The Beginner Photography Podcast

Recipe for Perfect Photos: Mastering Manual Mode Made

• Raymond Hatfield

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#595 In today’s episode of the podcast I share a simple, recipe-inspired approach to mastering manual camera settings. You’ll understand ISO, aperture, and shutter speed from a fresh, food-themed perspective, so you can finally create photos with confidence, not confusion.

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What You’ll Learn:

  • The exposure triangle (ISO, aperture, shutter speed) controls photo brightness and artistic style.
  • Each element is connected, and changes in one require thoughtful adjustments to the others.
  • Mistakes are part of the learning process—experimenting and “tasting” your results is essential.
  • Practical, easy-to-remember ISO settings based on different lighting scenarios are provided, along with advice on aperture and shutter speed choices.

Discussion & Reflection Questions

  • How does thinking of camera settings as ingredients in a recipe affect your approach to shooting in manual?
  • Which setting (ISO, aperture, or shutter speed) do you find most challenging, and how might you experiment with adjusting it?
  • What parallels do you see between culinary mistakes and photographic errors, and how can embracing them help you improve?

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Connect with Raymond!


Thanks for listening & keep shooting!

Foreign. Welcome to the Beginner Photography Podcast. I'm your host, Raymond Hatfield. And if you tell me if you've been in this situation, if you've decided to give manual a try, but you go out and you shoot and you find that your photos are either way too dark or way too bright or just plain blurry, you've probably thought to yourself, man, I'm never going to understand this whole exposure thing. Well, today I just want to hand you the recipe that will finally make sense of it all. Okay? There's no jargon here today. There's no math. I just want to give you clear, step by step instructions so that you understand how exposure works. Okay? Now, you're not gonna have to memorize anything today, but think of this as like you're following a new recipe for the first time. All right? You're gonna see some ingredients that you recognize. Sure. Of course, there's always those staples. You're gonna see a few that you don't, and that's okay. By the end of this, my hope is that you're going to understand what each ingredient does and how they kind of work together so that you know how to adjust the recipe to your own taste. All right, I thought of this recipe idea because maybe not everybody is adventurous and goes on road trips and needs a roadmap. Like most people say. That's kind of the common thing. But everybody eats, right? Everybody eats. And whether you enjoy cooking or you don't, you've probably made food before in your life. And even if it's something simple from a box, you know, whatever, there's always step by step instructions on the back. There's always a recipe on the back of how to complete the food. So we have this basic understanding of how recipe works. Right. So when you're making food without the recipe, if you just wing it, you're literally just like throwing these ingredients together in a pot and just hoping that it's going to turn out. And that doesn't always work. When I was a kid, I remember my mom. My mom would make really good steaks. I always loved the steak that my mom could cook on the grill. But I remember one time she decided to make ribs, right? And I'm sure she thought, well, fundamentally, they're the same. It's meat. You know, you put it on a grill and they turned. She destroyed them. She ruined them. In fact, like, I'm pretty sure that she also destroyed the grill. She did such a bad job. And we ended up just going out to eat. Right. Like, she did so bad that we just went out to eat. And you can kind of do the same in photography. When you're trying this new recipe, when you're trying to learn manual mode and it doesn't work, it's very easy to just say, no, I'll just go back to auto. Like, I'll just do the easy thing here. And it's, you know, it's whatever, but I want you to become a master rib chef. Unlike my mom, I want you to be really good at photography because I know that using this camera as a tool to tell stories is something that you want to do and that everybody has the ability to do. You just gotta know the fundamentals, right? So that is exactly what we are going to do today. But first, the beginner photography podcast is brought to you by cloudspot. You know, you've heard me say this before. Moment matters most. And what matters is meant to be seen. It's meant to be shared, you know, so once you learn how to nail exposure and start creating images that you're proud of, well, that next step is sharing them with the people who matter to you. And that's where cloudspot makes life so much easier. Because with cloudspot, you can just upload your photos, deliver them beautifully to friends and family or clients, and even set up simple print sales if you want to start making a little bit of extra money with your photography. There's no confusing tech, there's no clunky downloads. It's just clean, simple, simple galleries that make your photos look as good as you intended when you press the shutter. Now, I've been using cloudspot for years because it just works, you know, which is no surprise, because cloudspot was actually created by a working wedding photographer, Gavin Wade, who I've had on the podcast multiple times before. Go ahead, search back in the episode archives, check it out. But he knows what's important to us photographers, and he built the perfect platform for us. And to prove it to you, I want to encourage you to grab your free Forever account over@deliverphotos.com. yeah, I said forever. So again, see it for yourself over@deliverphotos.com there's going to be a lot of food, stories and examples in today's episode, all right? But I want to start off with pesto. I. I love pesto. Pesto is one of my favorite foods, right? And I love pesto pasta. In fact, we just had some the other night. But no matter how good the actual pesto is, right, how fre it is, how fantastic the ingredients are, if the pasta is cooked incorrectly, then the dish, well, it's going to be memorable, but not. Not in a good way. You know what I mean? So I looked into it, and it turns out that there's a lot of science that goes into cooking pasta correctly. In fact, you. You could probably consider it an art form. So if we're talking about photography, like it's a recipe, if you've never made pasta before, at this stage, the goal is simple, right? We need to learn how to capture a photo in manual mode so that it's not too bright or too dark, right? If we're going back to the pasta example, if you overcook pasta, it turns to mush. And if you undercook pasta, you're gonna break some teeth. And I mean, really mangle up your gums, right? If you really try to, you finish that thing off. But if you cook it just right, it's. It's pretty good. It's pretty good, right? And exposure works in the same way. If your photo's too bright, if your photo's too dark, it's going to fall apart. It's just not going to work. But when you get it just right, again, it's. It's pretty great. So let's start cooking. I like that. That was pretty cool. Okay. When. When I cook any new recipe, the way that I approach it, which, by the way, I. I do enjoy cooking, so I also enjoy shooting a manual, so that I think that's why I saw a lot of these overlapping themes. But when I. When I. When I try a new recipe, I read the recipe all the way through before even starting prep for step one so that I know how it all comes together and that I don't get caught unprepared. So let's do that first with pasta. Here is how to cook pasta. Step one, you turn on your stove. That's where you choose how much heat you're going to cook with. Step two is you fill your pot with water and bring it to a boil. You don't want too little water or all the pasta won't cook. You also don't want too much, or it'll just take years to boil. Step three, you just pour in the pasta, and then you cook until it's done. That's it. Now let's take that same recipe for shooting in manual mode. Step one. Okay. Is. I mean, obviously you got to set the dial to M first, but step one is to choose your ISO. That's how much available light there is. Step two is to select Your aperture. You don't want something too large or nothing's going to be in focus. You don't want something too narrow or everything is going to be all motion blurry. And then step three is to set your shutter speed for a proper exposure. Shooting manual is just like cooking pasta. First set your flame. That's your ISO. Then you pick your pot, and finally you cook it just long enough, and that is your shutter speed. And it all depends on the first two. That's the whole recipe for exposure. Now, if you are anything like me, you get it on a basic level, right? You get it. But you want to know a little more so that when you are out shooting, you can put it into practice. What ISO should you pick? What aperture should you pick? What shutter speed is right, and which one is clearly wrong. Right? So let's break it down some more, step by step. But before we do that, I want to make this as kind of a disclaimer. Like, I want it to be very well known, right? Like, what is. What is. What is the goal? All of the settings that you choose are dependent on light. And in our food example, light is the food in the recipe. You don't cook pasta in the same way that you would cook a souffle. I've never made a souffle. But you don't take the same photos inside your home in the morning as you would if you were out in the park in the afternoon with your kids. That's why I can't just say, use X ISO, use X aperture and shutter speed, because it doesn't work like that. You know, it all depends on what it is that you're cooking. It all depends on the light. And the light is different. I mean, from minute to minute, from where I am to where you are. So what I'm doing is I'm giving you the recipe, but know that you still are going to have to adjust it to be right for you. So step one, right? Step one is your ISO in the recipe example. That's where you turn on your stove. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever cooked, I guess, eggs in particular, eggs in a pan that is just way too hot? Chicken is the same. It's. It's miserable. It's like you're fighting for your life, trying to not ruin what it is that you're cooking. You know, you turn the stove down a little bit, but then you don't want to turn it down because then it's going to stop cooking. So then you're flipping the thing constantly to Avoid burning it. I mean, it's a mess. And that is a lot like your camera's ISO. If it's too high, your other settings are going to be all off and you're going to feel like you're in a battle to get them under control. If they're too low, you're going to be thinking, why in the world is this not working? All of my photos are far too dark. So that begs the question, how do you know what ISO to set your camera at so that it's not too high, not too low? Kind of in the same way that you set your stove, you just kind of pick it. Depending on what it is that you're cooking with ISO, you pick depending on how much light is available. Now, if you're out and it's a bright and a sunny day, little to no clouds, pick an ISO between 100 and 200. That's it. If it's an overcast day, pick something between 200 and 400. If it's early evening, pick between 400 and 800. And if it's anything later or you're inside, pick between 800 and 3200. It's not. It's not a shot in the dark, right? You're not just, like, throwing something at the wall. But this also isn't a decision that requires surgical precision. Okay, There's a. There's a lot of flexibility here, especially if you're shooting digital. If you use too high of an ISO, say, for example, 1600, when it's a bright and sunny day, your other settings are going to be totally out of whack, and you're going to create unnecessarily noisy or grainy images. If your ISO is too low, you know, and you're in a dark church, you know, basement reception, well, again, all of your other settings are going to be off, so you're going to get a lot of motion blur in your images. So to get better at picking the right ISO, you do it in the same way that you get better at picking how hot your stove should be by just picking something, seeing how it works, and then adjusting next time. That's it. Okay, so this isn't brain surgery. This isn't rocket science. You're not, you know, the world, the weight of the world is not on your shoulders here. We're just taking some photos, so pick something. All right, Step number two in the recipe is for your aperture. So now that the flame is on, we gotta pick our pot. When you're cooking pasta, you know, pasta is Actually pretty interesting because if, if you cook pasta in too small of a pot, what's gonna happen is you're gonna get clumpy, sticky and unevenly cooked pasta, which sounds absolutely delicious, right? But that is because the starch that is released from the pasta into the limited amount of water will actually saturate the water and cause the pasta to clump together and the water temperature will then significantly drop, preventing it from returning to a boil. However, if you use too large of a pot, you will unnecessarily waste heat and it will take forever to get it boiling. The right ratio is to aim for about four to six quarts of water per pound of pasta. Aperture is like the size of the pot that you're cooking with. If you have a big pot and you fill it with water, an appropriate amount of water, then the pasta is going to cook, you know, appropriately. But if your pot is too big when you don't need it, like if you're shooting wide open, F 1.8 on a very bright day, well, things are going to spill over and it's going to get messy. If you're using too small of a pot, say an aperture of f 16 when you're just indoors, that's going to restrict how much water you can use. That's going to be slower cooking. You're going to have, you're going to have the chunky, sticky pasta. No bueno. In photography, that means that less light is coming in, which is helpful on bright days. But again, if you're trying to shoot in a low light situation, it's not going to work out. The choice of your pot also changes the feel of the dish. A wide open aperture, again, say F2.8, can give you that nice blurry background like a pasta dish where like that one ingredient pops. I don't know if you knew this, but like, you know, like black truffles, it's like highly sought after. And like very high end restaurants, literally like the, the recipe for black truffle pasta is just boiled pasta butter and then black truffles. That's it. They want the pasta to be as bland as possible so that the one ingredient, black truffles, pop. That's like having a wide aperture. Your subject is in focus, but the background is out of focus. Having a narrow aperture, say f16, where everything in focus is like a big stew, where every element, every ingredient is going to be visible. It's, it's in the forefront. There's nothing, you're not hiding anything here. So pick, pick the right pot. Size. And that brings us to step number three, which is shutter speed. Finally, it is time to cook the pasta itself. How long do we cook our pasta? Well, how long we cook our pasta is actually predicated on the first two choices. How hot the stove is and how much water we're, you know, we have in the pot. Shutter speed is like how long you leave the noodles in the pot while it's boiling. If you leave them in too long again, they turn to mush. Gross. If you're, if your shutter speed is too slow, then the motion that you're capturing is blurry and your photo becomes overexposed. You're going to lose a lot of details in your, in your shot. If you take the pasta out too quickly and it's undercooked, hard, crunchy, not enjoyable. Is like if, if your shutter speed is too fast, you get a photo where everything's frozen, but maybe it feels too stiff and your photo is going to be underexposed, it's going to be too dark. The sweet spot. Al dente pasta is like the perfect shutter speed. Just, just the right balance to capture motion the way that you want it. Like, sometimes you want soft noodles, right? Motion blur for waterfalls. Sometimes you want more firm pasta, like, I don't know, rotini, right? That's like frozen action in, in sports. And the only way that we're gonna get better at this is, is picking something, trying it, and then adjusting, trying it again based on our preferences. If there was too much salt, use less salt next time. If the pasta's a little too mushy, well, cook it a little slower next time. Now here's where the whole recipe really comes together. ISO, aperture and shutter speed, they all do the same thing. They change how bright or dark your photo turns out. But just like cooking pasta, it's how they do it that makes all the difference. Think about it. You can crank up the flame under your pot. That's ISO. Or you can use a bigger pot with more water. That's aperture. Or you can simply just cook the pasta longer. And that shutter speed, all three will get your noodles soft enough to eat, but each one changes the final dish in its own way. If you turn up the flame too high, you're going to end up with bland flavor, right? You're going to get a grainy photo. If you use too small or too big of a pot, well, then the texture changes. It sticky, it clumps up. Or you have a well balanced dish, right? That's depth of field. If you leave it cooking too long, well, then you get mushy pasta, and it falls apart. That's like motion blur. The trick here in the Beauty is learning how to balance all three of those so that you get perfectly cooked pasta. And in photography terms, that's nailing your exposure. So when you're shooting, if your photo is too bright, well, you can lower the heat, right? That's turned down your ISO. You can shrink the size of the pot. That's a smaller aperture. Or you can cook it for a little less time. That's a faster shutter speed. Is your photo too dark? Well, then add some more heat, turn up that ISO, grab a bigger pot, open up your aperture, or give it a little bit more time. That's a slower shutter speed. And if your photo is blurry, right, you have motion blur. It's not out of focus, but it's motion blur. Then all you got to do is just. You got to pull out that pasta a little bit quicker. So use a faster shutter speed. That's it. Now, here's the thing that you need to realize. There's no single right recipe. If. If you were to Google I don't know, chicken salad recipe, right now, you're gonna find 49,000 million recipes in Google, right? And they're all gonna be a little bit different. And that's because it depends on what you want in the final dish or your photo. Some people love pasta that's a little more firm and al dente, right? That's sports photos, crisp and sharp. Others like softer, you know, long exposures, dreamy blur to their images. The exposure triangle is. It's a recipe card. It tells you how to combine the heat, the pot size, and the time to get the taste that you're after. But with any recipe, there's always some room for your own interpretation to put your own spin on it. In fact, some of my favorite recipes that I go to every single year, you know, say, Thanksgiving time or, you know, summertime, I save them. But I know that there's always something that I change about the recipe to make it more appropriate for me. That doesn't mean that the original recipe is bad. It just means I like it a little bit more this way. So let's go back over the common issues that you may face within your images and how to fix them, because I want to make sure that they didn't get too mixed up with the recipe. Example, if your photo is too bright or too dark, then the fix is usually it's one small adjustment, right? Like, you're usually pretty close to what you want. If your photo is too dark, you got to raise your ISO, you got to open up your aperture, or you have to slow down your shutter speed, that those are the only three options. There's nothing else you can do. If your photo is too bright, well, we do the opposite. We can lower our ISO, we can close down our aperture, or we can speed up our shutter speed, and that's it. If your photo is too blurry, again from motion blur, there's a kid like, you know, looks like it's stretched out across your. Your image, that's only shutter speed. It means that it's too slow, so you need to speed it up. If your photo is too noisy or too grainy, that only comes from having your ISO too high. None of the other settings. So just bring your ISO down and then bring up one or both of your other settings to. To compensate. If you're. You're just standing there looking at a photo that you just took on the back of your camera and, and you're thinking and you're overthinking, you know, what do you do next then? Well, you're in your head, and photography needs to be a little bit more fluid. So just change up something and take the shot right. Again, this is not brain surgery. Worst case, guess what? Nobody sees the photo that you're about to take. That's it. Worst case. In brain surgery, stakes are a whole lot higher. So if you're overthinking it, just change something and take the shot. So now you've got the recipe. You know the three ingredients, ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. And you know how each one changes the final flavor of your dish. But here's the most important thing to know. Knowing the recipe isn't the same as cooking a full meal, right? I mean, anybody can boil pasta, but what about seasoning it? But what about seasoning it? What about pairing it with the right sauce, plating it so that it looks delicious? Well, that's more than what I can get into, obviously, in just one episode here. And that's where my ultimate photography education bundle comes in. Think of this episode like a recipe card. The ultimate photography education bundle is like having the chef right there in the kitchen with you, guiding you step by step. In one afternoon, you're going to walk through shooting manual so that it finally clicks. That's cooking the pasta, right? Then you'll learn how to see the light. That's picking the right sauce to make the dish shine. You'll dive into composition. That's how you played it. And Present it beautifully, and finally, you're going to dive into editing in lightroom. That's kind of the sprinkle, the finishing touches, the fresh basil, the parmesan on top of that delicious plate of pasta. So whether you're cooking for just your family or you're inviting friends over for dinner, or maybe you're even dreaming about opening up a little restaurant of your own someday, the ultimate photography education bundle is going to give you the confidence and the skills to do it step by step. So if you don't just want to boil pasta, but you actually want to make beautiful and delicious meal, head over to beginnerphotopod.com bundle to get started today. And just so that we're on the same page and that there's no confusion, it's not a cooking course. It's everything. You need to go from being confused behind the camera to creating images with confidence. Right? We're not actually cooking pasta in the. In the bundle. You're smart. I figured that you probably get that, but I just. I just want to make that very clear. It's not a cooking class. Again, check it out. Beginnerphotopod.com forward/ bundle and it's on sale, so check it out. And there you go. Today you got the recipe for shooting in manual. I gave it to you. There you go. Enjoy. Welcome. I hope that it helps. ISO is your flame, aperture is your pot, and shutter speed is the cooking time. You put them together. And finally, you're going to cook up photos that aren't too bright. They're not too dark or too blurry. And remember, this is. This is just the start of your journey. You know, don't. Don't feel like you have to master the entire menu all at once this week. Just boil some pasta, ISO aperture, shutter speed, and then practice taste as you go. That's how you get better. Don't feel discouraged if it needs a little bit more salt or cooked a little bit longer. That's a natural part of the journey. So look at it that way. Don't feel like you're messing up or you can't figure this out. You can't do it. Don't do takeout. Don't go back to take out. This is a natural part of the journey. And if you do try it, I would love for you to share some of your photos in the beginner photography podcast community. I'd love to see what you've been cooking up, whether it's photos of your kids at the park or actually photos of pasta. I'm up for it. And if you're not a part of the community already, it's free to join. Safest place on the Internet for new photographers like yourself. Come join us@bounnerphotopod.com group. That's all that I got for you today. Until next time. Remember, the more that you shoot today, the better of a photographer you will be tomorrow. Talk soon. Thank you for listening to the Beginner Photography podcast. Keep shooting and we'll see you next week.