Digital Camera World - UK (2020-03)

http://www.digitalcameraworld.com MARCH 2020 DIGITAL CAMERA^55

CAMERA COLLEGE

Manual features explained

Where should you start if you want to take more control of your photography?

Exposure settings

You can use exposure

compensation to

manually make

an image lighter

or darker, but it doesn’t guarantee

consistency. If you change the

composition, the camera may simply

automatically readjust the exposure.

For repeatable, predictable results,

Manual shooting mode (M) is the

way to go. Here, you set the thee

exposure controls – aperture,

shutter speed and ISO – yourself.

White balance

The camera’s white balance control

is designed to eliminate colour casts

caused by different sources of light.

Set to Auto, it usually gives good

results. But it can struggle under

artificial lighting, and there may be

times when you’d prefer to retain

some of the colour of the light. In

this case, you can set the white

balance manually.

Image processing

Rather than leaving

it up to the camera

to automatically

decide how much

colour saturation, contrast and sharpness

an image has, you can manually change

these settings. They may be available as

standalone menu items, or wrapped up in

presets such as Picture Control or Picture

Style, which can be selected and edited.

Focusing

As well as being able to

manually select a single AF

point and position it over the

area you want the camera to focus on, you can opt

to manually focus instead. There are a number of

focusing aids you can activate in your camera to

help make manual focusing much easier, such as

magnified Live View and Focus Peaking – both of

which are included on the Nikon Z 7 shown here.

While you can let your camera handle all

the technical aspects of taking a picture,

there are plenty of opportunities to take over

with manual overrides or full manual control

• whether that’s to correct a camera error
  or to achieve more creative results.

Flash exposures

You can take manual control over

your flash exposures by setting the

flash to Manual – although you may

need to use a hotshoe flashgun

rather than a built-in flash to do

this. The camera doesn’t have to be set to Manual

shooting mode in order to use Manual flash – you can

use it in any of the camera’s more advanced modes.