Message text written by INTERNET:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Always? Wow. Any other nature folks out there always bracket? Herb, is this +- a half, a third, or a whole stop? <
because of the subjects i shoot and the lighting i like to shoot in, the bracketing for me usually is metered, metered -1/2, and metered -1 stop. on tricky lighting, i will go at least half stop over to 1.5 stops under in half stop steps. this range comes about mostly because i shoot slide film. if i had to shoot print film for some reason, like weddings/portraits and i had a chance to bracket, i would shift all of the bracketing to the overexposure side instead of the under exposure side. casual shots don't get bracketed, but i shoot very few of them on film. they belong on the digital camera. having said all that, 60-70% of all of my selects come at half stop under and almost all the rest at metered exposure. what is more interesting is that i always shoot in evaluative mode on both film and digital. i have never yet exposed an image on my current film camera that uses spot or center-weighted averaging mode and i am almost certain that i haven't used fully manual mode either. based on my experiences shooting slides, i would say that i have not yet run into a natural light situation where half-stop bracketing has not found the exposure i like the best. my first camera with any control more than a shutter release was a Pentax S1a/H1a. no builtin meter. after a few months shooting with the accessory clip-on meter, i stopped using the meter and estimated exposure by eye. PlusX film gave me enough exposure latitude to cover the rest. i do not miss those days. i trust the evaluative metering on my camera and have not had any regrets or missed shots because the meter misread the situation by more than half a stop. most of the time shooting, i never need to think about exposure in the conventional way, just that i bracketed in my standard way around what the meter says. i spend my time on composition first, depth of field second, and freezing or blurring action third. Herb...
