How to shoot
How to shoot in manual mode (and when not to)
Set ISO first for the light you are in, then aperture for how much of the frame you want sharp, then shutter speed to expose correctly — checking it…
How to shoot
Set ISO first for the light you are in, then aperture for how much of the frame you want sharp, then shutter speed to expose correctly — checking it…
In short: Set ISO first for the light you are in, then aperture for how much of the frame you want sharp, then shutter speed to expose correctly — checking it stays fast enough to freeze your subject. That order works because two of the three settings are creative decisions and only one is arithmetic.
ISO is the sensor's sensitivity. Outdoors in daylight, 100–400. Indoors by a window, 400–800. A dim room or a restaurant, 1600–6400. Modern cameras handle high ISO far better than photographers' habits suggest, and a slightly grainy sharp frame beats a clean blurred one every time.
Aperture (f-number) controls how much is in focus. f/1.8 gives one eye sharp and everything else soft — beautiful for a single portrait, unusable for two people at different distances. f/4 to f/5.6 keeps a couple sharp. f/8 and beyond for a group or a room.
Shutter speed then does the exposure arithmetic, with one hard floor: it must be fast enough to freeze what is moving. 1/125 for a still adult, 1/250 for someone walking, 1/500 upwards for a child or anything genuinely fast.
Keep the shutter speed at or above the reciprocal of your focal length: at 50mm, no slower than 1/50; at 200mm, no slower than 1/200. Stabilisation buys a couple of stops, but it stabilises the camera, not the person you are photographing — a stabilised 1/30 of a moving subject is still a smear.
For portraits in daylight: f/2.8, 1/250, ISO on auto with a ceiling. That combination keeps the face sharp with a soft background and survives someone shifting their weight between frames. Auto-ISO with a manual aperture and shutter is not cheating — it is delegating the only part of the triangle that is arithmetic.
Fast-changing light. Walking from a shaded street into full sun, aperture priority will track the change and you will keep shooting; full manual means you will miss the frames while adjusting. Manual earns its keep in consistent light — a studio, an overcast day, a lit interior — where you want every frame exposed identically.
Learn to read the histogram rather than the screen. A screen at full brightness in daylight lies to you in both directions. The histogram does not: if the right edge is stacked against the wall, highlights are gone and no editing recovers them.
As a starting point: f/2.8 for a single subject, 1/250 shutter, ISO set for the light (100–400 outdoors, 800+ indoors). Adjust aperture upwards for more than one person.
Not inherently. Manual gives consistency in consistent light; aperture priority is better when the light keeps changing. Most professional work in daylight uses aperture priority or manual-with-auto-ISO.
Usually shutter speed below the focal length reciprocal, or a subject moving faster than the shutter can freeze. Raise the shutter to 1/250 and let ISO rise to compensate.
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