How to Run Your Digital Camera in Manual Mode

So now that you have bought your Digital SLR, your Canon or Nikon and have taken a few pics maybe even a few thousand pics you are feeling still excited and proud of your pictures.
But now how do you go to that next step? How do you shoot in manual mode? There are three main setting for maunal mode.
What you have to control your camera is ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speed.
All of these three options can be controlled to give you a better picture but with a bit of practice you will be able to set these three setting correctly for you situation.
ISO ISO is the amount of light and color that will be written to your picture in any given time.
A low ISO would be 100 and at this setting it takes a long time to get the pictue written to the camera.
An ISO of 1600 on the other hand will not take as long to write a picture to the camera but since it is trying to write so fast it means that you will not have the great color and quality that you would have at 100.
Aperture Aperture is the size that lense opens to take a picture.
an aperture of 2.
8 would be very large and would allow a lot of light in compared to an aperture of 32 which would give you a very small lense opening.
The other thing to understand about aperture is that the lower number will give you a much smaller focus size, you know when you see a picture where the model is in focus but the foreground and background are out of focus? That is done with an Aperture of 1.
4 or 1.
8.
If you want everything to be in focus then you will need that Aperture of 32.
Shutter speed This is fairly simple.
Shutter speed is the amount of time that your shutter is actually open.
The time that youo would need the shutter open can range from 30 seconds in the absolute dark to 1/4000 of a seconde for a bright sunny and snowy day.
To keep a picture in focus you need to have the shutter speed very quick 1/60th of a second or less but depending on whether your subject is moving or not.
Contolling your camera Controlling your camera means that you have to evaluate the conditions to take a picture based on the amount of light, the subject your are photographing and the range of focus desired.
You can alsways control two of the settings but not the third or your picture will be either underexposed or overexposed (to dark or to light) Lets look at an example of how you would set these settings and then you can go out and try it out for yourself.
Kids soccer game on a cloudy day - All shots are tough for one reason or another but I choose this since it is very tough.
Since you want to take pics of moving kids you will want to keep the shutter speed very short.
Since there will not be much light you will want to make the ISO a bit higher and the aperture will need to be a bit lower so that you can get the kid in focus nad not have as many distractions in the backgound.
Probably 1/200th of a second or less, ISO of 400 and an aperture of 5.
6 or so.