Tee-Ball photos

Last night closed out the summer season for my son.

Nice shot, Skylar.

Good job, guys!

Matt was that a bracket shot?

Skylar,

No. There was no HDR.

You can't bracket an action shot (unless you were just compositing sky or something like that).

Just good dynamic range from the sensor. The cool thing is that shot was from the V1 and 1 Nikkor 6.7-13 VR (great lens!). It is amazing to me what the tiny Nikon 1 sensor delivers in IQ, despite what some internet posers may want you to believe. The 1 Nikkor lenses are very high quality.

It is a great system for sports especially because it is so FAST.

Interesting, what body were you using?

Nikon 1 V1.

You know I looked into those, because it is not like a normal P.I.S. Camera. Very cool.

Skylar McMahon wrote: You know I looked into those, because it is not like a normal P.I.S. Camera. Very cool.   I really like the appeal of your shot, it supplies or at least to my eye, the bracket shot feel. Don't you have a D7000 as well?

I do have a d7000, and like it a lot. The V1 has some great advantages for shooting kids sports though, namely the impressive autofocus and continuous shooting speed. No DSLR can match the V1's speed

Of course, the V1 is not a point and shoot. It is an interchangeable lens camera that accepts its own native 1 Nikkor line, as well as the full line of DX and FX Nikkor lenses with the FT-1 adapter.

Sky --
Matt is correct; you cannot bracket an action shot to merge into an HDR photo IF your intent is to stop action, because moving objects, people, animals will be in a different position on each frame in the bracket. Therefore, when you merge each bracketed frame into the single HDR photo, you will get ghost images. Sometimes that makes for a cool effect and it might be desirable. With some of the better HDR software like Photomatix and NIK HDR Efex Pro, you can also choose which frame you want the position of moving objects to be in and remove those objects that would create ghost images in the other frames, while maintaining all the other objects in the scene in all frames, but doing so does reduce image quality some.

HOWEVER, there is another way to achieve a "fake" bracketed set with only 1 frame for importing into an HDR program. The only reason to do this is for scenes that have moving elements where you don't want to deal with de-ghosting. In some cases, you will even get the exact same result, but in most cases, you lose some detail, because you don't quite get all the detail over the entire dynamic range. Simply take a shot that's something like -1EV or -2EV under-exposed. The key here is to be just enough under-exposed to eliminate all blown highlights yet still don't underexpose to the point you lose all or most shadow detail. Then, make either 2, 4, or 6 copies of the photo in post (in LR, you can make what's called "virtual copies"), depending on whether you want a 3, 5, or 7 frame bracket. Then, decide where you want the original photo to be in the bracket exposure-wise and with the copies, bump up or down the exposure in +1 and -1 EV increments, save the copies and import into your HDR program. Voila -- it works like a charm! I've done it several times.

This is one of those things that's not nearly as difficult to do as it is to explain. I can show you how to do this the next time we meet up.

Ted,

It's going to vary some depending on the scene, but I've found that if you slightly underexpose the original, you end up with more detail in the clouds in the final HDR image. It's a personal decision, of course, but I'd rather lose some detail in the extreme shadows and not have blown highlights. But, when shooting in RAW with today's sensors, you can recover some amazing shadow detail in post you thought was lost. So, I'd rather err on the side of under-exposed to retain more contrast and richer colors in sky detail. Of course, it also matters whether you metered on the sky or objects in the foreground. Most camera sensors aren't capable of capturing the entire dynamic range in really high contrast scenes. This is the reason for doing HDR in the first place.

Doing HDR this way with a single image, you can't regain detail that was never there in the original image, and I've found (at least on the D800 sensor) that it's easier to recover detail in shadows than in extreme highlights. Plus, I don't mind losing some tiny bit of detail in the extreme shadows, because I tend to like lots of contrast.

If your scene doesn't have a lot of bright sky, or the dynamic range isn't extreme, then you can expose normally. Then again, those aren't the types of scenes I would do HDR anyway, since the whole purpose of bracketing for HDR is to compress the DR across the whole scene.