How to work with Manual Settings
Are you feeling a little overwhelmed with working on Manual and all the different settings? I’m here to help you out! Today we’re talking all about manual shooting, everything you need to know and why it’s not even that complicated.
Before we dive into the settings, one more thing: always shoot in RAW. RAW files have a lot more information in them as compared to JPEGs, which makes the editing process easier and more versatile. So before you read anything else get your camera and set it to shoot in RAW.
Shutter Speed The Shutter Speed esentially is how fast your camera closes an how fasrt it captures the image. At a low Shutter Speed such as 1/100 (which means 1/100 of one second) will close slower, allowing more light to hit the sensor inside the camera. So the lower the Shutter Speed the brighter the photo. Lower Shutter Speeds can also cause motion blurr. If that’s something you want in your photo go for it. If you don’t then stick to a higher Shutter Speed.
If you’re using a lower Shutter Speed it can also be hard to shoot out of your hand, because ou can never hold your hand completely still so the image will get blurry aswell. In this case you could use a tripod or adjust the ISO which we will talk about in a minute.
These images were taken at different Shutter Speeds. The left one is the one I went with for this shoot, which was 1/400. The middle image was taken an 1/200 and the right image was taken at 1/100 which are both obviously overexposed.
F-Stop The f-stop impacts your image in two ways: It affects the brightness/darkness of your image and it also affects how blurry the background is/the depth of field. A low f-stop such as f1.4 will cause your image to be brighter and have a low depth of field (not a lot will be sharp/in focus). A high f-stop like f22 will make the image darker and cause a lot of the image to be sharp. Low f-stops look great when shooting outdoors if you want the model to be seperated from a busy background. Hihg f-stops are ideal for product or beauty photography to get all the details in the image.
The left image was taken in the studio with f22, the right image was taken outdoors with f1.4.
These images were taken at two different f-stops. The left image taken with a lower f-stop is exposed right and the model is nicely seperated from the backdrop. The right image, which was taken at a higher f-stop, is underexposed and the backdrop is so in sharp that you can’t really focus on the model.
ISO The ISO is probably the most underrated and overlooked setting there is. What it does is make the image brighter. The higher the ISO the brighter the image. Generally you should try to keep the ISO as low as possible (around 100-400), because the higher the ISO the more noise will appear. The amount of noise is also dependant on your camera, but at around ISO 1000 most cameras will start to have a lot of noise in the photo. Full frame cameras are better in this aspect.
+/- Correction This is an option on lots of cameras, but I would not use this at all. You can adjust the brightness/darkness of your photo with the other settings.
Watch the Behind the Scenes of this shoot on YouTube below, and don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel to not miss any future videos!