Why Auto Keeps You a Beginner
Alright. First real lesson. Let's talk about why I'm going to ask you to take your camera off Auto tonight, and why I think it's worth being a little uncomfortable about it.
Here's the thing. Auto mode makes fine pictures. I'm not going to sit up here and tell you Auto takes bad photos, because it doesn't, not usually. The camera's computer is pretty good at figuring out a reasonable exposure for a reasonably lit scene. That's not the problem.
The problem is that Auto is making all the decisions, and if you're not making the decisions, you're not learning anything. You could shoot on Auto for five years and you'd have the same skills you have right now. Maybe more comfortable holding the camera. That's about it. I shot on Auto for almost a year when I first got my DSLR, a used one I bought off a neighbor, and I'll be honest with you, that year taught me nothing. I got some pictures I liked, sure. But I couldn't tell you why they worked, and I couldn't repeat it on purpose. That bothered me enough that I finally sat down with the manual and forced myself to learn what the camera was actually doing.
The three things Auto is deciding for you
Every photo your camera takes is a mix of three settings. Shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Together people call this the exposure triangle, which is a fine name for it as long as it doesn't scare you off.
On Auto, the camera picks all three for you, every single time, based on what it thinks the scene needs. It's guessing. A decent guess, usually. But a guess that has no idea you wanted the background blurry, or that you wanted to freeze the water instead of smoothing it out, or that the light up on the ridge at 7am is doing something specific that the meter is going to try to flatten into "normal."
That's what bothered me on my hikes before I even owned a real camera. My phone kept flattening the morning light into something average. Auto mode on a DSLR does the same thing, just with nicer glass.
How I actually teach this (and why)
I tried explaining the exposure triangle to Tami once using three salt shakers on her kitchen table, one for shutter, one for aperture, one for ISO, moving them around to show how they relate to each other. She listened for about ninety seconds and told me I was making it more complicated than it needed to be. She was right, honestly. I'd overbuilt the whole thing trying to show all three moving at once.
So here's my opinion, and it's the one this whole course is built around: learn the three settings one at a time, not all at once. Everybody wants to understand the whole triangle in one afternoon. You can't, not really, not in a way that sticks. Master shutter speed first. Then aperture. Then ISO. It's slower. It works.
That's why this course goes in that order, session by session. Tonight is just about understanding that Auto is hiding these three things from you, and that hiding them is exactly what's keeping you a beginner.
What to do with your camera tonight
Find the mode dial on top of your camera. Don't touch it yet, just find it. You'll see Auto, usually a green square or a camera icon. You'll also see M, A or Av, S or Tv, and P. We're not going all the way to M tonight. That comes later, one setting at a time, like I said.
For tonight, I want you to do something simpler. Turn the dial to P, program mode. It's still going to help you with exposure, but if you dig into your menu you'll be able to see what shutter speed and aperture it chose for a given shot. Just look at those numbers. Don't change them yet. Just notice them changing as the light changes, as you point at different things.
Take twenty photos around your house or yard doing nothing but watching those two numbers shift. That's the whole assignment. You're building the habit of noticing, before you build the habit of controlling.
A caution here: your camera's meter reads the light through the lens, and it can get fooled by things like a bright window behind your subject or deep shadow across half the frame. Don't worry about fixing that tonight. Just notice when the numbers look surprising to you. That surprise is useful information, we'll use it soon.
Before next time
Bring your camera charged, and bring whatever confusion you ran into watching those numbers move, because that's exactly what we're going to sort out next session when we get into shutter speed on its own.