Stop studying and practice instead. It’s not a thinking exercise, its a doing exercise.
For one week shoot only using the Sunny 16 rule. Set the shutter speed to 1/250 and the ISO to 200.
Use the sunny 16 rule to set the aperture. Only shoot jpeg set all picture controls to off or neutral, no chimping allowed. Always have a subject but just shoot anything. Keep a log of which rule you used and why.
Go home home a judge the exposure. Rinse and repeat until you get it.
Just delete’em if the suck. If you are unwilling to try this, they just give it up.
Then the next week, use you meter same rules.
My 8 year old learned to shoot manual, you can too.
In many cases and for many people, it is perfectly fine.
This is obviously terrible advice, as is the general feeling of “don’t use the tools you have” that your response gives. Chimping, as it is so derogatorily called, is perhaps the best feature of digital over film. If you want to shoot film, that is great, go for it, but this type of advice is just bad.
1. Know your camera: what it can and cannot do. Not just the specs but practically in the field. That means getting out there, trying different things and not being afraid of getting it wrong. Edit: This implies knowing yourself as well, and knowing your limitations and inexperience. Once you know the parameters, you would know what is possible, and be able to laugh in the face of that once you become confident in your art.
2. Imagine a scenario where you would like to be in the scene yourself, but don’t have anywhere to place the camera. There is a willing bystander who could help you take the shot and you are willing to have them take the photo (hoping that they won’t steal or drop your camera).
a) What settings would you configure?
b) What instructions would you ask the complete stranger to follow?
Having a plan for such a scenario is important. I can’t count how many times I end up with a mangled image because I failed to change the camera settings or give easy to follow instructions.
Jim, I know what you’re after, ‘in firm control of the exposure, focus and composition’. I lived that on your terms in the '70s, with a Nikon F2 Photomic and a set of lenses that didn’t do anything different unless I dialed it in. Fair enough, that was the state of the technology at the time. What I’ve found with digital and all the things it can do for you is that how to constrain those behaviors is the important thing, and it frees me to concentrate on the composition. In all that, I spot meter so I know where the middle gray will be, and I move my focus point to the thing I want sharpest. Then, I move in the scene to compose my shot, knowing what the auto behaviors will give me. If I really want to control DOF, I use aperture priority, but still with the ‘constrained behaviors’ mindset.
Use live view to get the focus exactly where you want it. Not every situation will permit this but auto focus doesn’t always find what you think it will. I don’t know how many shots I took with the focus being close but not quite where I would like it before I saw a video on Youtube that showed the live view technique.
The “don’t chimp” is for the exercise only.
-If you are un-willing to try this, then just give up manual. Don’t pretend to be anything but a beginner photographer. If you want to learn photography, learn to shoot manual. It really is not hard.
Auto is never fine if you want a correct exposure most of the time. Sure that are cases when auto works, but here’s the catch - to understand when it would work you would need to actually learn photography.
For the most part these days few want to actually learn photography. I guess the idea is “just shoot raw and fix it later”, but guess what - that will not get really great exposures. If you have to “recover” the exposure, first of all it never looks great and your other creative options are limited.
If you want to shoot auto, just stick to you phone, the latest phones are amazing for the snapshots they are made for.
The exercise I have outlined is simple and effective, but already push back.
The “experts” are big on telling what you should do, but small to non-existent on how to learn it in practice.
I have to ask - why would you NOT try it out? What have you got to lose? If you can bring home correctly exposed JPEGS, just think where you can take you RAW exposures.
many people dont want to learn photography. they want to get the photos of their family, their pet. or the nice view of the landscape in front of them.
Or let me rephrase that … sometimes it is much much more important to have the photo in your camera than being able to claim “yeah I did that all in manual mode” … nobody cares about this if you missed the shot.
Personally I have my camera in aperture prio like almost the whole time, as the DOF can have a big influence on the look of an image. i rarely fiddle with iso and shutter speed can have a big impact on the look but those moments are rare for me.
No, I am giving a practical way to learn this. An actual practice that will help you learn manual, as opposed to just telling you should learn manual then launching into to yet another explanation of the exposure triangle.
If you know how to use manual, then yes I am not giving you any consideration, but do you need any?
The exercise you outlined is too terse; “Go out and use manual or give up” doesn’t really help anyone learn anything.
This is essentially what you’ve done, “use manual mode or stick to your phone camera,” with a side dish of “get of my lawn you digital kids!”
I’ve been making photos for 20 years, so this isn’t for me. However, people learn by (1) being curious and looking into things more or (2) seeing a problem (with their photos) and figuring out how to fix it. I don’t think your suggestion is verbose enough to encourage either.
If you do “action photography” (things that move fast in front of you), manual will get you more under/overexposed shots than automatic (not speaking of blurry ones :).
Use a lens hood. Especially when using fast primes with large front elements.
If you use a full format (FX) lens on a crop (DX) camera, it’s preferable to use a longer lens hood than the one recommended by the lens manufacturer.
“For one week shoot only using the Sunny 16 rule. Set the shutter speed to 1/250 and the ISO to 200.
Use the sunny 16 rule to set the aperture. Only shoot jpeg set all picture controls to off or neutral, no chimping allowed. Always have a subject but just shoot anything. Keep a log of which rule you used and why.”
Ok, you have 20 years, please explain it better than I have. You could really help out.
This rule will work for camera shake, but not motion blur on a fast moving subject. Two different animals. It’s not really possible to have a motion blur rule because it depends on speed of the subject, distance from the subject and angle to the subject.
I don’t understand why you would disallow checking the histogram periodically (“chimping”) in your “all manual” exercise. Surely this provides for more immediate feedback and a quicker learning process than shooting for an hour, getting home, and realizing you underexposed everything by a stop.
I agree that shooting manual is a good exercise, though.
Chimping is absolutely crutial to learning how to expose properly. It gives immediate feedback about the exposure obtained. Immediate feedback = quicker learning. Just because you and I spent way too much time with an exposure log doesn’t mean the current generation has to. Also, what does the sunny 16 rule actually teach you?
I’d say, shoot manual mode once you know how aperature and shutter work together. Turn on live histogram if your camera has it. Chimp your histogram after every shot. Think about what tones you want exposed and make sure you get them. Shoot in all the different metering modes and see how they effect the outcome. Shoot jpg + raw, because you never know when you’ll need the latitude because you captured something awesome. Know that the learning process is slow and you’ll screw it up a lot.
I like your list overall, but I would amend this for crop-frame cameras to use the reciprocal of the effective focal length. (So 1/52 for a 35mm lens on a Nikon DX camera, for instance.) Also, as noted above, I think this only works for camera shake from photographing stationary subjects and moving subjects may require a much faster shutter speed to freeze motion (which in turn depends on the speed of the subject and direction of movement relative to the camera).
And of course, one can purposely blur motion for artistic effect.
