----- Original Message ----- From: "Kostas Kavoussanakis"
Subject: Re: Digital profligacy
On Fri, 6 May 2005, William Robb wrote:
Before automation, you had no choice about learning the technical end of
photography. It was part of the game. You learned how to adjust an aperture
and shutter speed to match a needle in the viewfinder.
<snip>
Automatic exposure does not necessarily give correct exposure, it gives a best guess exposure, that guess coming from a rather retarded brain.
I cannot see how these two differ, assuming the same metering algorithm behind the needle reading/auto exposure. Actually, the auto exposure has a higher chance of being consistent for a learner on the same scene (assuming that the learner bothers to change the aperture or speed setting).
Depends on if the photographer has a less retarded brain than the camera, I guess.
If you are forced to learn exposure on a manual only camera (or better still, with an external light meter), you will quickly learn when the meter will fall down, an when it will be accurate, mostly accurate, or not at all accurate.
If you don't learn this, you will never know if the meter is doing it's job, since you don't know what it is doing.
The learning process involves making mistakes and learning from them. Auto exposure inhibits this process.
William Robb
