I agree you can get it in a single shot. This is far from the greatest photo you'll ever see but it's a sinlge shot and the sun is not overblown and there's no crushed blacks.
A1_07723-Edit by
Toby Gunnee, on Flickr
sun and that little cloud are completely gone; I bet it was a lovely orange glow (not light grey which you rightly don't like).
The area around the sun is gone in red channel, That stingy yellow is clearly indictive of that. In truth it should just be a brighter shade of orange.
In this example the sun is already touching the horizon with almost zero clouds, so a much easier case than anything completely above and with glowing clouds.
I can't go into shadows, but I bet they are up many many stops which is maybe not as bad as clipping channels, but easily can be.
Yes, for web only hardly anyone would care for this amount of clipping as this is fairly borderline. If you fancy printing a meter or two wide you will be in photoshop painting over the colour in a hope of remedy.
Whilst your photos are stellar I do wonder sometimes if you realise that the way you shoot is not the only way and other ways aren't wrong?
you can do any way you like but you need to get the complete data. There is an easy way and there are harder ways. Your choice.
I trashed enough money buying LEE plastic and degrading enough of my earlier images so a wise thing to do is take experience onboard instead of repeating mistakes.
Accidentally smashing that piece of s*** into pieces in Tenerife in 2014 was the best thing photographically that happened to me.
I must admit I am finding it difficult to understand why a 5 shot bracket is better than a 3 shot bracket. Clearly it is preferred by some, and camera manufacturers also give you the option but i can't figure out why?
more data. Simple as that. Why do you want the risk of not having enough? Also good idea not to throw away one of the frames shooting it way too bright. Default setups are very wrong and inconvenient.
Sometimes you only need 2, so you do 2. These typically have no specular highlights, just some stubborn shadows that are best lifted cleanly rather than denoised to death.
IIRC the max you can bracket is +/-3 ev, so if I take 3 shots one at -3ev, one at 0 ev and one at +3ev how would having another two shots at -1.5ev and +1.5ev help me as I've got the max dynamic range already?
This is where you got it wrong.
You have up to max 3EV
per step, so you can go way further.
And likewise 3EV steps are too big leaving a big gapping hole of data in the middle. somewhere between 1 and 2 is better, and clearly all scenes are different.
