Exposure Bracketing

Chris Dubea wrote:

Way back yonder, back in my Nikon days, I always had exposure bracketing on, because as they say, film is cheap....

I did this for a short while once entering the Fuji age some time back with a x100s, but stopped because I never needed any of these over our under exposed images.

So, the last two days, I turned it back on, mostly because I'm upgrading my Capture One from v12 with the latest upgrade offer, which includes HDR processing ability.

How many of you keep your exposure bracketing on all the time?

Equally important, how do you select which image to post process of the group?

Thanks

I usually use ISO bracketing with my Fujis, but my other camera (Sigma fp L) does not support it.

Generally with that camera I exposure bracket five shots, with a spacing of 1 EV per shot.  This means -2EV, -1EV, 0EV, +1EV, +2EV.  This gives me lots of choices in post processing.  I find myself gravitating to using the 0EV or the -1EV raw, and it becomes the only raw I process.  I'm using this camera this way more and more, but I don't always use exposure bracketing.  Sometimes a single exposure is more appropriate.

Moving on, if highlights are blown, they might not be completely blown in the next lower EV image of the set of five.  Sometimes the highlights appear to be blown but are not blown in the raw itself.  These are things I find out during post processing.  I might have to open a few raws to find out these things, then I choose which one to process further.

If the highlights are not a problem the shadows can be a problem.  So, I have to choose which of the five images gives me the best chances with both.  Plenty of time for that during post processing, of course.

And the subject matter always predominates when it comes to choosing the best of the five images to process.  Sometimes completely blown highlights are not important.  Sometimes blocked up shadows are not important.  So it all "depends".

I have not found it useful to combine a set of exposure bracketed shots into a HDR, because slight movement of foliage or people will mess up that area of the image.  I do like the results I get when I combine ISO bracketed shots into a HDR though, because there are none of these artifacts.  I wish all my cameras could do ISO bracketing!