For owners of digital slr cameras using full manual mode can seem very daunting and a dark art best left to the professionals. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Using manual mode is much easier than most amateur photographers think it is.
A common misconception is that manual mode means you need to set all of the cameras settings such as aperture, shutter speed and iso manually. Due to the huge number of combinations possible of just these three settings this can seem like an impossible task.
What few amateurs initially understand is that the cameras manual mode will advise you of the best settings to use for a particular scene. Based on this advice you can either do as it recommends or make minor changes to the settings in order to get better exposures in certain situations when you know that the camera will get it wrong (more on this later).
Before learning how to use manual mode lets take a look at how your camera works.
The Heart of Your Camera: The Light Meter
The way your camera chooses the settings to use in automatic mode (or advises you to use in manual mode) is via it’s internal light meter. Light meters simply measure the amount of light in a particular scene.
Back in the day light meters were external devices used by photographers to literally meter the light before they took a picture. This would tell them which settings of shutter speed, aperture and ISO to use for a particular scene. Every photographer had to carry one round with them and point it at their subject prior to selecting their settings and taking the shot.
These days every digitial slr camera has a light meter built into it which in itself makes life much easier for us as we have less kit to buy and carry round everywhere. In manual camera mode your camera gives you the ability to over write the light meters recommended settings.
How to Use Your Cameras Manual Mode
One of the easiest ways to understand light meters is to use them, so lets look at an example. In a typical situation in manual mode you should first decide which aperture you want to shoot at. If you are shooting an portrait then a large aperture such as f5.6 may be appropriate to help blur the background. If you are shooting a landscape a small aperture such as f22 in order to help you get everything in focus.
Once you have selected your aperture simply point your camera at your subject. Your camera will then monitor the light levels reflecting off your subject and indicate what shutter speed is required in order to obtain what it thinks is a correct exposure. This is usually done on the exposure +/- scale in the view finder.
Next you will need to adjust the shutter speed using a dial on your camera until the little mark on the scale sits in the middle of the scale. Now take your shot and you should have a correct exposure. How easy was that?!
Why Use Your Cameras Manual Mode?
Ok, so now you should realize that using manual mode is not as daunting as it seems thanks to the light meter. However you may be asking yourself “why bother using manual mode is you are simply setting the camera up as it would be in automatic mode”? Well this is a fair question and the answer is simply that in manual mode you have the freedom to correct any mistakes the cameras light meter makes.
Using Manual Mode Can Produce Some Stunning Results
Lets assume you are taking a portrait of a loved one in a sunny park and the sun is behind your subject (what is known as back lit). Shooting in automatic mode or with the recommended settings in manual mode you will usually find that the person becomes silhouetted. This may be fine and the result you desired in which case there is no problem. However if you wanted to show the persons facial details then you may need to override the settings recommended by your cameras light meter.
What the light meter will have done is looked at the scene and based it’s recommendation on the fact that a huge part of the picture was very bright (light by the sun). Your resulting exposure will not have been enough to capture your loved ones facial details.
In order to fix this what you would need to do is to walk up close to your subject and point your camera at their face so that their face fills the majority of the frame. Don’t worry about focusing now but just adjust your shutter speed based on this scene, then move back and recompose the scene as you originally intended. Now you are exposing for their face not the bright sky and your light meter will now indicate that your exposure is wrong, ignore it and take the shot. You should now have a shot where your subjects face is not silhouetted. This is because you exposed for the face, not the very bright sky behind the face.
Learning how to use your cameras manual camera mode is easy to do and essential if you want to get correctly exposed photographs in tricky situations where the majority of the frame is a different light from your subject such as the situation described above, snowy landscapes, beach shots, sun sets etc.
Hopefully now you should be comfortable using your cameras manual mode and understand how you can benefit from using it as opposed to relying on automatic mode.
If you want to learn more about exposure then we’d recommend reading Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. Check out our recent review here.
Did you enjoy this article? If so please subscribe to Digital SLR Guru to receive free updates!
Loading ...