How To shoot bracketed shots for HDR with a Sony QX

iPhone Photography

Sep 28

*The Charles Bridge; (cc) by-nc squics.com*

During a visit in Prague I tried to shoot bracketed photos with a Sony QX100 attachable lens style camera from which I wanted to create an HDR. You can see the result above. It's the famous Charles Bridge which is considered to be one of the oldest stone bridges in Europe.

I used a Sony QX100 (Read my review here) for this photo. The Sony PlayMemories app for controlling the QX camera does not have an automatic mode for shooting bracketed photos. But it has a manual mode that you can use. And the results are positively surprising.

The QX100 has an aperture shooting mode and supports aperture compensation from -3 to +3. For shooting bracketed photos in this mode with your QX100 camera, I strongly encourage you to use a tripod!

I mounted the QX100 to a Joby Griptight Gorillapod (without using the "Griptight") (Amazon Link) and operated the QX100 in deatched mode to avoid even the slightest camera movement. Detached mode basically means that I held the iPhone in my hands and used it as a remote viewfinder and remote shutter release.

To shoot bracketed photos, launch the PlayMemories App and connect your phone, then locate the shooting modes in the upper left corner. The shooting modes are:

* Intelligent Auto
* Superior Auto
* P(rogramm)
* A(perture Priority)

Manual bracketing mode with a Sony QX attachable lens style camera.

We need aperture priority mode "A". Tap the mode selector and select it. At the bottom of the screen adjust the aperture settings to your liking. Next to the aperture settings is an aperture compensation setting.

Tap it and you can set the compensation to +/- 1,2 or 3 stops. I started with a setting of "-3".

After each photo, tap the aperture compensation, and chose the next aperture compensation ("0" and then "+3"). If you use the camera in detached mode as I suggested, creating bracketed shots works quite fast and it will avoid camera movements as you don't have to touch the camera and can control everything from your smartphone.

Now you can create and HDR from the bracketed photos directly on your iOS device with Pro HDR X (The app is not available any more). I ran into memory problems on the iPhone when I tried to create the HDR from the 20 megapixel photos the QX100 creates. It worked fine on the iPad Air 2.

Did you create nice HDR with a Sony QX camera? Post them on twitter or Instagram and tag me (@squics). I'd love to see them.