Greetings all,

I have a camera that isnt really new, it is a bit over a year old. Besides it being stolen and replaced once and having to have it repaired for a zoom error once it has been a decent camera for me so far.

It is a Fiji FinePix S5800 and very litttle about it on the internet. I enjoy taking Macros and such with it, trees flowers ect. My son doesent sit still long enough so thats out of the question:D

Anyway, I have an interest in HDR photography at the moment and wonder why when using Autobracketing i manually set my bracket mode to +/- 1 my other options are +/- 1/3 and +-2/3

Which is better, auto bracketing, or manual 3 shot for compositing HDR images.

And does anyone know of resources on the Web for this type of camera, like hints and tips ect for low end cameras and the beginner :D

Thanks for your time.

http://www.digitalcameratracker.com/fujifilm-finepix-s5800/

http://www.fujifilm.com.hk/FinePix/tc/products/digital_cameras/s/finepix_s5800/pdf/index/finepix_s5800_manual_01.pdf

no idea about the camera I'm afraid, but 'camera' seems to have provided you with some links anyhow..

as far as autobracketing vs manual exposures, I'd say autobracket is the way to go... it'll fire off 3 shots in quick succession so any movement in the scene will be minimized over taking time out between exposures to change settings (think of moving clouds..).. also you're less likely to knock your setup out of alignment, making for easier merging later on.

someone correct me if I'm wrong but if you shoot manually bracketed exposures you better have some idea how many stops under/over normal exposure the bracketed shots were as you'll have to enter this exposure info for each file you intend to merge.... in my experience get it wrong and it turns out a right pig's ear... at least with autobracketing you can be sure the intervals will be uniform, like 0,-2,+2... sure you may not get the same breadth of tonal range but shoot in raw and you can stretch the exposures anyway and it'll save you precious time with no significant difference in result

Yeah, camera gave me a good review and a link to the manual, which i have :D

With autobracketing it seems to have an issue with order. It takes in mid,light and dark...rather than dark,mid and high which i think it should. so i rename them to a,b,c acordiongly and them load them into PhotoMerge HDR, whcih i prefer well over Photoshop which most times seems to do nothing. One drawbackof this camera however is it shoots in .jpg format...no RAW. They come out ok when reduced by well over half, but i guess thats just the quailty of my camera. It is my first one, so i didnt wanna over spend.:D

I never had to enter my bracketing detail for the HDR software I have, so I assume the bracketing detail is read by the software, from the EXIF info captured with the individual pictures.

Interesting, I will certainly go into more detail next time and delete the EXIF info to see how the software behaves.

Well, I was autobracketing, but have changed to manual and still no good. As I mentioned above, i had to buy the camera twice. knowing what i know now I would have gotten something with a RAW format rather than .jpg for sure. learning processes all around(;