 Is your camera your master or your slave? How's it? Welcome back to the five minute photo school. Cameras come in all shapes and sizes and they all have these amazing technological marvels within them that allow us to not worry about exposures and all that sort of stuff, to simply concentrate on the creative process of taking a photograph. And because of that temptation, many novice photographers are putting themselves at a disservice when it comes to creating amazing photos. In our first year of photo school, in addition to photographing exclusively in black and white because it would help us with mastering exposure and that's a little sort of a spoiler for next week's episode, we were also expected to make manual exposures. Not because it was hair pull because all the cool kids do it or some random YouTuber said, if you don't shoot on manual, then you are not a professional. Then, you know, we just kind of were told the reason that you do this rather than shutter priority or aperture priority is because you need to understand how these things work. You need to master the basics before you let a camera and a piece of software make a decision, an aesthetic creative decision for you. Your homework assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to photograph exclusively on manual to figure out the exposures by yourself. Now, there are a couple of ways of doing this. You can use the metering system that's built into your camera. If you want, if you've got spot metering and we'll again, we'll touch on this in next week's episode, or you can invest in a fairly cheap light meter and I'll link to the one that I use in the description box below. Or if you really don't want to spend any money, and I think most people don't want to spend any money at all, you can use what's called the Sunny F16 rule, which we will discuss in a little bit more depth in next week's episode. But suffice to say, this was the greatest piece of free because it used to come inside every film box, gear that was ever given away in photography. So we went off, we used our light meters and our little Minolta Fs and gray cards and all these kind of things, and spent a year working out and dialing in exposures. And yes, of course, because this was film, we didn't know until you, you know, you developed the film, we made mistakes, we made errors. That's the point though. But the payoff is that when you understand how to create manual exposures, how to photograph on the magic M dial, it's not because you are becoming some sort of uber hip, you know, photographer, it's because you are getting to grips with the basics of the craft. And when you understand those basics, then you can understand how to use aperture priority, how to use shutter priority in a way that feels seamless, that you are in control of the camera, not the camera being in control of you. When the camera is in control of you and you don't understand manual exposure, you get frustrated. And a frustrated photographer never takes a great picture. It is going to be tricky. It is going to be difficult. You will make mistakes. But remember, from the previous episode, mistakes are okay. They are part of the learning process. These five minute photo school lessons are weekly. I put them all together in a playlist, which you can find over here if you are new to the channel. Thank you ever so much for watching and I will see you again next week.