Auto Bracketing
By Phil Askey
Bracketing is a technique used to take a series of images of the same scene at a variety of different exposures that "bracket" the metered exposure (or manual exposure). "Auto" simply means the camera will automatically take these exposures as a burst </learn/key=burst> of 2, 3 or 5 frames with exposure settings of anything between 0.3 and 2.0 EV difference. This can be useful if you're not sure exactly how the shot will turn out or are worried that the scene has a difficult dynamic range. On a digital camera this can also be used to combine under and over exposed images together to produce an image with more dynamic range than the camera can normally capture.
When setting up for bracketing you can usually select the number of frames to be taken (typically 3 or 5), the exposure setting and the order in which to take the shots (eg. 0,-,+ or -,0,+ etc.). The example below (very subtle) was taken with auto bracketing of 3 frames at 0.7EV in the -,0,+ order. Thus, in this case without bracketing the camera would simply have shot the frame as 1.3s @ F14.


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Note added at 2003-02-22 21:50:39 (GMT)
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Jag skulle använda \"gaffling\" om det är en mycket dyr kamera för fackfotografer och \"automatisk alternativexponering\" om kameran är avsedd för amatörfotografer.

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Note added at 2003-02-24 10:09:05 (GMT)
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Rasmus Carlsson\'s suggestion \"autogaffling\" is good (but use it only if the text is addressing pros).