Mobile Photography Tips
In this lesson we are diving into manual photography. Did you know you can adjust the exposure triangle settings on the camera on your mobile phone as well? We touched on this a little in Lesson 3 but I’m going to share a great article written by iPhone Photography School on how to expand your use of the manual features of your phone HERE. (Because it really is a great article and I couldn’t have said it any better or added anything.
I also wanted to share THIS article from 500px which is a photography website that I love and is home to some incredible photography by amazing artists. If you love taking photos with your phone I HIGHLY recommend checking this article out but it also has some great general photography tips for everyone!
Manual Mode on your Camera
It’s time to try being TOTALLY in control of your camera settings! Turn that dial to the “M” setting (on BOTH Nikon and Canon). You have learned how to adjust your aperture in Lesson 2. You learned Shutter Speed in Lesson 3. You learned how to adjust your ISO to compensate for the brightness of your photos when altering these settings. Now you just have to put all of these tools together and make your own choices and you can start experiencing creative freedom with your camera.
In previous lessons I introduced you to the Exposure Pyramid (or triangle).
It will be good to review this again and refer back to it as needed to remind yourself how your adjustments to Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO will affect the amount of light that is let into your camera (and how bright or dark your images will be).
It’s time to make another new friend, who will be your BEST friend when shooting manually; the metering scale.
The metering scale is the green bar across the bottom of your image when you look through the viewfinder on your camera. It tells you when your image is at ideal exposure. That fat pointer in the center of the meter is where your sweet spot is for ideal exposure. The line underneath is where your exposure is sitting at the moment with your current lighting situation and settings. If your line is to the left of the center mark- you are underexposed, to the right- overexposed. As you can see in the image above I was a little underexposed. (Also, it’s a dumb image that I just quickly snapped to get a photo of the meter). Another thing to note is the broken line circle you see on the fruit bowl. That is where your meter is taking the reading from so you should place that on the subject that you want to be correctly exposed when looking at your meter (apparently I was very interested in the bottom of the bowl here).
Now let’s look at the numbers we see across the meter. The 60 to the left is the shutter speed. I would actually almost never shoot at this speed while hand-holding the camera. Any slight movement while shooting from either the photographer or the the subject would cause blur. I try to keep shutter speed around at least 100 when shooting non-moving subjects (obviously higher if the subject is moving). The 4.0 is our f-stop or Aperture. The 2000 is ISO. The 12 is the number of images I have left on my card. Without even seeing the image you can tell that I am shooting in low light by looking at the meter. I know this because the line at the bottom shows that I am almost correctly exposed with a low shutter speed (which allows more light in) and high ISO (which means the sensor is more sensitive to light). In very bright and sunny conditions my ISO would have to be at 100 (the minimum) and in order to get my image properly exposed (the meter line in the center of the meter) my shutter speed would be much higher. That is how the exposure triangle works and how each setting affects another. In a nutshell, shooting in manual is just deciding what is most important to you for each specific image and then adjusting the other settings to get the correct exposure (or get that little line in the middle of your meter).
Exposure
Now we need to talk a little bit about exposure. Shooting manually sounds pretty easy if you just worry about getting that little line right in the middle of the meter. Sometimes it’s not that easy though. Since my daughter is a gymnast, I used that as an example in Lesson 3 when we were discussing action photography and it is a good example here as well. Gymnastics is obviously a high action sport. It also is typically in low light conditions and flashes are not allowed. This means you will need a high shutter speed (which means less light in your camera/darker image) to capture the action, a fairly mid-range aperture makes it easiest to hit your focus (but also lets in less light than a smaller, more wide open aperture) and then to compensate for all of these low light conditions you will need to bump up your ISO pretty darn high. Unfortunately the higher the ISO, the grainier the image. So what’s the solution? Well for me the best solution was to upgrade to a camera that can handle higher ISO better without all the grain. But if that’s not in the budget you might do the best you can, underexpose a little and then brighten your image up with a little basic editing in software like Lightroom or Photoshop. Brightening an image too much in software will affect the quality and can add grain as well, but you can control how much to usually find a happy medium.
Overexposing an image, like missed focus, can be something that you cannot fully correct even in editing software. If the image is too overexposed it will not capture some of the details in the photo at all so even lowering the exposure in software will not bring them out because they were never captured in the first place.
Homework
- Practice, practice, practice. Seriously, just switch your camera over to Manual mode. Choose a subject (best to start with a still subject- a plant, flower, statue, or a model who will hold still for you). Choose and aperture. Think about how you want the image to look for this step- do you want the whole image fully in focus or just the subject with a blurred background? Try setting your ISO at 100 and see what your Shutter Speed Needs to be set at to achieve a good exposure using the meter. If it is above 100, you should be ready to shoot! Play around adjusting the aperture and in slightly different lighting scenarios and pay attention to what you have to adjust to get the exposure right and how your image turned out. POST some examples in the facebook group (or join if you haven’t yet) and ask questions there.