Sometimes the best way to learn an automatic camera mode is to turn the automation off first.

I shoot 90% of my photography in Aperture Priority.

That sometimes surprises my students.

After all, during the first day of my Texas Photography 101 class, I make everybody shoot in Manual. And I mean everybody. I don’t care

 

whether they’ve been photographing for years or, as was the case with one student in our latest class, they’ve had their camera for four days.

 

There’s a reason for that.

Before I want a photographer to let the camera make a decision, I want them to understand what decision the camera is making for them.

That’s the foundation of everything that follows.

Before We Make Photographs, We Learn Exposure

We start simply.

Put the camera in Manual. Take a picture of the room and give me a proper exposure.

At this point, I don’t particularly care about composition. I’m not worried about whether you’ve created a great photograph. I want to know whether you can make a technically correct exposure.

Then we move.

Go to a darker part of the room. Make another exposure.

Move somewhere brighter. Make another one.

And that’s when I can almost see the wheels turning.

Aperture. Shutter speed. ISO.

Change one and something else changes.

For a new photographer, it can seem backward and confusing—especially aperture, where the smaller numerical f-number represents a larger opening and the larger number represents a smaller opening.

So we slow everything down and work through the three components individually.

Shutter Speed: There Is Always a Trade-Off

A slower shutter speed allows more light into the camera.

That’s the benefit.

But there is a price.

If the camera moves or your subject moves during that exposure, you may get blur.

When I’m teaching, I sometimes tell students to listen to the camera.

There is a big difference between hearing a crisp POP! from the shutter and hearing that dreaded, drawn-out slow shutter.

If you’re photographing something that isn’t moving, a slower shutter speed may be perfectly acceptable. You don’t need 1/2000 of a second to photograph a flower that isn’t going anywhere.

But put a bull and rider in front of me and the situation changes considerably.

Photography is full of those trade-offs.

The important thing isn’t memorizing one “correct” shutter speed.

It’s understanding why you’re choosing it.

ISO: Use What You Need, Not More Than You Need

My philosophy on ISO is pretty simple:

Use the lowest ISO that makes sense for the situation you’re photographing.

I’m not saying you should be afraid of ISO. Modern cameras are remarkable, and today’s sensors can produce excellent photographs at ISO settings we wouldn’t have dreamed of using years ago.

But ISO is still part of a compromise.

If I can get the shutter speed I need, the aperture I want and the photograph I need at a lower ISO, that’s where I want to be.

If I need more ISO to maintain the shutter speed necessary to stop action, I’ll use it.

That’s an important distinction.

The goal isn’t “always use low ISO.”

The goal is “don’t use more ISO than you need.”

There are additional complications today, including technologies such as dual-gain sensor architectures. But I wasn’t about to dump all of that on somebody who had owned her camera for four days.

Sometimes good teaching is knowing what not to teach yet.

Aperture: Think About a Five-Gallon Bucket

Aperture can be particularly difficult for new photographers to visualize, so I use a five-gallon bucket.

Imagine an empty bucket sitting on a fence.

Drill a tiny hole in the bottom—think of that as something like f/16.

Now pour water into the bucket.

The water comes through slowly in a narrow, controlled stream.

Now take another bucket and cut a huge opening in the bottom—think f/2.8.

Pour the same water into that bucket.

BOOM.

It’s coming through fast.

That’s essentially what we’re controlling with aperture: how large an opening we’re giving the light to travel through.

But aperture isn’t only about the quantity of light.

It also affects depth of field—how much of the scene in front of and behind our focus point appears acceptably sharp.

That’s why aperture becomes such an important creative tool.

I’m not simply asking:

“How much light do I need?”

I’m also asking:

“How much of this photograph do I want in focus?”

Now we’re beginning to move from operating a camera toward actually making a photograph.

Exposure Should Eventually Become the Easy Part

As the students begin understanding how aperture, shutter speed and ISO work together, we start moving around.

Inside.

Outside.

Open shade.

Direct sunlight.

Different subjects.

Different conditions.

At first, the assignment remains simple:

Get the exposure right.

Eventually I want a photographer to be able to get very close to the proper exposure in about three clicks or fewer.

Why?

Because every second you spend fighting your camera is a second you’re not paying attention to the photograph.

The camera is only the vehicle.

What I’m really trying to teach is how to see.

Eventually, how to feel the photograph.

So once exposure begins becoming more comfortable, I start sneaking other things into the lesson.

Should this portrait be horizontal or vertical?

What’s happening in the negative space?

Why did you leave more room on one side?

What’s growing out of your subject’s head in the background?

What’s happening around the edges of the frame?

Now we’re making photographs.

Then I Put Them on a Football Sideline

Friday night we went to a football game.

And I kept everybody in Manual.

That was intentional.

Early in the evening there was plenty of light. But anybody who has photographed an evening football game knows what happens next.

The sun starts disappearing.

The light changes almost without you noticing it.

A setting that produced a beautiful exposure a few minutes ago suddenly doesn’t.

That’s exactly what I wanted them to experience.

They had to watch the light change and respond to it themselves.

I could have made it easier.

But easy wasn’t the lesson.

Understanding exposure was the lesson.

The next morning everyone brought me five photographs they considered their best.

We looked at them together.

We discussed what worked first, then what could be improved.

And that’s one of my favorite parts of teaching in a group.

If five photographers make five different mistakes, everybody gets to learn from all five.

Suddenly your learning experience has multiplied.

We talked exposure, but we also continued learning to see: negative space, backgrounds, framing, telephone poles growing out of heads—all those little things that eventually become instinctive.

And I take that responsibility seriously.

When someone is brand new, what you teach them matters tremendously. Give them bad information at the beginning and they may spend years building on a bad foundation.

Day Two: Now We Turn On Aperture Priority

Saturday morning I finally moved everyone into Aperture Priority.

This is where the previous day’s work begins paying off.

Aperture Priority isn’t giving up control.

It’s delegating one part of the exposure decision to the camera while you retain control of the decisions that matter to the photograph.

That’s a completely different concept.

I select the aperture I need for the photograph. I control ISO according to the conditions and the shutter speed I need. The camera calculates the corresponding shutter speed for the exposure.

But now my students understand what’s happening behind the curtain.

At least intellectually.

They hadn’t truly felt it yet.

That happened Saturday evening.

The Bull Riding Was the “Aha!” Moment

We went to photograph youth bull riding beginning late in the afternoon.

For this situation, I simplified things.

Most of the students could shoot their lenses wide open. If they had an f/2.8 lens, shoot at f/2.8. If their lens opened to f/4, use f/4.

I don’t need enormous depth of field for a bull and rider. I need enough depth of field to get what matters sharp, a sufficiently fast shutter speed to handle the action, and an ISO that allows me to accomplish both.

At five o’clock there was plenty of light.

Then the light started changing.

And changing.

And changing.

I kept talking to them.

Check your shutter speed.

Look in the viewfinder.

Listen to your shutter.

What’s the camera telling you?

And somewhere during that bull riding, things started clicking.

One of my students was an experienced photographer who had actually attended one of my classes about ten years earlier. She had been shooting Manual all these years.

She liked Manual because she liked knowing exactly what the camera was doing. She liked the control.

Years earlier she’d had a bad experience using an automatic mode with an older camera and essentially never went back.

Then, standing there photographing the bull riding in Aperture Priority, she looked at me and said something I’ll remember:

“My God. I finally understand this.”

She hadn’t surrendered control.

She finally understood how to let the camera help her without losing control.

That’s the entire lesson.

And Then There Was the Photographer Who Had Owned Her Camera Four Days

Perhaps my favorite part of the weekend was watching the student who had owned her camera for only four days.

Technically, she had a mountain left to learn.

Of course she did.

But something else was already there.

Her eye.

I watched her work.

She got down low. She looked for angles. She explored. She experimented.

Once she got past the intimidation of photographing that first person on the football sideline, she was off to the races.

She wanted to photograph everything.

And she started creating some remarkable images.

You can teach somebody what an f-stop is.

You can explain shutter speed.

You can teach ISO.

You can show someone where every button on their camera is located.

But that hunger to look at something differently—that curiosity about what happens if you get lower, move over, change the frame or wait another second—that’s where photography starts becoming something more.

Manual Isn’t the Destination

That’s ultimately why I teach Manual first even though I personally shoot Aperture Priority probably 90% of the time.

Manual isn’t necessarily the destination.

Understanding is the destination.

I want photographers to understand the exposure triangle well enough that eventually they don’t have to devote much conscious thought to it.

Because the faster you can operate the camera, the sooner you can stop thinking about the camera.

And that’s when you can give your attention to what really matters:

The subject.

The light.

The background.

The moment.

The feeling.

I tell my students that I’m going to teach them their camera, but the camera is really just the vehicle.

First I’m going to teach them to see.

And eventually, I hope,

I’m going to teach them to feel.

That’s when photography gets interesting.

— Joe Duty

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