In Support of Manual Mode
A few years ago, I took a photography class at the local community center. It went over all the basics: composition, exposure, etc. The teacher was also very insistent that we used manual mode on the camera. I never really understood why you would want to use manual—it just seemed like a pain, especially when you can just set the camera to aperture/shutter priority mode and let the camera change half of the exposure while you control the other. But, yesterday, while shooting the photo to the left, the camera was changing the exposure far too much due to the many differing types and amounts of light. So, I switched to manual and took a shot, looked at the histogram, and I kept taking shots until I got the histogram to look like what I wanted—no blown highlights, no lost shadow detail. (A good look at histograms from dpreview.com is here) Then, I was free to take photos without touching the exposure, and it came out just like I wanted. Needless to say, I’ll be using manual a lot more from now on.