The cartoon below is eerily reminiscent of a conversation I had last Sunday at an anniversary party*. A very nice lady and I were talking about her very nice Canon G9 camera. She pointed out the plethora of "scene modes" that she could select between and which confused her (she also said that sometimes she uses the "Av" setting. I asked if she knew what it meant, and she said no. I said "better not use it then"), and I said to her: "Listen, just use the green setting "
auto". That's what I do, and I've been reading about and using digital cameras for years and years. The odds of getting better pictures by getting fancy are much smaller than the odds of just messing things up because no mortal has any chance of understanding what the hell the camera thinks it's doing."
*Had a great time. We were a couple dozen people plus a band crammed into a space the size of my granma's pantry, and for some reason half the people either used a camera (in one instance an old Practica film camera of all things), or were amateur photographers. The food was great too.
I gave the happy couple, who are retirees and thus not flush with money, a nice Canon digicam with image stabilization. He often talks about things he's like to photograph but he's not had his own camera until now.
I only come off auto to kick in B&W, and sometime flower mode makes the autofocus not so arrogant when taking close ups of plants.
ReplyDeleteFrom the get go I had program modes, aperture mode, I used that when I wanted coerce depth of field, shutter mode, I used that when I wanted fuzzy waterfalls or sharp action, and general mode, which is where the camera lived.
They keep adding new modes, and there are just too many. I've taken to putting it in sports mode when going to the playground with the kids, otherwise leave the heck alone.
I have two adjustments in my camera, one for shutter speed and another for lens aperture. Works fine.
ReplyDelete"The odds of getting better pictures by getting fancy are much smaller than the odds of just messing things up because no mortal has any chance of understanding what the hell the camera thinks it's doing."
ReplyDeleteYou know it's real nice to read that other people (the professionals) have this problem with the new cameras. I guess you might call me an amateur photographer and really don't want to sound too stupid when I talk about cameras. But, I can't figure out mode, setting, specifications on them.
I remember reading, quite a while ago, several articles about how to stop that annoying flashing clock on VCRs. You put black electrical tape over them!
But now those annoying clocks take a timestamp (don't ask, probably SEMPTE coding or some such) from one of the TV stations and sychronize.
ReplyDeleteTrouble is, our cable company did not "fix" that to local time when taking a feed from elsewhere, sometimes the VCR would jump forward by an hour or two.
Our clock radio has an almanac so it knows when to change for Daylight Savings Time (like toggling between BST and GMT). Trouble is, this clock was sold to me the summer before they decided to change when to Spring Forward and Fallback. Now I have a clock that changes two weeks out of phase with the rest of the state. That reminds me, I still need to replace that clock.
Talking about time...one thing that enoys the heck out of me is...I bought a Casio watch for about $25(US) and it sets itself from the atomic time standard transmited across the country (good thing).
ReplyDeleteBUT, I buy a fancy radio, with a clock, in my car, cost about $500(US) and it can't do that. And setting the damn thing takes a rocket scientist. Although, I'm not even sure one of them could do it either!!!