Today’s Post by Joe Farace
A few years ago I was teaching a class on travel photography at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre filling in for a famous photographer who canceled at the last minute. While I was doing my Lenny Harris imitation, a couple of the students asked me why I was not shooting in Manual mode. I pointed to the camera’s dial, showing all its different letters saying I prefer to use the mode that fits the subject and what I was planning on shooting. It seems that the instructor at another workshop that they attended told them she only shot in Manual mode because it was the purist form of photography. Me, I’m not a purist just take pictures.
Accurate exposure obviously starts with correctly setting the lens aperture as well as the camera’s shutter speed and ISO. Today’s DSLR’s and mirrorless cameras let you choose to set the exposure manually or let the camera do it for you, including ISO. Some purists claim that manual exposure is the only mode to use and you can use either a separate hand-held light meter or the metering system that’s built into your camera to accomplish that. And the truth is that for 90% of photographs that you’ll make, any one of the camera’s automatic modes will do a fantastic job in producing correct exposures but its those last 10% that’ll kill you.
Sometimes you have to shift into manual mode, especially when the light is at the extreme ends of brightness or darkness. Lighting situations like these extremes can sometimes confuse even the most sophisticated automatic exposure system. That’s why manual exposure can be helpful when dealing with high subject contrast and strong backlight such as in today’s featured image.
How I Made this Photo: I photographed this young woman at Butterfly World in Coconut Creek, Florida using an Olympus E-20 with 35-140 mm (equiv.) f/2.0-2.4 lens at 72mm. The Manual mode exposure was 1/500 sec at f/6.3 and ISO 320. This was available light shot that was made in an indoor location that had extremely challenging lighting conditions with a mixture of mostly natural light with some artificial lighting. After this experience, I quickly realized that I needed a ring light when working under this kind of lighting at Denver’s Butterfly Pavilion. In Denver, I switched to using Canon DSLRs along with the company’s MR-14EX ring light. I used manual mode because every automatic mode that I tried when photographing butterflies there didn’t work—even though the literature says the ring light works with all the camera’s automatic modes. This was clearly one of those 10% times, when it didn’t.
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Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography that’s available from Amazon for $21.50 with used copies starting at giveaway prices—starting around five bucks.