I've been exploring the D70's bracketing feature. Bracketing means taking an extra photo above and below a given setting, typically varying the exposure. According to this tutorial:
The reason you do this is because the camera might have been 'deceived' by the light (too much or too little) available and your main subject may be over- or under-exposed. By taking these three shots, you are making sure that if this were ever the case, then you would have properly compensated for it.
With the D70 you have four bracketing choices: AE (exposure) & Flash, AE only, Flash only, or White Balance. You can also choose the order in which it performs bracketing. Both of these settings are accessed through the CSM menu.
To initiate bracketing the camera has to be in one of the four programmed modes (P, S, A, and M). Holding down the BKT button highlights bracketing options in the control panel, the back wheel toggling bracketing on/off, the front wheel dials through the various number of steps and step amount.
The bracketing icon indicates how many steps are left and which "direction." For example if you choose ++2 stepping it will show the normal exposure bar and a over exp bar if you choose 3 steps it will show the under, norm, and over exposure bars. Each time you take a shot one of the bars will be removed (depending on order setting).
 -1.0 AE |
 norm AE |
 +1.0 AE |
There's an interesting bracketing feature invoked when the camera is in multi-shot mode. Hold down the shutter and it will fire off all of the shots necessary to perform bracketing and then stop. For these shots the D70 was set for AE only, 3 steps, and 1.0 exposure per step. The camera was on a tripod and I simply held down the shutter and let multi-shot rapidly take all three exposures.
Clicking an image will open the full sized version in another window. These are images straight from the camera, no processing. Each image is about 1.5MB and was taken in medium sized, fine mode.
In AE mode the step sizes can be as small as 1/3 to as large as 2.0. I tried 0.3 and 1.0 in this test, showing the later here because the changes are more obvious especially at thumbnail size.
For white balance the step size choices are 1, 2, or 3. The thumbs below were taken with white balance bracketing set to 3 under a somewhat dim tungsten light bulb. Larger images aren't available.
-3 WB |
norm WB |
+3 WB |
Here's another use for bracketing that I hadn't even thought of, illustrated nicely by this series from Max Lyons. If you find part of an image over or under exposed you can "blend" a better version of that section from one of the bracket shots using Photoshop.
If you haven't heard of Mr. Lyons he has been making some very cool, large photos by combining multiple images. Check out his gigapixel image and the latest series from Washington.
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