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Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
Page 303
some of the cameras (D200, D2 series, D3, and D300 at
present).
When bracketing is active, a quick peek at the Bracketing
Progress indicators on the top LCD tells you exactly which
images you still have to take:
Indicator
Images Remaining to be taken
Normal, under, and over
Under, over
Over
Other options exist, but if you understand the above, you should be
able to figure them out.
If you’ve set a three shot sequence and see , you know that
you’re at the start of a new bracketing series. Any other
indicator would tell you that you’re in the middle of a
sequence. (This doesn’t apply to white balance bracketing,
which always takes a full sequence with each shutter press.
See “White Balance” on page <310>.)
One very useful potential of the bracketing system is to
increase the dynamic range of your finished shots. Landscape
and nature photographers like me often have a difficult time
balancing the exposure for distant objects and the sky against
foreground objects that may be in shadow. With film, we
used graduated neutral density filters in such situations, but
since we’re going to be working with our D300 images in an
image editing program such as Photoshop CS3, anyway, why
not go ahead and use different exposures for different parts of
the scene? Here’s the bare outline of the steps needed:
1.
In the field, set your D300 to
3F 1 .0
bracketing. In
theory, this provides us another stop of detail in the
shadows and another stop of detail in the highlights of
our final shot when we combine the images later.
2.
You need to make sure that neither the focus point nor
the aperture changes between shots. The easiest way
to do this is to use manual focus and either Aperture-
