 So what do you do if you're in a situation where you're photographing and you're not sure if you're getting your exposures correctly? Well one thing that a lot of photographers do is called bracketing. Now bracketing is actually something you can really only do with a camera that has some sort of manual controls or manual settings but it's also just good if you don't have a camera that can do those things to understand the concept of bracketing because it will help you in using exposure conversation and things like that for those of you have more automatic cameras. So I'd encourage you no matter what camera you have to just continue watching this video and see what we come up with here. Bracketing is one way that you can ensure that you're getting the right exposure of a situation and I think the best way to do this would maybe just to be explained to explain this with an example. So how about we move straight into that and it's an example that you might recognize from our metering lesson. So here we talked about this in the metering lesson and we said this scene is backlit which is often something that happens when you're shooting something like a concert or something like that. You have lots of different light sources and your your camera is looking at all of this and trying to make 18% gray but over here you've got 0% gray and over here you've got maybe 90% gray or 90% gray maybe in these spots right here and in general it's just a really hard scene for your camera to read and to know what to do. So one thing that you can do and what I did in the lesson I was talking about how I metered using this shirt right here and actually I think that I spot metered and then I overexposed just a little bit because I knew that this was a little bit lighter than 18% gray. Another thing that I was doing while I was shooting this was also trying a couple different exposures and that's essentially what bracketing is though it's a little bit more of an intentional version of that. So here is the image that I took and this is using the spot meter that I selected right here. This was about at zero. It wasn't perfect but it was about at zero on my light meter. I was using it very carefully and making sure that I was selecting the right spot. Now one thing that I also could have tried and I didn't do this. I actually edited these images to look like I did it for the same image but it's something I could have done in the moment. I could have also bracketed for another completely different light situation so I could have for example overexposed by two stops. So that's about what I did here with the edited version of this image or I could have underexposed by two stops. So I could have taken what value I had and I could have said okay well I guess I'm gonna underexpose and you can do that with exposure compensation. So you've got exposure compensation is one way that you can do it or if you're like me you shoot all of your photographs in manual mode and then it's pretty easy. So say for example this image was taken at ISO 800 and say that my f-stop was let's just say I was at f4 and let's say my shutter speed was at let's say it was at 1500. That's that's probably a little high I don't think it was quite that high but let's say just an example. Now one thing that I could have done in order to overexpose it would be to move two stops down from 500. So I could have exam for example so half of 500 is 250 and another half of that is 1, 200 and or 125th. I never say that correctly geez. So then we can go over here to the other side and make a photo that would be quicker. So 500 times 2 is a thousand times another 2 is 2,000. So I could take a photo at a two thousandth of a second that would look something like this. It wouldn't look exactly like that but it would look something like that and that would just be that would just be a form of bracketing. So that's this would just be bracketing. For some reason I always want to put two T's on this. I don't know why but bracketing is spelled with just one T. So bracketing and you could also do it with one stop. So you could also on your way to here 2,000 you could also take one at one thousandth of a second and you could also take one at one two fiftieth of a second and you could say that then you could have a plus one here and another plus or sorry any minus one over here. Now that is bracketing done manually. You can do it with your own fingers and decide okay I'm just gonna move my dial from one to the other. Another thing that you can also do is set up bracketing on your on your camera and actually have every time you press the shutter your camera actually could take two or three or four different photographs. So there's automatic versions of this as well. I would kind of not recommend doing that unless you know exactly what you're doing. You could use it for HDR photography and things like that and if you have a situation where you really need a good exposure. But in general I find that that just gets in the way and it also is a lot more photographs than you're gonna want to deal with. In the end you're gonna end up with that correct exposure and I would just if I were you do any bracketing just while you're shooting find your spot and and then just pay attention to your light meter and do your best to to get the photos that you can using that. Alright so that is a little bit about bracketing. I hope that it helps you and maybe explains what maybe just get another thing that you found in your manual for your camera. Something that you didn't understand. Maybe I explained it. So come on back and check out more lessons at alversity.org