Aperture Priority vs. Shutter Priority vs. Manual
As soon as you’re ready to leave the comfort of Auto behind, the next logical step is to experiment with Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority shooting modes (“Av” and “Tv” on your DSLR dial). These settings operate exactly the way their names suggest. You decide whether aperture or shutter speed is more important to the image you want to make and the camera will automatically adjust the other one for the correct exposure.
So if you’re shooting a soccer game, for instance, shutter speed is probably more important. There will be a lot of movement and you’ll want to capture the action crisply. But if you’re taking a portrait and you want to blur the background to allow your subject’s face to stand out, aperture priority is the obvious choice.
In both of these shooting modes, you still have to control for ISO, but they make your job a little bit easier than if you were to jump straight from Auto to Manual. Going back to our analogy, you only have to worry about two out of the three elements that fill the bucket. But once you’ve mastered Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority, you’ll be ready to take the final leap to Manual.
This is CameraSim, an online DSLR simulator. It allows you to play with camera settings, lighting conditions, distance from subject, and a few other factors that go into taking a picture, and to check your best guesses against the resulting image.
Shooting JPEG vs. RAW
https://www.ijyoyo.com/blog/why-shooting-raw-is-better-than-jpeg
Hands-on Assignment
The best way to learn all of this is by doing it, so we’ll be getting our hands on the cameras today. Go ahead and sign out a camera if you don’t have one already.
The assignment: Go out and shoot a mini photo essay with your camera set to shoot in RAW. The goal will be to get it down to five strong, final images (although of course, you’ll likely shoot many more than that and then curate it down to the best ones.)
The images should be related to one another in some way, and tell a story. No two images should be composed very similarly. No captions are required for this assignment, but photos should not be staged. This will involve approaching people you’re not friends with or related to.
You have until next class to complete this assignment. Please bring your memory cards to class (or otherwise have the image files available to you) so that we can use them in a practice editing workshop.