Nikon Exposure Bracketing

The change from Nikon to Canon has on the whole been fairly smooth but I did have one thing that completely caught me out.

Shooting grey aircraft against a grey sky is always a challenging task and it can cause the metering on camera to overexpose the image and blow out the sky. Having a grey aircraft against a white sky is never a good look!

It’s time like these when I switch over to manual mode. Setting the aperture, shutter and ISO myself I can control the exposure precisely but this time something went wrong. With my settings dialled in I start to shoot…..

“What the hell!”

My burst of photos all had different shutter speeds and the exposure is shot in all of them. A quick check of my settings reveals nothing so I shoot another burst and get the same results.

I don’t have time to delve into settings so I switch back to shutter priority. Back at home with time to spare I look into what is going on. Each shot halves the shutter speed which tells me it is bracketing but not why it’s doing it, I haven’t set bracketing.

I do something that most males do little of; I get the manual out and start to look out how Nikon has implemented bracketing on the D300. It seems that Nikon set the D300 (maybe others in the range?) to bracket shutter speed for manual mode by default. Not something I had come across before or experience when shooting with Canon. A quick change of custom setting e6 and the camera will not only bracket for flash output on manual mode, much better!

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About the author

Fast Air Photography

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