Ultimate Auto Bracketing Solution for HDR Photographers

Promote Control

I recently discovered an exciting new advanced shutter release solution for HDR photographers. It’s called the Promote Control which will make life much easier and open doors for new creative opportunities for any serious Canon or Nikon HDR photographer. I’ve been evaluating it over the past few weeks and all I can say is it rocks! My first big test using it was during the recent Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk and I shared one of the 11 shot HDR images in a recent blog post. Here are a couple of feature highlights:

• Totally eliminates the 3 shot auto bracket limit for Canon DSLR shooters so those of us with a fancy new Canon 50D, 7D or 5D Mark II are no longer filled with envy over our peers capturing 9 bracketed images on Nikon DSLRs. I’ve previously shared some quick tips auto bracketing work arounds for Canon shooters but the Promote Control solution hands down crushes any other auto bracketing trick / hack around.
• Nikon shooters will be excited to know that you can even exceed the 9 auto bracketed shots max and even more exciting the Promote Control adds the ability to adjust how many steps between each bracketed shot in increments of .3 stop. 20+ bracketed shots is now a possibility for both Canon and Nikon shooters!
• If the top two haven’t won you over, maybe this one will! The Promote Control has the ability on supported Nikon and Canon cameras to capture in Bulb mode! No longer are Canon and Nikon shooters limited to 30 seconds as the max length exposure in an auto bracketed series. This is huge for landscape or architecture HDR scenes where there is subtle detail lost when limited to 3o sec max bracketed exposures! I was holding out picking up this device until I saw the beta 1.8 firmware posted which now allows Canon 7D shooters to capture long exposures using the Bulb mode and it works great!

In my opinion, the $299.00 price tag and the extra gear to tug around are the only two major downfalls. I also found it kind of goes haywire when I forget to set the mode button to manual or bulb mode i.e. I left it in Av mode and it rattled off like 50 shots before I reached up and shut off the camera and control. It was also a little quirky to upgrade the firmware but I captured some screenshots of the process and will post in a future blog post. All in All it is an incredible solution that would be a great item on the gear list for any Canon or Nikon HDR shooter! On flip side, I still hope Nikon and Canon will wake up and take notice of the exploding HDR popularity and enhance the built-in HDR / auto bracketing capabilities. In the meantime, I’ll be using my favorite new HDR camera gadget!