The invention discloses a shooting state switching method and device. The shooting state switching method comprises judging whether the current shooting state in the current scene is wide dynamic or a linear state; calculating the dynamic range value of the image when the current shooting state is the linear state; determining the mid-lighting dynamic range characterization value in dependence on mid-order pixel points of a long frame in the image acquired at present and determining the highlighting dynamic range characterization value in dependence on high-order pixel points of a short frame when the current shooting state is wide dynamic; determining the dynamic range value of the image acquired at present in dependence on the mid-lighting dynamic range characterization value and the highlighting dynamic range characterization value; judging whether the dynamic range value satisfies the dynamic range condition corresponding to the current shooting state or not; if no, switching the shooting state. Because the image acquisition device obtains the optimum shooting effect accurately in real time by automatically switching the shooting state, the workload of the user is reduced.