Using a camera in manual mode

You can clearly see the effect of that four second exposure in the cropped image. The slower shutter allowed me to capture some of the movement in the water to create a smooth, silky effect. This was a creative decision that I could only have achieved by shooting in manual.

Interested in portrait photography? Click here. Interested in fashion photography? These examples show the difference between a shallow depth of field, which is a common choice for portrait photography, and a greater depth of field for a more fashion-style image. Throughout this course so far you would have seen how I make a number of creative decisions regarding aperture and shutter speed. Whether it be using a slow shutter speed to allow for panning, or a shallow depth of field to isolate the subject, each decision should be controlled by you, the photographer.

By shooting in manual, we have far greater creative control than if we used an automatic mode. These modes give the user control of either aperture or shutter speed, while letting the camera determine the remaining setting for best exposure. Manual mode takes it one step further and gives you control over both, but why would you want to use it? In fact, the vast majority, myself included, do not shoot in manual. The times when I switch to manual mode are simply when I think I can do a better job at judging the scene than my camera can.

It is tempting to let the camera control all of the settings. However, when you photograph in automatic mode, the camera will use settings that you might want to change. Moreover, you are not learning anything about photography. When we talk about settings, we are looking at the exposure triangle.

The triangle consists of three camera settings. These are aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. These directly influence how much light comes from your scene. They also add special techniques, such as differential focus and subject freezing.

If you wanted to capture bokeh , you need to know about differential focus and a wide aperture. To capture motion blur, you need to know how to use long or slow shutter speed.

When you look through the viewfinder , you will see a line of numbers at the bottom. This is only if you are going for that specific effect. The shaded part has some detail, but you want none. The sunny part of the building is still well lit if you bring the exposure down. So this is what you do to make the shadows and the entire image darker.

The light metre is a great guide, but you can use it as you wish. Do not be too dependent on it. Sometimes you do not have to rely on the in-camera light meter as it meters an average or a centre. When you are shooting RAW and low ISO and highlight and shadow inequalities, it is always worth going against the rules and underexposes the scene with 1 or 2 stops.

For instance, I tend to prioritize shutter speed most of the time because I shoot a lot of moving subjects cats! But I also shoot with a lot of good cameras that can handle relatively high ISO sensitivity settings. If yours doesn't perform well beyond ISO , for instance, you probably want to lock that down first. The whole point of Manual is that you get to prioritize what you think is important. One thing to remember when performing visual trial-and-error is that the camera displays may not be quite accurate, especially when it comes to exposure; also, what may look like really dark, clogged shadows on the tiny LCD may have reasonable tonal range when viewed on a larger screen.

You might want to turn on the camera's histogram display look it up in your manual to verify that it's not too shifted toward the shadows or the highlights, unless you want that effect. The guidelines for choosing settings are pretty much the same as those for shooting in the Shutter- or Aperture-priority modes.

You need to figure out what that setting is for yourself, because you don't want to drop below it thoughtlessly. By "thoughtlessly," I mean you really have to concentrate to handhold effectively as the speeds get slower: control your breathing, brace yourself against something, make sure image-stabilization is enabled, and so on.

The Internet is littered with rules of thumb about selecting shutter speeds depending upon the effect you want. Google it. Those rules were more important in film days, when trial and error was impractical, time consuming and expensive. Today, you can usually figure out within the first few shots what setting produces the image you want. Choosing an aperture: Keep in mind that if you have a zoom lens with a variable aperture range denoted as say, an mm f3.

With a lens like that, on anything smaller than full-frame you don't have a lot of flexiblity. For everything but studio-type work, if you're going to shoot with an inexpensive kit lens and want the closest you can get to a set-it-and-forget it choice, I vote for f5.

That will ensure snapshot-quality sharpness of most things you plan to shoot, and will keep the aperture from changing as you zoom. An alternative is to set it f3. If you want maximum sharpness throughout the scene and there's plenty of light, then f8 or f11 is a good choice. Try to stay away from f16 or higher on inexpensive lenses and small sensors, since sharpness tends to decrease past a certain point as other laws of physics intrude.

If you have a fast lens that supports apertures of about f2. First, the wider you go the harder it is to focus accurately; the smaller the zone of sharpness, the more difficult it is to keep the camera fixed on the appropriate point. This is especially true if you're depending upon autofocus. Also, cheap, fast lenses, like a typical 50mm f1.

ISO sensitivity : If you're confident about the high-ISO sensitivity performance of your camera, you may want to leave this on Auto; keep in mind, however, that some higher-end cameras won't let you use Auto ISO in Manual mode. The ability to do so is becoming more popular in that segment, though, as a way to allow for constant exposures when shooting video -- it lets you set the shutter speed and aperture and vary the ISO sensitivity as lighting conditions within a scene changes.

However, as sensor size decreases, out-of-focus areas tend to become increasingly unattractive; increasing ISO sensitivity exacerbates the artifacts in those areas. As with the priority modes, the camera will always choose the lowest available option that matches your chosen aperture when set to Auto ISO.

However, if you're going to use it, see if your camera has a menu option to set a prescribed range of values it can choose from. That's especially important on the high end, since most consumer cameras don't do very well above ISO , regardless of what their specifications may indicate.