Manual Mode Photography

by Kelvin Pimont from Kelvin Designs

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to use the M or manual mode on your camera instead of the automatic mode

You can get the pdf to follow along with this tutorial here:

Download the Source Files for this episode:

This post has been adapted from the YouTube tutorial found below.

Watch the video above or just follow the steps as outlined below.

Let's get started

This is a really short crash course to get you started. You'll see that when you retouch your photos later using the manual mode on your camera gives you much more control than when using the automatic mode.

First we're going to set the camera from A to M or in some cases written auto or manual - so just change that to M.

Now you have three settings that you have to adjust when you're doing portraits.

f-stop

The first thing we're gonna look at is f-stop

That is basically how open or closed the lens is - the more closed it is the sharper things will be. Similar to when looking through a pinhole everything is dark but very sharp and if it's very wide something that's very close is going to be very sharp and everything else is very blurry so when you do portraits and you want that nice bouquet behind your subject - open it up as much as your lens will let you.

That's what I did here and in this case we've got a 1.85 1.5 so that's we're gonna be open to 1.5

ISO

The next thing you're going to adjust is the sensor which is basically ISO.

ISO basically determines how sensitive your sensor is, back in the days of film - the iso of your film determined how sensitive your film was and the most common sort of outdoors film that we used was 200 ISO up to maybe 400 or 500.

Now because it's digital you can change it now on the fly between every photo but a good starting point is 200 so keep that in mind so for now I'm gonna set it to 200 ISO.

Shutterspeed

The third thing that I adjust and this is what I adjust the most on the fly is the speed.

Now speed is how fast the shutter opens or closes what that means is it's let's say one hundredth of a second that's how fast it opens and closes.

The faster it is the less light comes in so it's darker and the slower it is the more light comes in all right so depending on the environment and most cameras have a little sensor and if you look over here in the screen you'll see there's a little plus and minus and it goes left to right to show you if you're underexposed or overexposed

As a general rule it's safer to be underexposed rather than overexposed, because overexposed means you got blown out pixels which you just can't recover, whereas if you're underexposed you've got a lot of pixels within those dark pixels that you can lighten up and that you can still save. So try to just stay maybe 1/2 or 3/4 of an f-stop underexposed that's a good frame of reference.

So we're gonna change the speed now and I will adjust it based on what I see and what the sensor tells me. 

Results of Shooting in Manual mode

Here are the results of this photoshoot using manual mode:

Another little photography tip

when you're doing portrait photography it's good to keep a conversation kind of going with your model or your subjects because otherwise your shoot ends up being a little stoic, a little lacking life so just talk have a kind of continuous conversation and you'll see that your photos actually turn out a little nicer.

These three are your basics and this is how you start - you're gonna make some mistakes on the way and that's totally fine simply try and just practice it. You're going to miss on some photos but in the end the more you practice this the better you get.

It's such an easy concept once you apply it that you'll see results immediately also if you download the files for this episode you'll get a little cheat sheet that we prepared for you that shows you the differences of high and low for the three: the aperture, the ISO and the shutter speed.

Conclusion

Our short tutorial showed you that shooting in manual instead of auto and adjusting aperture, ISO and shutter speed gives you much better control and can actually make your portraits stand out. It’s always a very good idea to try out something new as you optimize and enhance your portraits. Test out these ideas and don’t hesitate to follow us for new tutorials!