'Manual' mode

I just want to announce to God-knows-who:

I have, and am learning, how to use the 'Manual' mode!

All along, 'Manual' mode is a mystery to me. Why should I be using M mode when Aperture-priority, Shutter-priority, P, Auto, and all the pre-set modes ie. Portrait, Landscape, Nightscene are just as good, if not better, in helping me to capture the images?

And I always suck at using the M mode. It's always too dark, too bright, too blurry. Never a great picture. However, I continue to endeavour in using the Aperture-priority mode so that I don't degenerate into using the P or Portrait modes all the time. I'm a firm believer of difficult or impossible to unlearn what you have learnt, especially the wrong methods, so I try very hard to improve instead of deprove most of the time, except when it comes to Maths, and maybe Science.

I was in Malaysia the few days before and I was shooting my hometown all over.

Some shots came out too dark or too bright when I used Aperture-priority mode. At one point, I decided to change to M mode so that I could adjust the shutter speed to 'control' (can you imagine me using the word 'control' camera-wise?) the amount of light coming in. And it worked well. From there, I try to remember that if my shutter speed is too high or too fast when shooting a still object or posed picture eg. 1/100, I'll get dark picture. If I want a less exposed picture (the sun is too bright), I need to up the shutter speed so that less light can come in.

It's a small kind of 'awakening' for me where camera and photography is concerned. I've always read that shutter speed has to do with the letting of light in, but somehow, I couldn't digest it. Now I am starting to understand.

Wow, as I reflected on all these, I feel that I've come a long way in learning about how the camera works. I still have loads to learn and these are just peanuts, but I'm just very glad that my camera did not become a white elephant like I had first worried that it might.