Why is my nikon D7000 taking black pictures on manual mode?

Question

All of a sudden my Nikon D7000 is coming out with only black pictures on manual mode. I have tried adjusting the shutter speed, iso, exc. I use manual mode all the time so I know how to have those settings correct but no matter how much I change all of them it only comes out black. When I change to auto mode the photos come out. I thought it was my lens so I tried other ones but it still won't work. Has anyone had this problem, and have you found a fix? Any advice is appreciated!

Answer 1

In a dSLR in M mode, your main guide to exposure is the light meter in your viewfinder. Because your viewfinder shows you the light in the scene, not the exposure on the sensor.

In all the automated exposure modes, the camera works hard to automatically adjust your settings to push the "needle" to "0" (where the auto-exposure systems thinks you'll get good exposure); so you may be thinking of that as your exposure compensation scale rather than a light meter. But in M mode, that needle can be anywhere on the scale, depending on how you've set your iso, aperture, and shutter speed. And that meter is telling you where the camera thinks the exposure is sitting.

If your frames are all coming out black, you're underexposing a lot, probably by -5EV, and the needle will probably be pegged all the way to the negative end of the scale (since on a D7000 it only goes to -3EV). That scale is marked out in stops (EV), btw. And you need to keep adjusting your settings until the needle heads closer to "0".

Sidenote: "0" may be close but not exactly right because metering can bias if a scene is mostly light or mostly dark, which is why we like to use M to override it, since we know what type of scene or look we're going for while all the camera can do is measure light in a scene. But if you use M mode and just set the needle to "0" all the time, you might as well use A or S modes instead: they'll do it faster. :)

In the case of underexposure, you need to adjust any of your three exposure settings to get more light: a slower shutter speed, a bigger aperture setting (smaller f-number) or higher ISO.

As I wrote above, the meter is marked off in EV, which can guide you in how much you need to adjust a setting. 1EV is a doubling/halving of the light. So with ISO and shutter speed that's doubling/halving the value. IOW, if you were -5EV and you wanted to only adjust that with ISO, you'd have to double your ISO five times (e.g., 200 to 6400) to get that. If you were doing it with shutter speed, you've have to double your shutter speed five times (e.g., 1/2000 to 1/60s). And with aperture, you'd have to go five stops on the f-number scale (e.g., f/16 to f/2.8).

Another alternative to using the meter, however, would be put to the camera into liveview and use exposure simulation so that you can see how the exposure changes as you change the exposure settings. But on a DSLR, you can only see this simulation on the back LCD of the camera, not in the viewfinder as you could with a mirrorless body.

Answer 2

Exposure is controlled by 3 variables: Aperture, Shutter-Speed and Sensitivity. When you are capturing in Auto mode, the camera sets at least two of them, Aperture and Shutter-Speed. It will also set ISO if it is set on Auto. On a Nikon camera, you will also see an ISO sensitivity set, say ISO 200, but if Auto ISO is on, the sensitivity will go up in automatic and semi-automatic modes.

When photos come out black, it is because the exposure is set significantly too low. The most common way to get an underexposed image is to have shutter-speed set too fast because shutter-speed has more range than any other parameter on most cameras. Bring it to 1/30s at least, even lower for testing and try to open up the aperture as far it it can. Under typical indoor lighting, even if the ISO is set too low, you should see something in the captured image.

Note when looking at shutter-speed in the viewfinder, usually 30 means 1/30s and 30' means 30 minutes. That would give you a completely white image in most well-lit rooms or outdoors during daylight hours.

Answer 3

is it just in M mode? Have you changed the shooting settings/movie settings/ manual movie settings to ON, recently? If so, then turn to OFF and will be back to normal