Nikon D-70 firmware hack concerning Auto Exposure Bracketing

[shant]

I am creating some experience with HDR photography and want to know

if there is firmware from the Nikon D70 wich is capable of

bracketing more than 3 pictures in a row.... Is Nikon working on

this?

[lukas_kisiel]

Sorry, what is HDR photography? Probably not a helpful answer, but what's the point? You can shoot NEF, bracket 3 frames and convert them, with exposure adjustments, to cover several exposure stops.

[john schroeder]

HDR is High Dynamic Range photography. If I want to do this with my D70 I take one exposure for shadows one for highlights and one in the middle then combine them in photoshop. HDR cameras do all this in one exposure.

[cabophoto]

There is an excellent explanation of HDR at http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/hdr.shtml

 

Carsten

[fourfa]

interesting article. here's my wish: "smart bracketing" - the camera meters the scene, the user selects X number of frames to shoot, the camera automatically fires off frames in sequence from 0.1% clipping of shadows to 0.1% clipping of highlights.

 

anyway, according to the article:

 

"It's beein brought to my attention that the new Nikon D2X allows bracketing in 2 to 9 steps, in 1/3, 1/2, and 1 stop increments. This is user selectable thru both the front and back command dials while pressing the Bracket button."

[jcs56]

Good day Comrades:

 

This sonds like Zone Sistem mixed with digital tecnology, very interesting. what can we spect in the in the future!

[andy a.]

ShanT, you can do it manually of course. Take the three frames, and if that doesn't go far enough, use the +/- ev or manual mode. You'll very likely want a tripod for that.

 

I tried the merge HDR tool in cs2 when it came out, and I found it completely useless for non-tripod shots. Any camera movement ruined it. Actually that was usually true for tripod brackets as well. Being off by one pixel made everything look smudged. I don't understand that tool at all. I can do it by hand much more effectively by aligning each layer properly and blending with masks between them if I have to. Maybe I'm missing something there...

 

Speaking of the above, the clipping bracket feature would be very impressive. Maybe a selector on what percent to allow to clip. .05%, .1%, 1%, etc. Seems doable, but there's probably demand approaching nil.

[cojacal]

Its also possible to push the dynamic range by processing just one captured raw file several times with appropriate exposure compensation each time in ACR. Stack the output as PS layers. I prefer to blend these layers with gradient masks ... in much the same way as you would use a ND grad filter in front of the lens. For extra control modify the masks with PS brush tools ... the possibilities are endless.

 

I have some examples from a D70 body on photo.net

<a href="http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=472297">here</a>.

 

HTH

 

Cheers

 

Colin

[rick_e.]

Also experimenting with HDR. Although I can not give an answer to Shant's question I would like comment on two posts:

 

Andy: Two approaches for your Photoshop pixel problem. (1) I found out when Autofocus in the camera is active the actual picture that is taken can slightly differ (but I guess that depends on the camera; setting to manual focus made it possible for me to use the HDR merge. (2) Try the little checkbox in the HDR photoshop images import that says something like "Try to auto-align images"... maybe that helps.

 

Colin: Very impressive pictures, but from my understand taking different exposures output out of ONE raw image doesn't really take full advantage of the HDR quality, while you still use only *ONE* "hardware exposure setting and therefor don't increase the real level of detail. This is a highly interesting discussion about that RAW/Bracket/Exposure stuff: http://www.phototakers.com/forum/ftopic25867.html&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15 (Especially on page 2 some people explain very good whats going on.)

 

Something like a flexible bracketing builtin feature in the camera would be really nice I guess. Doing it manually you loose a lot of time, and the clouds moved 100 meter further ;-(