I saw a t-shirt in an ad the other day that said “Everyone’s a photographer until…” followed by a picture of a camera’s mode dial set to “M.” Gatekeeping aside, I think it brings up a good point. The dreaded “Manual” shooting mode can be intimidating. After all, if you’re in some kind of auto or priority mode, you can pretty much be guaranteed you’ll get SOMETHING usable when you press the shutter. With manual mode, you have no such safety net. You could go home with a card full of pure black or pure white images, or worse, a completely blank roll of film if you screw something up. Right?
No matter how long you’ve been shooting, it’s not too late to learn to shoot in manual. But before we get into the nitty gritty, I want to say that shooting manual mode does not automatically make your photos look better, it does not automatically make you a better photographer, and you can absolutely create amazing art outside of manual mode.
What manual mode does do is give you control. If you’ve read any of my blog, you know that I’m a control freak about my images. I’m not interested in letting the camera do anything for me that I feel like I could do better myself, because as I’ve stated before, the camera can only guess what you’re trying to do. That absolutely includes exposure. And the camera is going to guess that you want to get as close to middle gray as possible, every single time. So even though I know plenty of photographers who do excellent work in Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, or even Program Auto, I personally find my mode dial fixed on “M” about 99.9% of the time. In fact, for most of my film cameras, manual is my only option. My 4x5 doesn’t even use electricity, let alone have the ability to measure light and calculate an exposure.
There is exactly one thing you need to know in order to shoot manual mode, and that is the relationship between shutter speed, aperture (or the size of the hole in your lens letting in light), and ISO, and the effect that each one has on your exposure.
Exposure is nothing more than how bright your image is recorded on your film or sensor. That’s it. You’ve probably heard of or read about the “exposure triangle” and seen that little diagram with each point on the triangle being either shutter speed, aperture, or ISO. I’ve never fully understood how putting those words in the shape of a triangle is supposed to help explain them any better.
The analogy I prefer is a water faucet pouring into a bathtub. Imagine with me for a minute that you’re super rich and have a bathtub with a magical faucet, made out of something expensive, like gold, or platinum, or college tuition. This is no ordinary faucet though, your magical faucet has three different knobs on it, which is how you know it’s fancy and you’re rich.
Your goal here is to get the bathtub full.
The first knob is your shutter speed. It works just like any other normal, non-fancy faucet. Except you can only put it in two positions: open or closed. There’s no in-between where you’re trickling water out. It’s either going full blast or it’s off. Obviously, the longer you turn it on, the closer you get to filling up the bathtub.
The second knob is your aperture. When you turn this knob, the mouth of the faucet gets bigger suddenly! Now the water can come out way faster, which means it doesn’t have to be turned on as long to fill up the tub. If you turn it the other direction, it gets really skinny and takes forever to fill up the tub.
The third knob is your ISO. When you turn this knob, the bathtub shrinks. Suddenly you don’t need as much water to get it totally full.
So the analogy is pretty on-the-nose here. Your shutter speed controls how long you’re letting light hit the sensor. Your aperture controls how much light can come through the lens at a time. And your ISO controls how much light your sensor needs to reach the same exposure. The point of the analogy is that there are tons of ways to get to the same target exposure. It’s possible to fill up the bathtub with any number of combinations of turning knobs on the faucet. You could set your aperture way down to a pinhole size and let light dribble onto your sensor for an hour. You could open your aperture all the way up, crank your ISO as high as it goes, and get the fastest possible shutter speed.
Figuring out which shutter speed, ISO, and aperture are best to use in your situation is the entirety of shooting in manual. And for a lot of situations, there are a LOT of combinations that will get the job done.
Here’s the thing though. Changing your shutter speed, aperture, and ISO do different things in addition to changing the brightness of your exposure.
Shutter speed controls how much movement you see in the photo. Obviously if you want to freeze the action, you need a faster shutter speed. If you want to blur something like moving water, you’ll want to aim for a slower shutter speed.
Aperture affects your depth-of-field, or how much of the photo is in focus. For landscapes, it’s common to want everything in focus, so you’ll need a smaller aperture. For portraits, usually you want to blur out the background and keep only the subject in focus, so a larger aperture is preferred. Remember that a smaller f-number is actually a larger aperture. So f/2.8 is a bigger aperture (and therefore shallower DoF) than f/11. It’s worth mentioning that aperture also has an indirect effect on image sharpness. Most lenses aren’t as sharp at their widest apertures as they are in the middle range, and having too narrow of an aperture causes you to lose some sharpness due to a phenomenon called diffraction. We’ll save an in-depth discussion on lens sweet spots for another post, but you should know that the vast majority of lenses are at their very sharpest in the neighborhood of f/8 or so. My 50mm lens’s sharpest aperture happens to be f/6.3. My 24mm lens does best at f/11. So when absolute maximum sharpness is important to a photo, I like to set those apertures and change shutter speed and ISO around them.
ISO affects only your image quality. What kind of digital camera you have will greatly affect how much digital noise or “grain” is introduced into your photo when you go up higher in ISO. How much is too much is a totally subjective question. My rule of thumb is to keep ISO at my minimum of 100 whenever possible, but if I have to choose between getting a blurry photo from too slow of a shutter speed, or just increasing my ISO, I’ll choose a little digital noise every time. Even my old 5D Mk II has given me very usable results at ISO 1600. Many film shooters purposely shoot high ISO films (or push their films to higher effective ISOs) because they want more grain.
So depending on your photo, you’ll probably have one or two settings you need to prioritize (like getting the right aperture for the job), and then you set the other ones around that to get the exposure where it needs to be.
Like anything else in photography, shooting in manual takes some practice. But with your camera’s built-in meter telling you when you’re at least in the ballpark of a correct exposure, it’s way easier than people tend to assume. And if worst comes to worst, and you have no way to meter the scene but have ot make a manual exposure, use the trusty “sunny 16” rule of thumb. If you’re shooting in bright sunlight, set your aperture to f/16, and your shutter speed to 1 over your ISO. For example, on a bright sunny day, f/16, ISO 100, and 1/100 shutter speed will virtually always give an exposure that’s not far off from correct. So would f/16, ISO 400, and 1/400 shutter speed. Or I could bump the aperture open a few stops and compensate by lowering the ISO or increasing shutter speed. So f/8, ISO 100, and 1/400 shutter speed. If it’s a little overcast, use f/11 as your baseline instead of f/16. If it’s cloudy or you’re in shade, use f/8 as your base.
Go give manual shooting a try. You might find you like it. You’ll almost certainly find it’s not as hard as you thought it would be.
What’s your preferred shooting mode?