In my recent blog “Camera Settings For Beginners: Understanding The Exposure Triangle”, I explained the three major components of the exposure triangle. In this post, I’m going to show you manual mode in action – and examples of what happens to certain photos when you change the aperture, ISO, and shutter speed.

So, I did a little experiment.

I set up my camera on a tripod on my apartment balcony which is up on the 5th floor.

I put my camera in manual mode, and took several photos of the same thing. I realized that it’s one thing to “explain” the Exposure Triangle in writing, but it could be even more helpful to visualize manual mode in action. 

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Manual Mode In Action: Understanding Your Camera’s Language

Okay, so I’m going to show you some of the photos I took of not only the landscape, but I also took photos of the settings being displayed to help break it down even further. I took these photos on my Canon 5D Mark IV with a 24-105mm lens.

Combining your knowledge of the Exposure Triangle with the settings being displayed on your camera, this will help you lock in the perfect photo (or pretty darn close).

To start, this is the image I took from my phone. So this is what you’ll be seeing from my camera as well. And to my surprise, my phone and camera presented strikingly similar results – check it out!

As you just saw with the photo from my phone, I also took my first photo in the same place but with my camera. You’ll notice that the sky isn’t washed out, it’s a nice blue tone, and all the colors seem to be reasonably balanced.

I’ve also decided to take a picture of my settings so that you can see what I used to achieve this outcome.

My shutter speed was set at 100, my aperture was F4, and my ISO was at 100. This allowed for the right amount of light to balance out the photo (all the more reason why the exposure triangle is important.)

Let’s take a look at the next photo outcome:

Yikes! What happened here?

This photo is simply overexposed…meaning that there is too much light passing through the lens (which is washing out my photo!)

Let’s take a look at my camera settings to see what exactly caused this.

If you look toward the bottom where the exposure meter is, this is an incredibly helpful tool that will actually tell you in real time if your photo will turn out underexposed, overexposed, or right in the middle.

In this case, you can see the little dash is not in the center…it’s actually quite overexposed.

Which would make perfect sense as to why my previous photo turned out as washed out as it did!

My ISO was set at 800 which was way too high for this application, and that was the main contributor to overexposing the photo. The aperture was also changed to f/8.0 which was too narrow of an aperture to use in this setting. I also tried raising my shutter speed to 250 which would have impacted it a bit as well.

At this point, I was just moving my settings around to show you how those elements of the exposure triangle contributed to the outcome of my photos.

Now that you’ve seen one that is spot on and one that is overexposed, let’s take a look at one that is underexposed.

In this photo you can see the sky is dark, and I can’t see nearly as much of the detail in the trees and buildings that I was able to see in the very first photo.

So – let’s check out the camera settings for this one!

For this photo, my aperture setting was what caused the photo to become underexposed. I changed it to f/13, and as mentioned previously, it is too narrow of an aperture for this application.

You can see toward the bottom that the little dash is to the left of the center, indicating that it is indeed underexposed.

In a real-life application, I would have been paying attention to this prior to taking the photo, but in this case it’s important to learn how and why your settings affect your photos.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully this blog post was helpful for any beginner photographers out there who are trying to learn their settings!

If you want to see more manual mode in action, be sure to check out one of my other recent posts “Camera Settings For Beginners: Understanding The Exposure Triangle”. This blog talks about the key components of the exposure triangle and why it’s important to understand it.

Another one of my recent posts to check out is called “26 Photography Styles For Any Skill Level”. This one breaks down a list of different photography styles to explore, ranging from beginners to pros.

Share your thoughts in the comments below – was this blog helpful? What do you want to learn more about in the photography world?