I have the feeling that the programmable user modes are likely one of the most useful features that I have never utilized. It seems that the premise is that there are certain setups that people use over and over, and you can pre program them so you only have to turn one dial rather than going through and setting several different things.
I don’t know whether I just shoot in too many different situations to have standard setups, or I’m not smart enough to figure out what my several most common setups are. The things I will change are: exposure: In low light TAv, set the minimum shutter speed and aperture I can get away with and take whatever ISO I get. In bright light, Av at ISO 100-400, and let it boost the shutter speed so it doesn’t blow out the highlights In some situations manual exposure works best (strobes, night photography, weird lighting) In wonky dynamic range situations, I’ll bracket, usually nominal and -2 stops to make sure that one exposure doesn’t blow out the highlights. I prefer to bracket with Av rather than TAv. Whitebalance: I don’t worry overmuch about that because I fix things in post, but I will try to get it close in camera. I think that I might just come at photography from an all manual background and only begrudgingly admit that there are cases where the $3 microprocessor in the camera is smarter than I am. I am forced to admit that there are a lot of times when it comes to focusing that it has better vision than I do. How do you folks deal with the various modes on your Pentax DSLRs? Are there any features that you consider super handy? Are there any that you think might be very handy if you got off your butt and learned out how to make use of them? Or do you carry around a spot meter, manually meter, manually focus, and are still tempted to use bulb and manually do the shutter speed as well? -- Larry Colen [email protected] -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
