Canon Rebel XT manual mode?—By Rocco
In Manual mode, I set the aperture and shutter speed to anything at all, and the display always shows that the image will be very underexposed, and it always is – totally black. There seems to be no possible values for these settings that results in an actual image, regardless of lighting conditions. Is my camera broke? Is there a 3rd setting? Am I doing it wrong? I’m new to photography and I bought the camera used, so any of these could be it. Thanks!

Best Answer —By Sound Labs
I think that you need to learn about the relationship between ISO, shutter speed and aperture before you start shooting in manual mode. If you don’t understand how these three things are all connected and affect one another, you’ll just end up dialing in all kinds of values, without knowing what it all means.

Baby steps. Take the camera outside, set it in auto, take a shot with no flash. Does it look ok? Next study the settings, what ISO, shutter speed and aperture did the camera choose? If you want, go into manual mode from there, copy the settings, now make small changes to each and see what happens.

There is no one setting that’s right. For example, if your camera chose ISO 100, aperture of f8 and a shutter of 1/200th, you can get the same balance with different settings, but they all have to balance out to the same amount of light, make sense?

I’m going to make this up, but let’s say that I changed the ISO to 200, and f10 and a shutter of 1/250th might balance out and give you the same generally correct exposure. Only the f stop will give a different depth of field.

Either way, start on auto mode for your general shooting and start reading like crazy, there are too many free photography tutorials on the web that you simply can’t ignore. From there, you might move to your camera’s aperture priority mode to change your depth of field and blur your backgrounds more and make your subjects pop.

If you feel the need to go manual, you can continue learning as you try it out. Don’t get too much into the hype that real photographers only shoot in manual mode. I chit-chat with lots of photographers and a huge chunk of them shoot in aperture priority. I shoot that way with my exposure compensation at my rear wheel (I don’t think Canon has that rear thumb wheel?) and only go manual for tough shots like shooting where there’s snow.

Also, for important shots, like anything that you plan to keep, if your camera allows, shoot in RAW+Jpeg mode. Even if you don’t work with RAW now, you will at some point if you get serious about your photography. Some of my earliest dSLR shots were taken as jpegs only and I WISH I had those RAW files!

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