Cameras and Manual Mode

Using Man­ual Mode on your cam­era… daunt­ing to most new­bie pho­tog­ra­phers, but a gem once you know how to use it.

Many new­bie pho­tog­ra­phers steer clear away from Man­ual mode, and Opt for Auto­matic mode instead.‚ Full ‘Auto’ mode chooses every­thing from your ISO, to your shut­ter speed and aper­ture includ­ing whether or not a flash should be used. So really, it gives you a safety net to assure you can grab that shot with­out muff­ing it up. That said, the shot you end up with is based on the CAMERA’s choices not the photographer’s choices.


Man­ual mode how­ever allows you to set both your aper­ture and shut­ter speed sep­a­rately, with­out the cam­era auto­mat­i­cally chang­ing the other to suit. With this in mind, you can be more cre­ative with your shots, and in turn, you can bet­ter under­stand how to get that per­fect shot.

Man­ual mode seems to take more time then, right? Right.

But as a result, it forces you to THINK about your sub­ject at hand, learn about light, shut­ter speed, depth of field and work at per­fect­ing your shot and your craft.

PHOTOGRAPHY FORUM LINK

Comments

  1. nancypics says:

    Good post :)

    For me, one of the bless­ing of orig­i­nally shoot­ing with a really really old film cam­era (Pen­tax Spot­matic) is that I HAD to learn man­ual mode, because that’s all the cam­era did! When I first got my DSLR, I turned my nose up at the auto mode (lol ;) although now I some­times use it. My favourite, though, is aper­a­ture pri­or­ity. Man­ual mode does require some though at first, but it’s like any­thing else: the more you do it, the eas­ier it becomes.

Speak Your Mind

*