shooting in Manual mode

I shoot exclusively in Aperture mode. I feel that shooting in manual mode may open up some possibilities. How do i Start doing it ? Any suggestions / Methodologies?

Thank you

Anil

You shoot a lot of birds, so I assume that you don't want to manual focus, but use M for exposure? I use my hand as the known target + a 4/3 compensation in the viewfinder:
Need an exposure crutch?

And for those who might ask "Why?": Post #47

sanil wrote in post #18196779
I shoot exclusively in Aperture mode. I feel that shooting in manual mode may open up some possibilities. How do i Start doing it ? Any suggestions / Methodologies?

Thank you

Anil

Many of us shoot M mode with auto ISO. It gives full control over aperture and shutter speed. ISO is usually a less critical parameter with today's excellent sensors, plus there is noise reduction in post-processing. Give it a try.

Good choice. I never understood why people shoot in AP mode.
You first need to understand how to "meter" your camera. I like to refer to it as calibrating. It just makes more sense to me.

You don't want to blow the highlights (white feathers) on your subject, so meter off of something white in the same light as your subject, and open up 1 to 1-2/3 stops on the meter. Use Spot metering mode.

Turn on your highlight alerts. If you see blinkies, then stop down a little either with shutter, aperture or ISO. Then ignore your meter until the light changes. Shoot when your subject is in the light, not in the shadows. For more in depth info, google " how to calibrate camera highlight alerts" or something similar.

Watch your histogram. Overexpose as much as you can without allowing it to touch the right side of the histogram.

Don't worry about the exposure of the background. The goal is to expose your subject to your liking.

Read chapter 6 for a better explanation. http://www.digitalbird​photography.com/conten​ts.html

Also learn about metering using an 18% gray card.

Auto ISO is NOT manual mode. The camera will still make decisions for you in this mode.

sanil wrote in post #18196779
I shoot exclusively in Aperture mode. I feel that shooting in manual mode may open up some possibilities. How do i Start doing it ? Any suggestions / Methodologies?

Thank you

Anil

Heya,

It requires you to control your meter regardless of modality selected and target some values that stop motion if necessary, and expose enough of the subject to work with in post without over-exposing and blowing out highlights (and thus losing data, you can recover shadow stuff easier and cleaner than trying to deal with totally lost data due to blown highlights). I like to spot meter in manual and I look for the darkest and brightest things I can to get an idea of what kind of range I'm dealing with. White is the ideal for the brightest thing to meter, or near white so that you don't over-expose to the point of data loss. Then look for the darkest things you may expose for. You could expose just for highlights. But you can also look at the light and dark metering points and target something between them, but that requires a good sensor with high dynamic range. When in doubt, simply expose up as much as you can without blowing highlights, and you'll have a good workable RAW file to process.

I target a shutter speed for motion stopping when I'm doing in-flight. I like shutters between 1/1000s and 1/2000s. I adjust aperture & ISO based on those needs. When in-flight, I stop down my aperture a bit to get better depth of field and sharpness. I compensate my shutter & aperture with ISO. I expose my histogram to the right but stop where highlights blow out. When I'm shooting something stationary, I open my shutter more and relax ISO and allow my shutter to fall slower and utilize mount & image stabilization to get data that way for a cleaner image (as this is often for me in lower light such as under canopy).

I find that I can use aperture priority or manual back and forth though. I use manual when the situation is too difficult even for a spot meter, such as shooting into a bright sky with a dark bird, or shooting a bright bird against a dark background. When the light is more diffuse and the bird and background are closer in exposure values, AP can handle it fine for me (exposing to the right still, as I dial in a little +EC and shoot RAW for recovery).

Regardless of the approach, in full manual, you have to watch the changing light conditions, clouds, etc. If you set it once and just shoot all over, you will get all kinds of mixed results. It's a dedicated way to approach things without automation to get the exposure close to what you want. If you're frantically moving from one place to another and firing off shots, semi-automation is likely more helpful (like AP) if you control your meter and understand what its doing so that you can influence the semi-automation.

Very best,

Shall try shooting in manual mode and post some pictures ... later this week.

One of the techniques i read else where and tried..

to take metering of grass in the same light as the bird .. null the meter .. to begin with...

then if the bird is white ... under expose by couple of stops and if the bird is dark over expose by couple of stops.. ..

if the light become brighter increase the no of stops ...

i was shooting birds flying on the water (which is lit bright with sun) and had miserable results.. could nt figure out why?

sanil wrote in post #18199145
Shall try shooting in manual mode and post some pictures ... later this week.

One of the techniques i read else where and tried..

to take metering of grass in the same light as the bird .. null the meter .. to begin with...

then if the bird is white ... under expose by couple of stops and if the bird is dark over expose by couple of stops.. ..

if the light become brighter increase the no of stops ...

i was shooting birds flying on the water (which is lit bright with sun) and had miserable results.. could nt figure out why?

Just watch for blinkies. If there are blinkies, then reduce the exposure.

Following rules of thumb might work sometimes, but they fail if they result in blinkies.

Sometimes there is not enough time to adjust the exposure, so you just do what you can.

sanil wrote in post #18196779
I shoot exclusively in Aperture mode. I feel that shooting in manual mode may open up some possibilities. How do i Start doing it ? Any suggestions / Methodologies?

Auto-ISO in M mode with HTP (Highlight Tone Priority) enabled is my go-to. HTP gives a stop of headroom for when you don't have time to perfect the embedded JPEG exposure, and does not give horrific shadow results with newer cameras with lower banding noise when HTP causes very low ISOs, especially newer cameras with the off-sensor ADC.

Keep your Av value wide open, unless you need DOF or your lens is sharpest stopped down a little; adjust shutter speed a little bit depending on lighting, with the knowledge of how the lighting drives the ISO at that shutter speed, to help decide with trade-offs. Even though my ISO might vary from 200 to 16,000 (7D2 ISO range for HTP), my aperture generally only varies by a stop or so and is almost always wide-open, and shutter speed is set for lighting and subject activity, but generally over a much smaller range than ISO. With a relatively calm bird in shade, I might drop to take a few shots at 1/100 or sometimes slower. Out in the sun, and with BIFs, shutter speed can be 1/800 to 1/2000.

You have to be careful about leaving the camera set to slow shutter speeds from the shade when you move to bright areas, though, as that can cause blown ISO 200 images. Unfortunately, the cameras don't seem to have a shutter speed escape option to raise the shutter speed when it would cause over-exposure. Eventually, we should have enough flexibility in settings that we can pretty much define what the Av, Tv, and ISO settings are for a range of light levels, and make the camera do what we would do if we had the time to do it.

no blinkies were there during that shooot.. while I was photographing .. in manual mode..

There are two methods for metering; 1. metering your white subject, 2. metering off of something neutral gray (i.e. grass) and then adjusting up or down depending whether your subject is light or dark. The "ah ha" moment for me regarding metering and learning how to shoot in manual mode was learning that, when in any auto mode, the camera will make all of your images neutral gray (or approx. 18% gray). Read Sandpiper's explanation in this thread; https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1371483

and here's another that may help. https://photography-on-the.net …showthread.php?​p=17826397

Become an expert at metering your camera, then you can think about shooting in other modes. You'll be better off for it.
Also, if you push the histogram to the right as I've suggested in another thread, remeber that you'll have to shift the exposure back in post processing, so you'll need Lightroom or other editing software to allow you to do so.

John Sheehy wrote in post #18199174
Auto-ISO in M mode with HTP enabled is my go-to. HTP gives a stop of headroom for when you don't have time to perfect the embedded JPEG exposure, and does not give horrific shadow results with newer cameras with lower banding noise when HTP causes very low ISOs, especially newer cameras with the off-sensor ADC.

Keep your Av value wide open, unless you need DOF or your lens is sharpest stopped down a little; adjust shutter speed a little bit depending on lighting, with the knowledge of how the lighting drives the ISO at that shutter speed, to help decide with trade-offs. Even though my ISO might vary from 200 to 16,000 (7D2 ISO range for HTP), my aperture generally only varies by a stop or so and is almost always wide-open, and shutter speed is set for lighting and subject activity, but generally over a much smaller range than ISO. With a relatively calm bird in shade, I might drop to take a few shots at 1/100 or sometimes slower. Out in the sun, and with BIFs, shutter speed can be 1/800 to 1/2000.

You have to be careful about leaving the camera set to slow shutter speeds from the shade when you move to bright areas, though, as that can cause blown ISO 200 images. Unfortunately, the cameras don't seem to have a shutter speed escape option to raise the shutter speed when it would cause over-exposure. Eventually, we should have enough flexibility in settings that we can pretty much define what the Av, Tv, and ISO settings are for a range of light levels, and make the camera do what we would do if we had the time to do it.

I'm sure everybody knows what HTP means...

Larry Johnson wrote in post #18196903
Auto ISO is NOT manual mode. The camera will still make decisions for you in this mode.

I disagree. Auto-ISO with manual Av and manual Tv is as "Manual" as it gets, because you are never compromising those two manual setting to adjust relative "exposure". Aperture determines real photographic parameters, and the exposure time does, too. "Exposure" and "ISO" are semantic/logistic nuisances that interfere with true manual photography, which is what you would have if you had a camera with no variable "gain" per se; just a photon-counting sensor and Av and Tv controls, where there is only absolute exposure, and no relative under- or over-exposure. No highlight clipping possible, and no low exposure issues other than shot noise, the texture of captured light.

Choosing photographically-relevant parameters, manually, is what makes manual manual; not circumventing current technological capture issues.

I've never understood the common desire to reduce complex things to simple things, and create innuendo out of thin air in the process. Manually setting the f-number or physical aperture is manual. Setting the shutter speed manually is manual. Setting the ISO manually is also manual, but it is not about photography, per se; it is about limitations of the camera's capture ability.

John Sheehy wrote in post #18199186
I disagree. Auto-ISO with manual Av and manual Tv is as "Manual" as it gets, because you are never compromising those two manual setting to adjust relative "exposure"...

I totally disagree. Anytime the camera chooses to adjust the exposure, it's not what we mean when we say "Manual exposure".

Archibald wrote in post #18199182
I'm sure everybody knows what HTP means...

I edited my post to spell out HTP (Highlight Tone Priority).

HTP is something that people avoid, and that is partly my fault, as I was one of the first people warning against using it in photography forums and Usenet when the feature was first introduced. HTP works by the camera metering for ISO 200, calling it 200, but using ISO 100 RAW digitization and RAW levels. It is supposed to be understood by the converter that the normal whitepoint and graypoints are one stop lower. IOW, if white were 8000 RAW number above black without HTP, it is 4000 with HTP. Some converters will ignore this, and just render the default conversion a stop too dark.

The reason it can be problematic is that cameras with lots of shadow banding noise at base ISO or very low ISOs, it can cause banding to be visible in "normal" conversions, because it is a one-stop under-exposure. It is even more problematic when f-numbers are low, below 2.8 for larger pixels and about 2.0 for smaller pixels, because then there is hidden under-exposure, and ISOs like 125 are under-exposed 1/3 stop more, so ISO 250 with HTP and an f/1.0 lens can really bring up banding noise.

With slower telephoto lenses f/2.8 and greater, higher ISOs, and camera lacking in banding noise, and especially ones with off-sensor ADCs, this just isn't an issue. It does not increase noise except in the deepest shadows of the lowest ISOs, and with more recent Canons, that extra noise generally falls outside the realm of concern. HTP give slightly smaller RAW files, as well, as they have more high-order bits that are mostly zeros in the RAW files. One downside is that the ISO won't go above a certain level with HTP, which is a very poor design decision on Canon's part, because there is no penalty to HTP at the highest ISOs, at all. HTP should go one stop higher, not a couple stops lower, than non-HTP ISOs.

PhotosGuy wrote in post #18199212
I totally disagree. Anytime the camera chooses to adjust the exposure, it's not what we mean when we say "Manual exposure".

Exposure on the sensor is not changed by the ISO setting in M mode. The ISO setting only changes the absolute clipping level, and the amount of post-gain noise added to the signal in readout. These are not real photographic parameters; they are technological problems forced onto manual-TV&Av photography.