Auto bracketing an underused feature of many digital SLR cameras

When taking digital photos making sure that the exposure is right for the specific lighting condition is one of the most important tasks for achieving a high quality digital photo. Auto bracketing can help in hard lighting condition when finding the right exposure value is not easy.

In order to achieve high quality digital photos you need to take lighting into consideration. There are two main values that need to be set according to lighting. One is exposure which sets the amount of light that the digital camera sensor is exposed by setting two parameters the shutter speed and the aperture value. The shutter speed defines for how long the sensor is expose while the aperture defines how wide the lens opens up or in other words how much light is allowed to ente through the lens toward the sensor.

The second setting is the white balance value. The scene you are taking a photo of is lit by one or more light sources. Each light source has a different temperature that depends on how the light is generated. Light temperature is actually the color of the light. Most light sources are not pure white When taking a digital photo your goal is to convey the colors in the scene as they appear. If there is a white paper in the scene it should also look white in the digital photo. To achieve that the camera needs to know what light is considered white. To do that the camera uses a white balance value which is basically an offset that sets what white color is. Different light sources require different white balance settings. You can set the white balance in the Canon Digital SLR based on the source for example setting it to daylight sun light, candle light, fluorescent and so on or you can define the actual light temperature in Kelvin for example candle light can be specified as 1800K.

Setting the Canon Digital SLR to the right exposure and white balance when you need to take a quick photo can be challenging even to a professional photographer. To help the Canon Digital SLR offers a feature known as auto bracketing. Auto bracketing basically means that instead of taking one photo when you press the shutter button, the camera takes a few photos each with a slightly different setting. For example if you set auto bracketing to exposure mode and 3 photos the camera will take 3 photos for each press of the shutter button, one photo with the settings you set, one with slightly lower exposure and one with slightly higher exposure.

Auto bracketing can be set for either exposure or white balance. You can also define how many steps should be taken or in other words how many photos will be taken each time the shutter is pressed and how big will the steps be.

Auto bracketing has its disadvantages too. One obvious problem is memory space. Since for each photo that you take the camera ends up taking 3 or even 5 photos, the space used is 3 or 5 times more than without auto bracketing enabled. Unless you have a very big memory card in your Canon Digital SLR this can be a problem.