Beyond Auto Mode: A Guide to Taking Control of Your Photography

GETTING BEYOND AUTO MODE: MAKING BETTER PICTURES

Modern cameras are smart. Modern camera makers have made it easy for you to use expensive and complicated equipment without any technical know-how.

The camera, however, is merely the tool we use to create our images and, like any tool, needs input to be used most effectively. Setting a camera on a pre-determined mode, such as “portrait,” is akin to a carpenter setting a saw to cut and walking away from the machine. The saw doesn’t know what result the carpenter is looking for, it is merely one part of the process. The same is true with your camera—it cannot know what you want to do, it can merely guess based on the settings you choose.

That’s where the frustration with DSLRs, or cameras with interchangeable lenses, comes from. We buy those cameras to make better images, and yet the trust we place in the camera itself is undermining our abilities to make compelling images. How often do your images look exactly the way you want them to? Do you blame the camera, or the lens? I often hear comments about how nice my camera is and how it must take good pictures. But just like a pen is controlled by the user, so is a camera—without input, it is merely a tool.

The camera makes decisions designed to best suit the way it’s been programmed, not necessarily the best settings for the specific images you want to make. The camera doesn’t care how your photograph looks, it simply uses a pre-determined formula that satisfies a set of criteria that ...