Cameras automatically do the wrong thing

Upper left corner: I just lost the highlights.

"It's so advanced, it's simple!"

We've heard that line before, but don't believe it. This is a ploy to convince non-photographers to buy more expensive cameras. The message is "you don't need to know anything, just press the button and the camera does the rest!" Right. So why do pro photographers often shoot in full-manual mode? It's because they know if you let the camera do it automatically, it will automatically do the *wrong thing*.

Autofocus, auto-exposure, auto-aperture, auto white balance ... all of these can ruin your photos. Only use them if you make sure the camera is doing exactly what you want.

I know what you're probable thinking: seriously, you don't trust autofocus? Let's try an example. I go out to take a landscape photo. I'm looking at a mountain with a stream. There are some nice rocks along the bank that I can use for a foreground. I want the rocks, the distant mountain, and everything in between to be sharp. I don't want to go past f/11 because diffraction will start to blur the image. I'm going to have to do some focus stacking. I manually focus on the rocks and take a shot. I take a couple in between to make sure I have the whole foreground captured. And finally I focus on the mountain at infinity. I'm not using autofocus because I know where I need the focus zones to be. While I'm shooting, I can pan around in the EVF or live view and see what's in focus and what's not.

Could I have done this with spot focus, and move the focus point around? With a DSLR, I can't move the focus point to the very bottom of the frame to get the rocks. I can with a mirrorless, and sometimes I do. In either case, I'm in control of and checking on what the camera is doing.

What if I'm shooting birds with a long, image stabilized lens? Then I'm going to use autofocus because manually focusing is too slow to capture the action. But I'm also going to take as many frames as I can because I know that some of them will be blurry.

How about auto-exposure using aperture priority mode? An obvious problem is that the camera will happily blow out the highlights, and the resulting photo is unusable. Even bracketing is no surefire solution--sometimes the sky is four stops too bright. So what do you do? You take a photo of the subject. Then to get the sky, you start spinning the exposure compensation dial--basically you're manually setting exposure. Ever used auto-exposure in snow? The snow will be gray and the trees will be black.

As for auto-white-balance, that may be the most insidious automatic setting of all. I'll cover that one in a separate post.

Fundamentally there is a problem with letting the camera do things automatically. What's in focus and what's not is a creative choice. Setting the exposure to show motion or not is a creative choice. Are you shooting low key, high key, chiaroscuro, silhouettes? You as the photographer know what kind of story, mood and composition you're trying to convey. The camera can't read your mind, and so it will do something other than what you intended.

#camera #settings #tips #automatic #photography