2 Camera Modes You Should Use For 98% Of Your Photos

do you have a digital camera that's always on the auto mode trust me you're not alone so many people spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars on their camera gear only to never get off the auto mode or even worse they just leave their expensive camera at home because they don't know how to use it properly but you don't need to be one of those people so in this video I'll share with you the two camera modes that you should use instead of the auto mode for much greater creative control if you look at your camera you'll most likely see a dial with several shooting modes each with an icon next to it but the truth is to get the creative control that you want with your photography you only really need to know about two modes aperture priority which is marked with the letters A or a V and shutter priority which is marked with the letters S or T V over time you might want to master the manual mode - which is marked with the letter M but for now it's definitely not a must so in this video we'll cover the two most widely used camera modes aperture priority and shutter priority we'll go through each of these two modes to understand what they do and when you should use them we'll start with aperture priority because most pros who need to photograph quickly use this mode to take the majority of their photos one of the most popular reasons that you would use aperture priority is to control how much soft beautiful background blur your photos have I'll ask my videographer to adjust the aperture of the video camera to illustrate what I mean at this point I am nice and sharp but everything in the background has a pleasing soft blur how much background blur you'll have is determined by something called an f-stop number the lower the f-stop number the more background blur there will be the higher the f-stop number the less background blur your photos will have right now the f-stop number is low and there's a lot of back blur if my videographer changes to a higher f-stop number increasing to f/8 than f11 and finally f-16 the beautiful background blur diminishes until it is almost completely gone okay so now we're going to shift back to a low f-stop number and the background blur effect has returned the effect is better for portraiture because it sort of brings all the attention to the main subject which is the face but you don't need to use this effect for only portrait photography adding background blur can also improve your nature product food and still life photos I'd like to show you how to access aperture priority right now normally most camera bodies will have the MSA P dial and what I'd like you to do is switch to a that signifies aperture priority some cameras it'll be a V now when you switch to a or a V you should be able to rotate the dial or sometimes it's like a joystick and can you see how the aperture is changing we are now increasing the f-stop numbers which is giving us a lot more focus sharpness and less background blur in our picture now there are two things that we're concerned with when we have a retro-styled camera such as this Fujifilm when you're dealing with your dial that has all of the shutter speeds I'd like you to switch to a that would be above the fastest shutter speed what this does is it initiates aperture priority now the next thing we have to do it's very important if your aperture ring if you have one is on a I need you to turn it to a physical number you can choose any f-stop that you want and you will be in aperture priority mode as long as you have the a up on your shutter speed dial okay so we're in aperture priority the f-stop number is at the lowest possible which is F 2.8 I like to do an experiment with you okay let's take a test shot here and you see how the trees are nice and sharp above my camera but the wonderful Mexican building behind is out of focus let's do some test shots we're gonna go from F 2.8 F 4 F 5.6 f8 f11 f-16 and finally the highest f-stop number which is f-22 from my lens and now let's put these pictures side by side the first one has a really nice amount of blur in the background but you don't always want to have background blur and your photos if you want your photo to have focus sharpness throughout the picture space use a higher f-stop number f/8 f/11 or greater will give you nice focus sharpness in the foreground and the background of the image a higher f-stop number is great for landscaped cityscape and architectural photography where you want to clearly show the entire scene keep in mind that you'll probably need to use a tripod when you increase your f-stop number past f/8 depending on how much light is in your scene to sum up use aperture priority to control how much background blur your photos will have with low f-stop numbers you will have a certain amount of background blur with higher f-stop numbers there will be less and less background blur what this means is that your entire picture space the foreground and the background will progressively have more focus sharpness as your f-stop numbers get higher and higher another popular mode is shutter priority you can use shutter priority mode to control what's called motion blur motion blur is when a moving subject is not clearly defined in a photo like in this case where the people are slightly blurred but the background is perfectly sharp every camera has a shutter it's either a physical or electronic element of the camera that opens for a while let some light in and then closes again to stop the light from entering the faster the shutter speed the quicker the shutter opens and closes when a camera shutter opens and closes very fast there is no motion blur when the shutter is slower to open and close motion blur starts to appear and may since the longer the shutter is open the more time your subjects have to move around within your composition which results in varying degrees of motion blur so when is shutter priority useful whenever motion is involved it can be moving kids or animals it can be fast moving cars or motorcycles it can either be water that's moving if you want your subject to be perfectly sharp use a fast shutter speed if you want to have some motion blur or motion smoothness in your image there is a slower shutter speed so shutter priority means that I'm telling the camera what shutter speed to use and the camera decides what the appropriate aperture f-stop number should be let me show you what I mean I went to photograph colorful san miguel de allende vehicles at a really low angle with three different shutter speeds so for this fuji film all you need to do is make sure that you have your shutter speed dial on a number just make sure it's not on an a also with regards to the actual f-stop numbers on the aperture ring on your lens please go to the letter A make sure you're not on a physical number this will make sure that you're in shutter priority mode okay now what if you have a more common camera body that has the MS AP top dial well it's very simple just go to the letter s for shutter priority or if you're a Canon user you would be going to T V next you can actually change your shutter speed by moving either your thumb dial or your top dial or a finger dial or in some cases even a joystick on the back of the camera and this will allow you to actually adjust the shutter speeds that you can see on the back LCD screen of your camera ok now that I'm in shutter priority mode I will select a shutter speed of 1 over 500 for my first test shot this means that the shutter will be open for 1 5 hundreds of a second this is very fast let me give you an example okay I was hoping to get one of these great green taxis and I did so as you can see the taxi is perfectly sharp because of the very fast shutter speed now what if we change to one thirtieth of a second that would be one over 30 let's take a test shot and see what happens to the vehicle okay I was really happy with that shot cuz I got a motorcyclist and I have a really cool blur it's actually exactly what I wanted okay now let's try one full second which is a long time fair shutter to be open okay another green taxi now at this time with the shutter speed of one second I can't even tell it's a car actually now we do know it's a car because of those great headlights so even though you could argue that this is an unusable picture for artistic reasons one second is actually really good okay let's pull up these three pictures now the one over 500 shutter speed is very fast the car is perfectly still one over thirtieth this sort of middle ground when there's a moving object you're gonna get a little bit of artistic motion blur that's great make sure you use a tripod now when you're at one second you're going to have extreme blur which can either completely ruin your picture or for artistic effect it can actually look pretty cool especially at dusk when you have the headlights of the car the headlights or the taillights are gonna create amazing motion blur now there's so much more I'd like to tell you about digital photography and while I didn't hold anything back there's only so much I could share with you in such a short video and that's why I've recorded an entire video Corpse about taking incredible photos with your digital camera and in case you rely entirely on your camera's auto settings this course will let you finally take your camera off of the auto mode so if you'd like to find out more about my digital photography course you'll find more information right under this video so take a look at my full digital photography course and I hope to see you there

Channel: Photography Pro

Views: 1,851,931

Rating: 4.9312167 out of 5

Keywords: digital photography, photography, mark hemmings, DSLR, DSLR photography, auto mode, photography mode, dslr modes, nikon, canon, shutter speed, photography tricks, camera modes, photography mistakes, photography hacks, photography tips, photography tutorial, posing, camera settings, aperture priority, shutter priority, vs, diy photography, camera hacks, tv mode camera, av mode camera, camera explained, posing tips, peter mckinnon, camera, camera mode

Id: pk8beQ0VyIA

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018