I’ve taken many photographs up on Hampstead Heath and so, to shake things up a bit, I set the camera to ‘M’ and see what I could do. The first couple of pictures that I took were heavily overexposed and as a result I tended to over-compensate, under-exposing the majority of the photos.

Going in on full manual was like shooting blind. I had no idea what I was doing and so in order to give myself a fighting chance I gave myself the following rule.

Pick the highest f-stop (smallest aperture) possible and then adjust the shutter speed until the picture is correctly exposed.

I’ve no idea how I arrived at this rule, but it turns out that having the highest possible f-stop isn’t necessarily the best approach (wikipedia). Nevertheless, I intend to do this more often until I manage to instinctively pick levels that are close to what I want.

Next time though, I’ll remember to set the camera back to shooting in RAW. When shooting in full manual, I’d forgotten about the white balance and so many of my JPEGs have a blueish tint to them.

The full set of pictures can be viewed on flickr (Experiments in manual photography) but the highlight of the set is the photo below.