Lesson 4 - Manual exposure setting

How to set exposure – manually

It’s all good and well to proclaim the virtues of a great exposure, but how do you actually expose? How do you know that your image is properly exposed? And what do you physically do on your camera to increase or decrease the exposure? Nothing, if your camera is set to auto-exposure – in other words, on one of the programmed exposure modes we’ll discuss in a minute. Your camera will take care of it – all you need to do is to point the beast at the scene you wish to record, compose, and push the shutter release.

However, for those who want to
• have more exposure control,
• be creative with their use of apertures and shutter speeds, or
• just plain don’t trust the programmed exposure modes,
you will probably be trying to figure out now how to set and work your camera on Manual mode.

Keep your manual handy for this:
Compact (fixed-lens) digital cameras
If you own a compact digital (i.e. you can’t remove the lens), you will in all probability have very little manual functions. Typically, this camera is geared towards the casual user, not the hobbyist, so the design favours point-and-shoot.

Still, the camera may have some manual functions such as aperture or shutter speed settings. Check your manual for this if there is no indication on the command dial of an "M" mode. If you can switch the command dial to manual, do so.

Typically, you now would have control over your aperture settings with the express purpose of forcing a particular depth of field through using a particular aperture – small depth of field through a wide aperture (f4) or a large depth of field through a small aperture (f16). Typically as well on compact digitals is that you would only have 3 or so pre-set apertures to work with on manual mode – a wide aperture, a middle-of-the-range aperture and a small aperture. This is frustrating, but better than nothing, I guess.

To select any of these apertures, you would need to turn a thumb dial to do so after setting "M" on your command dial. Let’s say you wanted to select the smallest aperture for the maximum depth of field you can get out of your camera: you’d select Manual, then turn the appropriate dial to turn to select the aperture. Now you are set for your first exposure, but you have no idea of what shutter speed you should use to correctly expose for the lighting situation you find yourself in.

Assume you are outside, and it’s broad daylight. Check through your viewfinder or LCD if you can see any exposure scale: a bar with a "0" in the middle, and a "+" and "-" icon on the left and right hand sides of the bar, respectively.

There should also be a little arrow or dot somewhere along the bar, either on the plus or minus side, telling you what your current exposure setting will result in: if the arrow is anywhere between the 0 and the plus sign, it means you are over-exposing. Consequently, an arrow on the minus side means underexposure.

Practice it, play around with different exposure settings see what happens with the various options available on your camera... The best way to learn is to practice, play, play and practice...