Nowadays everybody is having a camera whether a simple point & shoot digicam, a DSLR or a mobile with inbuilt camera. People are getting shutter happy, taking their cameras to their vacations, ceremonies and even streets. As a result, the net is now overflowing with tons of pics on social sharing sites. But if you want your pics to stand out, then you ought to get a grip on your camera. When you are using your camera in fully automatic mode, you are letting the camera take some educated guesses as to the scene in front of it and adjust the exposure accordingly. For those people who don't want to learn how to use their camera, they accept these guesses of the camera and think that to get a better photos, they have to upgrade to a higher priced camera. This belief is not entirely true. While you may get better pictures from a higher priced camera, in reality any camera is able to produce good pictures if you know how to control it. Most digital cameras nowadays, including the point and shoot models, offer manual modes to help you capture even better photographs. But very few people use manual mode including many DSLR flaunting people who have just upgraded from a point and shoot. Learning to shoot in manual or semi-manual modes like Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority is not very difficult. But it would require some experimenting with your camera so that you are able to comprehend what each setting entails. There are many websites which may help in learning to shoot in manual. For starters, you can have a look at this official Canon article or download this Nikon iPhone app. If you don't have your camera handy or just are lazy to go out and experiment, you can use this wonderful online camera simulator. (flash based tool, so won't work on an iPad or iPhone). Using this tool, you can easily simulate all the settings in your digital camera and see instantly how they impact the final photo. As always YouTube is your friend and you may wade through quite a number of good tutorials like this one. Kickstart your journey towards going manual now and be rewarded with far better photographs. It ain't that difficult fellas!
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It's true that having a basic idea of the cameras operation and controls can help in creating excellent photos, although personally I am one of the vast majority of people who have no idea about these things at all..! With features like 'auto scene detection' , 'intelligent focus' and 'image stabilizer' I have got excellent shots in a variety of lighting conditions, in some cases better than my SLR friends'..! I personally am more than happy for the 'machines' to take over the 'mind' in this case atleast.. :-)
ReplyDeleteI was also happy with the results of my auto mode cameras, specially with new advanced modes like you mention. Many people who take DSLR for the purpose of getting good pics do not even know how to use it. They basically use it as a pont and shoot, using it entirely in auto mode. Majority of the DSLR do not have the consumer features as they are geared towards professional users who can take care of the settings themselves. Therefore you may be getting better results than your friends having DSLR. As I said earlier, you have to know how to use your camera well and any camera would produce good results if you have that know how. Check my albums for an instant. Compare the latest ones with the earlier ones and you will find the recent pics are far better. Because in my latest trip, I always used Manual modes and had better control. Human eye is far superior to a camera sensor and adjusts accordingly to the light which majority of the times a camera can't match. All I can say is "You are smarter than your camera!".
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