![]() It’s also always worth shooting RAW rather than JPG images as there will be more scope for later adjustments. The X100F is limited to just 3 shots, within a range of + or – 1/3rd to 2 stops, whereas my other camera (a Sony A7iii) can take up to 11 shots, not that you really need that many… Then take your 3 photos, keeping the camera as steady as possible – the merge process can compensate for small movements between shots anyway, but keeping the camera still helps. It’s easy enough to do with your camera though, and potentially gives much better results… Start by setting your camera to ‘exposure bracketing mode’ and set the number of exposures and the difference between them. Most modern cameras and smartphones have an HDR facility built-in, so it’s all done automatically for you, but the results aren’t always that good, and you generally don’t have any control over the process. The trick is to take several shots, varying the exposure so you record detail in the lightest and darkest areas of the image, and then combine them so all parts of the photo are properly exposed and all the detail in the image is visible. If a building is sticking up into the part of the sky you are trying to darken with the filter, then the building too will be darkened and won’t come out well.Įnter the magic of HDR (or High Dynamic Range). ![]() ![]() ![]() However, filters are expensive, it’s all a bit of a faff to get them lines up, and don’t work very well if you don’t have a clear and straightish line between dark and light parts of your image. Graduated filters that fit on the front of your camera lens and just darken one area of the image are one way to control the brightness of the sky. These three photos illustrate the problem – the foreground in the top photo is too dark the sky in the bottom photo is too light the middle shot has the best brightness range, but the sky is still a bit light and the foreground clearly too dark and the image lacks ‘punch’. Expose for the shadows, and the sky will be burnt out – expose for the sky, and the subject will be too dark… If you are adept with Lightroom or Photoshop you can ’tweak’ the various bits of your image, but the effect is limited and often not sufficient to fix an image. How many times have you taken a photo on a sunny day, only for the subject to be in deep shadow, and the background or sky to be burnt out? Our eyes have the ability to cope with these huge ranges of brightness, and ‘adjust’ accordingly, but sadly even the best cameras are limited in how much they can handle. Works well on landscape shots and relatively close up shots – notice how much of each of these photos is in focus – far more than could be achieved by stopping the lens down. A pretty decent result, with minimal effort. A quick whiz through Photoshop’s merge mode, and hey presto, a stacked image was back in Lightroom. Set the camera drive mode to focus stack, set the close and far focus points on the LCD screen, and away you go… After a couple of attempts where I had the lens wide open at f2 and the camera created a batch of 87 images (!) I figured out that f8 was a safe bet and this yielded a more manageable set of 6-10 images to stack. The X100V has the option to automate this process, and my goodness, once you figure it out it’s brilliant. I’ve done this in the past with limited success, taking the shots individually and moving the focus point manually between shots – all a bit hit and miss (mostly miss!) I learned by chance that the X100V could do focus bracketing (ie taking several photos of a scene focussed at different distances, so they could be combined, or ‘stacked’) so the whole scene was in sharp focus. So it leaves me in a quandary – do I still need the A7C for ‘casual’ photography where a 35mm or so lens works for most shots, or is the smaller lighter X100V the way to go? (After all, I’ve also got a Sony A7iv and both zoom and prime lenses where I need flexibility, and that’s a much better option then than the A7C). So these became my start point, and only a modicum of tweaking was needed, both to the shots I left as mono, and the few that seemed to work better in colour. Wow! – what a difference, much brighter, sharper, and cleaner – noise, especially in the higher ISO shots was much better too. I had recently bought the DxO Pure RAW add-in, so as an experiment processed all the RAWs in that. Fortunately I always shoot with RAW enabled, and these files, although lacking ‘bite’ were much cleaner. Started processing them by loading the JPG simulated files into Lightroom, and have to say I wasnt that keen – they all looked a bit ‘muddy’ and the small amount of grain effect was rather noticeable. The half an hour I planned to spend wandering locally ran to almost two hours, and I took around 35 shots.
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