How to shoot in manual (M) mode

Hey everyone

In today's material I'm going to show you how to shoot in manual mode in just three easy steps so you know what camera settings to use when you're doing portrait photography outdoors in natural light .

So i have uploaded this material in the past it was one of the first.

l so it's been like maybe three years now and i felt like that info needed a little bit of a refresher so I thought i'd add in a lot of info examples for you my readers , so today we're gonna head out to a portrait photo shoot on location and i'm going to show you how i change my settings in a few different lighting scenarios and also with some camera and lens limitations as well so for example i use the sony a73 which has the maximum fast shutter speed of 1 over 8 thousand and then i also use the sony a7c which has the slowest maximum shutter speed of one over four thousand and then i also like to use lenses with wide apertures that go to f 1.4 f 1.2 , but i will also show you how to change your settings if you have a kit lens for example or a lens that doesn't have such a fast aperture so something like f 2.8 or 3.5 or 5.6 , so there are three main things that control the exposure and the look of a photo which is our shutter speed our aperture and our iso the shutter speed is the length of time a camera shutter is open to expose light into the camera sensor.

So if you use a fast shutter speed you are able to freeze movement and if you use a slow shutter speed this will cause some motion blur in your photos the next one we have is aperture which controls the amount of light that passes through a lens and also affects the background and foreground blur of a photo so if you use a fast aperture of f 1.2 or f 1.4 you will have more light passing through the lens and also more background blur if you use a slow aperture of f 5.6 or f 8 or in this extreme example of f 16 from my bokeh the snow blocker video you will have less light passing through the lens and less background blur and finally we have iso which is a camera setting that will brighten or darken your images typically the higher you go in iso the more grain and the more noise you will see in your photos so usually when i'm shooting outdoors in natural light there's more than enough light to keep my iso as low as possible at 100 and thus giving me a lot cleaner images the only time i really rely on iso to brighten my photo is when i'm shooting indoors or if i'm shooting in darker situations so the way i easily shoot in manual mode on my camera is that i actually think about it as if it's in aperture priority so as you guys saw from the example photos i feel like the aperture takes the most control over the creative style of your photo so for example if i'm doing a portrait photoshoot i usually like to have as much blur as much bucket as possible so i'll decide that i want to do that shoe wide open so i'll set my aperture to f 1.2 or whatever the widest open my lens can go and then i will change the shutter speed and then the iso accordingly until my image is correctly exposed and then for another example if i'm doing say a fashion photo shoot and i need both the model and the outfit from head to toe to be in focus i will pick a slower aperture of something like f 2.8 and set my camera to that and then adjust the shutter speed and the iso accordingly until my photo is exposed correctly.

The first setup we have is in the shade and i've got my settings set up as if the last thing that i was shooting was a wedding which would have been the reception which means it's dark so my iso is cranked my shutter speed is really low so the first thing that i do when i'm out on location doing a photo shoot with natural light is i bring my iso down as low as possible so that's usually a hundred on most cameras but as you can see haley is still quite overexposed in the shot so the next thing that i want to do is bring up my shutter speed to make it faster and expose the shot correctly so i like to bring it up to about one over 640 one over 500.

I think one over 500 looks really nice it's nice and balanced overall in the image and i'm keeping my aperture at f 1.8 as I want that depth of field and that nice bokeh in the background as well the next setup we have is backlight so we've just come out a little bit further out from the shade so we have some sun behind haley and as you can see these are still the same settings as what we were shooting with in the shade and i do feel like this shot is quite nicely exposed overall but when i'm shooting backlight I do like to very slightly underexpose my photos so i'm just going to bump up my shutter speed to 1 over 640.

It's like a little bit darker but having a slightly faster shutter speed is going to help us be able to retain that information so all the shots that we've been doing so far are wide open because usually when i do portrait photography i do love to have that nice depth of field and some bucket in the background of my shots but just to show you guys an example i am going to bump up the aperture to let's just say something quite high like 3.5 so say you've decided that's what you want your shots to look like you're going to be at 3.5 so as you can see the image is very underexposed right now so i'm going to bring the shutter speed down first so i've got it down to 1 over 200 3.5 and iso 100 and we've got a correctly exposed image if you want to go even sharper so let's say 5.6 i'm at one over 200 which is usually what i like to cap off my shutter speed at if especially if i'm shooting movement or if it's quite windy like it is today and i kind of want to capture the hair flying in a still image without having any movement blur in my shots that's when i will start to bump up my iso instead so we're at 1 over 200 5.6 and iso 100 so i'm going to just bump up the iso to about 250 and then as you can see we have a nicely exposed image overall so i'll take an example shot for you.

For the last example we are in the direct harsh sunlight on hayley's face and we've got the same settings that we were using before so the first thing i want to do is bring my iso down as well as possible to one over 100 and then i'm going to bring my aperture back to wide open as well to 1.8 because i you know i like depth of field so we're going to be shooting at 1.8 and then as you can see the image is totally overexposed so the last thing we're going to do is bring up your shutter speed and i'm going to just bring it up slowly until i can see the highlights like all the detail in the highlights come back on hayley's face so one of the 8 thousand looks really good if the sun is so bright that one over eight thousand is not enough or your camera only goes to one over four thousand so bring it back down to one over four thousand what you can do then is just to bump up your aperture again just to darken your exposure so you have all the detail in your subject space all right so take an example further and then i'll take an example image at wide open and one over eight thousand as well so that is all i have for today's material

I really hope you found that helpful and enjoyed reading the process of how I expose my photos.