Color experiments continued

You've already received some advice on camera settings, but I'll add this: Shooting full manual is fine if you are experienced enough to know exactly what you are doing. In most cases, shooting with one of the "priority" modes is fine as long as you know which is best suited to the subject you're trying to capture.

Aperture Priority is the one you should be trying to master as the lens aperture most directly affects the way you final image will look and how your subject is rendered in relation to its surroundings. If you want to isolate the subject and blur the foreground and background, choose a low ƒ-number (wide opening). If you everything in the scene to be in relatively sharp focus (for instance, an interior design or architecture), choose a high ƒ-number (small lens opening). You can use the camera's Exposure Compensation (usually a "+/-" button) to increase or decrease the metered exposure values, which will indirectly affect the other camera settings.

There are times when your subject's movement dictates the shutter speed and you will probably not want to leave that setting to the camera's discretion. In those cases, use Shutter Priority to directly adjust the shutter duration and allow the camera to set your aperture. Again, you can use exposure compensation to adjust the overall exposure, but you retain control of just how much or how little motion blur is in your shot.

A note on shutter speed and lens stabilization: If you want to pan the lens with the subject and you choose a relatively long shutter duration to blur the background while retaining sharpness in the subject, you need to assure that whatever stabilization system you're using is either turned off, or that it will automatically turn itself off if it detects an intentional camera movement. Some lenses can do this and when they recognize what appears to be a sweeping, intentional movement by the camera user, the system will turn off or maybe even dampen only movement perpendicular to what it thinks is the user's intent.

Let's say you want these deer to be nice and sharp while the background is horizontally blurred to show the speed of the animals across the field. Maybe set the shutter speed to 1/80 second and pan your lens left-to-right as the deer move, keeping them as close to motionless in your viewfinder as you can. (Depending on your camera, you may experience mirror blackout as you do this, so it will take some practice to get past the jarring sensation of the viewfinder blanking as you pan.) If you have stabilization turned on, it may attempt to counter your panning effort and you'll end up with a rock solid background and blurry deer.

Shooting a backlit subject like this can be difficult for any autofocus system, so you'll need to check your focus point to make sure it is on the subject and not some other part of the scene. If you are once again relying on the camera to do most of the work by using a zone autofocus, it may be trying to focus the lens on something other that what you want. Choose a single point autofocus and use the controls to move that point to where your subject is in the viewfinder. Or, if you have the time to set up properly, use just the center focus point to set focus on your subject before re-composing the viewfinder for the final exposure. (Usually accomplished with a half-press of the shutter release.)

I hope I didn't dumb it down too much for you. I don't know your level of experience and want to make sure you understand what I'm trying to say.