Sorry for that hiccup at the end. I’m still getting used to creating and editing videos!

How #SITSpics will work:

For those of you who don’t do video on the internet, here are the details written out.

Every month there will be a new theme and I’ll give you some quick photography tips on how to execute that theme. Take or leave my advice, but go out and take some pictures fitting the theme! Then:

1. Put your pictures up in a blog article or a social media site like Flickr.
2. Add your URL to the #SITSpics monthly challenge linky
3. Use your social networking skills to gather votes for your submission.
4. The submissions with the top votes will be featured in next month’s article!

Check The SITS Girls’ Education channel on Friday for July’s challenge and tips. In the meantime you can check out April’s 10-day #SITSpics challenge!

This first month will feature a short video to help explain the tips. I hope I can do that every month, but it’s a lot easier to write up a blog post than to live one!

If you plan on participating, feel free to grab a button or share the video.

Help me with next month’s theme: What would you like to learn more about?

Thank you for reading #SITSpics Monthly Challenge Sneak Peak!. Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I live in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons and assorted furballs. I'm a self taught photographer using this blog to help me record what I learn and keep myself motivated.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

Check out my favorite shots from the submissions for this week’s Friday Finds theme. Stick around until the end to learn more about participating and next week’s theme!

Credit: Siobhán Silke

Credit: Matus Kalisky

Credit: jennifer könig. (Jennifer König Photography.)

Credit: Daniel Griffin. (Falsalama’s Photography Blog.)

Credit: André

Credit: Scott Ableman

Credit: Bruce Irschick

Credit: Judith

Credit: Tim Lucas. (toolmantim.com.)

Credit: Sacha Fernandez. (Sonova Photography.)

Credit: Zoltán Horlik

Credit: TheSussman (Mike)

Credit: Alessandro Lorenzi

Credit: Tiziano L. U. Caviglia. (Blog.)

Credit: cityNnature

Credit: JustinDunn

Credit: Jota Aguilar

Credit: Sara Muñoz Hermoso

Panning Aplenty

If you want to feast your eyes on more than those 18 beautiful examples, check out all the panning submissions to the Friday Finds Flickr group! Take a moment to comment or favorite these photos and then share your favorite or create your own gallery of panning shots to share!

Next Week’s Theme Is…. Depth of Field!

Depth of field brings a photograph to life by allowing your mind to pretend the photo is more than two dimensional. Is only part of the photo in focus or the entire photo front to back? The depth a photo has is a creative aspect governed by aperture, focal length, distance and the camera’s sensor size.

Add up to five of your own photos showing depth of field to the Friday Finds Flickr group! Tag it with dwcff-dof to view it in the thumbnail gallery on the Friday Finds page this week and next week’s Friday Finds article!

Please note, only Creative Commons licensed photos are eligible for my Friday Finds gallery selection!

Thank you for reading 20+ Punchy Panning Pictures. Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I live in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons and assorted furballs. I'm a self taught photographer using this blog to help me record what I learn and keep myself motivated.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

Earlier today I mentioned to Pepper that I was thinking of getting a Flip UltraHD for video and she brought up the Sony Bloggie Touch. After comparing them and a few similar brands I decided on the Bloggie.

Here’s just a quick test video shot in 720p at 60 frames per second. While not really what I associate with HD quality, it doesn’t look bad panning around my backyard.

It’s about sixteen million degrees outside, give or take, and the concrete is scorching. I just barely touched it with my bare feet and I swear I saw smoke. I have no idea how my Maltese could lay on it!

The Bloggie also has the ability to capture still photographs up to 12MP which makes it a good option for a point and shoot too. The still camera part is a bit difficult to operate, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Below are two test shots with the camera completely unedited except for cropping. Not bad!

I ordered a Flexible Gorillapod from Amazon which is supposed to get to me in about a week and that should make vlogging a bit easier.

I’m sure you’ll hear a lot more about whether I love or hate the Bloggie as I use it more! (Now I just wish I had a better computer to process videos!)

Do you have a video recorder? If so, which one and do you like it?

Thank you for reading Sony Bloggie Touch. Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I live in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons and assorted furballs. I'm a self taught photographer using this blog to help me record what I learn and keep myself motivated.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

Credit: Micki Krimmel at Mickipedia

Rightfully so, most artists have a fear of their work being stolen, credited to others, or reproduced without permission. It’s truly terrifying to think about the number of bloggers I’ve helped who thought they could Google search for any old content, copy it (or worse hotlink it) and post it in an entry with or without credit.

Work posted on the internet is not public domain! Just ask Jodi of MCP Actions who recently found out her photographs were unknowingly pulled from the internet and used in a promotional flyer for an unrelated photographer’s photography workshop! She actually had to teach that lesson to a PR rep this week!

What if there was an easy way to signal to others that they could use your work as long as you got credit? What if there was a place you could go to easily find all the freely licensed content your heart desires? Here’s another secret: you can!

Creative Commons makes it easy to do both.

Credit: Michael Porter at The Libraryman Blog

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a licensing structure that gives you a way to share your work with others and transcend restrictive copyrights.

Traditional copyright protects the artist and by default, others are not allowed to reproduce or distribute the entirety of this work in their own presentations or performances, online or off. Creative Commons gives the artist freedom and control over how others use their work while helping educate the Internet population on proper use of copyright.

All of your questions, even ones you didn’t even know you had, are answered on the Creative Commons FAQ.

What kind of licenses are available?

You can choose a Creative Commons license that’s right for you. At their website, they’ll walk you through a short series of questions to select your license. The basic license allow others to freely use your work with credit and you may place additional restrictions:

Credit: Jayel Aheram at aheram.com

• Non-commercial use only. Restrict your work from being used for commercial purposes. Personally, I’d recommend this. If anyone’s going to make money off your work, you should get a cut!
• No derivatives allowed. The user may not make any changes to your work.
• Derivatives allowed. Users may make changes to your work, but they are not required to apply a Creative Commons license to the derivative (meaning others may not use the derivative work.)
• Derivatives allowed only if shared. Users may make changes to your work as long as they apply the same Creative Commons license you did to their derivative!

Why Creative Commons license your work?

If you are like me, an amateur photographer who loves to practice the craft and makes little to no money on the photos themselves, why be afraid of others using your photos in blog posts?

If someone came to you and asked to use your photo in an article as long as they gave you credit for it, would you say yes? If so, why not make it easy for others to receive permission to use your work?

I’ve licensed my work through Creative Commons for a long time. It may seem silly to give your work away for free, but there’s a benefit to you as well! Here are some reasons you might want to license your work:

Credit: Jonas Tana (@jonastana)

• Help protect your copyright. By clearly spelling out the restrictions, it’s clear that your work is not a free-for-all. It’s another barrier to get a user to stop and think before using your work.
• Gain exposure. Many of my photos are used on articles across the web and also in print with my name and/or link back to my Flickr profile or website.
• Opens business opportunities. If you share your work for non-commercial purposes only, it may open up the opportunity to be contacted about paying to license your work or being commissioned for work commercially.
• You can still be paid for your work. Creative Commons licenses are non-exclusive. You may still sell, publish, perform or otherwise make money off your work even if you have a Creative Commons license applied!
• Give back to the internet community. Enjoy the satisfaction of enriching the lives of others!

Creative Commons licensing tips.

If you’re interested in applying a Creative Commons license to your work, I’ve created a brief video with nine tips to help you make the most of it! These are some great tips whether you’re just starting to think about licensing your work or you already have Creative Commons licensed work out there!

To select a default Creative Commons license or learn other ways to batch or individually license your photos via Flickr, check out their set a license page.

Using Creative Commons licensed work.

For help finding Creative Commons licensed artwork and photographs to use on your blog, I’ve written Find Photos for your Blog in 6 Easy Steps.

If you’re not looking for photos, here are a couple other resources for searching Creative Commons licensed work:

• Using Google to Find Creative Commons Content
• Sources for Creative Commons Work

Always make sure you credit the artist including a link back to the original work on the same page you use the work. The credit does not need to go directly under the photo, but that’s generally preferred. I also like to look at the artist’s profile and pull their real name and website if available to include in the credit.

Also, it’s only nice to notify the artist when you use their image. It’s not required, but most people love to know when you’ve used their work!

Credit: Steren Giannini (Portfolio)

In short, Creative Commons rocks!

Creative Commons is a great way to find freely licensed artwork and gain exposure for your work. It’s easy to apply the license and easy to search for licensed works. It helps us join together as an internet community to supply one another with enriching content.

Is Creative Commons licensing something you currently do or will consider doing with your content?

Thank you for reading Creative Commons Licensing Your Photos. Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I live in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons and assorted furballs. I'm a self taught photographer using this blog to help me record what I learn and keep myself motivated.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

As the doors opened, I felt a little like we were in a very slow marathon. I wanted to take a picture of the entry bridge that was covered along either side with beautiful, bloom filled flower boxes.

Trying to keep track of two other adults and two children amid the dozens of other families sauntering by, yet to be dispersed throughout the zoo, proved a challenge in itself. I knew I’d lose them if I stopped to take a picture in such chaos!

After the pretty flowered bridge you’ll just have to picture in your mind, we came upon the flamingos! It excited me to see these as Mr. Serious likes showing me how he does his ‘mingo stance. “They’re not doing it!” he complained.

At the exit to this area was a forest of bamboo!

After wandering around aimlessly for a while, the next area we came to was the Museum of Living Art. The reptile house! Ah, what sweet, air conditioned bliss! One thing this zoo is really great about is having lots of cool (air conditioned or shaded) respites throughout the park.

The harsh brightness of the day did not make it very easy to take pictures. I used my Recovery slider in Adobe Camera Raw when editing most of them!

Texas town was pretty cool, though I didn’t get many pictures of it. There was a petting zoo, which was more like a “look-closely-at-these-animals-inside-their-pens zoo”; an air-conditioned area for young kids to climb around and play while learning more about farm animals and a water spigot which spit water from the roof of a building when you pulled its handle. There were also a lot of shops and a few places to stop and get lunch, but we explored neither of those options.

At one point in the park, there was a screened in aviary. When we went in, the only bird in sight was this cute little cardinal. Here it is, begging Mr. Serious for attention.

After seeing a few more things we decided to head back to Texas town and take the train back to the entrance.

Before exiting the park, we decided to go through the primate section and I’m glad we did! There’s a beautiful air-conditioned habitat for many of the apes. The orangutans kicked around outside and we got to see one of them go over to the water to take a drink and then spit it out like a fountain at one of his friends. I wasn’t able to adjust the exposure quickly enough to capture that!

It was a great morning! I’m sad we weren’t able to see all of the zoo in this visit, but we definitely plan to go back many times. My mom and husband were really great about letting me be off in my own world to photograph half the time we were there. The zoo is a great place to be to get pictures!

When’s the last time you went to the zoo? Leave me a link if you have pictures!

Thank you for reading At the Fort Worth Zoo. Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I live in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons and assorted furballs. I'm a self taught photographer using this blog to help me record what I learn and keep myself motivated.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

This week, it’s the theme of my Friday Finds Flickr Group!

While panning is a slightly more advanced photography technique, you can achieve results with nearly all cameras, even an iPhone! Why not take a five minute break this week to try something new or hone your skills?

Panning tips: a five minute exercise

This weekend my family and I went to the Fort Worth Zoo. Determined to practice panning, I knew the merry-go-round held my best chance! I asked my mom to take my boys on the ride so I could take pictures.

Out of 36 exposures, I took five that don’t make me cringe to show them as examples of this exercise. Though not brilliant photos, I’m fairly happy with the results. Here’s what I learned:

• Give yourself time. Choose a subject you can photograph for at least a few minutes. Playgrounds, amusement parks and street corners all provide great opportunities.
• Select a shutter speed. There’s no right number here as it depends on how fast your subject is moving, your distance from it and whether it’s coming toward or moving away from you! In normal light, start at 1/60 and adjust accordingly. I used 1/15.
• Use Shutter Priority mode. There isn’t time to adjust the exposure manually. Why not let the camera work for you?
• Get into the motion. Start following your subject before you click the shutter and continue following your subject after your pictures are taken.
• Turn your whole body, don’t move only the camera.
• Use continuous shutter mode if your camera has it. It will increase the chances one of your shots turns out right!

(Unfortunately my youngest son, who by the way spends all his free time climbing atop and jumping fearlessly from anything, felt terrified of the ride. He didn’t want to be on a horse or sitting in a chariot or anywhere but in my mother’s arms!)

Looking straight at me, giving me the evil eye!

Practice is important!

Have you ever missed capturing a fleeting moment? What would happen if a surgeon decided his book-smarts alone were enough to operate on you?

You can spend as much time as you’d like reading photography books and blogs, absorbing the hows and whys, tips, tricks and secrets of photography. Only after you put this knowledge into practice will you start to see an improvement in your photography.

I’ve tried panning shots in the spur of the moment as an opportunity presented itself, but I’ve never succeeded. Turns out aside from blind luck, the only way to get a photography technique down is to practice it!

Remember, the goal of practicing photography is sharpening your skills so you’re ready when that perfect opportunity presents itself. You don’t need to create amazing photos when you’re practicing a technique.

Keep practicing and you will notice an improvement in your skills! Fewer fleeting moments lost. Imagine how great it will feel to get that one in a thousand shot due to experience, not luck!

What can you do in five minutes?

Pick up your camera, choose a subject, adjust your settings and spend five minutes practicing panning!

Select a photo, create a set or write a blog post with your results and share the link with me in the comments!

Thank you for reading Panning: A Five Minute Photography Exercise. Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I live in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons and assorted furballs. I'm a self taught photographer using this blog to help me record what I learn and keep myself motivated.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

Square photographs feel more balanced to me and composition can seem to have even more impact with a square crop. I notice framing and lines more in a square crop as well! For an excellent read on how to achieve excellent square-format photos, check out Mortal Muses’ article on Square Format!

Every Friday I pick a new theme for my Friday Finds Flickr group and participants have a week to enter their photos. At the end of the week, I pick my 18 favorites and put them into a Flickr gallery and encourage others to make a gallery of their own favorite shots matching the theme. If you want to learn more and get involved, check out my Friday Finds page!

It was a really tough pick this week, but I found myself coming back to the photographers who strongly utilized framing and composition in their square format photo. Not all those below are perfectly square, but the sentiment of a square photograph remains! Please make sure to click through to the photos and favorite or comment if you like them as much as I!

Totally Not Boxy Square Photography!

Photo Credit: ZeroOne

Photo Credit: Potyike | 50mm Photoblog

Image by Kevin Dooley under Creative Commons license | cheap plastic lenses (lomo blog)

Photo Credit: Joel Bedford | Joel Bedford Photography & Retouching

Photo Credit: miuenski miuenski

Photo Credit: Gorka Valencia

Photo Credit: jean-fabien

Photo Credit: Lissa | effluere.net

Photo Credit: Luciano Zanardo | Rualan.com

Photo Credit: Darren Kirby | Blog

Photo Credit: Luis Argerich | Website / The Amazing Light (blog) / @lrargerich

Photo Credit: Dimit®i

Photo Credit:Matthias Rhomberg | Facebook

Photo Credit: Luis Argerich | Website / The Amazing Light (blog) / @lrargerich
[Oops! I don't usually pick two photos from the same person!]

Photo Credit: Martin Sojka

Photo Credit: Luis Hernandez

Photo Credit: Rémy SAGLIER | The Strange Shots (blog)

Photo Credit: Brandon Doran | Brandon Doran Photography / @brandon_doran

Square Photographs Squared

Please take a moment to look through all 76 square submissions this week!

Next Week’s Theme is Panning!

Panning is the act of following something moving with the camera lens so that the moving person or object appears in focus while the stationary world around it shows movement.

Please feel free to submit up to five square photographs to the Friday Finds group this week and tag them dwcff-panning! Also be sure to subscribe to my newsletter to get tips and links to complete this assignment plus more inspiration!

Thank you for reading 18 Hip-to-be-Square Photography Examples. Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I live in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons and assorted furballs. I'm a self taught photographer using this blog to help me record what I learn and keep myself motivated.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

I want in on the fun!

Why Vlogging?

My friend Pepper of Pepper Scraps has been vlogging as long as I’ve known her. Recently another super social-media-savvy friend of mine, Kimberly Gauthier started sharing vlogs on her photography blog and my kindred-photography-spirit Ashley Sisk does vlogs too!

These influences alone were enough to convince me to give vlogging a shot, but I also recently joined Empire Avenue where YouTube activity is taken into consideration. That pushed me over the edge! There’s no way I’m ever going to get a high YouTube score on Empire Avenue by liking and commenting on someone else’s videos!

Finally, there’s a personal reason I am interested in vlogging: I’m not very good at personal conversation with people I don’t know well. (If this seems a bit paradoxical, it is. It literally takes me years to form friendships offline.) When I went to Bloggy Boot Camp in October, I barely spoke to anyone and couldn’t even find the courage to go up to the event organizer, Tiffany, to thank her!

I wouldn’t say I’m shy at all. I have no problem opening my huge pie-hole when it comes to business and I’m also not uncomfortable with public speaking. (In fact, give me a microphone and a room full of people and I’ll happily sing you a song!) I’m hoping that vlogging will help me deal with some of my insecurities and the next time I meet someone new, I’ll be less intimidated to strike up a conversation with them!

A Personal Introduction

So here you go. As part of my next step in world photography blogging domination, here is a short introduction video to Daily Window which will live on my about page:

Is there someone working at YouTube whose job it is to pick out three of the most unflattering points in the video for thumbnail selection?

Tips for Your First Vlog

With Pepper’s help, I learned an incredible amount about vlogging in just one day. I had her look at my first cut of the video to critique it and she gave me some great suggestions which I used to make the version I presented.

She also pointed me to Jendi at Simple Vlogging Tips. I immediately dug into her site and subscribed to her newsletter. She has some really great pointers! I’m pleased to find out I did a few things right without even knowing about them!

• Start with an about video. Having a video on your about page is all the rage. It’s probably one of the most popular pages on your site and it should be a relatively easy topic to start with, especially if you have your Elevator Pitch down!
• Use an outline! So the first few times I tried to record my video I just had an idea in my head about what I wanted to say. Yeah, that didn’t work so well! So I wrote down everything I wanted to say and then broke that down into bullet points on an index card to prompt me. I taped it to the side of the camera so I wasn’t looking down to figure out what to say next.
• Introduce yourself. In every video, make sure you start out by stating who you are, your website title and/or URL. Jendi calls this an “audio logo”.
• Don’t worry about production value. You don’t need fancy music, spinning graphics, fade ins and outs or anything like that. Just your pretty face and a topic! A video camera of some sort kinda helps too!
• Use a flattering angle. I got this one wrong big time with the first cut of my vlog. Positioning the camera a little above eye level so you’re looking up into it will hide a double chin!
• Use a tripod. For my first take I positioned my point and shoot on a tissue box. I complained to Pepper that there was no better place to set my camera and she asked, “Don’t you have a tripod?” Um… DUH. Big fat, huge DUH. I really can’t believe I didn’t think of that. If you don’t currently have a tripod, Gorillapods are under $20 and I’ve never met a person who wasn’t delighted with theirs! There are also Gorillapod accessories for the iPhone if that’s your video camera of choice.
• Watch your light! This is the photographer in me coming out. Don’t tape your video with a bright window or light behind you. Your face will be completely underexposed. My lighting set up definitely could’ve been better here, but I was in a rush! Just like taking portraits, the best light is a bright but diffused (soft) light. I’d suggest open shade or facing a window or light source.
• Keep it short! People just don’t watch long videos. I’m going to try to keep my vlogs under 3 minutes. Wish I could just as easily keep my written entries short!

Are You a Vlogger?

If you’re an experienced vlogger, I’d love some tips and tricks! If you have software recommendations for Windows, I want to hear that too since I’m currently using a demo of something. (But I LOVE that it can insert my watermark!)

If you have a blog but have never vlogged, why is that? Do you ever think you’ll try it out?

Thank you for reading My First Vlog. Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I live in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons and assorted furballs. I'm a self taught photographer using this blog to help me record what I learn and keep myself motivated.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

I started answering her in the comments, but then my mind drifted to Empire Avenue and how wonderfully it encourages people to publish new content while socially interacting and I thought my response might be better fitted for its own blog post!

To me, good photography is when you achieve your artistic vision. Bad photography is when you fail it. By “artistic vision”, I mean the way you see the photo playing out before you click the shutter button. If you just wanted to take a snapshot to capture your life and that’s how the photo turned out, SUCCESS!

To some extent bad photography is also lazy photography: when you overlook the art and craft in it entirely. I would never begrudge a person who does “lazy photography” from taking pictures and sharing them: they are clicking the shutter for a different reason than I.

Sometimes it might be easy to tell if a person hasn’t achieved their artistic vision, but not always. I HATE it when I hear someone tell another person their work shouldn’t be online! The nerve! I’ve run into people in Flickr communities like that which is why I say WATCH OUT (it’s easy to tell the communities with attitudes like that!)

Having experiences like that is also the reason I like to remain positive about photography. Positivity is my overall leadership style; if I have to say something bad, I’m going to try to preface it and follow it up with something good!

There may be a time and place for cut-throat critiques, but it’s just poppycock that one person’s photograph is more important than another and doesn’t deserve to be online.

Instead of trying to cut people down and take away their rights as internet publishers or claim they are “ruining” photography, why not try to find something good in their passion to capture and share a piece of their lives?

Thank you for reading What is Positive Photography?. Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I live in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons and assorted furballs. I'm a self taught photographer using this blog to help me record what I learn and keep myself motivated.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

 Credit: Derived from this original Creative Commons licensed photo, Colored Pencils-1 by David Blaikie on Flickr.
See Flickr page for more details.

How to use ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed Creatively and Ditch Auto Program Once and For All!

The wonderful thing about photography is that it’s an art accessible to so many people. It plays an important role in documenting our history and culture and people who would never consider themselves artists find they have a deep rooted passion for photography.

They are most definitely artists!

As a painter, you wouldn’t load a machine with paint and set it in front of a canvas to paint your vision. (Well, most wouldn’t anyway. I can see it being someone’s thing…) Yet technically, that’s exactly what you’re doing if you’re too afraid to take your camera off Auto program settings.

Executing Your Creative Vision

The camera is a tool to help you capture life. It’s remarkable what can be done with a point and shoot on automatic settings, but if you’re serious about taking better pictures and recording your vision of the world, it simply won’t do.

Below are some straight out of the camera examples I shot this morning. On the left you’ll see the auto program results. On the right is the manual exposure. In each case I wanted to use aperture to creatively isolate my subject. This type of shot is impossible in auto mode. For all shots, the ISO is 200.

It’s been years since I’ve touched auto program and didn’t even realize the full extent of how little control it gives the photographer! Not only does the camera determine the aperture and shutter speed, it also automatically determines the ISO and even where in the viewfinder to focus!

Why did the camera choose the settings it did? I have no earthly idea but the exposure is correct straight out of the camera. A correct exposure is not the same as a creatively correct exposure. That is the missing link holding back many photographers!

I used aperture as my creative example, however you can deliberately select shutter speed to capture creative exposures as well. Maybe you want to get a picture of your child in motion going down the slide or want to freeze a drop of water dripping from a fountain. You can’t get the shots you want in auto program mode. The camera isn’t that smart!

Learn the Basics!

The first step to shooting manually isn’t necessarily changing your program mode to “M” on the dial. The very first thing you need to do is understand ISO, aperture and shutter speed and what each of these sub-tools brings to your photographs. You can certainly do this by trial and error clicking photograph after photograph and to some extents you will. Carve out an hour to read through this article and others and you’ll start out with all the knowledge you need to practice your creative vision!

ISO

This is the speed at which light is recorded on your digital sensor. The faster light is recorded, the more light is let in, but the more artifacts (noise) will remain in the photograph. For this reason, I like to stay with the lowest possible ISO to record a correct exposure. This is why you’ll hear me grumbling about having to use high ISO settings.

• What is ISO setting on your digital SLR (DSLR) camera and how do you use it?
• ISO Settings in Digital Photography
• A Harebrained Explanation: What is ISO?
• How ISO and Exposure Affect Noise

Aperture

This determines how much light is let in through the lens. There’s a diaphragm around the lens called its aperture. It opens wide at low values, like f/1.4 – f/3.6 and lets in a lot of light. Lenses that can open very wide are called “fast lenses” because they work really well in low light conditions! The diaphragm also closes in to let not much light in at all at higher values like f/16+.

The cool thing about aperture is that it effects the depth of field. When the aperture is wide open (let’s say f/1.8) there is a very specific plane of focus. It’s very important you are focusing on the right area! The distance between you and the subject AND the subject and the background are also taken into account in the plane of focus.

(For example, if you use a wide open aperture on a person standing 6 feet away from you, it’s probably going to be very difficult to get even one eye in focus, not to mention both of them together!)

Narrow apertures (higher aperture values) are great for landscapes or storytelling photos where you want a lot of both the foreground and background also in sharp focus. The higher the value (let’s say f/32!) the more everything in the photo is going to be in focus.

• Introduction to Aperture in Digital Photography
• Photography Basics: What is Aperture?
• Photography 101: Fixed Aperture Explained

Shutter Speed

This controls how long the shutter curtain remains open to allow light onto the sensor. (Have you noticed that light is a key component of absolutely everything?)

A longer shutter speed will let more light into the camera, however it will also be able to detect movement by either the subject (or its surroundings) or the photographer. Sometimes, this is exactly what you want creatively. Other times, you want to take measures to eliminate movement (such as more light or a lower aperture value). Likewise, a quick shutter speed can capture action in the blink of an eye and show us things our naked eye can’t register, like a drop of water splashing or a child mid-jump.

• Introduction to Shutter Speed in Digital Photography
• Back to Basics: Shutter Speed on DIY Photography
• Camera Shutter Speeds Explained

Getting Started on Manual

If you’re still not sure about leaving your dial set to manual, consider shooting in Aperture or Shutter Speed priority modes. This will allow you to select the ISO you desire and use either aperture or shutter speed creatively. Let the camera figure out the math, but take control of your creative vision!

Your camera manual will tell you exactly how you can take advantage of these features. Simply look them up in the index. Reading your manual cover to cover will also give you a better grasp on the basics of photography!

Most point and shoots have some sort of manual or semi-manual settings. Even if they don’t, they’ll usually have a variety of program mode settings. Read the manual to understand what they do (some set a wider aperture or a faster shutter speed, for example) and then choose the right setting for your situation with purpose.

It will make a big difference in your photography!

More Resources

I heartily suggest you sink into more about manually exposing a photo. If you love to feel pages between your fingertips, I couldn’t recommend Bryan Peterson enough. Any one or all of them!

There are a ton of free resources on the internet to learn more about photography too!

1. Kimberly Gauthier of Through the Lens gives away a free eBook on shooting in manual for liking her Facebook page.
2. How to Make the Jump from Automatic Shooting to Manual Shooting
3. Aperture and Shutter Priority Modes
4. Bernie’s Better Beginner’s Guide to Photography for Computer Geeks Who Want to be Digital Artists
5. Moving Toward Manual Settings: Understanding Aperture (a beginner’s guide)
6. Moving Toward Manual Settings: Understanding Shutter Speed (a beginner’s guide)

Please feel free to share your own tips, links or photos!

Thank you for reading Why Auto Program Mode is a Huge Creative Buzzkill. Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I live in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons and assorted furballs. I'm a self taught photographer using this blog to help me record what I learn and keep myself motivated.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.