Photography 101 - Manual Photography Pt. 1 (Patreon)

This week I am going to touch on the fundamentals. How to use your camera's manual mode.

In my opinion when it comes to portrait photography, manual mode is the only way to work. There are exceptions to this such as sports photography, where aperture priority mode may be a better option. But for any controlled environment there is no reason you shouldn't have ultimate control over what your camera is doing.

To be clear, this is not about autofocus vs. manual focus. It is perfectly acceptable in my opinion to let your camera find focus for you, so long as you are giving it the proper direction of what you want to focus on. This is about the three settings that a digital camera uses in order to obtain an image. These settings are: Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO

To start, place your camera in manual mode, often denoted by an M on the dial

Each camera will be slightly different, but it will often display these three main settings on the back of the camera or through the viewfinder. Let's talk about what they are, what they mean, and how to use them.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed is very simply that, it’s the amount of time that the shutter stays open while taking a photo. The shutter of course being the small cover that opens and closes to allow light in to reach the sensor. This is denoted in seconds, so when you see 1/1000 that means it is one one thousandth of a second!! Pretty unbelievable that a shutter can open and close that quickly! Many cameras can go faster than this. Once you get slower it starts to move towards whole seconds, eventually into timer and bulb modes. One second is often denoted as 1".

The longer your shutter is open, the more light comes in, and the more movement the sensor will detect. This is one key aspect that leads to blurry images, if your shutter speed is too slow, the camera sensor will be capturing all of the movement of those moments.

However, the faster your shutter is moving, the less light can come into the camera (think about blinking quickly, you barely see anything. The camera sensor is the same as your eyeball, it "sees" while the eyelid (shutter) is open. So faster shutter speeds will lead to sharper images, but you will need more light so that it can flood into the sensor within the short time the shutter is open.

Aperture

Aperture is the width of the shutter when opening. It is denoted by f/[number], this often feels backwards to most people, since the "larger" the aperture the smaller the number. Aperture is the primary setting involved with creating your focus depth (frequently called "Depth of Field.") The larger the aperture, the thinner your focus area will be, and the smaller the aperture the deeper your focus area is. This is the equivalent of your iris opening and closing when in dark or bright light. If it is dim, your iris opens wide to let in as much light as possible, and if it is bright, your iris will close down. Your eye is essentially a camera set to automatic mode, while always trying to maintain an even exposure so that you can see.

ISO

ISO on digital cameras is the amount of electricity that is pumped through the sensor while taking a photo. The lower the ISO the cleaner your image will be. However, sometimes conditions are just too dim to rely on shutter speed and aperture alone, so you have to increase the amount of electricity used to capture the image. The more electricity, the brighter your image will appear. However, this electricity also causes artifacts known as "noise" - higher end camera's can achieve higher ISO values while showing less artifacting, while lower end cameras will often show artifacting at even the slightest increase in ISO.

So let's try out these settings in a real world situation. For now I will be assuming you understand how to control the focus on your camera but will be covering that in greater detail in part 2. 

Let's say you are outside on a bright and sunny day, these conditions are great as the camera wants as much light as possible, and it is rare that any light source can overpower the sun when it comes to cameras. It takes a lot of power and specialty lights to have anything come close.

The basic thought process to my approach is this:

1st. Set the ISO as low as possible on your camera (this is typically 100) this creates the best starting point so that you will have little to no noise artifacting.

2nd. Set your Aperture depending on your subject, do you want to photograph something thin like a flower? A really wide aperture (1.8) is great as the depth of field does not need to be severely deep to capture the detail of the flower from front to back (distance from camera). Do you want to photograph something like a person? Let's go a little tighter on aperture (2.8) so that we can make sure that their entire face is in focus. Normally you focus on the eyeball that is closest to you, because of this, noses come toward your camera which can cause the tips of them to be out of focus if your aperture is too wide (shallow depth of field, we will cover depth of field or DOF in another lesson)

3rd. Set your shutter speed to get the proper exposure for the ISO and Aperture that you are currently at. On a bright sunny day, you will likely need to go very high (fast speed) such as 1/2000. 

4th. Take your first photo and adjust! How is your photo? Is it too dark? Slow down the shutter speed to something like 1/1000 (remember since this is a fraction of a second that 1/1000 is much slower than 1/2000 [half speed.])

5th. Take another photo! Still too dark? Wow it must not be as sunny as we thought! Slow your shutter speed further! Let's say it's so dim outside, that you have to slow down to 1/125. This is the first time you will want to consider touching any other setting than your shutter speed when trying to get a proper exposure. The reason is that 1/125 is likely to show motion blur, and anything slower will just get worse if you are photographing moving subjects like humans/animals/windy plants. 

At this point I would move back up to 1/160 as this is the slowest you can typically shoot humans without motion blur.

In order to combat the dark conditions, you have two options:

1. Open your aperture to a larger number (1.4 for example) - introducing blur depending on the depth of your object and distance to camera

2. Increase your ISO - introducing noise

This is where things become a balancing act, and you will simply need to practice and get a feel for the right settings over time. You will learn where to make compromise, and whether you want a sharper image with more noise (smaller apertures with higher ISO values) or if you want a more blurred image with less noise (wider aperture with lower ISO values.)

However, most times simply adjusting your shutter speed is all that is needed once you are at the aperture setting you would like to shoot at. Aperture is the only real choice you are making when taking a photo if your goal is to take a properly exposed still image, everything else is dictated by your available lighting conditions and options. This can be altered with artificial light sources of course, but the main point to understand is that aperture is a stylistic choice, and the other settings are just necessary evils to take the photo you are trying to take.

The best way to truly understand these settings is to go out and take some photos of still objects. Choose one object, try many settings on it, and understand the difference. However, if you haven't gotten a camera yet and are dying to learn, you can always head to 500px.com and look through the photos there, you can see the camera settings associated with each photo along with what camera model they used and the focal length of the lens at the time of the photo.

For example:

https://500px.com/photo/179076899/29861129503-jpg-by-alejandro-ilukewitsch

You can see their camera was a Leica Q, with a 28mm lens set to an aperature of 5.6, at 800 ISO. Leica is an extremely high end brand, so you don't see any visible noise artifacting at 800 ISO. For some lower end camera's in a lineup (such as a Nikon D5000 or 3000 series) or a Canon t6 series you may see noise at these ISO levels. - Another major factor in visible noise is sensor size, but that is yet a topic for another time. 

Hopefully this has been a helpful start into using your camera on manual mode, next time we will discuss Depth of Field, Focal Length, and Focus modes.