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Exposure Modes

So, the exposure modes is usually controlled by the mode dial on the top of our camera. And there's a few cameras that use buttons rather than dials, but a great majority of cameras have this mode dial on it. And what this is controlling is the way shutter speeds and apertures are set on the camera. Now, the mode dial will have several different options on it. There's going to be a bunch of different letters which are generally used for manual settings of some sort. You get to have a little bit of manual input. And then there's going to be a bunch of automatic settings. There's usually a green box, or a green camera, for very simple, simple full automatic and then some other scene modes. So, let's talk about the different options on our camera. First up, that little green zone and all of those scene modes, these are automatically going to set shutter speeds and apertures for you, and it's going to go in and it's going to adjust a whole bunch of other settings automatically, whether you...

like it or not. And so, if you want to change the ISO, there's a good chance that if you have the camera in that green auto mode, you will not be able to get into the ISO and make any change whatsoever, at all. And so, there are child safety locks on all of these features, and it's going to be really frustrating, and I would really hope, that somebody that has been watching the fundamentals of photography, all the way up into section four, right here, that you are no longer going to be using these on a routine basis. It's okay to set them, I'm giving you permission from time-to-time, but when you're doing your serious photography, you're going to want to get out of these modes because you're going to have all this knowledge and things that you want to do to your photographs and you can't do them here because they got the locks on them. So, you want to get into something that has a little bit of manual control. Now, the program mode is going to set the shutter speeds and apertures for you. And the difference between the program mode and that little green camera mode, right there, is that the program mode doesn't have the child safety locks and it doesn't automatically pop up the flash, on those cameras that have pop-up flash, which is one of the most irritating things about some of those automated modes is the flash pops up. You know, you're in the big concert hall, you're way up in the last nose-bleed seats and your flash pops up, and it's not going to reach the stage down there, that's ridiculous. We see that at the beginning of every Olympics. We got another Olympics coming up, We always got an Olympics coming up, but watch the opening ceremonies of any Olympics, when the torch comes out, everybody up in the the upper stands, fires their flash and illuminates the heads of the people in the front row, right behind them. It doesn't do them any good at all. So, in the program mode, the camera sets shutter speeds and apertures. Let's think about how this works now. So, we have a list of apertures, we got a whole bunch of different shutter speeds that your camera can choose from. If it's really bright it would go to F in an eight thousandth of a second. As it gets darker, it's probably going to work off of shutter speeds first, getting rid of those high shutter speeds. And then, it's going to kind of do a mixture of changing shutter speeds and apertures at the same time, until it runs out of apertures to go to, at which point it's going to just be changing shutter speeds down as you get down to a really dark area. And so, it's doing whatever it kind of needs to do to make sure there's the right amount of light coming in the camera. Now, where this can get a little bit more interesting is if you have your camera set in the program mode and auto ISO, because now it has three parameters that it can change. And so, if it's really bright, 22, eight thousandth of a second at ISO 100, it's probably going to take off some of those fast shutter speeds first, and then it's going to kind of work back and forth with shutter speeds and apertures until it gets down to the last aperture that it can use, and at this point, it's probably going to start going with the ISO, and bumping up the ISO, until it maxes that out. And what it's trying to do is, it's trying to maintain a shutter speed that you can hand-hold. It's assuming you're hand-holding the camera, but wait, are you hand-holding the camera? The camera doesn't know. You could have the camera on a tripod. It doesn't know about these things and that's one of the problems with this mode, is that your camera doesn't know what you're doing. And if it was to get darker, than it would just continue to change the shutter speeds at that point. So, if you are in the program mode, one of the options that you have of actually taking a little bit of control of the camera, is something called program shift. Your camera probably has a dial, a generic dial that can be used to change a lot of the different functions on the camera. In the program mode, that dial probably controls exactly the settings that you have for shutter speed and aperture. So, if your camera says, "Okay, you need 5.6 at sixteenth of a second." You could say, "But I don't like that. "Can I change it?" (clicking noise) Turn the dial, and you'll be able to change it to F 11 and 1/15 of a second. And then you can shoot the photo there if that's where you would prefer it at. The convenient thing is that the camera is always adjusting both of them at the same time, so you don't have to worry about the quantity of light coming in, you're just looking at the numbers going, "Hey, I would prefer 2.8", or "I would prefer 2/50 of a second." And it's a really quick way of letting the camera assist you in making a manual setting. Now, the camera is ultimately in control, but you're able to, kind of, guide it to where you think you would rather take the photograph. So, this is a great place for somebody who is kind of new to photography and they want to make some changes, but they want a little bit of a safety net, or an experienced photographer who just wants to be able to pick their camera up and quickly take a photo and, maybe if they want, make a quick change according to their needs. And so, it can utilize whatever apertures and whatever shutter speeds your camera or lens has available to you. Now, the problem is, is that some of these cameras reset, and the other problem is, some don't. And where this gets to be a problem is when you are wanting to take a photograph of a landscape and you go over and you take your landscape shot and you're done. And then you put your camera down and you go over here, and you decide you're going to take a portrait picture and you forgot that you were just taking a landscape photo, that you'd just adjusted your camera for. Your camera is still in that landscape mode when you're shooting portraits. And some cameras are kind of sticky in that regard. And Nikon cameras, for instance, kind of have a sticky mode where it stays in that exact shutter speed and aperture when you move onto a different subject. Canon cameras have the exact opposite problem. I will pick up the camera and I'll be doing some portraits and then I'll put the camera down and I'll want to go shoot portraits some place else, and the camera reverts back to it's original, kind of, middle-of-the-road state, and I've got to go dial in those settings again. So, when you want to dial in something specific you got to keep resetting it, on the camera, which is a bit of a pain, or it just kind of sticks where you want, even though you switch. And so, the program mode, in my mind, is just a quick shot, I need a fast picture and I'm not really too particular about shutter speeds and apertures, as long as I get generally close, I'm fine. But, when you are working with a subject and you have the opportunity of taking several photographs and kind of refining the process as you shoot them, you're probably going to want more of an advanced mode than the program mode. Next up on the list would be shutter priority or time value. And this is where you get to choose the specific shutter speed and the camera will figure the rest of the equation out by moving the aperture around. So, in this one, which I would have to say is probably one of the more popular modes for people who are just getting into photography, because shutter speeds are relatively easy to understand. I mean, it's not a hard concept, it's just a period of time. So, I'll think about the easy one and I'll let the camera figure out the hard one and so, you could select a sixtieth of a second, and the camera might recommend a five six. And you might say, "Well, you know what? "I need a fast shutter speed." And then, you'd say, "a thousandth of a second," and then the camera would adjust to 1.4. The problem is, is that if you select too fast a shutter speed, in this case 2000 of a second, and you don't have a 1.0 lens, which very few people do, you're not going to be able to take the shot. Well, I shouldn't say that, it's incorrect. You will be able to take the shot, but it will be too dark because what happens in this mode, is your camera still lets you shoot photos, but it does give you a little bit of a warning that your picture's going to be too dark, and you have to be really aware about that warning, which is often either a lightening bolt blinking, the aperture blinking, or something in your camera blinks to let you know, "Hey, I don't have an aperture "that this is going to work with, "but if you want to shoot, go right ahead." All right? So, at the other end of this spectrum, you could say, "You know what? "I want a really slow shutter speed." And you're probably going to have an aperture, but if you go too slow, you're probably not going to have an aperture for it. And if you think about of how many apertures are on a camera, there's usually about seven or eight, and how many different shutter speeds there are, there's a lot of those, 18 different shutter speeds, there's usually eight different aperture settings. More than half the settings, if you don't know what you're doing, are unusable. And so it's very prone to making mistakes. Now, I'm not saying that no one should ever use shutter priority, far from it. It's just a mode that you have to be very aware of to make sure that your camera has an appropriate aperture that it can work with when it's in this mode. And so, I generally don't recommend people using this. If there is a specific shutter speed that you need to do something in a very particular way, I would recommend full manual exposure. And we'll talk about that in just a second. All right, next up is aperture priority, which is very similar to shutter priority. You get to set one thing and the camera figures out the rest of the equation. So, if you set an aperture of 5.6. It might select, say, a sixtieth of a second. And you could choose a different aperture. Thinking about aperture, I want to shoot at 1.4. Or you could be thinking shutter speeds and go, "Well, I want the fastest shutter speed possible, "so I'll set it to F 1.4." And because there are so many shutter speeds, it's highly unlikely that you will ever set an aperture where you don't have a shutter speed. And so, you could set the aperture down here in the 1.4 to 2.8 region, to get shallow depth of field or to freeze motion, whatever reason that you want to change it there. You'd set it to F 11 to 22 region, if you wanted to maximize the depth of field, or perhaps you wanted to blur the motion, or you could set it somewhere in that F four to F eight range, to get the maximum sharpness. And so, we're going to talk more about these five different things here, but this is basically the whole world of photography. And if we look here, this is just a few clicks back and forth on the aperture dial. And so, you can go from one extreme to the other, by just adjusting a few clicks in aperture priority. And so, for a lot of photographers, aperture priority is the best quick mode to use because they have specific control of what they're doing and they can go from one extreme to the other in as few clicks as possible. And so, if you talk to serious photographers, you'll find that they usually only use two modes on their camera, full manual, and aperture priority. Every once in a while they'll use a program mode just to get a quick shot, and there are some people who do like shutter priority for certain types of subjects that work very well, and I can understand that, but it's a small percentage of them. So, this is kind of my favorite mode for doing travel photography, when I'm walking down the street, and I don't know what my next photo is going to be. Whatever that photo is, I can get to it very quickly with just flipping that dial that controls the apertures. So, that was program, that was shutter priority and aperture. Now, these modes that we've been talking about have something in common. These are all auto exposure modes, which means the camera is in control of how bright or dark your images are. You get to choose and have some say as far as what sort of shutter speed and aperture, but when it comes to brightness, the camera is in control at this point right here. And so, the way that you can get in and have some say as to how bright and dark your image is, is going to be using this exposure indicator, which the camera normally wants to keep positioned right in the middle, under the zero. Now, your camera's display might be slightly different than this, but this is generically what a lot of them look like, and so this is back, once again, with that display that's usually in the bottom middle of your display and it's usually this graphic indicator that goes to the dark side and to the minus side. And a special little word of warning to all of you Nikon owners, and there may be some other owners as well, Nikon, in some of their cameras, typically ones that are more than two years old, have had the minus over on the plus side, and so this whole display that I have created doesn't take that into account. I've put the minus on the left side and the plus on the right side because that's the way it is in the vast majority of cameras, and that's the way most people think seems logical when they think about light and dark. All right, so, the camera wants to have the indicator in the middle which means it believes that you are shooting a subject that is not too dark, and not too bright. If your subject is darker than average, the indicator should be over to the minus side. If your subject is lighter than average, it should be over to the plus side because this light meter up here is simply telling us how bright and dark the subject that we are photographing is. And so, this is representing the lightness here. Over here, we're at minus one, this represents the darkness of this subject here. So, the meter should match the subject. So, middle-tone gray is going to be right in the middle. Now, what is this? Well, we've got middle-tone gray, we've got black and we've got white so we need average everything. If we average everything, it's in the middle. And so, we can mix up white and blacks, you can have a checkerboard, and that ends up being gray and it's average. This is predominately black and so, what that means is that the indicator should be over on the minus side. If the subject is predominately bright, white, it should be over to the right-hand side on the indicator. Now, to make this change on your camera is going to be a plus, minus button on your camera. If your home, you've got your camera right there, look at that camera, find that plus, minus button, or dial on your camera, and this is going to allow you to make your pictures a little brighter or a little darker. All right, so these doors are painted bright white, but they do not look like they're bright white right now because I took the photo with a camera in an automated mode and it thinks that these doors are middle-tone gray. So, what I can do to correct for that is find the plus, minus on my camera, and dial in a plus one, or a plus one and a third, or a plus two, or however much of an exposure or compensation that I need. I need to brighten that subject up. And that is a better representation of how bright that subject is. On the other end of the spectrum, this was taken at night time. This was supposed to be a very dark photo, but the camera doesn't understand that. It thinks everything is middle-tone gray. I need to go into the exposure compensation on my camera and I need to dial this one down fairly far. I'm going to go all the way down to minus two in this case, because this is a very dark situation. There is very little light there. These are dark buildings and this is at night time. And so, I need to correct for what the camera thinks that it's trying to do. And so, in some cases I need to go to the plus side, in some cases I need to go to the minus side. And this is just where you need to use your intuition. Looking at a subject, is this brighter than average or is it darker than average?