Today’s Post by Joe Farace
To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude—Jeanne Moreau
I taught a class on travel photography at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre filling in for a famous photographer who canceled at the last minute. When we went out to the Wakodahatchee Wetlands for a shoot, some of the students asked me why I was not shooting in Manual mode. I pointed to the camera’s dial, showing them all of the different options that were available and saying I prefer to use the mode that fits the subject matter I was shooting. It turned out that the instructor at another workshop they attended told them that she only shot in Manual mode because it was the purist form of photography. Me, I’m not a purist I just make pictures.
Shooting in Manual Mode
I will agree with the student’s former instructor that obtaining accurate exposures starts with correctly setting the lens aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Some purists will claim that using manual exposure is the only mode to use and you can use either a separate hand-held light meter or the metering system built into your camera to determine the “correct” exposure. The truth is that for 90% of photographs that you’ll make, any one of the camera’s automatic modes can do a fantastic job in producing correct exposures but its those last 10% that’ll kill you.
Today’s DSLR’s and mirrorless cameras let you choose to set the exposure manually or you let the camera do it for you, including ISO. But 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 systems. That’s why manual exposure can be helpful when dealing with a high subject contrast and strong backlight or when a specific mood is desired. But not the current Instagram trend of underexposing portraits to create a low key look; that really doesn’t work, IMHO.
How I Made this Photo: Sometimes I just don’t feel like lugging a DSLR (or even a film SLR) and a tripod, no matter how lightweight they may be, around all day. When the sun gets low on the horizon, I like to swap my DSLR for a small point-and-shoot camera like the Leica D-Lux 2 that was used to make this image on the beach at Acapulco near sunset. The exposure was 1/2000 sec at f/8 and ISO 400. Image was tweaked in Photoshop using the Bi-Color filter that’s part of Color Efex ro add some color to the scene.
Manual mode is useful for those shooters who would rather drive a car with a stick shift than one with an automatic transmission. But while purists claim manual exposure mode is the only one to use, outdoors I tend to use all of the letters on the dial.
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