Yes, I said it! It’s not a misprint, or a mistake, if you genuinely want to improve your enjoyment of photography, get out of manual and start having some fun. After all, do you really think the boffins at Canon, Nikon, Sony and Panasonic et al would have bothered putting all those modes and scene options on your favourite camera if they hadn’t meant for you to use them? Of course not, and the reason they are there is to make your photography more fun, to take away some of the stress of capturing the perfect shot and to allow you to concentrate on getting better compositions, “seeing” the light, or to engage with your subject to get more intimate images.
I can hear the purists screaming “SACRILEGE” at the notion of using the hundreds of thousands of man-hours of development and decades of technical know-how these companies have put into creating these automatic modes on your camera, but I really don’t care and in reply I would ask this - hands up, who here drives an automatic car?
Because it’s the same thing, right? Car manufacturers created automatic transmissions to make driving easier and more enjoyable and sales in Australia vastly outstrip manual transmissions. Yes, even though manual transmissions are actually more fuel efficient (just ask any motoring purist who practices double-declutching), and are often cheaper than their automatic counterparts, most of us choose simplicity of operation and an improved experience. You won’t catch peak motoring RACQ or the NRMA preaching at us that manual is better and that we should all switch because it will make us better drivers, yet it happens all the time in photography.
So, why is it that a driving instructor will happily teach you in an automatic car, yet photography instructors always seem to insist on teaching you to use your camera manually? Are there real benefits or is it just some outdated snobbery that pervades the industry as a means of separating those who “know” from those who don’t?
There has long been the suggestion that professionals only shoot in manual mode, but how true is that in reality? Back in the days of film, professionals were generally using larger formats of film (medium and large format) for studio portraits and other social photography, the size lending itself to better reproduction in larger prints. Medium and large format cameras were, generally, entirely manual in operation, with exposure measured using separate light-meters and the required settings manually set on the camera, which was also manually focused. This tended to mean that professionals, in general, shot in manual.
Despite this, almost all the technological advancements in cameras of the 1970s and 1980s were applied to the 35mm format by Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax and Konica, with the advent of things like TTL exposure-metering and auto-focus, all aimed at democratising photography for the masses. This created a divide in photography in which professionals shot medium format in manual whilst amateurs could use auto settings on the 35mm format. Of course, this division wasn’t strictly delineated, because sports, news and documentary photographers also tended to use 35mm, and, as digital overtook film in the early 2000s, the line became ever more blurred. Many studio photographers failed to adapt to the new technology and the increasing pixel-count of 35mm DSLRs created more competition in the studio and social space to the point at which medium-format film and transparency was no longer viable.
This meant that by 2005, the vast majority of professionals across all genres were shooting in the 35mm format, with all the electronic advantages that these cameras contain and so the past adage is no longer true because pros do shoot in auto. NO, obviously I don’t mean the “green square” or the “P” mode, but more the aperture-priority (Av) and shutter-priority (Tv) that give us flexibility with a level of automation. And we definitely use auto-focus where and when it is appropriate, simply because it’s faster, and often more accurate than doing it manually in the field. Yes, we still use full manual mode in the studio, where we control the light and all aspects of image creation, but outdoors, in everyday shooting scenarios, you will find that pros now shoot in some form of auto at least some of the time. That’s because these modes ARE highly accurate and reliable, and using them gives us time to concentrate on the other critical aspects of photography that allow our work to stand out and be saleable.
Photography has always been a fusion of science and art. The science side mostly relates to the physics stuff, these days garnished with a healthy side dose of electronics, replacing the old-fashioned chemistry of the past, whereas the art addresses the proposition, the composition and the ultimate “success” of the final image, as measured by many of the same style elements as other visual mediums such as fine-art painting.
Unquestionably, an understanding of the “exposure triangle” formed by shutter speed, aperture and light sensitivity (iso) will make you a much more accomplished photographer, forearming you with the knowledge of how your camera should respond to a given lighting situation and allowing you to accurately predict the best settings to capture the shot you want. But modern cameras do have the ability to do much of this thinking for you though, with “creative modes” and “smart scenes” that apply the most appropriate settings (as dictated by lab testing) for the particular camera/lens combination in use at the time, so being a technical wizard isn’t always necessary.
What cameras can’t do yet is to “see” the image you want to capture. In the future, yes, it is likely that Arificial Intelligence will have a crack at this most intangible aspect of image-making, however, at the moment, as it has been since the dawn of the photographic age, the image is composed in the photographer’s head and that is what the camera will capture. This is why I believe it’s so much more important to get to understand the artistic elements of photography (framing, the rule of thirds, leading lines and so on), and let the camera to get on with the technical aspects of capturing the scene you have visualised.
Knowing the rules will improve your assessment of a potential scene and allow you to create more visually appealing images, however, like everything in life, practice makes perfect and the more photos you take, the better you will become. The auto modes on your camera will encourage you to take more photos because you will get better results than you would from trying to shoot in manual all the time which will, in turn, encourage you to take more pictures and get ever better. Shooting in auto means don’t have to think about the science so much, more the art, and that will help you to get better to the point at which you can put your camera in manual and start to use it even more creatively.
So, don’t listen to the naysayers, stick your camera in one of its auto modes and enjoy your photography so much more – if only someone could do the same for golf it would be so much better ;-)
Next time in Tech2 Tips we'll be looking at why you should rent, not buy your photographic equipment (or at least some of it). We'll see you next time :-)
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