Nikon D7000 manual White Balance Bracketing

122David Busch’s Nikon D7000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography

4.Choose bracket increment. With the setting button still held down, rotate the sub-command dial to choose the exposure increment, 0.3, 0.7, 1.0, 1.3, 1.7, or 2.0 EV (unless you’ve redefined the exposure compensation increment in CSM #b2). BKT will be displayed in the viewfinder and top-panel LCD.

5.Frame and shoot. As you take your photos, the camera will vary exposure, flash level, or white balance for each image, based on the bracketing “program” you selected, and in the order you specified in CSM #e6. In Single frame mode, you’ll need to press the shutter release button the number of times you specified for the exposures in your bracketed burst (2 or 3 shots). I’ve found it easy to forget that I am shooting bracketed pictures, stop taking my sequence, and then wonder why the remaining pictures in my defined burst are “incorrectly” exposed. To avoid that, I often set the D7000 to one of the two continuous shooting modes, so that all my bracketed pictures are taken at once. The D7000 does provide those indicators on the monochrome LCD (a BKT indicator as well as a bracketing progress indica- tor), but they may be overlooked.

6.Turn bracketing off. When you’re finished bracketing shots, remember to press the bracket setting button and rotate the main command dial until the number of shots in the sequence is 0F, and the BKT indicator is no longer displayed.

White Balance Bracketing

When you choose white balance bracketing, the D7000 does not take three different exposures. There’s no need, if you think about it. The camera always takes a RAW expo- sure first, no matter whether the camera is set to JPEG, RAW, or RAW+JPEG. If you’ve selected JPEG-only mode, the camera converts the initial RAW exposure to JPEG for- mat using the settings you’ve opted for in the camera, and then discards the RAW data. In RAW mode, the camera stores the RAW data as an NEF file, and also creates a Basic JPEG version of the image that is embedded in the RAW file as a thumbnail. That thumbnail is what you’re actually looking at on the back-panel LCD when you review your pictures; you never actually see the RAW file itself until you import it into your image editor. Your computer may also use the embedded JPEG file, when it displays a RAW image. Finally, if you save in RAW+JPEG, you end up with two files: the NEF RAW file (with its embedded JPEG image) and a separate JPEG file at the quality level you specify (Fine, Normal, or Basic).

Since the RAW file that the camera initially captures contains all the digital informa- tion captured during exposure, when you specify white balance bracketing, the D7000 needs to take only one picture—and then save a JPEG file at each of the required white balance settings. One snap, and you get either two or three JPEG files at the quality level you specified, bracketed as you directed. Very slick. As you might guess, WB brack- eting is applied only to JPEG files; you can’t specify WB bracketing if you’ve chosen RAW or RAW+JPEG. RAW files created are always unmodified, and will be converted