On my 550D (and 300) there is an "Exposure lock" button marked * on the back of the camera.

Reading the manual, it is used of you are going to take panorama shots to keep the larger picture with the same settings.

Ok, I thought I understood that, but now am not so sure.

I once did a pan' shot with my Nikon but when I joined the two pictures, they didn't look that good. I put that down to the exposures being different.

Slowly working my way through the 32 GIG of pictures from my holiday, I am constructing the pan' shots and am seeing possible problems with exposure locking.

But what really interests me is: Alghough I am guessing this is the "Idiot's way of doing it", why wouldn't you just put the camera in MANUAL mode and take the shots without changing the shutter/appature?



Anyway, with the exposure lock, there would be problems if there were DARK and BRIGHT areas in the bigger shot, as the dynamic range would/could be too high.

So, thinking about that, and HDR, I am confused with this question:

HDR is where you take several shots of the same thing with different exposures. The program then takes the best of each and gives you a composite. But basically the range is "flattened"/reduced. Which is what HDR is sort of about. - right?

The subject has a large dynamic range - which exceeds the range of "usable" on the camera - or something.
Taking the multiple shots the program gets the "normally exposed" parts and melds them together to make one shot which has the highlited dark parts of one and the darkened parts of the other.....

So, if I am taking a pan shot which goes from DARK to BRIGHT, locking the exposure will give extreme dark areas and extreme bright areas. If that could be taken in ONE frame, you would/could/should do a HDR on it and get the resulting composite.

I guess it could be possibe with a pan shot - doing each with HDR - but it would be complicated. Right?



Am I digging my self into a hole?