Couldn't get it out of my mind

In the last post I hinted at not being content with the blown out highlights in the All Saints church images: after all Magic Lantern Auto Bracketing should have taken care of things.

So, within an hour of getting home, I popped up to our local church, Christ Church in Ramsdel, to do a quick experiment, ie in a relatively high dynamic range environment: although the weather was a little flat, so the Church windows were not really ultra-bright. Nevertheless, a reasonable test scene.

Still using my EOSM with the 10mm end of the 10-20mm Sigma, I decided to expose for the highlights and let the Auto Bracketing in ML handle the rest. Here are the two test images - one with the chandelier lights on and one with them off:

In both images, the windows are fully captured, with no 'highlight end damage'.

Bottom line: I think I'll switch my ML bracketing strategy, at least in churches. Rather than expose for the shadows and let ML handle the highlights, I think I'll set the exposure for the highlights myself, eg a stop down from the highlights being clipped, and let ML handle things from there.