So by the end of this video, you're gonna have all of the information that you'll need in order to
shoot your camera in manual mode and this is gonna mean two pretty awesome things for you: 1. you're
gonna be able to take your camera and create the kind of video and photos using the settings
that you want to see-- and not rely on the weird algorithms half baked in your camera --and 2. what
i'm going to show you here will not only work with your camera but also on every single camera ever
created. Yep all of them. Are you ready? Then let's go. Okay so when we were talking about
controlling a camera manually we are essentially talking about three basic functions and that is
aperture, shutter and ISO. Now all three of these functions have one big thing in common: each one
of them on their own can make your image brighter or they can make your image darker and this is
really nice because that means anytime you're in a situation where your photo or video is too bright
or too dark, you can use any one of them or a combination of all three to adjust the exposure to
exactly where you want it to be. Okay, let's dig into this and i think we're gonna start with uh
aperture. So aperture is literally just the hole in your lens that lets light through it and into
your camera and the aperture adjustment is making that hole in the lens bigger or smaller. And by
doing that you are controlling the AMOUNT of light like the volume of light coming into your camera
and so of course you know the bigger the hole is in your lens the more
light that that lens can let through and the smaller you make the aperture
the less light is available to come into your camera and aperture is measured in what's called
f-stops and there are some common numbers like f 1.4 and f 2.8 and f4 5.6 that kind of thing
you don't necessarily need to memorize all that now the main thing that you need to know
is that the lower the aperture number the larger the hole in the lens is so this one here this lens
the maximum the very largest this aperture can go is f 2.8 and as i increase that number the hole in
the lens gets smaller so we'll go from 2.8 that's all the way wide open and then f4 f5.6 f8 f11
and so on and so forth now the creative aspect of using aperture is being able to control something
called depth of field and being able to control this is typically my top reason for shooting in
manual when you're controlling depth of field you're deciding how out of focus it will be
behind your subject and in front of your subject and so with a really wide open lens like what
i'm using right now on this camera i've decided that i want the background to be pretty blurry
because it's kind of busy back there and i didn't really want people to be focusing on the mess
over that way and same without in front too if i put my hand in front of the focus point it's
pretty blurry as well so that's with the wide open aperture on this particular lens now if i were to
start closing down the aperture making that hole in the lens smaller i'll show you what happens
there so now i've closed down the aperture a fair amount so now you know in the foreground
my hand's not as blurred out and in the background that's not as blurred out either
and you can start to see more of the mess back there let's change it back that's better oh
much better look i definitely love like the wide aperture blurred background kind of look and feel
so a wide aperture lets in a ton of light and it also gives you that nice thin depth of field
whereas if you close the aperture down you're letting in less light and more of the background
in the foreground is going to be in focus all right moving on to shutter now remember i'm going
through the basics of these three things now and then we're going to combine them in a little bit
and really show you the power of shooting manually on your camera all right so shutter now that
the light has passed through your lens and the aperture within the lens it's now going into your
camera body the next thing that light is going to run into is your shutter or shutter curtain
as it's sometimes called and in manual mode you get to decide exactly how long that shutter
curtain is open for before it closes again and under normal photographic or video circumstances
shutter speeds are measured and shown in fractions of a second so half of a second 50th of a second
one thousandth of a second eight thousandths of a second and on the other end of things if you're
going for like really long exposures like if you had your camera on a tripod and you wanted to get
beautiful starry sky and you wanna just let in as much light for as long as possible
you're talking like one second or two seconds or 10 seconds you know 30 second long exposures but
when we're talking about day-to-day photography of like people or action or anything going on you're
more in the faster end of the spectrum for shutter speeds now on the exposure side of things a faster
shutter speed makes for a darker exposure and a slower shutter speed or a longer shutter speed
makes for a brighter exposure which makes total sense because the longer your shutter is open
the more light is coming through and onto that image sensor now if we're talking more the
creative uses for shutter a faster shutter speed can freeze the action from a skier flying by to an
f1 car that image and all of its detail can be 100 tac sharp with a really fast shutter
speed whereas on the other end of things a slower shutter speed can show movement when you want to
all right folks we're at the last stop on the line here so the light has gone
into your lens and you've decided how much light gets to go through and into your camera body and
then you've decided how long you want that amount of light to go through your shutter
and now it is hitting that image sensor and that is where iso comes in or some people call it iso
they're wrong so iso does one thing it controls how sensitive your image sensor is to light so on
your image sensor is where the image is actually captured and if you're using a film camera this is
where the light actually hits the piece of film so a lower iso number means that the sensor is less
sensitive to light and a higher iso number means that it's more sensitive to light here i'll show
you actually on this camera itself okay so we're gonna go to a lower iso we've gone from 800 down
to 100 so a lot darker there now we're going to go back up to 800 which is the exposure that i
want but we can go higher than that and as we make the image sensor more sensitive to light
well it gets a lot freaking brighter doesn't it so i i like to think of the iso setting as kind
of the enabler and what i mean by that is is that it enables you to use the settings that you want
to use for aperture and for shutter so for example if i wanted a wide open aperture like i have right
now to have that nice blurry background well it's a ton of light coming in and so you don't need as
much light sensitivity for your image sensor and so you could bring that iso down or if it
was night time when there isn't a lot of light we can bump the iso or the image sensor sensitivity
up so that we can still get the kind of exposure we want even with a lot less light going around
now there is one side effect from changing that iso around on your camera and that is noise or
graininess to the image so so how we're shooting right now is a very clean iso it's a lower iso
on my camera and so the lower the iso that you have set on your camera the cleaner and more
generally high quality the image will be whereas if you start juicing up that iso you're basically
pushing the gain of that image sensor and eventually you're going to start to see graininess
or artifacts and things like that here i'll show you i'll crank it up but adjust the exposure for
the high sensitivity there now this is so i went from a very clean iso on this camera which
happened to be iso 800 it's not super important but i went from that all the way up to 25
600 iso and you can see i've got roughly the same exposure it's maybe a little touch brighter but
there's a lot of noisiness going on a lot of sort of digital visual noise going on and so in general
you want to be aiming for the lowest iso that you can when you're taking images or videos okay
that's better back to a nice clean iso and so for most cameras their base iso their sort of cleanest
highest quality iso will be around iso 100 or iso 160 and it just goes up from there okay
so now it's time to put all that knowledge of aperture shutter and iso together to go and make
some cool looking images so we're going to take a portrait of deju we're at degree's place now and
uh he wants a nice christmas portrait of himself so when we're talking about portraits we really
want to isolate the subject because it's really about the person it's not necessarily totally
about the surroundings it's more about the face and with maybe a little bit of christmasy-ness
in the background too we've got that tree right there personally when i'm thinking about portraits
i'm immediately thinking about where my aperture is at and for my kind of style for portraits i
want to have my aperture as large as possible as wide open as possible and on this particular
lens that's 1.4 and that's going to give me a really nice blurred out background and the
reason why we want to blur out the background is because we don't want the focus to be
on all of that in the back we want it just on dexu's face really all right so i'm just going
to leave the settings on this camera where they were for my last shot and it was a landscape shot
and it was pretty dark outside and i didn't have a tripod and so anyways that's where my settings
are at it's like f8 right now we're at 25 600 iso super high iso let's just see how it looks
okay not bad the lighting on his face is pretty good we've actually got ourselves pretty close to
a window and a window behind him too so the light is nice but it's just really busy in the
background and i know those little tiny christmas tree lights i know that when those blur out they
can look really great and so we're gonna open the aperture wide up and adjust the other controls on
the camera to accommodate for that okay we're just gonna skip back to the studio real fast so i can
show you in real time as i'm changing the settings with this nice little camera filming camera rig
okay here we go so these are the settings i had when i took that first shot of degree and you can
see that we've got f8 for aperture which is much too small of an aperture for this for the kind
of portrait shot that i want to get if you ask me we're at 1 60th of a second that's perfectly
fine for for taking a portrait but then we're at iso 25600 which is really high up there so you're
going to get some serious grainy digital noise there okay so our initial creative choice here is
wanting to blur out the background so we are going to change aperture first and i'm going
to open it all the way up to 1.4 we know that's where we want our aperture to be but now clearly
there's a problem it's way too bright we're letting in so much more light now that we've
opened up that aperture and we're gonna have to do something about that so what i'm gonna do
is i'm gonna start bringing down that iso because that iso is very high up there
so here we go we're gonna bring it down to about 800 iso yup that looks pretty good 160th of a
second for shutter is great that's a nice hand holdable shutter speed you're not going to get
any weird blur for like you know just taking a portrait of a person so we've got wide open
aperture 1.4 we got shutter speed at 1 60th of a second and iso 800 let's see what it looks like
nice okay so that looks way way better for this purpose for taking a portrait and having all the
focus be on the person while bringing in a little bit of context and the context in this case is
some Christmas cheer with that tree in the back okay so for our next example i want to freeze
some action and so of course we're talking about the shutter now so we are trail side here's Beth
she's all geared up again it's really freaking cold out Beth uh she was going up for a ride
and she said hey why don't we get a couple shots for the gram and i said who the hell is graham
there's a little bit of a mellow corner here and i want to get Beth kind of ripping around that
and i want to freeze all the action and so to do that we're going to need a fast shutter speed
all right got the nice ninja turtle gloves going on they are necessary today so Beth is
going to go by using the settings i already had on the camera and we'll just see how that goes
cool okay so that didn't look great um there wasn't really any stopped motion or there wasn't
any sort of like cool motion blur it was just sort of like a blah sort of shot so let's change
some settings and try it again okay so let's change up some settings and yes i am back at
the studio because it was just way too cold to do this setup out there that day these are the
settings that i had on the camera for that first shot and it didn't look all that great mostly
because of the shutter speed and the shutter speed is shown right here shown as 1 250th of a
second and the next one over is our aperture f4 and then over here is obviously our iso
i know from my personal experience with shooting a lot of mountain biking i know that if i want to
freeze the action of a mountain bike going normal speeds i'm going to want the shutter speed to be
around 1 000 of a second so let's do that so we've changed that but now things are looking
pretty dark we know for sure that we want to lock in our shutter speed somewhere around a thousandth
of a second that was our sort of creative choice for this and aperture is around f4 which i kind
of want because i do want a fair amount in focus and i don't want to miss focus on the rider so i'm
going to keep that at f4 and so now the only way that i can change my exposure is by going into iso
so on this camera you can go like this and we are going to bring this up to an exposure where it
makes sense i think about 3200 iso that looks like a good exposure to me one thousandth of a second
for the shutter speed nice fast shutter speed f4 for the aperture to get a fair amount in focus
and iso 3200 to get that exposure just right my hands
now we've frozen the action using fast shutter speed
but i really want to convey the sense of motion in this one and so now we're going to use a slow
shutter speed and we're going to this really cool thing called a pan shot and photographic
perfection and there we go yet another example of just using aperture shutter and iso together
to create essentially limitless creative possibilities with your camera
well okay folks that is it that is aperture, shutter, iso all the main functions of shooting
your camera manually and now it's on you to go and practice. I recommend taking one setting at a time
just you know rolling the dial and changing the aperture to see what that does for depth of field
or you know chasing your cat around the house and trying different shutter speeds
i can tell you what all the settings do but it really comes down to you as the photographer
to put these things in practice and that's what gets it locked in your head forever
that's it for this camera tutorial subscribe if you want to see more because we've got
more coming as long as a lot of really cool tech reviews coming up as well i'm going to
be down in the comments answering people's questions for the next few days so make sure
you put your question down if you have any and we will see you on the next one everybody. Cheers!