How to Shoot Manual in 10 Minutes - Beginner Photography Tutorial

So today we are going to talk about how to photograph

manual

ly and this is probably one of the most popular topics for

beginner

s and you may be here because you just bought your first camera or maybe you have been doing

photography

for a while but you want to take your

photography

to the next level and you've probably heard from people all the time that you should

shoot

manual

, but you know, don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who says you should. You're not a real photographer if you don't

shoot

manual. Personally, I don't care what other people do, but you have to understand that there is a big difference between not shooting manual because you don't know how and why and not shooting at all. manual because it may not actually affect your photography much so you have to understand that there is a difference and if you are not shooting manually because you don't know how then you really won't get very far as a photographer so there is no reason not to learn because it is very easy and just by watching this video and a little practice you should be able to shoot in full manual mode and there's no time I promise so let's get started right so I'm filming with the back of my camera pointed at some things on my desk and please excuse me for the fan noise it's back there for a reason and on the left side of the screen I made this simple graph to make it easier for you to see what I'm doing when As far as photography goes manual, there are three things you need to remember: aperture, shutter speed and ISO.

These are the three things you'll constantly be adjusting on your camera when shooting manual and I know it can sound a bit loud. complicated right now, but once you understand what they are and learn how they work together, it will be much easier to understand. I promise you, so the first thing is the opening. Aperture actually has more to do with the lens than the camera itself and when the aperture is wide open, your lens lets more light into your camera to make your images brighter, so a larger aperture, more light, smaller aperture, less light, it's pretty easy to understand, so let me demonstrate it right now.

I'm going to increase my aperture completely. up to f/2 and as you can see the image becomes much brighter. One thing that's a little tricky that you have to remember is that the f-stop and the aperture size it represents are backwards, so the smaller the f. -Stop number: the larger the aperture, so for example, in this particular lens, f2 means larger than f-16. You know at least it's not some weird mathematical formula you have to remember. Just know that the opposite is true. Okay, and now I'm. I'm going to decrease the aperture size by increasing the f/stop and even maybe down to f/8 and I'm going to take another photo and as you can see the image became a lot darker so again there's a larger aperture . light smaller aperture less light now let's move on to shutter speed shutter speed is what determines the amount of time your sensor is exposed to the landscape or light, so a faster shutter speed means your sensor will be exposed to light for a shorter period of time and a slower shutter speed means your sensor will be exposed for a longer period of time, so a faster shutter speed, darker shutter speed slow, brighter, let me show you how it works, so now I'm going to increase my shutter speed and as you can see, the image became a lot darker.

I'm going to take a photo here and then I'm going to slow down the shutter speed right there and take another photo, so that's pretty obvious, that's how you change the brightness of your photo with your shutter speed, so now let's move on to ISO ISO, You know, its name may not be as obvious as aperture or shutter speed, but in some ways you could think of it as a volume knob on your stereo or a microphone, so what is the ISO? Does your camera's sensitivity to light change? So when you increase the ISO your camera becomes more sensitive to light therefore your images become brighter and when the ice on your camera decreases your camera becomes less sensitive to light therefore your images get darker, let me demonstrate.

So first I'm going to increase the ISO to ISO 3200 and then I'm going to take a photo and then I'm going to decrease the ISO to ISO 160 and again you can clearly see the difference. Now some of you might be thinking, so why do we need three different things to change the brightness? Why don't we just have a big tile that says glitter? That's because all three of these things have different side effects and some of you might have. I already noticed that when I showed you the side by side comparison, but let me demonstrate it again, so now I'm at f2, which is the widest aperture that this allows. lens and Bob Ross is in focus, but everything else seemed blurry and that's because with a larger aperture you get a shallower depth of field, which means that with a larger aperture the plane of view that is in focus will be shallower, so obviously this is useful when you're taking a portrait of someone with a nice blurred background, but what about when you want to? to take a family portrait or a group portrait with multiple people, in this case Bob Ross and Ron Swanson, what do you do when you want them both in focus?

What you do is you decrease the size of your aperture, let's bring it down to maybe five point six and as you can see they're both in focus now because with a smaller aperture again you get greater depth of field, so this is where it gets really interesting, now both Bob Ross and Ron Swanson are in focus, but because of the small aperture their image is too dark, everything is underexposed, so what can you do? You can slow down the shutter speed and make the image brighter. Now both Bob Ross and Ron Swanson are in focus and everything is correctly exposed, but shutter speed also has its own side. effect and if you look at the fan on the back in the photo that was taken with the fastest shutter speed, it looks like the fan is barely spinning, but in the photo that was taken with the slowest shutter speed it looks like the fan It's spinning so fast it's almost invisible, the fans have been running at the same speed the entire time I'm recording this and this is all happening because of the shutter speed, so let's say you're taking a family portrait and there's a group of kids and like We all know that kids are biologically incapable of sitting still so you want to use a smaller aperture because you want everyone's faces to be in focus but now you have to slow down the shutter speed because your image is underexposed so Imagine that that fan is like any other type.

Of the moving objects you want to take a photo of, it could be some wild animal, it could be your children, so to avoid any kind of motion blur, you should keep your shutter speed reasonably high whenever you are taking a photo. photo and it is Not always the subjects that move your hands also move because you are alive and I get a lot of comments from people saying that their photos are not sharp and asking me if they should buy a new camera or lens, but there is a There are many possibilities to The shutter speed may not be high enough, so try that first and that doesn't mean a slower shutter speed is always bad.

Sometimes you want that slower shutter speed to get certain effects or a long exposure, like when you're doing night photography or light trail shots or when you want to portray a certain movement of a musician or a dancer, you can do a lot of interesting things with a slow shutter speed, you just have to keep your camera incredibly still or use a tripod, so let's say you're taking a group portrait and there's a group of kids. You want to keep the aperture small, without everyone's faces in focus, but then that exposes everything insufficiently, so you have to reduce the shutter speed, but since the kids are moving, you want to increase the shutter speed every time. that I am taking pictures of people or anything living, I usually keep my shutter speed above 125 seconds or sometimes 250 or 500 just to be safe and when you are shooting in the sun or when you are shooting with flash obviously You can go higher than that, but now we have to work with what we have now.

I'm at f/8 and five hundredths of a second and as you can see, everything is clearly underexposed, so what do you do? What you do now is time to increase your ISO and now as you can see I'm at ISO 6400 and as you can see everything is very well exposed, everyone is in focus and the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze the movements , but using high ISO also has its own side effects. Remember when I said that ISO is like the volume knob on a stereo or microphone. What happens when you increase the volume to the maximum?

You start getting nasty feedback and the sound gets distorted and doesn't sound very good, something similar happens when you increase the ISO of your camera too much, so when you increase the sensitivity of your camera too much it starts to pick up all kinds of noise and grain They all appear in your photos and images. purple and green and blurry and it just doesn't look very good and just to demonstrate I'm going to take a photo at ISO 25600 and you'll be able to see the clear difference so if possible you'll want to keep your ISO as low as possible to get the better results, the differences may be subtle, but you can still notice the difference between ISO 100 and 200 and 200 and 400 and it gets progressively worse as you go up, depending on what you're trying.

To do, you'll always want to start with the aperture or shutter speed and then adjust the ISO only when necessary. Now that you understand what they are, I'll put everything on Automatic and see what the camera does with that photo. the camera decided to take the photo at f-16 at a 34 second which is a bit strange and I sell 2500 so that's what the camera decided to do in full auto mode so the problem here is it doesn't matter how expensive it is or not. No matter how good it is, your camera isn't very smart, it won't be able to read your mind about what you're trying to do, so it doesn't know if you wanted to take a portrait of Bob Ross with the background blurred or if you wanted to keep the ISO as tight as possible. low possible or if I wanted a faster shutter speed to freeze motion, I don't know.

I just pressed the shutter button and it did what it thought was best for the situation, so that's what actually shoots. The manual does this for you and your photography manual gives the photographer complete control so they can push their camera's capabilities to its full potential in any situation. That way, if I want to take a portrait of Bob Ross with a nice blurred background, I can do it. that if I want both Bob Ross and Ron Swanson in focus I can reduce the aperture and reduce the shutter speed to compensate for the lack of exposure and if I want to increase the shutter speed for whatever reason I can make the aperture larger again or increase my ISO, this is how to shoot manually and feel free to leave me any comments or questions if you have any and I'll show you some more examples of photos that were taken at different settings so take a look and That's it for me today and I'll give you I'll take you to look as always and see you next time, bye.