Automatically Wrong
Although it isn’t my favorite camera, my Canon G9 is my preferred carry camera. It’s almost always at my side, even when I’m lugging two D300s and a full complement of lenses and strobes with a tripod strapped over my right shoulder.
The compact camera has high resolution, relatively low noise at lower ISO settings, shoots RAW, and has complete manual control, if needed.
I almost always shoot aperture priority, auto-exposure, auto focus. That doesn’t mean that I always let the automatic setting stand without modification. This fisherman along the banks of the inlet at Red Banks on Hoover Reservoir posed an automatic exposure problem.
The composition included the two trees as framing devices for the horizontal edges. Back-lit early growth leaves framed the upper edge with the grassy area balancing at the bottom. The sunlight just cleared the stand of trees across the inlet throwing its shadow across the water throwing into into just enough darkness that the fisherman, also back-lit, would stand out from the shadows.
The EXIF data for this photo, shot at a short telephone length to shorten the perspective, says the exposure is manual. It’s accurate because I first shot the photo with auto-exposure to see what the camera would do with the extreme highlights of the leaves. Experience told me the result and all I needed to do was confirm my observations.
The camera, attempting to balance the wide exposure range of the photo, found a happy medium where the midtowns settled into approximately the middle of the histogram with the highlights of the sun striking the leaves set to spectral white and the shadows holding slight detail.
My preference was for the shadows to go darker and for the highlights to have detail. I dialed in a one stop underexposure and checked the histogram for the highlight and shadow limits. The underexposed frame was now a more perfect exposure with details in the highlights and still held some details in the shadows.
The auto-exposure setting would have produced a technically correct exposure. It wouldn’t have produced an image that accurately recorded the emotional impact of a fisherman sitting on a darkened stream on a cool spring day.
It’s not necessary to rely on automatic. It is necessary know how automatic works so you can alter it. Understanding how to modify automatic settings to create your mind’s eye images is an important step in becoming a better photographer.
Auto-exposure can be perfect but it isn’t always the best choice for shooting some subject. Knowing when to say no to yes is just as important.
