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celavin

celavin

Member Since 15 Feb 2018
Offline Last Active Apr 06 2019 09:47 AM
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Bracketing on the D5100

31 March 2019 - 06:29 PM

Hi --
 
I recently took my D5100 camera on an extended photo expedition. Because I was using two new lenses I hadn't worked with before and I was also dealing with tricky lighting situations, I set the camera to auto-bracket.
 
I had never used the auto-bracketing feature on my D5100 before this trip. My only experience with auto-bracketing has been with film cameras, where the camera shoots three pictures in rapid-fire succession and the pictures are not guaranteed to be identical if anything moves while the pictures are being shot.
 
The experience the D5100 gave me while auto-bracketing was identical to the experience I get when shooting a single shot. So I assumed that the camera was shooting one image, and then altering the exposure digitally in the background to create the bracketed shots. As such, I would expect three identical pictures with different exposures.
 
That doesn't seem to be what I got. For starters, I don't seem to have three copies of anything. I have groups of similar pictures with different exposures, but I haven't found three copies of any shot. The similar pictures are nowhere near identical; I think they're the product of me just shooting many pictures in quick succession, rather than anything the camera did with bracketing. EXIF information for the shots shows exposure bias settings of -1, 0 or 1 EV scattered throughout the pictures. But I have no single picture for which I can find three copies shot at -1, 0 and 1 EV.
The odd thing is that, whenever I ordered a playback of the pictures on the D5100's LCD screen, it looked like I was getting three copies of the same shot with different exposures. But that's definitely not what I downloaded from the SD card -- either from the NEF set or the JPEG set.
 
(And I didn't get to check too many pictures on the LCD screen. Shooting outdoors in strong light, I can't really see anything on that screen. And when I do see something, the shot almost always looks underexposed on the LCD screen, then looks just fine when downloaded and shown on a monitor.)

How does auto-bracketing work on the D5100? I'm about to take the camera on another extended photo expedition, and if I made mistakes the last time I don't want to repeat them.
 
Thanks,
CL