Sunday, October 14, 2012
coach Hi and welcome to another of my articles
Hi and welcome to another of my articles, my name is Chris Martin and I am a Professional Photographer in Kent, UK. Today I will be covering the camera settings so many of us are scared of using. Its time to get that control dial spinning guys and stop using the auto and scene modes, the results will make it worth it I promise!.
The mode settings on most DSLR's are changed by a circular dial that is normally located on the top left of the camera as you are looking through the viewfinder. All too often we rely on the Auto setting on our cameras and thus hand over all control to it. The camera has no idea what we are photographing or the affect we desire, its up to us to tell it!, there is no point in spending our hard earned cash on a camera with lots of flexibility only to leave it in auto.
The changing of the values explained below differ from camera to camera and manufacturer, I would recommend checking in your camera manual how to do this. On the Nikon cameras which is what I use, the dials if front and to the rear of the shutter button change the vales.
So lets get started, the first Mode is 'S' or on a Canon camera 'TV', it stands for Shutter Priority or Time Value. So what is this mode and when and why should we use it?. Well if we are looking to take an image that is speed related and by this I mean we need to have a fast shutter speed to capture action or maybe a slow speed to get more motion in an image, the S mode is the one to use. When in this mode we are in charge of what the shutter speed is and the camera sorts out the rest, kind of a semi auto setting. So if we are wanting to freeze action, we can set the shutter speed to maybe 1/250th second or maybe we want to get some motion in the image we could then set the shutter speed to 1/30th second.
Onto the next setting, A or AV, this stands for 'aperture' or 'aperture value'. This setting is used when we need to dictate what aperture we would like to use. Say we would like to take a portrait and would like the background all soft and blurry, we would set the camera to F2.8 or F4, again the camera would sort out the rest as with the S mode. If we were shooting a landscape we want everything pi sharp form the foreground to the background, so we would set the value to F16 or F22.
The next on the list is P mode, when you turn the dial to this mode it is in essence the same as auto. However with P mode if you don't like what the camera has decided, you simply change either the shutter speed or the aperture. When you do this a small star will appear next to the 'P' to tell you that the camera settings have been overridden. This mode is good if you are on your holidays or taking snaps but still gives you the flexibility to override it very quickly and easily.
The last on the list is M and this stands for manual, in this mode you are in complete control of what the camera is going to do. Now this is great as you are in the driving seat and the camera is going to do exactly what you want. The downside is if you are new to photography the results maybe very hit and miss. For example I would use this mode all the time when shooting in the studio as I am in control of the light and know for a fact that my subject will be lit at say F8 & 1/125th second, if i left it to the camera it would not know I am in a studio environment with flash heads and the results would be awful. Another application would be if I was photographing a waterfall for example, I would need a very long shutter speed to blur the water and the aperture I would want to be around F8 for good depth of field. When on location using the M mode can be fun as you can experiment, if unsure maybe use the S or A mode to get a good starting point by looking at what the camera suggests and then go into the manual mode.
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