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Auto Exposure Bracketing

This is something every photographer should know about and use. AEB – or Auto Exposure Bracketing, is a simplified, systematic way to change your exposure settings. Advanced users will generally use the Manual Mode in the same way. This is something I cover in the Canon 40D Crash Course and it’s worth sharing here.

Say you are in a tricky lighting situation, such as looking into the sunset as I was yesterday. You have a cool shot, but you aren’t really sure if you should under expose or over expose and even looking at the monitor doesn’t give you a really good idea which is best.

This is a good time to try AEB, and it depends on the camera you are using, but what you are going to do is set the camera to change your settings automatically, so when you take three pictures, one will be normally exposed, one under exposed and one over exposed. AEB allows you to choose the amount of variation between each shot. In this case it is one f stop.

While on the monitor I liked the normally exposed shot, the under exposed shot actually came out the best once I pulled it up in photoshop. By shooting with AEB in tricky lighting situations, you cover all your bases and increase the likelihood one of your shots will come out perfect.