Manual mode vs automatic mode

[Byrnew]

Hi all,

I bought my first camera a nikon d3500 and I am realy impressed with it and enjoying snapping away. Before I got it I was researching a bit to much into it to try and learn about it to shoot in manual mode. As pointed out on this enjoy it and use the automatic mode which I am and I am realy happy with the quality and results that I am getting .

So just one question when I feel I am ready to move into the manual mode is there going to be much of a quality / sharpness diference between using manual bs automatic mode in the photos that I take ??

Thanks

Wayne

 

[Soocom1]

In the beginning you'll ask... "why the hell did I buy this?"

As time progresses, you will find some major advantages with manual mode including specific type of shots that automatic simply wont allow you to make.
Including many creative aspects like specific focus points that the system wont recognize, aperture settings, ISO speeds, etc.

sorta like going from a microwave TV dinner to a scratch made 5 star meal.

 

[zulu42]

Hi Wayne, there's no difference in quality between manual and the auto modes. Same lens, same sensor, same quality.

Now, if you try to shoot a fast moving subject and select a slow shutter speed, then it won't be sharp... but that can happen in automatic also if the camera selects too slow of a shutter speed.

I would suggest moving away from automatic when the camera isn't doing what you want it to- in a specific situation. For example, maybe you want to shoot a silhouette of some trees with a sunset behind them, and the automatic mode just won't give you the nice dark black tree outline you want. That's an opportunity to learn "what do I change to make the trees look black?"

 

[Byrnew]

In the beginning you'll ask... "why the hell did I buy this?"

As time progresses, you will find some major advantages with manual mode including specific type of shots that automatic simply wont allow you to make.
Including many creative aspects like specific focus points that the system wont recognize, aperture settings, ISO speeds, etc.

sorta like going from a microwave TV dinner to a scratch made 5 star meal.

Thanks for the reply I will start trying it out slowly and learn from the photos I take ;-)

 

[Byrnew]

Hi Wayne, there's no difference in quality between manual and the auto modes. Same lens, same sensor, same quality.

Now, if you try to shoot a fast moving subject and select a slow shutter speed, then it won't be sharp... but that can happen in automatic also if the camera selects too slow of a shutter speed.

I would suggest moving away from automatic when the camera isn't doing what you want it to- in a specific situation. For example, maybe you want to shoot a silhouette of some trees with a sunset behind them, and the automatic mode just won't give you the nice dark black tree outline you want. That's an opportunity to learn "what do I change to make the trees look black?"

Thanks for the reply I understand where you are coming from . Il slowly try mess around and research the different modes and see the results that I get;-)

 

[Overread]

Mechanically and optically what mode you pick makes no difference what so ever. The same settings no matter the mode, will deliver the very same photographic results.

Now lets pick an example where you might see a difference - action (because action is easy to show in this).

So lets say you've got someone running and you go to get a sharp shot.

Auto mode. The camera cannot see a person running. All it can see is the light entering the sensor and the meter. So it will balance the scene based on the light. It will typically aim for a pretty "portrait" based set of settings, so it won't be considering the shutter speed beyond balancing it to exposure and ISO. Chances are you'll get blur unless the lighting is very strong and thus forcing the shutter speed way up.

Manual mode. You decide! You see the person running and you want them sharp so you'd set the shutterspeed to a base-line value to get a sharp shot (to help you out as you likely lack the experience to put that into context - a good shutter speed would be 1/620sec). Now you know that when your set aperture and ISO you need to balance the exposure (using the meter) to get at least 1/620sec or faster to get a sharp shot.


So in this example you might well get a sharper shot because you've got contextual awareness of the scene and situation. Furthermore you've got creative control over the camera. You can blur that shot if you want; your can make it super blurry or super sharp. The CHOICE is yours. If you're in auto mode the choice is the cameras and it lacks most contextual awareness and has no idea what kind of creativity you want.


Now between those two modes there's the priority modes. Aperture and Shutter priority where you control two settings and the camera controls the third. So in aperture priority you control the aperture, whilst the camera controls the shutter speed. This is faster than manual mode (the camera reacts to ilght changes way faster than you can). You can still control the shutter speed, by varying the aperture and ISO that you control. Indeed for a sports shot you might well use this mode since you don't mind if the shutter speed is faster than the minimum (as noted earlier) just as long as its above it. So you can flick the aperture and ISO just ilke you would in manual mode; then let the camera change the last faster for you.



In the end there will be a period where the camera is better than you. With practice, some help (ask for it on the forums - show shots - talk about what went wrong - read the getting feedback link in my signature below) and some references - Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson is a good read for that - you can improve. Before long you'll surpass auto mode. Heck I can't even remember the last time I touched auto mode.

Now I don't use manual all the time, most of the time I'll be in aperture priority, which is honestly the most common mode many use in general.

 

[Soocom1]

Agree with above.

Let me expand using landscape:

With automatic mode, the camera will function as it is programmed.
Specific functions set to specific perimeters. Even the creative modes will in large part be generalizations.

When shooting auto with landscape you will also find very quickly alot of very contrastically FLAT images.
ergo and typically very light overall or way too dark with little depth or contrast from sky to light colored ground or water.

Slower or faster shutters, lower ISO settings or even higher ISO settings WELL outside of the pre-programmed stuff then allows for ALOT of depth in Dynamic Range (DR) and various creative aspects.
Soft water, tree movement or blur, or even really FAST images like a landing bird or a reptile catching a bug.

Canon's system has an FEL feature that allows for variable contrast and exposure settings that can balance out a photo while allowing for contrast.

Other makers do similar.

 

[zulu42]

As part of my ongoing learning process I try to give myself "assignments". While learning the basics, assigning myself certain, specific images forced me to learn different settings and skills - one image at a time.

In case it might work for you, or another reader, here's a project list that will take you out of automatic. At your own pace, create the following images:

A silhouette - where the subject is rendered as only a black shape but the background has the desired brightness.

Light trails - a shot of a street at night where the car headlights and taillights are rendered as white and red stripes across the image.

Stop-Action - a running dog or a flying baseball where the moving subject is sharp and shows no motion blur.

background blur - an image where the subject is nice and sharp but the background is completely blurry - popular in portraiture.

 

[AlanKlein]

If it works, don't fix it.

 

[otherprof]

Hi all,

I bought my first camera a nikon d3500 and I am realy impressed with it and enjoying snapping away. Before I got it I was researching a bit to much into it to try and learn about it to shoot in manual mode. As pointed out on this enjoy it and use the automatic mode which I am and I am realy happy with the quality and results that I am getting .

So just one question when I feel I am ready to move into the manual mode is there going to be much of a quality / sharpness diference between using manual bs automatic mode in the photos that I take ??

Thanks

Wayne

It might be useful to post some shots where auto didn’t produce what you wanted, and get suggestions about how that could have been achieved.

 

[Byrnew]

Thanks all for your feed back I realy appreciate them . Excellent information and I am excited to move forward and learn each of the points noted. Thank you all ;-)

 

[stk]

I would recommend that you learn how to use the manual mode, but for most shooting some sort of automatic is the way to go.

I shoot in aperture priority with or without auto ISO 70 % of the time. I see no need to use manual when the automatic modes give you what you want. For me full manual is for long exposures on a tripod or for when I'm shooting portraits with speedlights.

 

[RVT1K]

You may not get better results shooting in manual but you certainly will learn how to work your camera. Maybe take some shots manually and then set the camera to auto and see if the shots look different. Then check what may have been set differently in auto from what you set manually.

The only time I use my camera in a fully manual mode is when I'm using a lens that my camera does not recognize. I'll set my camera to aperture-priority probably 80% of the time and shutter-priority the rest.

 

[petrochemist]

Which parts of the cameras functions do you wish to control manually?
Focus?
While I do sometime control a camera fully manually I'm usually employing some degree of automation. Switching to manual focusing tends to give better results when in very low light levels or when there are foreground elements that distract the AF. In good conditions its considerably slower if accuracy is needed.
Exposure?
I spend most of my time in Av mode where I set the aperture & the camera picks a suitable shutter speed based on the light getting through the lens & the exposure compensation set...
If shutter speed is critical I often switch to Sv (if the camera can't control the aperture of the lens I'm using I might use auto ISO in Sv)
In very low light levels I'll do all the exposure settings myself.
White balance?
I shoot JPEGs most of the time even when shooting infrared, so white balance is another function I need to get reasonable. AWB is terrible for IR, but with a normal camera I'll generally leave that automated unless in conditions where the white balance shouldn't be neutral.

I don't think I have any even half decent digital camera that doesn't have at least 5 places where manual/auto options exist. It's fairly rare that I'll have manual control of all of them for a shot, it would be rarer still that I set the camera to control all of them - except perhaps by accident.

Most of the time I'm using semi-automatic workings, setting the aperture myself usually these days with an old manual focus lens. I control the settings that have a creative affect on the image & will generally let the camera worry about the others. In fully manual working it's too easy to mess up fleeting photo opportunities, and in most situations there's nothing being gained.

 

[Derrel]

Nikon has an excellent metering system which reads distance and color and reflectivity, using what they call
3-D metering. They also have 3-D matrix metering, with the actual color of objects in your scene taken into account,and the scene being broken into a matrix. Nikon invented matrix metering in the 1980s, with the Nikon FA being the first camera to introduce matrix light metering.

Today's automatic modes give pretty good results for beginners , especially using Nikons matrix meterin algorithm/program. Like many long-term users of Nikon cameras I am extremely partial to using their aperture priority light metering mode. Your results should be basically indistinguishable between scenes that are metered manually and scenes which are metered using aperture priority automatic.

The web and YouTube are filled with examples of praise being heaped on manual mode. in my opinion many times manual mode id slower and more work then aperture priority automatic. Last weekend I was a guest at a wedding and I shot 467 photos, split about equally between program mode and aperture priority automatic.

While I seldom use program mode,represented by the capital P on the dial of my camera, I used it last weekend for the first time in a couple of years.