How to take 3 or more pictures using Nikon D40 for HDR

Hi Guys,

I'm a newbie in this forum and i've read most of the tutorial. Its very nice site and I've learn a lot. I'm new to photography and I just have Nikon D40 kit lens. When I read the HDR photography I was amaze by the outcome of the pictures taking 3 or more pictures with different exposure and combine them using photomatix or Adobe. That's where I decide to learn this techniques. Since I only have nikon D40 and no lens yet but the one that came with the camera. How do I take 3 or more pictures with different exposure to make HDR photo?

Wilfred Chang
Philippines

It seems the D40 lacks of an auto-bracketing feature, so you will have to shoot manually (this is no good news for you since touching the camer between shots undoutfully will end in image misalignment).

Set M mode and do 3 shots, one according to the camera metering, one -2EV underexposed and last +2EV overexposed with respect to the camera metering.

BR

I also have a Nikon D40 and read up on HDR photo merge. Yes you have to manually adjust - no auto bracketing! :mad:

But...if you have a strong tripod and still scene you can do it being very careful!;)

Good luck and post some pictures when you try it out!:):):)

Kori :)

Hi Wilfred - Welcome to the forum. The only thing I would add at the moment is that you want to make sure that your three or five or whatever shots differ in Tv, ie exposure time. Keep the aperture the same throughout so as to avoid depth of field effects.

Cheers

David

I do not use the Nikon D40, so can't comment 100% on this. However, I do use the Nikon D300, and was convinced that IT didn't have an auto-bracketing feature either. Then one day, I was reading the finer points of the main manual, and discovered in the 'Interval Timer Photography' section that (quote)"If exposure and/or flash bracketing is active while interval timer photography is in effect, the camera will take the number of shots in the bracketing program at each interval, regardless of the number of shots specified in the interval timer menu." (endquote).

Therefore, to take a series of bracketed shots automatically, I will first select the number of bracketed shots I want, then go to Menu >> Shooting Menu >> Interval Timer Shooting. Select 'Now' with an interval of 10 seconds, and set it to take 1 shot. Then, after 10 seconds, which gives me time to clear the tripod and perform last minute micro-checks, the full bracketed series is taken, one time.

Note also that once you have the 'ten seconds' and 'one shot' stored, you can quickly start the process without going through the full menu by pressing Menu >> Shooting Menu >> Interval Timer Shooting, then when you see 'Choose start time', press left rather than right, then up to choose 'Start On', then OK. Its much quicker to do it than to write it!!

I may be way off the mark here but can you not take one shot in RAW and then use the RAW converter to produce 2 further exposures 2 stops either side of the original? Does this have the same effect?

Wirefox - the whole point of HDR is to create an image from a wider range of light than your digital camera sensor can capture. Therefore, you have to use multiple exposures at different EV settings to gather this range of light values. The software then allows you to choose just what you wish to display. So no, it doesn't have the same effect. A single shot in RAW, adjusted, might be pretty, but its not the same because one RAW image can only contain so many light values - you can't get any more from 1 image...

Hi.... I'm new to SLR and HDR photography and I share the lack of bracketing problem with my Nikon D60.

What D60 and D40 users might want to check out is www.d-software.co.za (I think that's the web address) which is run by Flickr member Deneys. He says he received a D60 as a gift and has developed his own freeware for taking multiple exposures in order to create HDR images.

I have downloaded the freeware but only spent a few minutes using it so far so can't really comment on its usefulness. Judging by the feedback Deneys has received it appears to be a winner and he is frequently releasing new updates.

It does have one big limitation but you can check out the details for yourselves!

Hope this helps.

Kev