Manual Mode ? Sounds Scary!


When you shoot in manual, you’ll adjust these three settings in order to get the correct exposure or lighting:

Shutter Speed

All are equally important in getting the correct lighting and style of image you want. So what do they all do?


Aperture controls how much light is coming through your lens, so it helps determine how light or dark your image will be.
It also controls the depth of field in your image. For example, if you’ve ever seen a picture of a person who’s in focus but the background is blurry — that would be a shallow depth of field since they were the only thing in focus.Aperture is also known as the “f-stop” and can be written as a fraction like f/6 or f/22, but most likely appears on your camera’s settings as f6 or f22.
The smaller that bottom number is (like f/2), the less depth of field there will be


Shutter speed controls how bright or dark your image will be based on how fast or slow your camera’s shutter is. The faster it is, the less light comes in because it’s open for less time. Likewise, the slower the shutter is, the more light comes in so it’s brighter.
Shutter speed also controls whether or not your image will be blurry or crisp. So let’s say you were at fashion week and someone walked by you quickly on their way to a show — if you’re shooting at a slow shutter speed, they’re going to be blurry. But, if you’re shooting really high, they’ll be crisp and clear.Shutter speed is shown as a fraction on your camera, like 1/30s or 1/2000s.
The slower the shutter speed is (like 1/30s), the blurrier your object will be if they’re in motion


ISO is how sensitive your camera’s sensor is to light. ISO controls how bright or dark the image is. The higher the number, the brighter the image — and the lower the number, the darker.
It also controls the amount of grain in an image. If you’ve ever seen an image that was taken in a darker location, and see little specs in the picture, you can assume it was grain. When you’re adjusting ISO, it’s important to remember not to shoot too high or you’ll see grain start to appear in your image. Every camera is different, and the higher quality your camera is, the higher ISO you can shoot without grain appearing.ISO is written as 800 or 1000 (pretty simple), and the higher the number, the brighter the image. But remember there will be more grain, which you want to avoid.
Try to use the lowest possible ISO if you can, to keep the highest quality image.