Selecting the 'right' shooting Mode

Hello everyone,

below, please find some images that will hopefully help you to understand when to choose the 'right' shooting mode on your digital camera. I will go over these in class as well, so note down any questions you may have.

I have shot these last week, on a brief walk through downtown.

The first image was taken in program mode, meaning the camera selected an aperture and shutter speed at random (based on the camera's computer evaluation). As you can see, the car driving by is slightly blurry.

When looking at a photograph, I encourage you to try and pin down exactly what it is you would like to change. Now that you are learning and getting experience with your camera(s), you may want to take an image in Program Mode first, so that you can see what the camera is choosing for you.If you like what you see, then move on to the next scene. If you don't like it, then adjust your camera settings accordingly. In this case, I did not like the fact that the car was slightly blurred, I wanted it rendered sharp instead.

So I switched to shutter priority (TV on a Canon, S on a Nikon) as this gives me control over what shutter speed the camera will use. I selected a faster shutter speed of 1/500 of a second which froze the car and rendered it sharp.

For the final image, I decided to use shutter priority mode again. This time, I felt a bit more creative, and wanted to blur the cars a lot more. Program mode showed the car neither completely sharp nor blurred, so using shutter priority gives you the control to go either way consistently. For this image, my shutter speed was slowed down to 1/4 of a second.







I did these two images to illustrate when to select Aperture Priority Mode (AV on Canon, A on Nikon) on your cameras. As discussed in class, the creative job of aperture is to control DOF (depth-of-field, or the area of acceptable sharpness in your image). I wanted to limit sharpness and only have the sign in front in focus. So I selected the largest aperture (which equals the smallest F number on your camera) using aperture priority mode. Program Mode would not have given me this precise control. As above, you can see that the same scene can be recorded in different ways. You just have to pick the look you want, and whether shutter speed or aperture can get you there.

Remember, select shutter priority to control movement in your photographs.
Select aperture priority to control DOF.
See you in class!