Let (within reason) the camera do the work!

or…
getting the most out of automation, part 1

When reading reviews of new cameras, the reviewers generally take the availability of manual settings, or, failing that, the degree to which the user can control otherwise automated functions as an indication of how suited the camera is for advanced or even professional use. The assumption seems to be that any serious photographer is going to want, at least from time to time, to take direct control over the photographic process: kind of like the pilot of a 747 taking the plane off auto-pilot in the middle of a storm, or for a tricky landing, or in any situation where he doubts the ability of the automation to handle the unusual demands of the situation.

People are sometimes shocked when I tell them that I never take the camera off automatic (well, to be honest I keep it on program all the time…which is slightly different than auto…read on). I don’t even use aperture preferred or shutter preferred. I seldom use any of the scene-specific programs. I don’t use advanced features like individual program modes. I am not sure I could find the white balance controls on the camera I’m using now. I haven’t taken any digital camera I have ever owned off auto-focus, ever.

I am, pretty much, a point and shoot guy all the way. The image above was taken on unadjusted Program…and it is about as difficult an exposure problem as you are every likely to face.

Does that make me a bad photographer? Does that make me less of a real photographer than the guy or girl who is always fussing with the settings, and who considers auto as the sole resort of the weak minded, the lazy, and the totally clueless?

It is not like I don’t understand how to use the manual settings. If you take a look at The Technology Odyssey, you will see that I have paid my dues. I am a card carrying member of the do-it-the-hard- way photography guild, because, when I was learning photography, the hard-way was the only way to do anything. I cut my teeth on the sunny 16 rule and carried a hand-held exposure meter…two meters in fact…one standard reflective/incidence and a spot meter. I studied Ansel Adam’s Zone system. My first SLRs had match-needle metering. When auto-focus came out, I was among the many serious photographers who swore it would never do for serious work…passing fad! no future!

So, what am I doing these days, extolling the virtues of P&S?

Perhaps it is because I do understand the advantages (and the limits) of manual control of the photographic process that I have become such a staunch convert to automation. The fact is, eight years of working with digital cameras…eight years of looking at the results, of studying the images these cameras produce…has convinced me that, in 90% of situations, when it comes to exposure, the camera is smarter than I am. More…in something close to 90% of the remaining situations where manual control might have produced a better image, five minutes in Photoshop or Lightroom, in the comfort of my office, will do the same thing. That doesn’t leave much room for me to better the exposure automation.

I can still remember my very first day of using a digital camera. I was teaching at the time and it happened that the day the camera arrived we were going on a field trip to a local college. While there I took pictures of the kids in all kinds of situations…including inside the athletic complex. The pool was housed in a large open well in the building, two stories high, with a balcony around the second story and a huge skylight for a ceiling. Under the balcony there were florescent lights, and they had incandescent spots on the pool itself. The kids were on the balcony. I happily snapped away, knowing that I probably wasn’t getting anything good. I mean, three different light sources, bright light over pool and the kids semi-shadowed by the balcony overhang…what chance?

When I got home and put the images up on the computer I was simply amazed. The camera had balanced all those light sources perfectly, read the lights and shadows better than I could, and produced very good images…from a technical standpoint, excellent images. That made an impression on me that has not faded, and that has been confirmed again and again in the field.

I’ve even experimented with bracketing (shooting images that are intentionally over or under exposed on either side of the image as the camera would have exposed it…some cameras can be set to do this automatically for tricky exposure situations). In my case I was experimenting with HDR, a process where you take three or more exposures of an scene and combine them in software to produce an image with a much higher contrast range, in theory, than you can get from a single image. It works, for instance, when you have a spectacular sky over an equally spectacular landscape…any exposure the camera will make will either blow out the sky (make it so light it looses all detail) or leave the landscape way too dark. In theory, if you take an exposure for the sky, and a separate exposure for the landscape, you could then combine the sky from one with the landscape from the other and get something much closer to what you experience when actually looking at the scene. HDR software simply automates the process, and performs a much more subtle blending…balancing shadow and highlights in every area of the image.

The thing is, so far I have not been able to create an image that looks any more natural than the center (correct according to the camera) exposure of the three…especially if I do a bit of postprocessing magic with Lightroom, using the recover tool to bring out detail in the sky on the center exposure.

This indicates to me that the exposure system in the camera is already doing about as good a job as possible balancing the light and dark areas of the scene. I do have my own tricks for particularly tricky scenes. See part two.

Back in my early days of working with digital P&S I did occasionally come back with images that were mis-focused. The auto focus locked on something else in the scene…not what I was looking at. It took a few missed opportunities for me to realize that you have to pay attention to those little indicators that tell you what the focus program has selected to focus on, and, if it isn’t what you want it focused on, you had better give it another chance. That means pushing the shutter release down only half way and letting the camera achieve focus…always…every time! It means paying attention to the little blinking light that tells you the camera has not achieved focus. It means paying attention.

These days, if an image is mis-focused, I don’t blame the camera. I just forgot to pay attention.

Which brings us to the difference between Auto and Program. Almost all P&S cameras have both an Auto and a Program setting. Auto is really what it says. The camera does everything. It selects the exposure mode. It sets the exposure. It selects the focus mode. It sets the focus. I can only assume it is also selecting white-balance and sharpening and color space and all the other things that can be set on a digital camera. The difficulty is that it does not tell you what it is doing. It just does it.

Now that I don’t like. (It drives me crazy when the hard-drive of my computer spins and I don’t know what it is doing. That is just the type of guy I am.) I like to know. I may not make a single change to what the camera chooses, but I want to know.

Program is Auto with control. The camera still makes all the decisions, but in Program it tells you what it is doing…and…you have several options to adjust things within the range of the program. This I like.

Many cameras will allow you to shift the program…that is, to change the balance between shutter speed and aperture…while still maintaining the selected exposure. Many cameras will allow you to choose between wide-area, multi-spot exposure metering (sometimes called average metering), center weighted metering (average metering with more consideration given to the center of the frame where the subject is likely to be), and spot metering (which meters only on a spot in the center of the frame…sometimes you can even move the spot around in the frame, and you can certainly move the whole frame to put what you want metered under the spot. But that’s one of those tricky techniques. Read on.) Many P&S give you the choice between wide-area-multi-spot focus, center focus, and spot focus (similar to the exposure options but controlling, obviously, where the camera focuses). All P&Ss allow you to change the ISO setting in Program mode, which is another way of controlling both shutter speed and aperture. Most allow you to override the selected exposure by a factor of 2 in either direction (over or under exposure) using the EV control.

And all of this without leaving Program mode. All of this while still letting the camera do the hard work of determining correct exposure and focus. You might call Program controlled automation. Combine it with some old tricks of framing from the do-it-the-hard-way days, and you are well on your way to getting the most out of automation, by letting the camera do the work. Within reason.

You do have to pay attention. It does you no good to know what the camera is doing and to have the options to change the choices the program makes unless…unless you are paying attention! Automation does not mean that you let the camera make all the decisions…just that you let the camera make all the adjustments.

So, use Program mode and pay attention. In Part Two of this article I will detail the things you want to pay attention to, and the ways you can control them in program mode on most cameras. Read on, and you will be well on your way to technically correct exposure and focus on the vast majority of your shots.

And that is the bottom line. That is the reason for this article. I have limited time to pursue photography. While I am in the field, I want my creative self completely engaged in imagining every possible composition in any given setting, in seeing every image that might be there. I don’t want to have to deal with exposure and focus, except as elements of the possible images. Therefore I let the camera do everything it is able to do for me. I am confident it can, withing reason, if I am paying attention, do an excellent job of computing the correct exposure…better than I could using manual controls. I am confident that it can quickly and easily, if I am paying attention, establish correct focus…just as fast or faster than I could manually.

Let the camera do the work…

And that brings us to Part 2…