” Manual mode is the pro mode! All the other modes are for noobs!!” That’s what they say. Is there any justification for this or is it just rubbish? I have my own opinion about Manual mode and I will talk a little bit about it in this article.
Right off the bat I can say that the mode a photographer uses does not say anything about how well they can use a camera and how great a photographer they are. Period. This should already conclude the article but I like to give some arguments to my train of thoughts. First of all, I am by all means not a professional photographer but I use Aperture priority mode 95% of the time. Why? Because I am shooting in natural light conditions. I need a mode that adapts to the light available without me having to adjust 3 variables.
What a lot of people do in manual mode — aside from bragging that they use manual mode and own your noob *ss — is trying to get the meter right up the middle, which basically is what any automatic mode will attempt to do anyways except when overruled. Yes even in semi-automatic modes you can overrule the middle of the meter and in the case of Aperture priority mode you can do this by either changing the aperture (in case you need a higher or lower shutterspeed and more or less light), changing the ISO (in case you need a higher shutter speed) or the exposure compensation (in case you need to adjust the shutterspeed and the light). You can literally adjust the shutterspeed in 3 seperate ways without ever having to change the shutter speed directly. The kicker is that you don’t have to do this all the time. But you can. And this makes aperture priority mode just as manual as manual mode itself. I know when to change the variables (ISO, Aperture and shutterspeed) and I know how to do this. We call it aperture priority mode but a lot of great photographers use it just as manual as people who use manual mode.
So in short, for natural light I don’t see a lot of use for manual mode but I do see a lof ot use for it when shooting studio, concerts or with filters. The claim that semi automatic modes are for noobs while manual mode is for pros is bullocks. Case closed.