You Are Smarter Than Your Camera

If you ever want to go beyond the basics of photography, you really must learn how to take your camera out of automatic mode. The fact is, although your camera is one smart cookie, in the end, you are smarter than your camera. This was especially evident to me when I was taking snow photos this weekend during the blizzard.

You see, if you leave your camera in auto mode, it will do all the thinking of what aperture, shutter speed, and ISO to choose to achieve the correct exposure. More often that not, it will do a pretty good job of getting your exposure correct, but this all changes when the camera is faced with some challenging scenery. There’s no better example of that than a photo of snow falling against a backdrop of snow. When your camera “sees” all that white snow, it thinks it is looking a very bright landscape. It tries to expose for this very bright scene the best that it can, and it usually comes up with something like this:

I hope you can see that photo is grossly underexposed. Everything is too dark…sure, we can see the detail of the snow on the trees, but it looks like it was night-time, not the middle of the day. Here’s where your smarts come in. If you have your camera in manual mode (or at least shutter priority or aperture priority), you can control the settings to get the right exposure. You’re smarter than your camera–you know that’s a bunch of white snow you’re taking a picture of, not a bright sunny valley. Never let your camera do all the thinking.

This is more like it:

If you are still trying to figure out how to work your camera in manual mode, though, don’t despair. It’s a technique that takes time to learn with a lot of practice involved. I’m also planning on hosting a couple of workshops this spring for folks who’d like to go beyond the auto mode of their camera. Stay tuned for dates and times!