Sony RX-1 review, part 13

I shoot raw exclusively, and if I do HDR I do my compositing in post. When I’m doing handheld HDR – or tripod-mounted HDR, for that matter — what I want from a camera is to have it make a series of exposures as rapidly as possible at various shutter speeds. I want to be able to specify how many exposures, and how far apart the shutter speeds are. It’s nice to be able to specify the order of the exposures (low, nominal, high, or nominal, low, high, for example), and the bias around the nominal exposure (symmetric, biased towards less exposure, biased towards more exposure, for example). My Nikons let me do all that.

I’ve found that success in HDR is dependent on getting the exposures as close together in time as possible, so that the probability of the camera moving too much or parts of the subject moving too much during the sequence is minimal.

Today, I set up the RX-1 for this kind of exposure bracketing. The bracketing feature is invoked from the “Drive” sub-menu, where it resides along with single shot, continuous, continuous with focusing only for the first picture, and some other things. It took me a while to find it. My search was not helped much by the sorry excuse for a manual that ships with the camera, which doesn’t have the word “bracket” in the index. There is an online manual here, which is much more complete.

The exposure bracketing capability of the camera is limited, but it works well.  There are always three exposures, and you can select the EV difference between them in a setup screen accessed from the Drive sub-menu. At around a dozen images, the RX-1 buffer is adequate for hand-held bracketing of what will become single images, but it’s too small for hand-held bracketed panoramas.