M is for Manual

I've always been very intimidated by the manual option on my camera.  Goodness, it took me almost two years of owning my camera before I fooled around with any of the other options besides auto or auto-no flash!  But for the past 4 months or so I've been shooting on Aperture-Priority, which is a perfectly respectable place to be. And I've been fiddling with that setting often too, often trying to over or under expose my photographs, depending on the situation. Two weeks ago I picked up a copy of Bryan Petterson's Understanding Exposure and while there are some very basic concepts in there that I have understood for awhile there are also some excellent tips and technique suggestions in there as well. For example, he suggests setting the  White Balance to "cloudy" on most days and improving the color saturation on the camera. So far, this has worked well but I have been messing around the white balance options a lot more too.  The book has strongly encourages photographers to get in manual mode and so I tried it and I cringed at some of my photographs but others looked, well, surprisingly ok!

This photo was taken in manual mode and is SOOC.   I think I'll venture more into this manual mode a bit more and we'll see where that goes. Like anything I try, there will be horrible shots and good shots....practice makes perfect!