Bracketing Photography in the Field

Hey, what's up guys, professional, outdoor photographer, David Johnston here. And today I'm in Joshua Tree National Park. This national park is unlike anything I've ever photographed. Not only is it a different landscape, but it's also a lot more difficult to photograph. And that's because of the dynamic range in this location. Now, what I mean by dynamic range, is how much difference there is, between high highlight contrast, and low shadow detail in the photograph. So you have a lot of shots that you could get, but, there's so much variation in light, that it's really difficult to photograph. I mean, you can see right now how bright it is, versus how dark the shadows can be. But I'm out here waiting on sunset and I have this composition framed up. And I'm really excited about it because it's using a lot of really nice leading lines with cracks in the rocks. But I'm gonna shoot this photo with bracketed shots in the field. And bracketed shots are a way that you can use your camera's technology to photograph those high dynamic range situations and try to get as much detail out of the highlights and shadows in the same shot. I'm gonna show you how to do that and how it works. Now. Most cameras today have what's called a bracketing setting already built into the camera. And how this works is instead of shooting a single shot, your camera will automatically take a sequence of photographs. One photograph is gonna be overexposed, one is gonna be properly exposed according to the histogram and the settings that you're using in your camera, and then the last photograph is gonna be slightly underexposed. Now, what these different photographs are gonna do, is pull more detail out of this. So that when you merge it later in post-processing, which I'm gonna show you how to do in just a second, is that you get as much detail as possible, coming out of all those factors. So you're getting details in the lines, in the cracks, in the different shapes of the rocks and really completes a good photograph. So you can see behind me here, how much shadow detail that we have in this composition. And what I wanna do, is use these lines and the rock to really pull you into the frame coming in on both sides, but they're really dark. This first image that's gonna be slightly overexposed, is gonna bring out more detail in these shadowed areas of the rocks, and also a lot more linear shapes, really helping you pull more detail out of those shadowed areas of your photograph. The properly exposed photograph is gonna be just a little bit different. This is basically gonna be that type of photograph that you would have shot without using bracketing. You look at the histogram, you set up your camera and your settings and photograph this as best as possible to capture the correct light in the image. This is basically just that middle standard image that you're using, for this bracketed shot, and it's really gonna pull a lot of detail out of the mid-tones in your image. Mid-tones are basically that center point in the histogram that allow you to photograph something really well, but sometimes the mid-tones lose out on shadows and highlights. The next shot is gonna be an overexposed shot. Which is gonna pull more detail out of those highlights. Now, as you can see with this section of the rock, it's very highlighted. We have a lot of bright, bright details in here. What the underexposed part of the photograph and this bracketed sequence is gonna do, is bring out more detail in here. Because we're not worried about the shadow detail in the underexposed photograph. We're just pulling out details in the highlighted portions of the image. So we can really work with that and use all three of these images in this bracketed sequence, to pull out as much detail as possible for a successful photograph of a landscape scene. Now, as the sun continues to descend over the horizon, we're not gonna get as many harsh shadows and highlights that we have right now. Remember, we're just setting up the shot for success for later. What's going to happen, is as the sun goes down, you're gonna get softer and softer tones with your highlights and shadows. Now, that's not saying that you don't need to use bracketing anymore. In fact, the shadows are gonna get deeper, and the highlights are gonna get softer. So you want to do your best, with bracketed photography to bring out that detail like we've been talking about. Now, also in a location like this, right now as the sun is pretty high in the sky, you don't have a lot of pretty tones in your image. But as that sun continues to descend over the horizon, what happens is you get a lot of softer pastel colors that show up and the sky gets a deep, deep blue and sometimes orange yellows and purple tones tend to come out within these reflections on the rocks. Bracketing photography helps you bring out all the detail in those softer pastel tones. Next up though, I'm gonna show you exactly how you can merge all three of these bracketed shots in post-processing for a successful final image. So, once you've finished the infield work of bracketing your images to pull the most detail possible out of them. The post-processing work starts. Now, on my computer screen, you'll see that we have several images here of the same composition. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell them apart. So one good trick in the field is to, in between every bracketed sequence, you just hold your hand in front of your lens so that there's a divider, a black photo in between each sequence. That allows you to know, when one bracketed sequence starts, and the next one begins. So, to go back to the computer screen, we can just pick out which image composition and bracketing sequence we wanna use. I'm gonna use these last three images that we have here. So, all you have to do is select one, hold down your shift key, and select the last one. This is gonna select all three images in the sequence that you'll be merging together into a high dynamic range image. So all I'm gonna do is hover over this selection, right click, and I'm gonna go to photo merge HDR. And what Lightroom is gonna do, is it's gonna pull up a window that's gonna merge these things together and show us an example of what the final product may look like. So, through those three images, we can see that we have more detail in the shadows down here. The highlights are still a little bright, but that's okay. We can work on that in just a second. So, what do you know to do when this screen comes up and when you start to merge these together? Well, basically what you have to know is what to select, in the HDR window. And that's auto align, never select auto settings because what auto settings do are they edit your photo for you and you still want full control over your image. And then for ghosting, ghosting is the amount of halo that occurs around subjects. Sometimes when you get a lot of dynamic range, you get a glow around objects and we don't want that. So we're gonna keep our D ghost amount on high. If you wanna know where your ghosting is showing up. You can always select this little window right here, and it'll show you in the image with a red highlight area. We don't have any ghosting in this, which is great. So I'm gonna turn that off and then stack. We're not creating a stack in this because we want one single image to come out of it. And then I'm just gonna hit merge. Now, Lightroom is gonna merge these three images together to create an HDR image for us, that we can further edit, to pull more detail out of those sections of highlights and shadows. So, here we can see the HDR merge. I'm just gonna double click this and zoom in on it, for our screen and go to the develop module. Now, in the develop module, there are gonna be, several different tools that we're gonna use to fully develop this image. Now, remember, from starting in the field, our goal was to photograph this in a way that pulled a lot of detail out of the highlights, and a lot of detail out of the shadows. We want to compliment that in the post-processing work, not work against it. So, knowing that, I'm gonna make some global adjustments of decreasing my highlights, to get more detail out of that sky, increasing my shadows, to get more detail out of my shadows, decreasing my whites and then slightly increasing my blacks. I'm also gonna add more contrast to this, which is gonna pull more detail out of those highlights and shadows. And I'm also gonna increase my clarity, which really gives us like a punch of detail and lifts the shadows a little bit more. Creates more texture and range in the image for us. This is a great slider to use. But always remember to keep it around 30 or below or it starts to look a little bit fake. So, that's a great image that we have here. I'm also gonna add a little bit of color to this, maybe some vibrance and finally some saturation to really make that sunset pop out. Now, I may actually decrease the highlights a little bit more to pull more color out of that sky and the sunset. And there we go. That's a good final image that we have, of this sunset, using our bracketing to allow us to photograph something really well in the field but then use the post processing software of Lightroom, to compliment what we've done in the field by pulling more detail, more texture, more clarity out of those shadows, and then pulling back the highlights to allow us to get more color and get more good sunset detail into the top of that frame as well.