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Tuto 6: Trick to get 5 auto-braketed photos with a Nikon D7000

Before starting

Here's a little trick I use with my Nikon D7000 to get quickly and easely 5 auto-braketed photos with increments of 1EV. This can be useful to process HDR images with more informations than when processing from 3 braketed photos (refer to this tutorial for this point: Braketing for HDR).

Things you need

Your Nikon D7000 and its manual (in case you don't know how to use U1 and U2 instant recall mode).

The objective

Configuring U1 and U2 mode in order to quickly take 5 auto-braketed photos. One reason to use 5 photos instead of 3 is the amount of noice generated on the HDR image: it is much well controled. I also noticed better results depending of the scene you are working on.

The trick

 If you own a D7000, you may know that braketing is limited to 3 photos, with EV increments of 0.3, 0.7, 1.0, 1.3, 1.7 and 2.0. Usually, I use braketing of 3 photos with a 2EV increment between each.
If you own a D7000, you may also know that it proposes an interesting option that allows you to create two different user profils (called U1 and U2):



For each profil you have the opportunity to save any shooting scenario you want (i.e. A/S/M mode, file type, white balance, ISO, and all the others stuff you usually use).


The idea to get 5 auto-braketed photos is to configure U1 and U2 modes as following:

U1: bracketing of three photos with 1EV increment.
U2: bracketing of three photos with 2EV increment.
Note that apart braketing parameters, all other parameters should be the same from U1 to U2.


Thus, when I shoot the three photos with U1, and then shoot three photos with U2, I'll get six photos (with a duplicate one) with those expositions:

-2/-1/0/0/+1/+2

Just delete one of the duplicated 0EV, and you have 5 auto-braketed photos with 1EV increment, just by switching quickly the U1/U2 mode.

Next step will be HDR processing, this way: http://bwtutorials.blogspot.com/2011/10/tuto-2-hdr-for-black-and-white-with.html