Explosive Photo Editing

With a combination of camera features, lens choice, lots of practice, and more than a modicum of good luck I got the shot to the right. To freeze that ball I used an ISO of 3200 which on the Nikon D700 has a reasonable noise level. I had the camera set for A (aperture preferred) with the aperture set wide open at f/2.8 giving me a shutter speed of 1/6400 sec.

For the explosive photo editing to come, freezing the ball is not required but that and the fact that I caught the ball in the very center of the shot is what led me to us the method that follows. If the ball had been just a few inches higher or my granddaughters bat had been a smidgen lower she might have actually hit the thing, but were talking photography her not scores and she has hit many of those bright yellow-green softballs.

I've talked about Lightroom several times in this blog but the technique described here cannot be done in that application. What we are about to look into requires layers and Lightroom does not allow working on layers. The photo was actually edited in Photoshop but the exact same steps are available in Photoshop Elements and they work the same way and just as well. One difference is that the Photoshop version was processed in 16 bit mode and the Elements version had to be reduced to 8 bit mode to complete the steps. I may need to get back to this bit depth later but for now I'll just mention that almost everything you do with an image is done with an 8 bit version. Larger bit depths help during the editing phase.

The first step is with the original image and it can be done in Lightroom or any other editing program. I cropped the photo to the square shape putting the ball in the center and made minor adjustments to the brightness, sharpness, contrast, and vibrance.

Once I liked the original image I moved to Photoshop and copied the background layer. Now I had two identical layers, one on top the other and I was ready to start. At this point in either of the Photoshop programs select the Background copy layer if necessary, then from the menu at the top of the screen choose Filter>Blur>Radial Blur. A small window will pop up. First choose the Blur Method by clicking on Zoom. Under Quality select Good and at the top move the amount slider to about 60. Note that there is no preview of the blur just a graphic representation of how much stretching can be expected. Click OK and the blur will be applied to the entire image including your subject. At the bottom of the Layers Pallet (top in Elements) click on the "Add Layer Mask" the little rectangle with the circle in the center. A White square appears along side the thumbnail image on the background copy layer which is the blurred layer. Click on the white square then press the letter "b" on the keyboard which will select the Brush tool. Hold the Brush over the ball and adjust the size by pressing the right bracket key "]" to make it larger or the left bracket "[" to make it smaller until it's the width of the bat or the size of the ball and click and drag the brush over the areas of the image you wish to be sharp. Note that I have painted over the ball, bat, face, and part of the arms of my subject. When the photo looks like you want it to your finished. Above is my "Explosive" result.

I hope this works for you, Comments and questions are welcome.

Shooting Sports

We're not talking NFL here but kids playing a great game. Look at the first photo.

If you've seen great sports shots they are frequently tack sharp players against a very soft background. The players stand out and the background shows enough detail to let you know  what kind of place the  shot was taken in. Here a grass field with a parking area visible in the background. The autos and surrounding shrubbery are soft enough to let the sharp players stand out. The players are moving but are sharp. With a modern digital camera and a reasonably long lens these shots are not hard to get.

 If you're not sure what settings to use when you start this kind of shooting let's explore the settings I use and look at the reasons why. 

You can set this up before you leave home and be ready to shoot without carrying a list and trying to do this sitting on the sidelines. As you become more familiar with your camera these settings are very easy to make quickly in the field but this time just sit down in a comfortable chair and put the camera in your lap. Ready?

If your camera has interchangeable lenses and you have more than one lens find the longest one and put it on. This may be a 70-200mm or 18-300mm or one of many others. Here we are looking at the large number and we want the lens that has the largest large number, usually 200 or 300. If your camera does not have interchangeable lenses you can zoom your lens to the end that gives you the largest or most close up view and if you've put a long zoom lens on your camera you'll want to zoom it to the longer end also.

Now, the mode. Usually a dial on the top of the camera allows you to select the mode. This is the dial that allows you to select portrait mode, action mode, scenic mode and others. Frequently it's set to Auto or the green camera mode. If you haven't used them there are some very useful modes labeled M, A, S, and P. On the Canon they are M, Av, Tv, and P. For our sport shooting setup let's choose either A or Av which allows you to set the aperture and will automatically set the shutter speed for you. Since we would like sharp images and a soft background we'll use the command dial to set the aperture to the smallest number your lens will allow. This may be 5.6, 4, 3.5, 2.8 or something else but as you turn the dial you want the smallest number it shows.

The next setting to make is the ISO and since we will be shooting a fast moving target and would like a fast shutter speed we want to set the ISO a little above it's lowest setting. Usually the ISO settings are 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and sometimes even higher. This time try 400 or 800. I've assumed the game is going to be in daylight.

Now comes focusing. Your camera usually defaults to focus when you press the shutter button half-way down and as long as you hold the button half-way down the focus stays locked. For moving subjects we want the lens to continually refocus to keep a moving subject sharp so set your camera to the "Continuous Focus" mode.

If your camera offers a continous shooting mode where holding the shutter release button causes the camera to shoot 3 to 6 photos every second, you may want to try this also. I usually depend on one shot at a time but I occasionally do use the continuous shooting mode.

And that's it. When you arrive at the game, point your camera to the field where the action will be and look through the viewfinder. Most cameras will display the current shutter speed there. You want the speed to be 1000th of a second or higher. If it's too low readjust the ISO to the next higher number and check it again.

In both of the included images the players are sharp even though they are moving, and the background is soft (blurry). Next time you are trying to be a sports photographer give these ideas a try and post comments here to let others know how it worked.

Infra Red Photography

Infra Red photographs are taken using only infra red light. Since human eyes cannot see infra red light we are then taking photos with invisible light. The first question that occurs is "How do we do that?". Before digital photography it was done with specially created infra red film. Because the film was sensitive to invisible light we had to load the film into our cameras in total darkness. I carried a light proof bag with sleeves for my arms. The camera and film were zipped into the bag, then I would insert my arms into the sleeves, open the camera, and load the film by feel.

With digital cameras it is both easier and more difficult to create infra red images but before that description let's take a look at the result. The first image shows the basic idea of what you get. First the image is usually a black & white or monochrome image. In film days that was the only possibility. The chlorophyll in green plants reflects a lot of infra red light and the blue sky shows very little therefore, as you see, the sky is nearly black and the trees appear to be snow covered. White clouds also reflect infra red and they appear very bright. The overall effect is a high contrast dramatic image.

So, how do we do this with a digital camera? Well working on our side is the fact that digital sensors are very sensitive to infra red light. This creates a problem for camera manufacturers because the sensors are so sensitive to infra red light that the camera's photos would not be good at all, so the maker has to put a filter in front of the sensor to block infra red light. This is great for regular photography but not for us if we want to take infra red (let's say IR from now on) images, so what do we do?

We need to purchase an IR filter which allows IR light to pass through and blocks almost all visible light. I can take my IR filter and hold it in front of my eye on a bright sunny summer day and I see nothing at all. It is completely black. If I look directly at the sun (very briefly please) I can see the sun but that is all. IR filters vary widely in price depending on quality and upon exactly which areas of the IR light are blocked and which are allowed through. Here my advice is to start with a less expensive one since you may find it works better for you than a very expensive one. That is difficult to explain but still true. My first digital IR images were created using a Kodak gelatin filter that I got for about $30.

With the filter on your camera you can see nothing through the viewfinder or the live view screen so you will have to focus first (oh, you MUST have a tripod). Once you have focused and put the filter in place you will have to experiment with exposure. My first shots using a small point-and-shoot camera were about 30 seconds long on a bright sunny day. The blocking filters on cameras have gotten better so you may have to go 45 to 60 sec. Your first test exposures are a "crap shoot" strictly a guess. If it's dark go longer if it's too light go shorter. In a few minutes you should have a decent shot.

Now here comes a surprise. The photo is not black & white. Since we are using a camera that separates red, green, and blue, the infra RED light we are using exposes the red pixels more than the green and blue so we have a very pink image.

Before we go any further I'll mention another way to create IR images. My first digital camera was a Nikon D100. When I upgraded to a D200 I kept my 100 as a backup and found I didn't use it. It laid in my camera case but never came out. An internet search revealed that there were quite a few companies and individuals out there who would convert digital cameras to IR cameras. They remove the IR blocking filter from the sensor and replace it with a filter that blocks visible light (similar to the one you use in front of the lens). Now that the blocking filter is removed your exposures are almost the same as a normal color camera and you no longer need a tripod and extremely long exposures. Remember you cannot take normal color photos with this camera any longer; it's IR only. Another warning: your meter will work but it will not necessarily be as correct as it used to be and you will find yourself compensating for images too dark and too light as you go. I found the cost of this conversion ranged from $100 to $400 and I advise you to research the provider before you send off your valuable camera and money. I would highly recommend the guy who did mine but he no longer does the modifications so you are on your own there.

Back to pink images. because infra red is closer to red than green or blue there is an over all pink cast to the images. There is more exposure to the red pixels than the green or blue BUT the green and blue get some exposure also and you can leverage this to create "false color" images. This is way beyond this post but fun to do.

Any photo editor will allow you to reduce saturation and create a black & white image. In Lightroom I adjust contrast highlights, shadows, blacks, and clarity, but in any editor you will be able to create a decent monochrome image. I chose the image you see here for a couple of reasons. First you can see that IR does not penetrate fog and by shooting this particular image in IR the grass and the sky are both light and the dark slacks and hair on my model stand out clearly.

If you like the effect, give it a try. There are many websites devoted to IR photography with detailed advice on how to get 'er done. As usual comments and questions are welcome. I promise to read and answer but I am sometimes slow so please excuse me if I seem unresponsive.

'Til next post: Keep Shooting.
Jim

How High is Your Camera?

No, I'm not asking if your camera has been exposed to cannabis or some other hallucinogen, I want you to look at some of your photos and estimate how far your camera was from the ground when you took the shot. Now take a tape measure and see how far your eyes are from the ground. Do you notice a similarity to your photo estimate?

Bottom line here is that most photos including a very high percentage of amateur  photos are taken by a standing photographer with the camera held at eye-level. With the advent of cell phone cameras there has been a jump of photos shot by a sitting photographer but I think you'll find most of those taken at the eye-level of the person sitting across from them at the table.

So what difference does it make? Elevation is a key to controlling the background. In the included image I found myself with a very photogenic boat filled with flowers, a nice piling arrangement and a beautiful blue sky with fluffy white clouds.

My problem was including all of those items in the same photo. Shooting from the aforementioned eye-level would have created a shot of the flowers but not much of the boat and a not-very-pretty shot of the pilings. The background would have been the lawn which at this time of the year was not a lush green.

By lying on the ground and using the 24mm end of my zoom I was able to feature the pilings, include the boat from an angle with included both the form of the boat and the flowers without more green than flowers, and include the sky as a primary background with visible clouds but a plain blue sky behind the pilings.

In this case I chose to create an HDR image with 5 shots but since I had a polarizer on my lens to pop up the sky I have a nicely exposed image that would stand well without the HDR. Comparing the two shots side by side I thought the HDR shot had the edge so I included it here.

I remember a shot I took several years ago in Ottawa, Canada that I can't seem to locate now in which I was shooting one of the beautiful government buildings from across the street in front of it to get the building arranged as I wanted it. A standing up shot included the street and its traffic, but at the edge of the grass area on which I was standing was a border of a flowering hedge.  By sitting on the ground I was able to hide the street and the traffic behind the hedge and create a nice bottom border of flowers for the building and hide what I didn't want in the photo.

At the other end of the scale there is the hail Mary shot which is taken with your arms extended above your head and the camera aimed (by guess and experience) at your subject. With this you can get over people and objects near you and if you are aiming down use the ground as a background which may be a nice uncomplicated way of simplifying your image.

Remember try higher and lower instead of always shooting at eye-level, and... good shooting. Again comments and questions are welcome, but sometimes I forget to check for a few days so don't panic.

The Camera is Wrong Again

 Touring a reproduction U.S. Civil War display I spotted a tent in the style of the times and tried a camera metered exposure shot. I wanted the fence in the photo and this first image is what I got. The tent was in brighter light than the fence and the surrounding foliage. While the tent was near the center of the photo it occupied a much smaller area than the remainder and look what happened. The tent is very washed out looking and has very little detail. The fence and foliage look fine but the tent was my main subject. There is no single, best way of approaching the problem. Let's look at one way.








Move in and isolate the tent. Now try an automatic exposure and see how it looks. In this case it was still too bright so I noted the shutter speed, 1/60 switched to manual mode and set it faster, 1/250 and got the exposure of the tent that I wanted and here is that shot.











Now I back up and use the same exposure and I have my original scene with nice detail and texture in the fabric of the tent.

Now a new issue is that the fence is a little darker than I would like so lets examine some possible corrections. An on-camera flash could provide fill, but the closer part of the fence on right would be brighter than the more distant fence portion on the left. So let's do the simplest solution in post (that's shorthand for post processing).

And, here we have the final version. Using Lightroom 5. (Earlier versions and most any RAW converter will work also. Even Photoshop Elements has a shadows/highlights control that will work fine.) In Lightroom I just lightened the shadows and most of that effect was on the fence. Left is what came from my decisions.

It took longer to write it and even longer for you to read it that the taking process actually took. The shot was taken in less than a minute and worked quite well.




Again comments and questions are welcome.

Jim

What Your Camera's Meter Doesn't Know

Your camera does not know what the scene looks like to you.

In the first example I set my camera in P mode. If you are not familiar with the various settings on DSLR cameras "P" mode is almost fully automatic. However unlike the Auto, or Green Camera mode found on many DSLRs the P mode allows you  to control ISO settings and it allows what is called, exposure compensation. Usually controlled with a small button marked with plus/minus signs like this [+/-]. Let's look at the first shot, fully automatic, and it's not bad. Notice the light range is so great that the trees and foliage are rendered as silhouettes. It is obviously sunrise/sunset (actually, sunset I'm not usually an early riser) there is good color in the sky and as I said before it's not bad, but it's not what I saw. By the time I shot this photo the world, locally, was pretty dark, the sky was not the pale blue you see here and the reds and oranges were much more vivid.

So, let's get back to "exposure compensation". The scene I wished to photograph was the one I saw before me. It had richer colors than the automatic one and more texture in the water. In manual exposure mode I could have used a faster shutter speed or a smaller lens opening. In the "P" mode I can use the +/- button and dial in the amount of over or under exposure that I wanted. Here in the second version I dialed in -2 also referred to as -2EV (Exposure Value). It is now 2 stops underexposed from the meter reading.

Please keep in mind that the meter reading does not give you a correct exposure, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CORRECT EXPOSURE. I do not even claim that the exposure in the second version of the shot is better than the first one, my only claim is that I like the second one better. I am the photographer and I get to decide what exposure I like best. Had you been standing beside me at the time this shot was taken and taken your own it might look quite different. Hey, I might even like yours better than mine.

Photography is based on artistic decisions. Knowledge of photographic techniques equips you with the tools you need to get the shot you want.

It's been awhile since my last post and it feels good to be back typing. Comments are always welcome.

Combined Techniques

Let's put together two photo techniques and see what happens.

The last post here was about creating a panorama. Back in August of 2012 I did a post on HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography.

In creating a panorama two or more shots are assembled into an extra wide or panoramic image. In HDR photography two or more different exposures of the same image are put together to create an image with detail in all areas including portions of the image that would be too bright, or too dark, to include detailed information.

So now let's combine the techniques and create an HDR panorama. In this case I pointed my camera at the left end of the about to be created panorama and took five images at five different exposures. Moving to the center of the future panorama and being sure to overlap the first shot series, I took another five exposures from way too dark to way too light. Moving right I repeated the procedure for the final shot.

Now I uploaded all 15 exposures to my computer and started to work. I selected the first five images and exported them to Photomatix Pro and created an HDR composite. With the next five I repeated the process using the same settings to create the same effect and then did the same once again for the last five.

Now with three HDR images in my Lightroom organizer I selected them and selected "Merge to Panorama in Photoshop" and here is the result:

I enjoy creating HDR photos and also panoramas. I have contemplated putting the two together on several occasions but had not stopped and said OK, now is the time. Well then came four inches of rain and the creek in my back yard looked more like a river (to me) and I decided now is the time.

Still I cheated. I used the Program Mode and a five shot automatically created bracketing series in Nikon's Continuous High shooting mode, where the camera takes one exposure at the meter reading, then at one and two stops less and then one and two stops more. In Continuous High mode this takes less than a second on the Nikon D700 and was done hand held. Here, as in the processing described above, I repeated the same steps twice more and the shooting was done.

Photoshop had no trouble matching the images. Since I was standing quite close to the creek the curve is exaggerated but since there really is a curve it looks nearly the same as real life. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised by what happens even when I take shortcuts I know I would be better off not taking.

Give it a try, surprise yourself.

Shooting a Panorama

A panorama is not difficult to shoot. Many current cameras have built in assistance for doing them and several allow you to point your camera at one end of your panorama, press the shutter button, and sweep across the scene until you reach the other end, stop and wait a few seconds and your panorama is complete. Heck my phone does that. OK, my phone does a pretty poor job of doing that. You might substitute another word for pretty if your not blogging.

Here I'll describe doing it the old-fashioned way, like we did it way back in 2008. You might have noticed in a post a few days back that it's not a new idea. The shot here was from about 1976 and if your familial with Salisbury Maryland this is the back of downtown and a parking garage in the right side of the photo has not yet been built. Technology wise this is an amalgam; the shots were done on black & white Tri-X film and were, just a few years back, scanned into digital files and stored on my computer. I found them recently and told Photoshop CS6 to create a panorama for me and voila a panorama.

Most panoramas today begin life as digital images and what follows will assume you have either a DSLR or another digital camera that you can control manually. As I mentioned in an earlier post the reason manual control is needed for panorama photos is that they are made of several separate photos and when assembled as you see here they should appear as a single image. A single image has a single exposure, a single white balance, and a single point of focus. If you use your camera in a automatic mode all three of those things may change with each shot. Now that I've said that I'll say that if you took your photos in a automatic mode today's panorama creating software may very well do a great job of putting them together, but here on Jim's Photo Stuff we are going to be more careful so we'll use the Manual Mode.

Step one, of course, is to choose what you are going to shoot. The method we will be describing will work best if there is nothing very close to the camera. If you want that kind of shot we'll discuss some more techniques down near the bottom of the post.

I have gotten very good results creating panoramas with my camera hand held, but I do recommend a tripod if one is available. If I am shooting hand held I face the end of my panorama and line up the camera for the last image, then I twist my body until I can line up my first shot. Now I take the first shot and slightly untwist to prepare for the second shot. You will want the shots to overlap by about 1/3 so there will be plenty of area for the software to create a good alignment. Untwist some more, take the next shot and so on until you take the last shot. It is important to keep the camera level for each shot. Pointing down or up will create a curved image which doesn't usually look as creative as it sounds.

If you are using a tripod, level your camera and turn it left and right deciding where the image will start and where it will stop. In the hand held description I did not mention exposure, white balance, and focus, but I will cover them here and you will use the same procedure whichever method you choose.

Set your camera in the Manual Mode and look at the panorama you've planned. Do you see a brighter area and do you see a darker area. You are looking for an area that is in between, not the darkest and not the lightest. Set your exposure for that area. Be sure your focus is in manual mode and focus on a point roughly 1/3 of the way into the shot. Take your white balance off automatic and set it to the current conditions such as daylight or cloudy. Now take all the images you planned being sure to over lap them by about 1/3.

If you would like to include items that are relatively close to the camera pay attention here. The image to the right shows the type of path your camera will follow if you hold it in your hand and twist your body as I described above.


In the second image you will see how your camera will move if the panning is done on a tripod with the camera attached the way cameras are usually attached. The camera pivots around the point on the camera body where the tripod screw attaches.

Now for the optical purists and the people trying to include items near the camera and far away lets look at the third image. You will need to purchase or "home brew" a panoramic head for your tripod. A panoramic head allows the camera to slide backward so that the point of rotation is not under the camera body but under the lens and specifically under what is called the nodal point of the lens. A search for panoramic heads or panoramic heads diy should provide you with enough information to spin you head as well as your camera, but if the regular tripod method is not giving you correctly aligned images this may be your answer.

You're not done of course you now have the shots but no panoramic image. Upload your panorama pieces to your computer in the usual way. Now since my typing fingers have exceeded today's mileage allotment we'll be back soon with what to do now.

Thanks for reading.
Jim King

The Manual Mode

In my last post I nearly ranted about the Program Mode. And that, seriously, is the way I shoot. I try to use the camera's computer to do the hard work, fast. I did mention that their were situations which require using the manual mode and I'd like to tackle some of them here. I say "some of them" because as I go I'll probably think of more and more, but as a percentage of shooting situations I think those that require Manual Mode are a fairly small percentage (I may change my opinion on that as I go, but I don't think so).

Baseball under lights (Little League) My experience has been that Little League fields are lit well; this is not pro ball where the fields seem as bright as daylight but, kick up the ISO to 800, open the lens wide, and you can get shutter speeds of 125th of a second. What is difficult to get is consistent exposure. The background for a specific shot may be bright dirt around home plate, mid tone grass in much of the field, or black sky behind a low angle shot. Each one of these situations creates a different exposure and your subject (a player) may be exposed properly, or be under or over by a stop or more. Since the fields are lit quite evenly you can try several exposures manually until you get one you like and stick with it. The players are usually lit the same wherever they are. I find in the deep outfield I may need a stop more and I can set that on the fly quickly.

Followed the same rules with b&w film in the mid 70s.

Panoramas A panorama is composed of several shots, at least two and maybe eight or more. Let's say we take 5 photos that we plan to combine into one panorama. If the exposure changes between each shot they will be hard to blend together. Moreover if the white balance changes, or the focus it can be difficult to create the final image that looks like one photo. So here is the second occasion that Manual Exposure is, if not absolutely necessary, is a far better way of creating the necessary images to blend into a panorama.

Night Sky Taking a photo of the stars in the sky is relatively easy in the Manual Mode and virtually impossible in any automatic mode. Here's how to make a first try. After dark set your camera up on a tripod and aim it at the area of the sky you'd like to try first. A small flashlight will come in very handy.

• Set your Mode to manual
• Focus to manual
• ISO to 400
• Aperture to it's widest opening (smallest number)
• Focus at infinity
• Shutter speed to 30 seconds
• Shoot

You can't do that in an automatic mode but it will probably give you a good start for your first night sky shot.

Studio Photography This topic is way beyond the scope of this post but traditional studio photography uses flash studio studio lights. The shutter speed is normally set to the "sync" speed of the camera, maybe 1/250 sec. and the aperture adjusted for correct exposure. If neither the lights or the subject moves all exposures will be identical. Auto exposure will not work with studio lights. (Studio is studio, dogs are allowed.)

Multiple flashes can be used fully automatically if, as an example, you purchase all Nikon Speedlights and operate them with Nikon's CLS flash control system. Canon and others have similar systems and some after market manufacturers sell flashes that are advertised to operate with this system.

Multiple Flash (the inexpensive variety) Another method of studio style lighting can be done with relatively inexpensive flash units that are, like Nikon Speedlights, designed to fit on top of a camera. This is done in exactly the same manner as studio photography above and the camera is in a fully manual mode. In studio situations you can use auto-focus if desired.

Groups of Similar Photos to be Displayed Together Here an example might be several photos of the same child playing in the back yard. In an automatic mode the skin color and tone as well as the appearance of clothing can change in a disconcerting manner between photos. Manual Mode will solve this problem.

Of course some experienced photographers use manual exposure all the time. With practice it can be very fast and easy. I will still save it for those occasions when I feel it's necessary and use Program Mode most of the time. This is a topic that can create a discussion similar to the Nikon vs. Canon wars that occur among photographers. I don't claim to have the best answer, but the one that works well for me.

Since I've posted a taste of using the Manual Mode I believe I've planted a seed which I may try to grow in coming posts. Perhaps the Muse is with me.

Using the Program Mode

I haven't written any posts for a long time, but here is an item I would like to discuss. The Program Mode. I teach photography classes and I find that, for the most part, students are divided into those who set their camera to the Auto, or "Green Camera" mode (yeah sometimes red) and those who have become more serious and have switched to the Manual Mode. The "Green Camera" mode in modern digital cameras works very well. You will usually get well exposed and in focus photos and be pleased with the results. 

The Green mode relies on the three most important aspects of good photography: 

• Where you are standing
• Which way you are pointing the camera
• When you press the shutter button

Great photos are made all the time by getting those three items correct. The problem, for those who are getting more serious, is that the Green mode gives you no control over anything else and while the "Big Three" are VERY important, the decisions made by your camera's computer do not always result in the best photo and doing well in the big three can still result in a bad photo.

Good photographers use more control to create better photos. Good photographers adjust Shutter Speed to control how motion is captured, Aperture to control how much of the image is in focus, and ISO to allow Shutter Speed and Aperture to be set in a range that will deliver the image they want. Many photographers as they become more serious are aware of this and since they want to control all of these things gravitate to the Manual Mode. Please don't misinterpret me here, the Manual Mode works and there are times when it is the only way to get images the way you want them. 

However, your camera is capable of sophisticated light measuring and exposure calculations that happen faster than you could possibly compete with, and when you put your camera in the Manual Mode you are turning off (for the most part) the camera's computer. When you put your camera in the Green mode you are turning off much of your input. I propose a system (and a Mode) that uses the camera's computer and allows you almost all of the control the Manual Mode shooter has. The Program Mode.

Let's set the camera to "P" or Program Mode and see what control we have (in most DSLR cameras, I can't promise all).

We now control the ISO, the camera will not change it and we get to decide what setting to use.

We control the flash, it will not flash unless we turn it on and it will flash, even in bright sunlight, if we do turn it on. If you are a newbie you may not realize how important this is but when you are taking close up photos of people in bright sun there are usually dark shadow on the face. The flash will automatically lighten the shadows and create a more pleasing image, and that is just one example.

Look through your viewfinder and find the aperture and shutter speed. They are both displayed in most viewfinders and your manual will tell you which is which. Watch the numbers and, at the same time, rotate the main command dial. On most DSLRs if you're rotating the correct dial the numbers will change. One will get larger and the other will get smaller and rotating the other way will reverse the process. If you watch the Shutter Speed you can adjust it to a slower or faster speed and the computer will adjust the aperture to give you a correct exposure.

If you watch the aperture you can set it for a smaller number so that the background will be out of focus and not compete with your subject if you spin it the other way, to a larger number, more will be in focus so that more of the photo will be sharp.

Take a shot and look at the image on the camera's LCD. Is it too dark or too light? If it is the camera's meter did not do what you wanted. Find the small button that looks something like [+/-] you may have to consult your manual under "exposure compensation" to be sure how to use it but frequently you just hold the button down and rotate the command dial. Your display will either show a minus sign followed by increasing numbers or no sign (or +) followed by a number that ranges from 1 to 3 or maybe more. If it is a minus sign you image will be darker when you shoot next and if no sign or + your photo will be brighter.

For most photos there is nothing that you can do in the Manual Mode that can't be duplicated in Program Mode. You can pick your aperture or shutter speed. In Manual Mode you can pick both but you must compensate for changing one by changing the other to keep the same exposure which in Program Mode is done for you automatically. In Manual Mode you can deliberately choose to under expose or over expose and in Program Mode you can do the same with Exposure Compensation. In Manual you must change the ISO yourself and the same in Program; In manual you decide when to use flash and in Program you make the same decision. Flash is controlled automatically in Program Mode and has it's own Flash Exposure Compensation. In Manual you need to figure it out and that requires you to do mathematical calculations and to know the distance from you camera to your subject.

When do I recommend using the Manual Mode? Well since I've typed quite a bit, I will try to return on the next post to address that question.

Thanks, for reading.

Jim