Is Manual mode the best way to use your camera? A Canon expert explains

"Use Manual mode" is common advice from professional and advanced photographers on this website and elsewhere. Recently, a photographer asked me why manual exposure was almost universally suggested. Manual exposure puts the photographer in full control, forcing them to choose how movement of the camera or subject is captured and how much depth of field is needed. If you are always in Manual mode (M), you don’t need to decide what mode to use. 

EOS R System cameras introduced another exposure mode, flexible priority (Fv) where the photographer chooses the most important parameters, letting the camera determine the others or takes full control – just like Manual. 

Cameras are designed to help photographers capture better shots; lots of great automated features ease the learning and reduce the potential for getting it wrong. There are very few pros who wish autofocus would go away, so perhaps it is worth considering an alternative to always suggesting use of manual exposure. 

For many photographers, shutter speed is the most important decision to portray motion, others want control of depth of field. Using shutter priority or aperture priority is not wrong; actually they help as there is less to tax the brain. This means more mental capacity to do other things like composition, anticipation or previsualization, which the camera cannot do. Certainly, a skilled photographer is able to balance exposure control with all the other elements, but it is not the magic way of working if you don’t have the same expertise. It’s far better to come away from a shoot with results you are pleased with, or a client pays for.

I often use ‘assisted Manual’, by choosing shutter speed and aperture, letting the camera determine exposure using Auto ISO. When I’m shooting motorsports, I’ll use Tv mode and Auto ISO since I want to control movement.

A panned picture at 1/30 secs doesn’t look different when the aperture is f/4 or f/11, so I let the camera choose. Flexible priority might be the only mode you need, but I prefer to have controls for shutter speed, aperture and ISO.

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