The Manual Mode question and answer thread.

[clarion]

Depends if you have surly landscapes

[Jaded]

[Charlotte]

Surely no one uses just auto modes per se. They use compensation and/or spot metering.

You'd be surprised, then 

[Kim]

I, for one, will confess to using full-auto mode a lot of the time.  Not because I don't know what I'm doing, so much that the majority of the time I can't be arsed (see also my general inability to actually get a camera out).  I usually take photos to illustrate things rather than to create art, and it's surprising how good full-auto can actually be on a modern camera.  When it gets it wrong, as Jaded says, I'll generally resort to compensation or spot-metering rather than going manual.  Bracketing is everyone's friend.

I am, of course, a philistine.

[mike]

I, for one, will confess to using full-auto mode a lot of the time.  Not because I don't know what I'm doing, so much that the majority of the time I can't be arsed (see also my general inability to actually get a camera out).  I usually take photos to illustrate things rather than to create art, and it's surprising how good full-auto can actually be on a modern camera.  When it gets it wrong, as Jaded says, I'll generally resort to compensation or spot-metering rather than going manual.  Bracketing is everyone's friend.

I am, of course, a philistine.

that makes me one too...

I do 90% of every wedding on Aperture priority, auto ISO.  I use exposure comp in some settings and manual when I'm using flash in the evening, but otherwise there just isn't time to think about settings.  Auto ISO is brilliant, I'd much rather have the right depth of field and shutter speed and a grainy photo at ISO6400 / 12800 than a blurred photo at ISO400 when the bride and groom wander out of the nicely lit aisle and into a dark corner of the church for a bit of the service.

Even engagement shoots where I've got more time, I'll normally use aperture priority and auto ISO, plus comp when needed for all natural light shots.  It lets me think more about what the subjects are doing and less about the camera.

[Aunt Maud]

I taught myself The Zone System when I studied photography at The London College of Printing, and although things have changed quite radically I still use it for digital photography, as the basics of exposure are still the same.

I'll try and put something together over the next few days to try and easily explain the basic principals and a few simple ways of getting a decent manual exposure by using the light meter in a camera and successfully calculating exposures lasting several minutes.

It's a great thing to learn and opens up the world of low light, mixed lighting (my favourite for colours) and night photography. This time of year is a good time to take night photos, as you don't have to hang around late at night with the drunks and loonies like in the summer.

You'll need a tripod and a cable release or long exposure timer to really reap the rewards though.

[rogerzilla]

An incident meter is as close to infallible as it gets for slide film or digital, which have similar requirements (no overexposure).  You only mess with the indicated exposure if you want to get extra highlight or shadow detail, For instance, if you wanted to show contours in a snowscape, you'd underexpose a bit and to drag a bit of shadow detail from a black cat in a coal hole, you'd overexpose.  In 99.9% of cases you wouldn't change a thing.  It's different with negative film, which can have enormous dynamic range and a very forgiving characteristic curve, so you can bias the exposure one way or the other without worrying about blowing the highlights or losing all shadow detail.

[drossall]

My late father-in-law got me interested, soon after my wife and I were married. He lent me a manual Kodak 35mm folder and a Weston meter, on the principle that understanding manual mode was necessary before using anything automatic.

Later I moved on to a Petri K-mount, still manual but with an integrated meter(!), and then to the dizzy heights of a second-hand ME Super, which I always loved, and a very second-hand Super A, which had good features but somehow not the same charisma.

As a result, I stuck to Pentax when I moved to DSLRs, and I'm very happy. I have to admit to using manual rarely, but I never use program mode either - as someone said above, it's mostly aperture priority and exposure compensation for me.

[tonycollinet]

...
A good skill to master is judging the tonal range of a scene and it's good to get to know how many stops range your camera can record.  If your scene has too broad a spread of tones you need to manage it with neutral density filtration, lighting,  masking or HDR combination of multiple exposures.
...

I'm pretty certain ND filtration won't help here. It will reduce the overall exposure value, but the tonal range will stay the same (dark areas reduced the same number of stops as bright areas.)

[Tewdric]

You don't filter the whole scene.  Typically used by landscape photographers to bring the sky down 1-3 stops.

[Aunt Maud]

Tewdric means and ND grad filter which has a portion of the filter darkened and the other part clear.

[Aunt Maud]

An incident meter is as close to infallible as it gets for slide film or digital, which have similar requirements (no overexposure).  You only mess with the indicated exposure if you want to get extra highlight or shadow detail, For instance, if you wanted to show contours in a snowscape, you'd underexpose a bit and to drag a bit of shadow detail from a black cat in a coal hole, you'd overexpose.  In 99.9% of cases you wouldn't change a thing.  It's different with negative film, which can have enormous dynamic range and a very forgiving characteristic curve, so you can bias the exposure one way or the other without worrying about blowing the highlights or losing all shadow detail.

It depends whether you're happy having an average exposure or not.

The Zone System works exceptionally well for transparency, as you can adjust the development of each exposure if you use sheet film, just like you can with B&W. It also transfers well to digital, as digital photography is based on exactly the same principals as film, except any over or under development to control tonal range of the final digital image is done on a computer instead of in a tank of chemicals and doesn't involve silver halide. Unfortunately with digital photography, as you said, you don't have as much range or latitude, if you like, to play around with exposure and development as with film, but you can still adjust an exposure to produce an image that you have "visualised" (we're getting into poncey photographic speak here), that may be far removed from the image produced by taking an average meter reading.

Although incident light meters are good when you're using flash or are able to stand in the scene and measure the light falling on it, they are not the best choice for photographing landscapes or architecture, where the subject can be hundreds of meters away and is lit by a different light to the one you're standing in.

[LEE]

If I shoot with my lovely new Yongnuo flash then I will shoot in Manual because any sort of Auto/ETTL setting seems to get it entirely how I didn't want it to look.

Since it has High-speed synch to 1/8000 I can pretty much use Manual mode on the camera and flash to blend the background exposure and subject exposure how I intended.

On my pocket camera, a Canon S120 (bloody love that thing), I have set a Custom Mode to RAW, 35mm zoom, ISO 800 and F2.8.  When I switch it on it takes 2 seconds to "boot" into those settings and I know it will most likely bag me a decent shot (It replicates my old Olympus XA2 using "pushed" Ilford FP4, my all time favourite film camera).  It really helps knowing what to expect when you power on, that's as close to Manual as I ever get unless I have time to kill to think about things.

I'm spoiled by my Canon DLSLR.  It can generally grab a decent shot when all the odds are stacked against it.  With exposure bracketing turned on a few stops, it's simply astounding just how "salvagable" an image is nowadays. But..despite all this...it's still just a box that captures light.  If you point it at shit it will take a picture of shit.

I'm still astounded by people who "see" a great image better than I will ever do.  If you have the gift to "see" an image then fully-Auto mode will be fine.  If you don't have that gift then all the manual setting in the world won't help. (Still obsessed with Vivian Maier's gift).

[Aunt Maud]

Yes, no amount of metering will compensate for a poor composition, but the right exposure at the right time can produce some lovely colours.

This was taken on 5x4 Fuji 100 asa transparency. I'm not sure how it will render on your monitor, but the original has some rich colours.

[Gattopardo]

Not sure if this question is appropriate for this section, but here goes.

Having done an a level in phtotgraphy and got to play with film and manipulation of images, I'm a little lost with digital.  I have loads of raw images and not really sure how or what to use to manipulate them.  Interesting point about underexposure and over exposure in digital images I didn't know that.  Thought it was all telly magic and they appear.

[mike]

Try Picasa if you're on windows or Photos if mac.  Both are free and will let you fiddle with the raw files - try playing with the colour temperature and exposure first, then other stuff.  Both will try and suck in all your pics because they want to be a file manager and help you rank stuff, they do a great job at it too.

If you want something more powerful that'll do more editing as well as the file managing for you, Lightroom is the 'industry standard' - about 100 pounds for the CD.

Full editors like photoshop and Gimp are much more powerful photo manipulators but won't do the file management and they're complicated to learn. 

[fuaran]

Also try RawTherapee, it is free, and can do lots of stuff for adjusting RAW files.

[Biggsy]

Choose and download a RAW processing program.  Light room is popular.  Silkypix Development Studio is my favourite.  RAW Therapee is free.

Edit: Posted from my phone where I don't get a warning that someone has beaten me to it.

[Afasoas]

With timing (and to a lesser degree composition) - practice, practice practice.

I have fond memories of shooting football and getting very good at anticipating where the ball was going to be. I can't even explain the mechanics behind it, except for hearing a kick, seeing the ball in motion and the camera falling in the right spot - start depressing the shutter before the next kick - click and bingo. I used to shoot tournaments, ten minutes with a game in which to get a good shot of every player, move onto the next game.

Spray and pray was of no use - I'm handing a memory card to someone whose job it is to sell the pictures. They need 1 quality shot not five mediocre shots to sift through - otherwise people take to long choosing their photographs and the whole thing falls to pieces.

And incidentally, sports was the only time I used aperture priority. I was strictly a manual shooter for everything else.



I've got some tuition notes and slides on how automatic exposure/reflective light metering works - the basic gist is that most cameras adjust the exposure to give a preset measure of brightness. I believe the first preset measure was derived by measuring the average brightness of an arbitrary number of photographs processed by an arbitrary number of photo labs and averaged out to be 18% gray. That value of brightness doesn't translate very well from the media of print to digital photography, so most cameras use a value of between 12% and 15% grey. I can't find my original references for this, but there's a bit of chatter on this blog that probably helps: http://www.ryanewalters.com/Blog/blog.php?id=3551583675371023276



There's an experiment I used to get my tutees to do. Fill the frame with some white card and photograph it. Then fill the frame with black card and photograph it. You can try this with any camera on auto mode. What result do you get? It's important to fill the frame. If there are any caucasian skin tones in the frame (fingers etc.) the camera will adjust it's exposure accordingly.

The camera, just as it doesn't know whether the card is black or white, doesn't know whether the skin tones are caucasian or not.

[Gattopardo]

How about filters on a digital camera?

[DDCyclist]

I, for one, will confess to using full-auto mode a lot of the time.  Not because I don't know what I'm doing, so much that the majority of the time I can't be arsed (see also my general inability to actually get a camera out).  I usually take photos to illustrate things rather than to create art, and it's surprising how good full-auto can actually be on a modern camera.  When it gets it wrong, as Jaded says, I'll generally resort to compensation or spot-metering rather than going manual.  Bracketing is everyone's friend.

I am, of course, a philistine.

This +1

The camera(s) have always got it right enough for what I need. I generally take photographs when I'm out walking and don't have time to stop and faff about with settings.

I did go through a phase of saving in raw on the dSLR, but it was eating battery power like Garfield eats lasagne. I didn't have (or want to carry) a spare so I abandoned that idea. I've never really needed the RAW image anyway.

[LEE]

I do 90% of every wedding on Aperture priority, auto ISO.

It's the Auto ISO that makes me tremble.  I've had some horrible noisy images doing exactly this because of cameras too eager to push ISO rather than reduce shutter speed.

Some cameras let you set a limit on how high Auto ISO will go. I have mine set to 1600 which is still fairly "clean".

I try to leave my cameras in some Auto or Program mode, so I don't have to think if I quickly need to grab my camera.

With my pocket camera I have a Custom mode that boots the camera in Shutter Priority, at 1/200th, an ISO of 800, -1/3 EV and zooms to 35mm equiv. 
I've basically set it to boot up like my old Olympus XA2 (well that would have had 400 ISO film in it) for street photography.  It takes 3 seconds to boot and it's great knowing exactly what things will look like when it does.  Makes it feel like a prime lens compact camera.

[mike]

I do 90% of every wedding on Aperture priority, auto ISO.

It's the Auto ISO that makes me tremble.  I've had some horrible noisy images doing exactly this because of cameras too eager to push ISO rather than reduce shutter speed.

Some cameras let you set a limit on how high Auto ISO will go. I have mine set to 1600 which is still fairly "clean".

Same, and mine are set to different values depending on how well they cope with it.  I'd still rather have grain than blur though, the happy couple (most happy couples!) won't notice grain, they want to see eyes and teeth....

[LEE]

How about filters on a digital camera?

Use them.

I think Neutral density and ND Graduated are essential.  Polariser is useful (though I don't have one yet).

DSLRs have a big dynamic range but frequently not enough to capture a bright sky and dark foreground.  It's very rare for a pro Landscape photographer not to have an ND Grad filter attached, to "bring the sky down".

a Variable (circular) ND filter is essential for serious video, if you want to maintain the same ISO and cinematic shutter speed that is.

My "pocket" camera has a built-in ND filter which is a really nice feature, though I'm not sure whether it's a virtual filter or not, i.e. just turns down the sensor sensitivity.  If so why not just offer me lower ISO?

[Afasoas]

I meant to say in my earlier post, if anyone is interested in the tuition notes, drop me a PM and I'll send them on.

At the minute I can only find a few lessons worth, but the rest must be around somewhere - worth a trawl through my email archive probably. They start off with the basics and work upwards. There's even a 7 page glossary that shows literally explains what all the settings on the camera mean, with examples for the symbols etc. They then go on to aperture priority, shutter priority, explaining exposure etc.