Manual photography: Why shoot manual at all?

Leica’s M-series rangefinder cameras are the ultimate expression of manual photography. These are very expensive cameras, though, and any DSLR or mirrorless camera will offer manual control too, though not quite in the same way. Leica M11. Image: Leica

Digital cameras have had auto-exposure and autofocus for so long now that a whole new generation of photographers may never have used manual controls, and an older generation of photographers raised on manual cameras may have abandoned these controls long ago in favor of labor-saving automation.

But even today, all DSLR and mirrorless cameras, and many high-end compacts, still offer manual control. Why? And is it still worth shooting in manual when autofocus and auto-exposure are so much easier and quicker?

Here are three quick answers::

Autofocus and auto-exposure are quicker and easier but they are not necessarily better. You can’t always assume that ‘the camera knows best’. Manual control will often enable you to finesse your results much more carefully and revive important techniques and ideas which are in danger of being forgotten.
Manual photography achieves a consistency between shots which automated shooting doesn’t provide. With auto-exposure and autofocus, the camera will check and adjust the settings for every shot, even if they don’t need to change and, what’s even worse, changing them when they need to stay the same.
Photography doesn’t have to be easy. Who said it did? A manual process is more engaging than an automatic one and teaches photographic skills that should not always be left to the camera. The current craze for ‘retro’ cameras is another sign that photographers want real engagement with the process, not just easier end results.

The bottom line? Manual photography is slower but better.

It’s not ALWAYS better, to be fair. If you are photographing sports and wildlife you won’t have time to fiddle with exposure controls between shots, and there’s no way that manual focusing can possibly keep up with fast-moving subjects in the way that AF tracking systems can.

But that’s only one small segment of photography. With almost any other genre there is time to use manual exposure and manual focus, and keep in mind that these might not even change from one shot to the next anyway.

This is a key point, by the way. Cameras will apply autofocus and auto-exposure before every shot, even in situations where you know they don’t need to change, or where you don’t actually WANT them to change. When you shoot in manual, you get to choose when the settings should change, and when they should not.

So let’s take a look at these manual controls and why they are important.

The Fujifilm X100VI celebrates manual exposure, with physical shutter speed, ISO and lens aperture controls. This is one of the reasons for its cult following. Image: Fujifilm/B&H

Manual exposure

These days we let the camera work out the exposure. It measures the light in the scene using very sophisticated multi-segment metering patterns, then translates these into shutter speeds, lens apertures and, if you’re using the auto ISO option, it will set the ISO too.

You do have some control. In P mode the camera chooses the shutter speed and lens aperture to give a balanced combination of both, but in A mode, you can choose the lens aperture yourself and the camera will then pick the shutter speed to deliver the correct exposure, and in S mode, you choose the shutter speed and the camera picks the lens aperture. So if you have automatic modes where you can set those two important creative controls yourself – aperture and shutter speed – then why do you need the M (manual mode)?

Nikon Z5 II mode dial — Most cameras have a mode dial where you can choose between auto-exposure modes, but there is an M (Manual) option too. Image: Nikon

Let’s start with how cameras work out the exposure. The camera’s light metering system may be sophisticated, but it’s also fallible. Even the most advanced systems can only measure the light reflected by the subject. If the subject is dark or black, it doesn’t reflect much light so the camera increases the exposure – which is exactly the wrong thing to do because it’s SUPPOSED to look dark or black. And if your subject is light-toned or white, the camera will compensate by reducing the exposure and it will no longer look bright or white in the photograph.

Have you heard of ‘18% gray’? That’s a standardized gray tone that light meters attempt to match with the exposures they choose. It’s an average mid-gray. Metering systems have no idea whether individual subjects are light or dark so they simply aim for this average.

This is why cameras have EV (exposure value) compensation controls. These let you manually increase or reduce the exposure set by the camera. It’s an implicit admission that the camera is just aiming for the exposure middle ground and you will often have to take over. The camera can get you in the right ballpark and, with many everyday subjects, may nail the exposure completely, but in the end it takes human judgement to work out if it’s right.

There has been a subtle shift in exposure know-how as cameras have become more sophisticated. In the old ‘manual’ days, the light meter gave you a reading which you then interpreted according to your own observations about the subject and the light. Some photographers used separate handheld light meters instead to measure the light actually falling on the subject – often a far more useful measurement.

The point is that with manual exposure, measuring the light and using exposure compensation aren’t a separate process but the same process. You use the meter reading and your own judgement at the same time.

With modern auto-exposure cameras it’s changed. Now exposure compensation is a second process you need to apply to compensate for what you think the camera might get wrong. It’s a subtle shift but an important one. Before, the light meter was just a source of information; now, it’s something you have to override. You have to stop the camera getting it wrong.

ISO and the ‘exposure triangle’

With film, you don’t get to change the ISO setting from one shot to the next because the film sensitivity is fixed. The lens aperture and shutter speed are the only exposure controls you have. With digital cameras you can change the ISO, and this has led to the concept of the ‘exposure triangle’, where the ISO becomes a third factor in setting the exposure.

Fujifilm X-T5 ISO dial — These days, the ISO setting is often lumped in with lens aperture and shutter speed as part of the ‘exposure triangle’. This is not strictly accurate and can make exposure decisions a lot more complicated. Image: Fujifilm

This doesn’t help. Exposure theory is pretty simple if you’re just dealing with lens aperture and shutter speed. Throw in ISO too and it suddenly becomes more complicated – too complicated, I would suggest for any kind of quick, clear thinking.

ISO is not like lens aperture and shutter speed. It’s not changing the amount of light reaching the sensor. Instead, it’s like turning up the gain on the light it does receive. This is a vital tool in low-light situations, but when it’s used as an everyday exposure variable, it just confuses everything.

I have in the past said what a wonderful thing auto ISO is. The basic principle is that the camera automatically raises the ISO to keep the shutter speeds high enough to prevent camera shake, or to allow fast action-stopping shutter speeds for poorly-lit indoor sports. Auto ISO is a great feature for automatic exposure.

But if you want to use manual exposure techniques, it just gets in the way. With auto ISO enabled, the camera will ‘fix’ the exposure using ISO, even when you’ve manually selected the lens aperture and shutter speed.

When shooting with manual exposure, by all means choose a suitable ISO setting for the conditions, but don’t let the camera set it automatically. Once you’ve chosen an ISO setting, you’re back to exposure basics with the lens aperture and shutter speed. Including ISO in the ‘exposure triangle’ is fine as a theoretical argument, but introducing it as a third exposure variable for every shot you take is just over-complicating a very simple set of principles.

Autofocus vs manual

Modern autofocus systems are incredibly sophisticated. The camera can focus on hundreds or even thousands of points around the frame, choosing them automatically if you let it, and tracking subjects in real-time as they move around the scene. Modern AF systems are indispensable for many high-speed, high-pressure shooting situations.

But for many everyday scenarios they are overkill. They are highly technical solutions to simple problems. Worse, they introduce the same problem as auto-exposure systems – instead of actively choosing what to focus on, you are often left in the position of having to observe what the camera has done and quickly override it if it’s not what you want.

Autofocus is undoubtedly faster than human focusing – except where switching to the correct focus mode and positioning the focus point exactly where you want it in the frame is actually slower than simply turning a focus ring on the lens and watching your subject come into focus in the viewfinder or on the rear screen.

But manual, ‘visual’ focusing is not as precise as autofocus, especially with the optical viewfinder of a DSLR where there’s no focus magnifying mode. Does manual focusing have a comeback here?

It does, and it brings back the old concepts of depth of field and ‘zone focusing’.

This is a Laowa 9mm f/2.9 Zero-D fully manual lens, and it has features that regular AF lenses don’t have. These include a physical aperture ring, a long-travel manual focus ring and depth of field markings for different apertures to help with zone focusing for street and travel and hyperfocal focusing for landscapes. Image: Venus Optics

Sometimes, if you’re shooting a subject close to the camera or with a very wide lens aperture, the focus is so critical that manual focus may give you less reliable focusing than autofocus. No argument there.

But often – very often, in fact – what you need is control over the zone of focus, or depth of field. In other words, control over the near-to-far sharpness. Here, you need to focus between your near and far objects, not on one or the other, and choose a lens aperture small enough to render both sharp. Autofocus systems make no provision for this kind of depth of field control at all. They are complete tyrants. Once you (or the camera) decide on the focus point, that’s where the camera will focus.

If you want to use zone focusing – an extremely useful technique for street photography – or hyperfocal focusing for landscapes, where everything is sharp from nearby to infinity, then your camera’s AF system won’t help you. It’s something you’ll have to do yourself – manually.

Auto white balance

White balance variants — Do you want to control the white balance setting in your photographs, or are you happy for the camera to take its best guess for every shot? Image: Rod Lawton

This is just a short comment about something many photographers might not consider important. If you leave the camera’s white balance set to auto, it will almost certainly render each scene pretty well, compensating for artificial light and different phases of the day so well that you don’t even bother with the white balance presets.

If you shoot RAW, then it’s even less of a problem, because a RAW file contains all the color information captured by the camera’s sensor, and you can choose the white balance later when processing your RAW files.

Except…

You can end up with a whole batch of images with subtly different white balance settings, even though they were shot in the same lighting conditions, just because the distribution of light and colors has changed.

And even though you can fix this with RAW files, it’s an additional processing job you need to carry out later. It’s unnecessary work, and all because the camera is evaluating each frame individually every time you press the shutter release.

But that doesn’t just apply to white balance. It applies to exposure and focus too.

The simple fundamental flaw with automatic systems

Every time you take a shot in auto mode, the camera is re-checking and re-adjusting the exposure, re-checking and re-adjusting the focus, re-checking and re-adjusting the white balance. Sometimes this is useful, like when you are taking single shots some time apart in varied conditions.

Sony A7C R — Shooting with autofocus and auto-exposure is quicker and easier than doing it manually, but it can dim your awareness of what the camera is doing and what the image actually needs. Image: Sony

But what if you are taking a series of pictures in the same light where you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to work out what the exposure should be? What if you’ve set your camera up for zone focusing for some street photography? What if you want to capture the changing color of the light as the sun sets and turns to dusk? The absolute LAST thing you want is for the camera to be changing the settings all the time when you’ve already worked out what they should be.

Shooting in manual is not some kind of hair-shirted hipster fad. It’s a way of overcoming some of the basic inadequacies of auto-exposure modes, the frustrating over-complexity of AF systems and the randomness of auto white balance adjustments.

Most of all, it’s a way of maintaining consistency across a whole series of shots where you don’t want the camera making constant adjustments, where you already know where you want to focus and how, and in situations where it’s just simpler for you to decide what to do yourself rather than waiting to see what the camera does and having to correct it.

If you want to re-engage with the photographic process, getting a retro camera is one way to do it, but switching the camera you already have to manual mode is the other. At first it will be tough and frustrating and you’ll lose a lot of shots, but in the end you’ll understand exposure and focusing in a new and more creative way.

You will be back in the driving seat and your camera will go back to simply being a tool.