The Magic Green Bar of Manual Mode

Ellie told me something recently that is so amazing.  She told me the secret of how to shoot photos in manual mode, and the secret is what I'm calling "the magic green bar."

So, do you want to know the secret, too? 

Of course I'll tell you.  But not until I explain what manual mode is...for those of you who may not know.  Basically, manual is a camera mode (symbolized with an "M," quite predictably) that lets you choose all of your own settings, namely shutter speed and aperture.  Those things are just a little confusing, so I'll send you over to The Pioneer Woman to learn about them.  She has a great series on what shutter speed and aperture are.

Okay, so now that you know what manual mode is, I'm almost ready to tell you about the magic green bar.  But first, before you get into shooting manual mode, you need to actually set your camera to manual mode (surprise, surprise!).  If your camera is capable of shooting manual, you can change the mode to manual on the round dial thing on the top of your camera.  If you don't have a top dial thing, chances are that you can't shoot manual.  I'm very sorry.  But assuming you can shoot manual, the next step is picking an aperture.  If you don't know what that means exactly or what aperture you want, that's okay - just pick a medium-sized number, like, say f/4.0.  If you don't know how to pick an aperture number, I'd recommend checking that handy dandy manual that came with your camera, because different cameras have different ways of picking apertures.

Okay, now that you've got your aperture number (we'll call it an f-stop because it sounds cooler), you can learn the secret of the magic green bar.  It works like this.  You look through your camera's viewfinder and hold the shutter button down halfway to focus.  Do you see some green lines and numbers and stuff in the viewfinder?  No?  Try again.  Hold the shutter button down, and look for green stuff.  Found it?  Good.

Now, for what all that green stuff means.  You should see a green horizontal bar.  Do you see that?  Along the bar (or line) are little dashes.  Do you see them, too?  Okay.  Now look underneath the horizontal line.  You should see a little upward-pointing arrow.  This one is really important.  Found the arrow?  Great.  Now what you need to do to pick the shutter speed (which makes the settings "right" to take a picture), is change the shutter speed until the green arrow is right in the middle of the green bar.  Ususally, you change the shutter speed by rotating your camera's little wheel.  If you don't know what little wheel I'm talking about, or your camera doesn't have a little wheel, you should probably check your camera's manual, since different cameras also have different ways of picking shutter speeds.

Okay, now that you've got your aperture set and your shutter speed picked using the magic green bar, all you have to do is - click - press the shutter button to take a picture! 

That sounds easy enough, right?

Well...I've got to tell you from experience that it takes practice.  I'm still practicing, and a lot of my pictures don't turn out right when I try to use manual mode.  The magic green bar is great, but it doesn't always make your pictures exactly the way you want.  Sometimes you have to play around.  Also, it's so easy to forget you're on manual mode and take a picture with the wrong settings.  I've done this before, and ended up with some pretty cosmic results.

But I'm learning, and practicing, and practicing, and practicing some more.  So hopefully it'll get to the point one day where manual will be automatic.