I quickly stumbled on what I believe to be the best shooting mode: aperture priority.01
This means that you pick aperture and the camera automatically picks ISO and shutter speed.
This makes sense to me because, for most types of photos, shutter speed just has to be “fast enough” so that there’s no motion blur from objects in the environment or your hand moving. And ISO should simply be as low as possible.
The times switching into full manual have made sense:
- Low light: I want to make the shutter faster (e.g., fix at 1/125s)
- Low light: I want to keep the shutter open for longer (e.g., open to 1/60s)
- Long exposure (these failed)
It is a bit strange that the first one is necessary. That’s because the camera doesn’t respect a minimum shutter speed in the face of the photo being under-exposed. It will keep slowing down the shutter past what you set the limit. It’s weird to me that there’s no way to turn this off. Nuances like this help me understand why learning the edges and behaviors of a tool is good and takes time.
It’s interesting to compare my process for shooting now vs when I used an iPhone.02
| iphone | real camera |
|---|---|
| 1. Take photo | 1. Pick aperture 2. Focus 3. Adjust exposure to avoid whites clipping 4. Take photo |
It’s more laborious, but the additional steps are all things that add aspects the iPhone lacked (depth of field w/ focused area) or improve upon what it did (over/under expose).
I will note that I did occasionally focus or manually turn down the exposure in the iPhone. But wow it’s much more fun to do with physical controls.
Relevant cross-references:
- “Shooting street” involves setting up your camera mode to be ready for quick captures.
- Exposure is something I’m constantly manually adjusting. I keep wondering whether there’s a mode that will help me out more.
Footnotes
