If you’re just introducing yourself to the world of DSLR camera operation or have used one on auto for years but seek to get more results out of your photography, manual mode is for you! It is a great tool to fully express your photographic creativity, and boasts greater control and creative opportunities than shooting in auto mode can ever provide a photographer.
Their are a few key settings that you must first learn to be able to understand and use manual mode effectively. These three settings determine 90% of a photos composition yet a majority of hobby photographers have never actually used them themselves as auto mode decides these settings for you without you ever even knowing they exist! These three settings are Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO and they all control the light hitting the sensor on your camera.
Shutter Speed is one of the most straightforward of these settings to understand, the shutter speed is simply how fast the shutter of the camera opens and closes while taking your picture. So for example, all of my images of the night sky require the shutter to be open for 10+ seconds at a time for each individual photo. This type of photography is called “long exposure” and requires a tripod to keep the camera in position while the photo is being taken. When faster shutter speeds are being used it will be represented on the camera in a fraction ( ex. 1/20 tell us that the shutter will be open for one twentieth of a second) Faster shutter speeds such as 1/1000 and above are typically used to capture animals and objects in motion. A good rule to keep in mind for shutter speed when shooting handheld, is the 1/ Lens Focal Length rule. This rule states that in order to avoid blurring the image from your hand shaking while holding the camera, make sure your shutter speed is always 1/ Lens Focal Length or faster to get a clear blur free image. In practice this means if you have a 50mm lens then the slowest shutter speed you would want to use would be 1/50 when shooting handheld. If you had a 200mm zoom lens instead then the slowest shutter speed would be 1/200 instead. Another important effect of shutter speed is on the photo’s brightness, the longer the shutter remains open the more light will enter the camera and be collected in the final photograph, this is why long exposures are used to get photos of the stars and other visually ‘dim’ objects as the longer shutter speed produces a brighter end result. In practice when starting out in manual mode, I recommend setting the aperture first to determine depth of field then starting at the 1/Lens Focal Length Rule for shutter speed then going faster from there to darken the image if necessary. (this practical application applies to daytime shooting only and I will create a second article relating to manual mode at night & astro-photography)
Aperture relates to how open the camera lens is to the light coming in. The aperture, also know as f-stop and displayed as Av or f/x (where x is the current aperture value) is simply a measure of how much light the lens is allowing in and the higher this number gets the less light is passed through the lens into the final picture. The aperture also has an important role in controlling depth of field for the shot which is an exciting photo mechanic to control your cameras focus depth. A low aperture such as f/3.5 and lower will produce a very shallow depth of field, which allows you to get background blur as demonstrated in the image on the left below (example A). In this photo you will notice the dandelion is in focus but the background is blurred and not in focus completely. This is due to the shallow depth of field used in the image which allows you to blur the background (or foreground) and have the other in focus using that depth of field to your creative advantage. The second picture on the right, is an example of what would happen in the same scene if instead a wide depth of field was used. This image instead, has both the dandelion and the mountainous scene behind it in focus, and was only possible due to the high aperture used to take the picture which created a wide enough depth of field for both the dandelion and the mountains to be in focus.
Example A (Aperture of F/2.8 used)
Example B (Aperture of F/22 used)
This creative decision can give your photos drastically different tones and feelings as you can see in these two very similar compositions above that come out quite different due to the change of aperture & subsequently depth of field that was made. This is why I would recommend if you want to make the switch to manual mode but don’t feel prepared to tackle all three settings yet, simply move over to Av mode (on Canon) or A mode (on Sony and Nikon) which allows you to control the aperture manually but have the camera still set shutter speed automatically for you. However once you become comfortable in aperture mode I recommend switching to full manual ASAP as it offers many more creative decisions similar to the one offered by depth of field that allow you to have greater control over the final image.
The third and final setting in this trio is ISO. Simply put the ISO controls how bright the final shot will come out but at a cost. The more you turn up the ISO, the more noise and grain will be added to the image as a result of this, and for this reason I like to turn up ISO last when shooting in manual mode. In most situations during the daytime an ISO of 100 ( or whatever your lowest ISO is on your camera) is completely acceptable and will produce a well lit, clean image ( in this case the lighting of the image falls on the shutter speed and aperture alone) However many times while taking photos during sunrise or sunset a higher ISO will be necessary to get bright enough photos to see clearly and that is completely normal. It is better to use a higher ISO while taking the photo to get it brighter while shooting it than it would be using post processing software to brighten the photograph (such as lightroom or photoshop) as those methods tend to add a lot more noise and grain than ISO on the camera itself does for an equivelent amount of brightness. ISO is certainly one of the easier settings to control but using it properly (and only when necessary) will certainly improve the print quality and overall clarity of your photos tremendously. Another consideration (mostly important for higher ISO photography) is that there is software such as, Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and also free software which can be found by searching “photo noise removal” which can help remove noise with a small detail trade off. This software is greatly beneficial for reducing noise in situations where it is unavoidable while taking the photograph!