INTRODUCTION TO GOING MANUAL

F-stops, shutter speed and ISO are the three key camera settings known as the exposure triangle. It's the gateway to the creative photography experience you’ve been craving but requires understanding the confusing relationship between time, quantity, and sensitivity—and the almost mystical relationship between the exposure settings and your light meter. But don't worry, nobody leaves the room until everybody understands F-stops, shutter speed and ISO!

HOW A LIGHT METER THINKS (OR DOESN'T)

Friend, enemy, loyal companion, manual metering takes you on the important journey to mood and exposure. Yes, it’s a simple tool, but also a living rascal. Don't worry, we'll tame it. You'll learn overall metering, spot metering, highlights, shadows, the all-important middle grey tone. You'll master all the different light meter modes and when to use them for the effect you desire.

HOW DOES THE LENGTH OF YOUR LENS AFFECT DEPTH OF FIELD

It’s entirely possible you bought that long telephoto lens to put backgrounds out of focus and not bring things closer. Learning when to use a long lens to put backgrounds out of focus is one of the main ways you will begin to think like a professional.

OPENING THE DOOR TO DEPTH OF FIELD

For many professional photographers, controlling the out of focus background is the money shot. That’s called depth of field and you'll learn to control it like the pros. There are so many ways to control how much the background goes out of focus—relative distance between subject/camera/background, lens length, aperture, and combinations of all the above. We'll cover them all.

FOCAL LENGTH AND THE SHAKES

What lens you choose to use has a lot to do with how still you can hold your camera. In this section we talk about several different techniques to help you keep your camera still and produce the sharp pictures you really want. You'll learn to understand focal length to avoid photos that are a blurry mess and make them tack sharp instead.

MASTERING COLOR BALANCE

What color is the sun? Wrong. It’s blue. That’s just one example of the complicated matrix of color. We will learn several different ways that your camera sees color and how you control those ways. There’s automatic color balance, custom color balance, and manual color balance. We'll discuss them all and you'll learn to control color balance when you are shooting in raw.

SHOOTING RAW

Shooting raw means you are taking advantage of everything that expensive camera has to give you. It’s more than recommended, it’s mandatory. You will learn just exactly what raw files are and how you deal with them in your editing program regardless of the program that you use. Yes, it takes a little more energy but it’s worth it.

MAKING SENSE OF HISTOGRAMS

Sure, they look like gibberish but they are actually a very straightforward way of assessing your exposure and contrast. Super fun! I'll teach you to evaluate the brightness, darkness, and contrast of your photographs just by looking at the histogram. We'll discuss clipping (over or under exposing your picture can actually do damage). All of this can be seen in the histogram.