Learning how to master the manual mode has always been labeled as one of the main reasons people tend to avoid purchasing a proper camera, thinking you need to spend a lot of time to learn how to take great pictures, but most importantly, to make a reality the vision you have in your mind of what you want the final picture to look like, and this way of thinking is further bolstered by the ongoing trend of enabling devices and software to do the work for us, decide for us and process images in such a way that the only thing we have to do is point the device and shoot. Now, for general purposes the automation of the process has allowed photography to become a popular hobby, which is great, but it comes with a great issue, if everyone is just pointing at the same subject and letting the device decide the optimal settings to achieve an OK picture, everyone ends with equal results, and you see the same ok picture a million times, this quickly makes them to our eyes unoriginal, less interesting, and at the end of the day forgettable, because in photography it usually doesn’t matter if you have the best tool when everybody else has also access to the same tools, what matters is how you make the most of it, going the extra mile, taking the time to understand how to achieve the results you already have in your mind, instead of conforming for whatever the tool decides is best for you, and half a million other people taking the same shot as you.

Mastering the manual mode doesn’t mean that you will not use the other modes your camera has available, because there is a reason for them to exist, none the less I will not go into detail here about their advantages, and it should be enough to know for now that learning to master the manual mode will make it very easy and painless for you to understand these other modes and be able to make the most out of them.

Now, maybe you are here because you already have a camera and want to tame that beast, or are thinking in buying one but do not want to commit to such investment before learning a thing or two about them and how they are different from the camera you already have in your smartphone, to everybody’s benefit (or almost everybody anyway) most of current-gen smartphone camera apps already have included a PRO or MANUAL mode, this way you can learn to master the manual mode even if you have not purchased a camera yet.

When you shot an image in auto mode the camera software will evaluate the image you intend to shoot and, sticking to the settings available to you on this mode, it will select a combination of shutter speed, aperture and ISO, these three control how light is captured in your camera and directly influence the final image, the camera will try to get an image that is balanced, this is an image not too dark and not too bright, in other words, an image that is well exposed (closest to 0 in the light/exposure meter, evaluating the area you are focusing at), it will try to get in focus as much as possible of the image, depending on your lens, and it will try to freeze movement to further increase the sharpness of the image, when you switch to manual mode you will be able to control shutter speed, aperture and ISO individually, this way you can decide the best settings combination to take your picture, instead of letting the camera decide, giving you a better control over the end results and allowing you and your photography skills to grow outside of the narrow space of pictures that can be taken in auto mode.

Understanding how shutter speed, aperture and ISO are related is the KEY to mastering the manual mode, they form an intertwined triangle, where you can compensate one of them with the others and viceversa, while you may think that it is very hard to understand how to work with the manual mode, I will show you that in general terms you will just have to make 3 decisions based on your desired picture in order to put the manual mode to work in your favor; we will start with ISO which is basically how much light the camera sensor captures or how sensitive is to the light, a lower ISO number means that each pixel composing the sensor will be less likely to capture light, and increasing this number will let them capture more light, higher sensitivity to light means that neighboring pixels might capture light differently, this is known as introducing noise to the image, and it reflects as grainy dots of varying colors along your picture, we dont have to understand right now all the science behind ISO, you just have to know that lower ISO will result in an image that is cleaner but requires a lot of light in order to be able to be captured by the sensor, and higher ISO will allow you to take images in scenarios where there is not that much light, but you will need to keep the shutter open longer to allow the light to reach the sensor, and this will add noise to your image. ISO values usually go from 100 to 6400 or even higher, for values of 3200 and above it is easy to observe noise in pictures taken so you should try to use these values in combination with photography techniques that allow you to minimize noise, or reduce it in post-processing.

The next one is the shutter speed, with this one you will control how long the camera sensor is exposed to light, it is usually set as fractions of a second, going from 30 seconds (or more in BULB mode) to 1/10000 of a second, or less, this one is fairly intuitive and the easiest to master, slow shutter speeds (as in more time) will result in more light going into the camera sensor, this means also more movement captured by the camera, and it will be a good idea to use a tripod to avoid capturing movements that shake the camera, like your own pulse, faster shutter speeds (smaller fractions of a second) will limit the light going into the camera sensor and will freeze movement, it will also be easier to shoot handheld without capturing undesired camera shakes.

Finally but not less important, the aperture, it controls how open or closed are the blades inside your lens, it goes from 0.8 or similar up to 22, although this number actually reflects the denominator of a fraction, which is the real number that you control with the aperture, its easier to say aperture 2.5 than f/2.5, this is why you sometimes hear photographers saying that an aperture 1.2 is wider than aperture 16, if you do the math f/1.2 is greater than f/16 for the same value of f; wider apertures (closer to 1) will result in the blades of the lens opening wider, allowing a lot of light to go into the camera, but also reducing the space in front of the camera where things appear in focus and sharp, the effect given in areas not in focus is known as bokeh, and it depends in each personal taste wether you like it or not, narrower apertures (closer to 20 or 22) will result in the blades of the lens closing in, limiting the amount of light going into the camera, just like when we close our eyes in a sunny day, this also increases the space in front of the camera where things appear in focus and sharp. Depending on your preference, you will want to shoot your pictures under-exposed, over-exposed, or right in the middle.

The way you prefer to shoot will affect the way you post-process your images, but for now, it is enough to know that over-exposing helps saving detail in the shadows, at the expense of the highlights, under-exposing helps preserve detail in the highlights at the expense of detail in the shadows while exposing in the middle will preserve some detail on both ends of the spectrum. The exposure/light meter is usually presented as a ruler with 0 in the middle and 3 units to each side, positive and negative, each of this units is known as a STOP and will help you to know how to tweak shutter speed, aperture and ISO to move the exposure left or right in the ruler, and lock it just where you want it to be.

Parting from these concepts and knowing what they do, is time to decide which setting to be your anchor, and continue from there to set the other two, this translates easily to the following questions, do I want my picture to freeze everything in it? I’ll set a fast shutter speed; do I want the motion to be part of my picture just like waves, clouds, or people? I’ll set slow shutter speed (preferably with a tripod); do I want everything to be in focus and sharp? I’ll set a narrow aperture; do I want just my subject in focus and bokeh in the background and foreground? I’ll set a wider aperture; do I have a lot of light available? I’ll set a lower ISO (usually the lower the better); am I in a dark place? I’ll set a higher ISO to be able to capture more light (with some noise added). This is in general what you need to remember and go through each time you intend to take a picture, and while it seems slow at first, once you pick up the pace of it, you can make changes and adjustments very quickly, and get better results than just relying on whatever the auto mode throws at you, it also helps that once you get the hang of it you usually get to a place where you are going to take pictures, you adjust your settings once and just move around those numbers, depending on your subject, you will also come to the point where you get familiar to the different light conditions and what settings work for you, at that point the only limit will be your imagination… and at least a tiny light source.

While you master the manual mode try starting with the following settings, and tweak them depending on your desired picture:

• Sunny or bright scene

  • Shutter speed: > 1/250

  • aperture: 11

  • ISO: 200

• Cloudy or indoors

  • Shutter speed: ~ 1/125

  • aperture: 8

  • ISO: 1000

• Night or dark places (tripod recommended)

  • Shutter speed: 1/30 <

  • aperture: 4.5

  • ISO: 1600

Practice makes perfect, so try the following examples and check your results to get familiar with how changing each setting influences your pictures: Find a place where you can easily take pictures of a subject in motion, you don't even have to get out of your house, you can play a video on loop and take pictures of the tv/monitor, take pictures of a plant while the wind moves its leaves or water running at the shower or faucet, at this point, it doesn’t matter if you end up with a great shot, we are just practicing and getting to know our camera; once you are ready, fix the ISO around 200-400, and the aperture around 6-8, now you will shoot 5 pictures at the following shutter speeds: 1/1000, 1/250, 1/50, 1/5 and 0.5.

Depending on your specific light conditions you will end up with either a completely black picture, a completely blown out (white) picture, or a little bit of both, this is fine, the idea is for you to clearly see the difference in the picture when speeding up or down the shutter, as you can see in my examples taken with those settings:

It is clear how changing the shutter speed will allow you to define the amount of light going into the camera, too fast and it will be very dark, too slow and you will have an overexposed and blurry picture. I have a second set of pictures taken with the same exercise, using water as the subject, to show you how the shutter speed can freeze motion, at the expense of light, you can try this too in your house:

Here you can see that the picture with a shutter speed of 1/1000 sec can freeze the tiny droplets of water surrounding the main water source almost in their place, as we move to the next images with lower shutter speed we can see how the movement starts to get recorded by the picture in the form of trails or lines, instead of a fixed droplet in midair, also the water stream starts to get fuzzier and light fills the shot until there is so much light we cannot see what is going on in the picture.

To keep practicing redo the exercise but now fixing the shutter speed at 1/100 sec, the ISO around 200-400, and shooting pictures first changing the aperture to the following settings or the closest one to those, depending on your lens: 4.5, 8, 12, 16, 22, and finally fixing the shutter speed at 1/100 sec, the aperture around 6-8, and shooting with the following ISO or the closest one: 100, 400, 800, 1200, 3200.

Once you get your set of 15 pictures, and if you used always the same subject, you will be able to compare them, and find that you probably ended with two or three images that are not very dark or very bright, in spite of having being taken with different settings, this is because as I said earlier, these three settings are intertwined and you can compensate the limits you might be having with one adjusting the other, this is for example, in a bright scenario I could increase shutter speed to minimize the amount of light coming into the camera, but freezing the subject, or I could use a slower shutter speed in order to capture the movement of the subject and instead restricting the light that comes into the camera by taking my aperture from lets say 4.5 to 16; the ratios and rules for compensating one setting with the other two are available in most photography places, in order to keep this post lean I won’t be going into detail about them but I might do a separate post about it in the future.

If this information was helpful to you please let me know, and if you would like me to add something else, clarify a section of this post or go into further detail do not doubt on reaching out to me, I am more than thrilled to help in any way I can a fellow photographer, cheers!