Behind the scenes, ThePhoblographer team is constantly pushing one another to be their best creative selves, and when the challenge was made to shoot only in Program mode for a month, I couldn’t resist. While I don’t dispute that Manual mode will give you far more control over your final image, I found that after a month of letting my camera determine the best exposure, I was able to refocus on making better photographs.
One of my favorite creativity tools comes from my high school and college days as a musician—Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. In it, there is a prompt that says, “Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do.” There’s a constant trope within photography circles – ‘P’ has become analogous to “amateur.” That some photographers will roast an image or fellow photographer for shooting in a mode other than Manual is easily one of the silliest arguments in photography culture today. The trope goes further to insist that if you’re not shooting in Manual mode, you either don’t understand proper exposure or simply don’t know how to make photographs.
Learning how to properly expose a photograph is crucial when we first start on our photography journey. As we grow, we often take pride in the technical understanding we develop, but sometimes, we fear the simplicity that many of our tools afford. This fear is a creative block that blinds us to the fact that composition is just as important, and at times more so, than nailing the exposure triangle. While an uninteresting photograph can be technically correct, it doesn’t stop being an uninteresting photograph.
Shooting in Program mode made me reevaluate what makes a good photograph. Sometimes, manual controls will allow you to cut corners on composition. For example, I don’t frequently shoot portraits, and this could leave me in a creative rut with a subject in front of my camera. Rather than work out a better way to photograph my subject, it’s often easier to default to shooting wide open with a large aperture lens. Instead, shooting in Program doesn’t always allow you to shoot wide open, depending on the lighting conditions. This forces you to take a few breaths and approach the shoot with new eyes.
As a street photographer, Program mode allowed me to focus on a scene rather than play with settings. A great example was a recent image I took while testing the Canon RF 20mm F1.4 VCM. I found myself on a street corner, and I knew what I wanted – two pairs of subjects intersecting on the street. The moment would take just a couple of seconds to unfold, and there’s a higher likelihood that I’d miss the moment if I were fixated on my camera’s settings. Instead, with the camera already set to Program, I pulled the camera up to my eye and waited. Done. The moment was captured, and my editor didn’t say it was a bad or unusable image.
Since June, nearly all the product images that were shot for this site were taken in Program mode. I took this challenge seriously, not out of obligation but because after a full week of shooting in P-mode, I was focused on composition in a way I hadn’t given much thought to since I was initially learning photography. By no means am I saying that Program has replaced my typical workflow, but it was a freeing experience to apply the lessons learned to both personal and professional projects.
To be a great photographer, you have to be mindful and present in the moment. You have to look at your subject without prejudices or projecting your feelings onto it. Getting wrapped up in settings and making a technically correct image can distract from the goal of creating an impactful one. My month of shooting in Program mode allowed me to reclaim this bit of mental clarity when shooting. Instead of fighting the anxieties around making perfect images, I began to accept that not every shot is a good shot and that it was far more important for me to be present in a scene – to take it all in. Understand the character of what I was looking at. Look beyond the people, the cars, the objects, and take in the feeling of the scene. Sometimes it was full of energy, like many of the shots on the streets. Sometimes, it was a Zen-like calm in going through the process of making an image. In the end, this month of shooting with an odd restriction made me rethink what makes for good imagery, and ultimately, that will make me a better photographer.