Dust off that fancy ass camera of yours, switch the dial from Auto to “M” – manual mode and let’s get uncomfortable.

If you are anything like me, when you aren’t good at something right away, you feel defeated. Maybe you just want to give up, put your camera down and pull your phone out of your back pocket. Well listen my friend, it honestly isn’t that hard. What is hard, is getting over that feeling of discomfort and continuing to practice.

What I did to practice shooting in manual mode

Do you know what I used to do when I was practicing using manual mode? I took my favourite teddy bear, Tommy (he was a monkey actually), and placed him all over my house and outside. Each room in my house had a different lighting situation. This forced me to figure out what settings I had to change in order to get a nicely exposed photo.

During that time, I had gone through some youtube videos to teach myself what each setting meant and did and then wrote on flash cards. “Need more light change XYZ”, “Need it to be darker, change XYZ”. I kept these in my camera bag so that when I got stuck, I could reference these to help myself out.

This is why I created a FREE cheat sheet for you to download, print, and keep in your camera bag. It will help you figure out what to change if you need your photo to be brighter or darker.

Click here if you would like access to this awesome FREEBIE that so many people have found helpful 🙂

Now go grab my cheat sheet, start practicing and bring your camera with you everywhere. Your adventure awaits!

P.S.
If you want some tips on “How to Hold Your Camera”, check out my post here.