700 – to put bracketing on white balance. When you take RAW images, white balance makes no difference other than recording the value somewhere in the file, and it’s simple to put right in Lightroom.

Incidentally, writing RAW in capitals distinctly annoys some pedants, who a) have nothing better to do, and b) suffer from the delusion that only TLAs should be capitalised and RAW is not an acronym. No, it isn’t, just a name that is conventionally in capitals, and the rule is simply one some nerd thought was how things ought to be. And I think it’s always a good thing to annoy pedants, especially those who tell me I shouldn’t begin sentences with ‘And’. Or ‘But’! Or ‘Or’.