Teach me how to shoot in Manual

Lets say that I'm a noob who's never shot in manual, but that I have a fairly good understanding of my camera.

How would you explain the best settings in bright light, flash, golden hour & low light situations?

Thanks!

Milla wrote in post #9890772
Lets say that I'm a noob who's never shot in manual, but that I have a fairly good understanding of my camera.

How would you explain the best settings in bright light, flash, golden hour & low light situations?

Thanks!

Learn the Sunny-16 rule, then expand on it. You can use a calculator like the one pictured here, or just learn the rules behind it.

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I can tell you what NOT to do. Do NOT adjust the ISO, aperture and shutter speed so that the meter "dial" is centered every time you take a picture. If you do that, you might as well be shooting in Av or Tv.

the chart looks complicated. I am still clueless.

Milla wrote in post #9890772
Lets say that I'm a noob who's never shot in manual, but that I have a fairly good understanding of my camera.

How would you explain the best settings in bright light, flash, golden hour & low light situations?

Nobody can tell you the "best settings" for any situation without being able to measure the light. In addition to the average lighting level, one needs to know the light levels of the brightest and darkest areas of a contrasty scene that is to be photographed.

Buy a decent light meter such as the Sekonic L-358. Ignore the meter in the camera completely and leave the exposure mode knob set to "M".

You may want to read a book or two to start learning about how to use a meter in a variety of situations, but there's a lot of information here and folks will answer specific questions for you in a heartbeat.

I use my Sekonic L-358 far more than I use the meter in the camera. I normally use it in the "incident" mode which means that I measure the light falling on the subject rather than measuring the light reflected from the subject (which is all the camera can do). My work flow allows me to work faster than I could with the camera alone, and almost all of my images are properly exposed without any experimental shots or setting exposure compensation.

Going to have to read up on Sunny 16... Thanks OP for asking and others for responding

The point of shooting manual is to control variables. The point of controlling variables is to make the pictures look the way YOU want them. So there are no best settings in manual for any situation other than the ones you want to use for the effects you want to create.

There is no shortcut to using manual exposure. You must learn how all the variables can affect the final image so you can use them creatively in manual mode.

Study and experimentation, not web forums is what will help you learn all that. A few good places to start:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=52418

http://www.cambridgein​colour.com/tutorials.h​tm

http://photo.net/learn​/

Thank you for your responses everyone!

As someone stated "sunny 16" is a good place to start when working out exposures. From there, it is fairly easy to see if there are any other factors that may come into play (extremely bright/dark subjects or highly reflective surfaces)Getting to know your f-stops will help with this as it is then easy to adjust SS as a reciprocal.

For example,a portrait will normally require a wide aperture say f2.8 so on a bright sunny day you can work out the difference in aperture between f16 and f2.8 in stops and use this to adjust the SS (5 stops) so 1/100 becomes 1/3200.

Once upon a time most daylight shots for news photographers was 1/125s, f8 for slow things or 1/250s and f5.6 for faster movement. But film technology began to expand the sensitivity of emulsions and that has been vastly expended by the capabilities of digital sensors. It's no longer as simple as "f8 and be there." See this link for a good article:

http://ezinearticles.c​om/?F8-and-Be-There&id=1088221

I've nothing against handheld light meters. I have one and use it every now and then. It's very useful when I want to be careful and creative. However, when things are going at their normal pace, depending on what I want to capture, I use P, then Av and rarely Tv. I shoot the moon in manual.

As I've gotten older, I seem to have become less patient, certainly find it easier to forget a step in an involved procedure (good thing I'm not a surgeon) so I need all the help I can get. P plus the exposure compensation control does it for me most of the time. I guess I am officially now a Digital Snob (although I keep two film cameras on hand, just in case an EMP ever strikes our part of the world.

I was gunna suggest the sunny-16 rule as well, but the main thing is turn the dial on top of the camera to "M" and shoot, then shoot some more, then when you think you have the hang of it, shoot some more. Good luck and you'll catch on pretty quick, after all we all have a great light meter built right in to our cameras, and heads, the LCD screen, histogram, and eyes.