09-24-08 – In and Out

If I shoot in shutter priority mode, focal length and aperture are fixed. Are white balance and ISO locked as well? Or would I need to shoot in manual mode?

In shutter priority, none of those are locked. Shutter priority is “use this shutter speed, adjust everything else to give the correct exposure”, which is wrong for HDR. You want over, correct, under exposure.

You want manual, and then you have to lock ISO and white balance. You then change the shutter to cover the exposure of everything in the scene.

Duh. I was taking some pics today and the error I had typed earlier hit me. Yeah, for the few HDR pics I’ve done I shoot in aperture priority and use auto bracketing. I have only done HDR using three exposures, ususally normal and +2, -2 or +1, -1. Is there a significant benefit to including more of the in-between exposures?

soosh, about the auto ISO – to be honest, I don’t know if it changes or not. The way your question is stated leads me to believe that its locked. My hunch is that its locked if I use manual but I’m not sure if it is with aperture priority.

I shoot with both the Canon 20D and 40D. The 20D is my travelling companion – always in the car, always in the boat.

I like your shots alot. I don’t know why, but when I think of HDR I picture big scenes. I’m going to have to try some smaller scale stuff like that.

See, when I think HDR, I think of the details you can bring out of the darkness.

Yep. It’s slowly sinking in.

Off topic sidebar – I can’t stop playing with the panoramic stuff. Here’s one from tonight. I can’t figure out how to keep the seams out of the sky. Perhaps it is the lack of a true pano head?

http://photos.imageevent.com/ulle17/fark/Peoria-Pano.jpg

To keep this thread clean, I’m also going to post this in another forum.

If you can pull that off with a double exposure, it’s completely legit IIRC. Not sure about doing it in post-processing. Do we have anything that’s considered a digital equivalent of a double exposure?

Hmmm…. time to dig out the D-50 manual and see if that’s one of the fortunate nikons…. Otherwise, I’m sure I can find something else creative to do.

There are some Nikon DSLR’s that can do double exposures in-camera, but combining them after the fact is generally not allowed. The kicker here is that combining the exposures isn’t all that different from what you’d do with HDR anyway, but overall I’m not sure that gets at the theme’s intentions. Perhaps SilverStag can weigh in on this one as the theme suggester.

Double exposures are a gray area that we probably didn’t give enough attention to during the recent revisitation of the rules. My gut feeling on this is that they fall into the class of “prohibited unless expressly allowed”.

My reasoning is thus:

In-camera double exposures are limited to film cameras and a very small subset of digital cameras, leaving most people out of the loop if double exposures are called for- hence they are exclusionary, to an extent. I know Elsinore is not in favor of things that artificially limit participation, and with good reason. I agree with her.

Now, if we want to revisit the question of Double exposures and using image-editing to produce them, I submit that’s a question for a different forum.