the full-time college student's guide to simple manual digital slr photography

8/4/2019 The Full-Time College Student's Guide to Simple Manual Digital SLR Photography

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The Full-Time CollegeStudents Guide to Digital SLR

Photography

The other day I was having a debate (of sorts) with a friend of mine about how we takepictures. Since I converted to shooting in full manual, I have been trying to get him to try itout too. Naturally, he came up with a bunch of excuses - one of them being he is a full-timecollege student so he has no time to learn manual (really lame excuse, I know)! So, I thoughtI would write up the shortest possible guide to shooting your camera in full manual mode -here it goes!

The way the picture turns out (its exposure) is controlled by four main things, these being:

1. Aperture (fancy word for hole to let light through)

2. Shutter speed (the amount of time the light is allowed through the hole)

3. ISO (the sensitivity of light to the digital sensor)

4. White balance (the temperature of the image)

When you are shooting in manual mode, you have control over all of these componentswhich may seem a little daunting, and to be honest, frustrating too.

A little more in-depth:

Aperture is measured in f-stops. When you see a number like F3.5 or F22. Thats the sizeof the hole in the lens, to let the light through. A large aperture like F3.5 is useful becauseit gives you a narrow depth of field. What this means, is that it blurs out the background.Making it easier to concentrate in on the subject in the foreground (for portraits). While F22(or there abouts) will give you a large depth of field, which is normally quite common forlandscapes.

**Note** the smaller the F-stop number, the bigger the apeture (hole in the lens) will be. e.g. F3.5 will be bigger

than F22. I wanted to make a note, because this was always something that confused me.

Shutter Speed is measure in fractions of a second to seconds themselves. If you see either1/125 or 125 in your viewfinder it is the speed of your shutter, going at 125th of a second. Nowyou can increase or decrease that to whatever your camera limits are. But let me tell you whatthe shutter speed is pro-dominantly used for. Well, its as simple as motion. You know whenyou get a blurry photograph out of you camera and youre sure its not camera shake? Theres


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a good chance that its your shutter speed, set at too low of a fraction. My point is, if you wantto freeze motion (like a waterfall, or a kid riding a bicycle) you should use a relatively fastshutter speed. If you want to create a bit of motion blur for creative effect, you need to use aslower shutter speed (around 1/40th to 1/60th of a second I have found works well).

**Note** to get good motion blur shots, we use a technique calledpanning. All this requires is for you to set yourshutter speed to 1/50th or whichever youd like and then follow the subject with the viewfinder while you clickthe picture (preferably at the same speed).

ISO relates to the sensitivity of your cameras digital sensor to the light coming into thecamera. It starts at ISO100 and (depending on the camera) can move up to ISO6400 or moreISO is especially useful in low-light situations (clubs, parties, big halls etc.). When there isntmuch ambient light, you can bump up the ISO to allow your picture to expose correctly (nottoo dark or too light). When you bump your ISO from 100 to 200, it is equivilent to openingyour aperture one whole F-stop. In broad daylight, ISO100-200 is normally used. Cloudy canbe from 400-800 (depending on the weather, of course). And of course the low light situationsISO1600 to whatever your camera can go up to!**Note** ISO settings are very useful, but like everything they have negative effects too. These negative effectsare called noise. Noise, is essentially how grainy your picture looks. Normally textures will look rough and notsmooth. I know noise is a bit of a weird thing to call it when it comes to seeing and not hearing, but hey, I dontmake the rules - I just follow them!

The best way to see (before you take the picture) the exposure is by looking at your exposuremeter. Normally this is inside the viewfinder, but it can also be on your LCD screen. As ageneral rule, you want the little block to sit right in the middle of the scale, this will ensureyou get a perfect exposure. If your meter is reading in the plus side, you need to close downthe aperture to cut down on the amount of light getting in (going from F3.5 to F4 or F5.6) or

you could increase the shutter speed (the less time the shutter is open, the less light gets in).And vice versa if your image on the minus side. You need to open the aperture. Now, if youaperture is as far open as it can go and you are still too dark, you can compensate with shutterspeed (baring in mind that, free hand, you can only go as slow as around 1/10th of a second orso, or else you will suffer from bad camera shake. Any slower than that and you will requirea tripod.) What can you do if you aperture is wide open and your shutter speed is as slow ashumanly-possible and your exposure meter is still reading in the minus side? You guessed it -bump up the ISO! Keeping in mind that if you over-do the ISO, you will get noise.

White Balance is the temperature of the image. It is measure in Kelvin (for those ofyou that dont know, Kelvin is the scale of absolute temperature.). A low Kelvin temperatureusually means that the picture will be quite yellow and a high Kelvin temperature meansthe temperature will be quite blue. The white balance in your camera is used to controlthis temperature by choosing what kind of light you are shooting in. For instance, my Canon


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EOS 450D has a WB (white balance) for shooting in broad sunlight, one for shade, one forcloudy weather, one for incandescent bulb light, one for fluorescent bulb light, and even onfor when you use the flash. There is also the AWB (auto white balance) setting, which isgood for a quick shot, but not if you want to take good quality pictures. I like to set my whitebalance manually, so that if I take a lot of pictures at a given time, I can safely apply post

settings to all of them without messing any of them up. This is because I know what the whitebalance was set too. If you are on AWB it could be different for every shot, which will lead totemperature problems in post production.

There is just one more thing I want to mention which will ultimately lead to better

photographs - composition. If you are an artist (painter or sketch artist) you will probablyhave heard of the rule of thirds. All this is, is a way of positioning your subject which ismore appealing to the viewers eye. Let me tell you how it works. Basically, you divide yourviewfinder into nine equally sized rectangles or squares (depending on the aspect ratio ofyour camera) by drawing two parallel lines in the horizontal direction and two in the verticaldirection (so it looks like a tic-tac-to board). Then, when you are getting ready to take yourshot, try to get your points of interest as close to the points of intersection (the point where avertical line and a horizontal line cross-over) as you can. All this does is make the picture a bitmore likely to draw the viewers eye in.


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Well, thats it from me! If you have any questions or comments feel free to emailme at [email protected].

Get out there and start shooting!Samuel Tom

the full-time college student's guide to simple manual digital slr photography

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