20 July 2006
Beginner’s Guide to Manual Photography
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: Photography .
Some might ask why you would want or need to modify camera settings manually when the camera can do it for you ‘just fine.’ It is certainly possible to get a nice photo just snapping away in automatic mode, but more often than not what you’ll end up with is a snapshot rather than an expressive photograph. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, really, but if you want to consistently end up with photographs instead of snapshots, you’ll need to grab the wheel and take control. For example, your camera may decide that it wants to use flash when a much nicer photo would result from natural available light. You can get the same overall exposure with many different settings, and the feel of an image will change noticeably with each different one. But I’m getting way ahead of myself…
The purpose of this article will be to lay out some of the most basic (and important) manual settings which can be found on most cameras. While this is hardly an exhaustive list of manual settings, bare in mind that this is an introduction to manual settings. The things I’ll be focusing on are Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO (sensitivity).
