Steve,
Thanks. 😀 I tried it a few minutes ago, but the first one was way off. The second was OK. It "forced" me to use F3.5 at 18mm FL. The shutter speed and ISO were different. As far as I know the camera will not let me choose the settings I want such as seen in the three photos I showed...then process them in camera. Do other cameras do that? Does anyone know?
I don't understand how you can couple that with the exposure compensation bracketing that I chose. Is the Canon T7i different than the T8i that way?
I was checking even further. It looks like even the Canon R6 requires HDR software for Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB). I'll look more into it tomorrow and possibly just buy software. I've been putting it off. But yesterday was a prime example why I needed to make a HDR image.