OFFAUTO

You bought a real camera. It is still on auto.

Off Auto is the first month with that camera, written down. Pick what you are photographing and it tells you exactly what to set, shows you what that looks like, and sends you outside. Twelve photographs worth learning, and no settings to fiddle with.

A portrait taken at 105 mm and f/4, the background softened but still readable.

One person, and a background that gets out of the way. Written for hazy sun.

THE SHOT
f/4 Aperture
1/1000 Shutter
100 ISO, set by the camera
The whole idea

Two decisions, and one consequence

Manual mode is usually taught as three dials to balance, which is three times more than anybody needs on their first afternoon. Put the camera in M with Auto ISO and there are two things left to decide. The third is not a decision at all.

You choose

Aperture

How much of the picture is sharp. Wide open dissolves the background; stopped down keeps the whole street in focus.

You choose

Shutter

Whether movement is frozen or smeared. A child mid-stride, or water turned to silk.

The camera chooses

ISO

What is left over once the light and your two decisions are known. It has no creative consequence, so the app lets the camera set it and tells you where it will land.

The cards

Photographs worth learning

A card is one photograph and the settings that make it. It names the light it was written for, states the lens, the aperture and the shutter, and stops there. Nothing on it can be adjusted, because a beginner handed a set of sliders learns about sliders.

A room photographed by the light already in it, at 35 mm and f/4.
One of them

Indoors, no flash

A room, the light that is already in it, and no flash.

f/4 Aperture
1/125 Shutter
1600 ISO, set by the camera

The ISO climbs to 1600 indoors and sits at 100 in sun, and that is the only thing the light changes. The two decisions stay exactly where they are.

There are twelve in all, from a football match off the touchline to a stream turned to smoke on a tripod, and each comes with its own set of photographs showing what happens when you change your mind.

What happens if I change something

Asked as a question, answered with a photograph

Under every card is a row of plain-English questions. Open the aperture. Use a longer lens. Slow the shutter down. Tap one and the picture changes to show the answer, and the card says what it cost you. Below is the same portrait at the two ends of the lens.

The same portrait at f/2, the background dissolved into soft colour.
f/2The background stops being a place and becomes colour. Two stops of depth given away to get it.
The same portrait at f/16, the background sharp and legible.
f/16Everything behind her is legible again, which is usually the opposite of what a portrait wants.
After you have been out

It reads your last shoot and says one thing

Bring the files across from the camera and Off Auto reads the settings you actually used. Not a score, not a list: one sentence about the afternoon, waiting the next time you open the app. It is as willing to tell you what went well as what did not.

Your last shoot · Sunday afternoon, 43 frames

Four were slower than your hands hold at 105 mm.

The rest were fine. Below about one over the focal length your own movement smears the whole frame rather than just the subject, so if these look soft everywhere, that is this and not your focus.

1/60 · f/4 · ISO 1600 1/40 · f/4 · ISO 1600 1/30 · f/4 · ISO 3200 1/25 · f/4 · ISO 3200

It works the light back out of the exposure, which is what lets it tell a wrong choice apart from a photograph that was never available. And it checks the lens you own first: it will not tell you to open up to f/2 on a lens that stops at f/4.

Privacy

It collects nothing, and has no way to send anything