David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Auto or Scene Mode?

Here's a dirty little secret: Plenty of professionals leave their cameras in auto mode most of the time.

It's true. Oh, they still duck into manual mode when necessary. (And there are also plenty who never use auto mode.) But today's digital cameras have extremely sophisticated light metering, white-balance detection, and autofocus; why not exploit their powers?

It probably goes without saying that auto mode works well for the huge majority of amateurs, too.

All SLRs, and a fair number of compact cameras, nonetheless offer manual controls, too—overrides for shutter speed, aperture size, focus, and so on. If you have them, you gain a lot flexibility you don't get in auto. Only with manual shutter-speed controls can you blur a brook into a milky, silky ribbon; only with manual focus can you specify exactly which element of a photo is in sharp focus. Chapter 6 gives these controls a workout.

Nowadays, though, there's something in between auto and manual: scene modes. If you've lived your life so far in auto, scene modes should be your first step up.

Camera companies have realized that learning to use manual controls is beyond the patience of casual shutterbugs. So, in their never-ending quest to make photography idiot-proof, camera makers routinely stock their latest models with a bunch of scene modes. These are prefab, memorized settings for common lighting and subject situations like Sports, Night Portrait, Beach/Snow, and so on. These canned modes exploit the flexibility ...