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Digital Photography

Bracket Your Important Photos

SUMMARY: Explains bracketing, and how it can improve your overall digital camera picture taking.

Bracketing is the process by which multiple photographs are taken of a particular subject with some of the settings slightly modified, such as shutter speed, f-stop, or aperture. For important photographs, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to correctly guess 100% of the time all of the digital camera settings needed to take the perfect picture in a given lighting situation. You might accidentally over or under-expose a picture, use a shutter speed that is too quick to allow the proper recording of the ambient light, etc. Thus, bracketing your photos takes advantage of an important feature of digital photography - you are not wasting any film!

Check your digital camera's manual to see if it has an automatic bracketing feature. If not, you can simulate this by taking three or more photos of a given subject. Change the shutter speed, perhaps allow more or less light in the picture, or maybe zoom in or out a little for different effects. Remember, you will not take the perfect picture every time, even if you are a professional picture taker, so bracketing just increases your odds of getting a great photo of a particular subject.

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The MalekTips website was created in 1998 by Andrew Malek of Envision Programming. The page's goal is to freely disperse computer-related tips, hints, and informative articles. Tips are organized to be easy to find, and are presented clearly, in easy-to-understand language. MalekTips also provides information and links to public-domain, open source, freeware, shareware, and commercial software available for download. < more >