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Question from Amy: “I just recently started shooting in Manual and I love it; however, it seems my photos have a lot of noise now. They are not as clear. What am I doing wrong? Any help is greatly appreciated!”
Katherine: Do you have a high iso?
Ronald: Maybe your ISO is so high. If you take pictures with good light condition (sunny day) your ISO must be the lowest one, maybe ISO 100
Tommy: ISO, check it
Stacy: and blurriness is probably to do with not moving your focal point to where it needs to be… don’t just leave it in auto or it’ll just grab the focal point closest to the camera… move it around! 🙂
Jaye: High ISO and incorrect exposure can result in lots of noise in images.
Dexter: Set your ISO to the lowest number (i.e 100,200,400-800)
Cheryl: I rarely come out of Iso 100 ….. Only if I have to
Colleen: where have you set your ISO? In Auto it might have been picking it for you…in manual, you have to set it….sounds like it’s set too high….
Steven: Sounds like your ISO is too high. A quick refresher on the exposure triangle: Your aperture (f number) controls your depth of field and how much light is let in – the lower the number, the wider the aperture, the shallower the DOF, and more light. Your shutter speed is how long it takes the photo. Rule of thumb is to go no slower than 1/current focal length to keep motion blur from the camera in check. For crop cameras, make it no slower than 1/(1.6 * focal length). I usually just use 1/(2*length) as I don’t want to do math. 😛 . Finally the ISO controls how sensitive the sensor is – a low ISO as people mentioned above results in little noise, whereas high ISO makes things noisy (which you can remove SOME of in post processing). Take a couple of shots and see how high you can go on ISO before it starts looking ugly. Find a good balance of the three in your photo and know your camera like the back of your hand so you can change any of the settings on the fly. Manual mode is a bit overwhelming at first, but you get used to it after a while. Good luck!
Damian: Yep, the good thing about manual mode is that you set everything yourself. The bad thing about manual is, you set everything yourself! ISO is the only thing that will give you noise and like the others said, it is probably set too high. Depending on how new your camera is, you can probably come up to 400 or even 800 without viable noise of you really had to. I only really go as low as 80 or 100 if it’s extremely bright outside.
Tom: Shooting outdoors in daylight, your max ISO should be 100-200.
Bobbi-Alan: My “ah ha” moment for shooting in manual was getting proper shutter speed. I rarely shoot under 1/200, usually around 1/250. I shoot kids and families mostly!
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