Gadgetory

hello - I'm Gary Sims from Andrew authority now you've probably used your smartphone quite a lot for taking photos you probably just get out of your pocket and you point and shoot it takes a photo and it's all done automatically what's interesting though is that a lot of smartphones now include a manual mode on the camera particularly at the high end so the question before stays how do you take a picture using manual mode on your smartphone well let me explain now finding manual mode is different on every camera on some cameras tucked away amongst the other modes like time-lapse & panorama and slo-mo and there'll be one mode they're called either professional mode or manual mode you just tap on that mode an extra set of controls will appear on the screen on some cameras it's actually always on the screen just hidden away just a slide up or slide to the side and these extra controls will appear when you slide them away again everything will go back to being on automatic now to understand how to take a picture with manual mode you need to understand what these controls do now the first control to talk about is called metering mode now taking a photo is all about light how much light is coming into the sensor now obviously if you're outdoors in bright sunlight or if you're indoors in a restaurant there is a difference to amount of light that's coming into the sensor and so the camera has to measure that amount of light and that's called metering the metering mode now the standard metering mode is called matrix metering where the whole frame is used and the average light is taken across the whole frame has an amount of light coming into the camera from this if you have a bright source like a a light from on the ceiling or the sun shining in and it's inside the frame that can actually distort the amount of light that the camera thinks is coming in so therefore you have an option to pick different types of metering mode and one of them is called your spot metering where you just literally it just said one spot the center spot is where it's going to measure the light and that's useful when you want to exclude bright light sources from other areas of the frame even better is what's called center where it's not just a scent of spot but actually just the stuff in the middle maybe for taking the port trait using a photo of something just the light that's available on that thing that you're taking and my favorite is tap metering we were actually able to tap on your touch screen and you say to the phone where I've tapped that's where I want you to measure the light source and that's good for tapping on someone or something in a photo that's not quite in the center maybe you're taking antistick short and you want the light on someone's portrait to the left but you want to capture something else in the rest of the frame or for bringing out the detail is something that's maybe in a part of the shade now the next thing you should play around with is the shutter speed now back in the days or film there was and today with a DSLR camera there's actually a physical shutter that would open up for a fraction of a second let the light in and then close down again and how long that shutter is open depends on how much light can go in now on a smartphone there's not an actual shutter it's done using the same thing activated for a fraction of a second and then dis activated so it's on and then off and how long it on for is how much light is coming into the photo now with as far shutter speed you can capture action really really well as if you're capturing sports a football we're capturing a racing car or you're capturing it's a you know a child doing something interesting or a dog shaking water off itself then having a far shutter speed means that you capped you free as a moment perfectly with clarity in just a fraction of a second at the other end you have a slow shutter speed which means the shutter speed is open for a long time and that will actually add some different effects example it might add some blur so I'm going to running with a football or a car is going par you can actually get that sense of motion by including a slight bit of motion blur with it it's also good at night times you want to take pictures of car taillights as they're going down the road you can leave the shutter open for a longer period of time and get those red streaks and to capture some artistic photos like that it's also good with water if you want to take water coming over a waterfall and use a slow shutter speed you get a silky effect of the water and it kind of adds that motion blur to the wall cascading over the edge now the problem with shutter speed is when you go for slow shutter speed you also introduced the problem camera shake no matter how how they do you think you're holding your mobile phone you are actually slightly moving it and all that motion of you moving actioning it items those not the motion of the subject moving but your movement and that makes the whole thing become blurry so if you're using slow shutter speeds you really do need to use a tripod now the companion of shutter speed is the ISO speed now back in the old days when it was actual film the film actually had to have a rating to say how quickly it reacts to light now there were various different standards over the years from different manufacturers in the end the international standards organization ISO actually came up with a scale to say how fast film reacts and the scale is logarithmic so iso 200 is twice as part of iso 100 iso 400 is twice as fast as 200 800 times 400 and so on now we've used that same idea even into digital photography and it basically tells you how sensitive the sensor is going to be to capturing the light now the problem with high ISO numbers is is it they issues a lot of noise because the sense of trying really hard to capture that light very very quickly it sometimes doesn't do it very well and it introduced specs and and it's a very noisy picture is not a uniform color on the picture so in general for good quality you need lower ISO speed but of course light is the key here you can't use a low ISO speed inside of a restaurant or in indoor photo there are a few other things you can play with one of these white balance or white light sources have an amount of different colors in them white accords made up of a combination of all the colors if you're looking at something like candle light that's got that red warm glow to it if you're looking at something maybe like a flash from the camera that has maybe a much brighter harsher light to it and a salon sunlight of course is there in the middle and white balance tries to compensate so the white still look good so by in a dark candle lit red kind of environment the camera might I tend to blue to the white to kinda balance them out and that's the white balance and you can basically non-auto the camera measure the amount of white and kind of has a guess of what's going on or you can set it to cloudy flash tungsten candle light and the camera will kind of add in its own kind of tint to compensate for that from some third-party camera apps you can also set the white balance so you point there both the camera act at a white sheet of paper in the lighting conditions you say that is white and the camera will compensate so that white looks bright white in that particular environment now how quickly you play with one is manual focus you can actually sort of control the focus like you would on the manual focus ring on a camera I found that quite difficult to use I still find either using touch focusing or automatic focusing better but it's there if you really want to persevere to take a particular type of shot and the other thing exposure compensation basically rather than having to fiddle with the shutter speed and with the ISO speed you can just say I'd like this to be double the exposure or half the exposure and use the evey number minus 1 or plus 1 minus 2 plus 2 which gives you double each time the amount of exposure or less exposure and you can actually use that for doing your own manual HDR photography you can take one at - Evi one one at 0 1 + E V and therefore you get these three two exposures dark in the middle and bright light and then you can combine them into get together in software on your desktop there's very different applications that you can download and that will combine them together to give you manual HDR in fact some third-party camera apps will do any bracketing which means automatically it will take three photos or even five photos at different exposure settings when you take those afterward and you combine them together on your desktop to give you that that HDR manual HDR mode so what's my advice for taking a shot in manual mode basically don't do everything on manual leave most things on automatic and then play with one of the controls the first one you want to play with is shutter speed and see what different effects you get by using a far shutter speed and by using a slow shutter speed you might also they want to play around with the white balance and of course if you're into doing manual HDR you can play with the exposure compensation but if you want to do all of them then really go and buy yourself a digital SLR camera because that's really the best way to do that but on your smartphone playing around one of those controls can actually give you some interesting results I'm going to inframan your authority I hope you enjoyed this video please go tell me in the comment if you ever use manual mode are you going to try and use manual mode and have you had any success with it please do subscribe to handle authorities YouTube channel follow me on Twitter and last but not least duo go over to Angela for calm because we are your source for these Android