Get that camera out of Auto mode!

Whether it’s walking around Chicago or simply seeing how friends operate their cameras. I see no shortage of photographers with SLR cameras who are afraid to turn that dial away from that safe, green, Auto mode. The purpose of auto mode is to give the photographer an average shot in terms of white balance, exposure levels, and color temperature levels. Auto mode will also often decide for you if flash should be used or not unless you disable that feature.

Now in this posting I’m covering a general aspect of switching to the Manual, Aperture, or Shutter priority modes, but not going into great technical detail. My goal is to show you that the shift is much easier than you’d think! Top it off, higher level SLR cameras such as Nikon D300, D700, or D3/x…have no auto mode. To start off with, anyone who has asked, I have always suggest a great book that can show you the A-Z’s of shooting in full manual mode with very easy explanations and great examples…Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. If you read this book and still have no idea how to shoot in manual mode, then I dare say that you should return your SLR camera asap, and stick with a nice point and shoot pocket camera

Why learn manual? I mean, camera technology is good and we paid for all of those processors inside the camera that calculate what settings to use, so why not stick with auto? The purpose of all of those processors is to give you a nicely balanced and centered shot, and unless the lighting is just right…they tend to sometimes look safe and boring. On top of that, when you learn to shoot in manual mode, you learn to tell a story through your images. Even more so, when you have a nice quality lens that’s capable of shooting great depth of field shots, why not use it?! Now don’t get me wrong, you can get amazing shots in auto mode, but they are often come across rather than made. What do I mean by that? I mean that if I see a photo on the web and want to recreate it, I can plan in my mind which settings I would use and switch them around very quickly when on location vs putting the camera into auto mode and hoping for the conditions to be just right. I believe that good photos are made and not simply come across.

Let’s take a fellow photographer and friend of mine, Jessi Ringer http://5ringsphoto.com/ Look at any one of her photo shoots and you will see not only creative photos, but exposures that change dramatically from one to the next in the same environment. She is able to create these images not because she has an ‘eye’ for photography, but because she’s had years of practice, figures out what works vs what doesn’t, and knows her camera like the back of her hand. There are other factors, but that’s the base. And in some pseudo-philosophical sense, once you command your camera and not the other way around, you open the door to capturing some amazing images.

And yes, I believe less in someone having an eye for photography and more in them taking the time to learn and practice. As with almost anything in life, pro photographers practice and work their way to the top rather than simply being born with the ability to snap a great photo. I’ll have a post on that topic in the future, but for now it’s on to photos that would not have been possible for me to get just the way I want them in auto mode…

~ by novophotography on July 20, 2009.