Category Archives: Introduction

Stop Shooting Auto! is a set of photography lessons and associated articles, mostly dealing with getting the correct exposure. The lessons are very friendly to beginners who know very little about photography. If you’re scared to take your camera out of green box mode because you have no idea what the controls do, or you don’t even know what green box mode is, this is the site for you.

If you’re new here, you’ll want to start by going through the Exposure Lessons in Order. These lessons are designed to take you from knowing almost nothing to understanding the fundamentals of exposure. Don’t forget to do the exercises so that you practice what you’ve learned. Practicing and experimenting are the best ways to really understand what you’re doing.

Other interesting articles that don’t specifically deal with exposure lessons can be found in the Index of Entries.

Please feel free to ask questions and leave comments– I like getting reader feedback! If you’ve learned something from the site, let me know. And please spread the word, since more readers make me a happy Patti.

If you’re new to Stop Shooting Auto!, the best way to explore the site is to click the link on the left for exposure lessons in order.  That’s the gentle introduction to exposure that’s the heart of the site.

I got email from a reader this week thanking me for SSA!, and asking what they could do for the site. Thanks for asking! I love getting email like this– it makes me feel like I’m helping people.

First off, I’ll never say no to receiving large stacks of cash. If you have a lot more money than you know what to do with, feel free to come by my loft and leave it in my mailbox. I promise to buy lots of excellent camera gear with it. :-)

Seriously, comments and questions on the entries really contribute a lot to the site. Not only do they help me feel like I’m not shouting into the void, but they also give me excellent feedback. If I know where my explanations have worked and what could be clearer I can do a better job in the future. Suggestions for topics let me know what people are interested in learning about.  Constructive criticism is welcome too, of course.  You can keep the hate mail to yourself, though.

Another great way to help is to spread the word.  Tell your friends!  Link to the site. (It goes without saying, but don’t spam.)   Stop Shooting Auto! is still a young site, and publicity is a good thing.  Getting new readers always makes me happy.

Click the links.  I actually make a very tiny amount of money from the site from Amazon product referral links.  As of this writing, I’ve made less than $50– on an hourly basis, that would make me the envy of third-world sweat shop workers.  Clearly, I’m not doing this to get rich!  However, when you buy something from a product link on the recommendation page or What’s in Patti’s camera bag?, I get a few cents from it.  That won’t make me rich, but it makes me smile.

More than anything, though, keep reading and commenting, and let me know how I’m doing.

Digital SLRs have a really cool feature that’s often overlooked by novice photographers, but is heavily-used by professionals. It’s the histogram, and it can tell you a lot about how well your image is exposed. I’ll be writing more about it soon.

This histogram came from Photoshop, but your camera should provide you with a similar though probably simpler display on the LCD.

Do you ever use the histogram? Do you know how it works? Have you even noticed that it’s there?

Stop Shooting Auto! is a set of lessons in exposure, and how to get more out of your digital SLR. Shooting in automatic mode is easier than using Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, or Manual modes, but it will often not get the shot that you have in your mind’s eye.  I want to demystify the controls on your camera in a way that’s easy to understand, without throwing around a bunch of jargon.

The best way to use this site is to go through Exposure Lessons in Order, and follow along by trying out the exercises. Feel free to skip around, if you’d rather. And please ask questions! Leave a comment if you want to know something or want to add something to what I’ve written.

I’ve seen a lot of new traffic here recently. Welcome!

If you’re new here, start with Exposure Lessons In Order to walk through the lessons in the order they were posted. Feel free to ask questions! All friendly comments are welcome.  Play along with the exercises too, since it’s more fun to learn by doing than by reading my ramblings.

My very first 35mm camera was a spiffy Kodak Pony IV that had its very own flip-down leather case. I was 11 years old, and while I thought the camera was cool it was truly mystifying to me. I couldn’t just point it at something and push the button– there were all these controls I had to set. The one that controlled the distance made perfect sense, but the shutter and aperture controls baffled my young brain. What the heck did they do?

The back of the camera had a slot where you inserted an exposure table for whatever kind of film you were using. I think I only had one table, but that seemed OK. I spent a lot of time deciding whether a shot was bright sun, hazy sun, or cloudy bright. I guessed a lot. I got surprisingly not-horrible pictures.

In my high school journalism classes I learned to use an SLR– a Pentax K1000. The Pentax was completely manual, although when it had batteries installed it had a light meter. A light meter! You could look through the viewfinder and twiddle the dials, and a little needle would go up or down to show you when you had the right exposure. I didn’t really understand what the dials were good for, but I sure knew how to put that needle in the middle of the indicator.

In my early 20s I scraped up enough money to buy a Nikon N2000. This was about the time that autofocus cameras started getting popular, but they were comparably expensive. Who needs autofocus anyway? I shot bejillions of rolls of film with this camera and the cheapest lenses I could find, and I bought books on photography so that I could understand what I was doing. I started to grok f-stops and shutter speeds and why they might matter.

In 1995, just before taking off to spend the summer in Europe, I impulse-bought my first digital camera. It was a Logitech Pixtura, which I didn’t know at the time was a rebranded Kodak DC40. I also set up a website to chronicle my travels, and the combination of the two was truly amazing. I could sit on the beach in Cannes and take pictures of my hotel, then dump them on the computer, touch them up, and send them out to the internet for my friends to view. (These days, such a site would be called a blog, though the concept didn’t exist at the time.) While the computer made life wonderful, switching to digital meant that I no longer controlled my exposures like I did with an SLR. Instead, I picked things like portrait or landscape by turning a dial to a picture of a head or a mountain, then let the camera do the work. I could always fix it up later if there was a problem– that’s what the computer was for.

I owned several digital cameras over the years, but a couple of years ago I bit the dust and bought my first dSLR– a Canon Digital Rebel XT. The Rebel did everything automagically, just like my earlier digital cameras. All I had to do was turn the dial to the mountain picture to take landscape photos, to the flower for macros, or to the portrait for people. What could be easier? For maximum laziness, I could just set the camera to fully automatic mode and let it figure everything out. Cameras are smart, and I let mine do all of the thinking for me.

When I looked at my photos they were OK, but very few seemed to be good. Was the camera junk? Was I a bad photographer? I spent a lot of money on this thing, and I wanted it to do better than it was. I thought about my old Nikon and the photos I took with it, and wondered how to get similar quality from the dSLR. Maybe film was just better than digital.

As I was drifting off to sleep one night, the answer came to me. The camera couldn’t read my mind, and it didn’t know much about what I was shooting. All it could do was look at the scene and guess what was going on, but it couldn’t know that I wanted to capture a bird in flight and it had no idea what to do with a sunset. I got out of bed, read the instruction manual from cover to cover, and took the camera out of automatic mode. With practice, my photos improved until I could occasionally get shots that I didn’t hate. I even got a few that I liked quite a lot.

My camera hasn’t been in auto mode since, and I’m much happier. My newest dSLR, a Canon 5D, doesn’t even have pictures of mountains or flowers on the dial. If I want it to be good, I have to work a little bit. I don’t mind.

Enough about me. Let’s talk about you for a minute. You bought a dSLR because you wanted to take good pictures, but you’re just using it as an overpriced point & shoot with interchangable lenses. You want to do better, but you don’t know an f-stop from a bus stop and you’re afraid you’ll get a ticket if you set your shutter speed too fast, if only you knew what too fast was.

Let’s fix that. I’ll do my best to explain the concepts in simple language, and I’ll use lots of illustrations to help make things clear. I’m not a professional and I’m not an expert– I’m basically a photography hacker who isn’t afraid to read and experiment and figure out how it all goes together. I take lots of crappy, badly-focused pictures just like you do. My birds are blurry and my highlights are blown out, and every time that happens I look at the picture and try to figure out what I could have done differently.

Together we can learn what the camera can do and why we might want to twiddle a knob a particular way. Our photos will get better, and maybe some day they’ll even get good. I only ask for one thing– promise me that you’ll take your camera out of automatic mode and keep it out.

Ready? Let’s go.