Manual Photography Basics – Discover Your Camera’s Inner Secrets

When you are ready for more advanced photography, changing from the automatic settings on your camera to using manual photography basics can help you to achieve a larger degree of control over your photographs. There are several manual photography basics you can utilize to achieve more control.

Manual Photography Basics: Measure Light

Measuring light can be one of the first manual options you may wish to experiment with. Light with a strong degree of intensity can provide a faster image imprint than weaker intensity light. As a result, it is important to use a light meter so you will know how long the light should be exposed in order to capture the photo.

Basically, there are two different kinds of light meters.

They are incident and reflective light meters. An incident light meter detects the amount of light that is reflected upon the meter. A reflective light meter detects the amount of light that is reflected off the subject. All electronic cameras today have built-in light meters; however, you can also use a hand held meter as well in order to achieve a higher degree of control and precision when using manual settings.

Manual Photography Basics: Using a Gray Card to Measure Light

In order for a light meter to assume the percentage of light that is reflected from the subject, it must be calibrated. For effective results you must be able to understand the measurement angle, how to isolate the subject you are measuring and the area where the reading is being taken. As one can imagine, this requires a lot of mental calculations. A gray card can help to reduce much of those calculations.

In order to use a gray card correctly to measure light, you will need to angle it toward the source of the light. Ideally, it should be angled both vertically and horizontally.

Manual Photography Basics: Exposure Controls: Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO

The ISO number is a rating of the cameras sensor (or films) sensitivity to light. You will commonly hear the term ‘stop’ referred to in photography. One ISO stop increase would refer to the sensitivity being doubled. Higher ISO settings can be used with advantages for low light situations; however, you will find they tend to produce more grain (film camera) or noise (digital camera) so you should be aware of this before using high ISO settings.

The shutter speed allows you control over the amount of time during which the shutter is open to allow light to pass through and reach the sensor or film.

Stops are also used in order to measure the speed of the shutter as well. A one stop increase in shutterspeed cuts the amount of time in half that the shutter remains open. This will consequently cut the amount of light that reaches the cameras sensor or film in half.

Aperture refers to the size of the opening of the lens. This setting will control the amount of light that passes through to the camera’s sensor. It can also determine the DOF. Like many other settings, aperture is also measured in terms of stops. In aperture settings, it is measured in terms of f-stops. Each stop increase will double the amount of light that is allowed to pass through.

Manual Photography Basics: Focus

There are several different situations in which you may wish to change to the manual focus on your camera rather than use the automatic focus setting. Using the manual focus tends to provide you with more control over the focusing. Portraits are one situation in which manual focus is ideal. Using manual focus helps to ensure the eyes of the subject are in perfect focus.

Using manual focus when shooting through mesh or glass can also be advantageous. This is because the mesh or glass tends to confuse the camera regarding where to focus when the automatic focus is employed. With manual focusing you can avoid this problem.

Automatic focus is great in fast moving action photography but the cameras auto-focus is sometimes not fast enough. In this case you can preset the focus on the right distance manually and wait for the right opportunity.

The auto-focus on many cameras don’t work well in low light conditions so you may need to set your camera to manual focus.