Beginner’s Guide to Manual Shooting
Shooting in manual mode, where you’re in complete control of all the camera’s settings, allows you to properly expose a shot in all lighting, locations and situations.
To get you going with the basics of manual shooting, here’s a simple rundown of camera settings to help you improve your photography.
Exposure meter
Before sorting out anything else you need to ensure your image is correctly exposed. Not only will this lead to a better photo, it will also make it far easier to edit and apply presets to. And don't stop checking it! A cloud, reflection and shooting a slightly different direction can completely change how exposed an image is, and you may need to account for that.
The exposure meter is your tool to constantly refer to. Every time you set up a shot, make sure the arrow is pointing to 0. If it is above zero it is over-exposed, and if it is below, it is under-exposed. By altering ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed (discussed below), you can manipulate your exposure to ensure it is correctly exposed every time.
ISO:
How much the camera artificially adds light to an image
When shooting in very low light, you may need to increase the ISO. However, increasing the ISO will add more ‘grain’ to the image. The better the camera, the less noticeable the grain, but once you really start getting higher, the photo will have a lot of 'noise' and won’t look crisp and sharp.
A good starting point is to always bring your ISO as low as possible (generally around 100). You shouldn't need to touch this very much at all until shooting in really low light conditions, but for day-to-day shots, you should be able to keep it at ISO 100 most of the time.
Aperture (F-Stop):
How much the camera lets light in
This can be a very confusing aspect of photography but we'll try and simplify it as best we can!
Just look at the Aperture as a number (F-Stop) – don't overthink it. The lower the number next to the ‘F’, the more light is let in and the more 'bokeh' there will be. Bokeh is the difference in the sharpness of the subject relative to the rest of the image (when the subject is sharp and the background is blurred, as seen below).
The majority of the photos you see on our site and Instagram pages are shot with a low F-Stop, giving the photos a lot of bokeh. However, you may not always want such a dramatic change in depth of field.
A few examples of when you would want F-Stop to be higher:
If it is too bright outside, your shutter speed is as fast as it can go, your ISO is as low as it can go, yet the image is still overexposed. If all of this is the case and your exposure meter still says that it is over exposed, you will need to increase the number of your aperture to lower the amount of light that is getting let in with each shot. Increase this number slowly until the arrow is back to zero, giving you a correctly exposed image.
You want multiple things in focus. For example, you may be wanting to capture multiple people at different distances from you, or you may want to capture a large amount of a landscape and you don't really want anything 'out of focus'. By increasing this number, you remove the amount of bokeh from the shot, allowing more things to be in focus. As an example – you want to get a photo of a massive lake and mountains that stretch on for miles. The last thing you'd want is for one tree in the foreground to be tack sharp, and the rest of the image to be blurry. So to get more of it in focus, just increase the F-Stop. A good range would be f7-15. While this will lead to more things being in focus, it will also lower the amount of light coming in, darkening the image in the process. Which leads us to our next topic – shutter speed.
Shutter speed:
How fast the shutter opens and closes to capture an image
Increasing the shutter speed limits the amount of light that enters the camera for each shot. Inversely, the slower the shutter speed, the brighter the image. With this in mind, for the previous landscape example, you would then decrease the shutter speed to let more light in. Generally speaking, if your subject is quite close and fairly still (a person standing or sitting) the shutter speed doesn't matter too much other than altering the amount of light getting into the image.
However, if you are using a zoom lens, or you are trying to capture action or something fast-moving, you will need to ensure your shutter speed is still quite fast to keep the image sharp. For example, if you are trying to capture a race car driving by, the shutter speed should be as quick as possible to capture it without any blur.
Phew! That should be enough info to get you going.
While there are still plenty of other tips and tricks to get the most from your camera, this should really help in transitioning to better quality photos. Use this guide as a stepping stone to learning more about how you can utilise your camera to create shots exactly the way you want them.
Want to learn even more?
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