62 Part I Understanding Digital Wedding Photography Manual mode Manual mode puts you in complete control. At a wedding, manual mode is only useful when you know you'll be shooting many shots in the same place and in the same lighting conditions. Manual mode lets you find the correct exposure and stick with it. I often use this mode for shooting portraits and I always use it for group photos. If you were to use one of the automatic settings for a group shot, the camera would change the exposure every time you recompose the scene because different things will be in the center of the metering area each time. With manual mode, you don't have to worry about the camera making exposure changes. Manual mode is extremely useful for shooting at night with a flash because you are able to dial in just the right combination of ISO and shutter speed to get a pleasant amount of ambient light in the background without causing too much ghosting around the subject. As long as the light stays consistent, your camera settings can stay the same. Metering for Proper Exposures Your camera is an incredibly complex and accurate light-metering machine -- but it has one big shortcoming -- it can't think! Thinking is your job. Once you understand how your camera sees the world, you can learn to take a meter reading (using your camera) and then override that reading as necessary before you ever even shoot your first shot. Once you understand the process of how your camera sees things, you can make a fairly accurate prediction as to when it will make correct or incorrect exposures and you can dial in a change to counteract