In this edition of Digital EOS Essentials we explain all you need to know about bracketing with your EOS camera

Making a bracket

Utilize your EOS camera’s automatic bracketing

If you’re new to Canon photography then you may be unfamiliar with ‘bracketing.’ It sounds  technical, but it’s not a complicated technique to get to grips with. Bracketing involves taking a sequence of pictures of a scene, but changing a camera setting for each picture.  It provided a safety net for film photography, when you wanted to be confident that at least one shot would be correctly exposed.  But with a digital EOS camera’s live preview, instant playback and histogram, you can do that right there on the spot.

However, there are still occasions where you might want to try different exposure settings, and without the price of film to factor in, there’s nothing to stop you making as many variations as your memory card can hold.

There will be scenes where the contrast will be too great to capture detail in a single exposure too. When you’re taking a photo of a landscape, for example, you may have to choose to capture detail in the sky or in the land. Bracketing the exposure and blending the best bits of each shot in Photoshop or similar software, will allow you to capture detail in both the sky and land.

You can bracket shots manually by using exposure compensation control when you’re shooting in Aperture Priority (Av), Shutter Priority (Tv) or Program (P). When you’re shooting in Manual (M) mode, you can change the aperture, shutter speed or ISO to make a shot brighter or darker, although you may want to avoid changing the aperture as this will also change the depth of field.