What's Your F Stop? Or Do You Go Auto?

 I know some stuff about photography.

My first camera was an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic.

I wandered around Saigon on days off from the war effort taking lots of pictures.

To get those images I needed to make shutter speed, ASA, and F Stop decisions, but, using the "spot" I could dial in the focus.

It was challenging and fun.

I still have the Pentax, but haven't used it for decades.

When I want to get back to film and decisions I use a Leica M3 that I inherited.

On that camera you need to make pretty much all the settings decisions.

In advance.

There is a rangefinder that always takes me hours to figure out again what it does and how it does it, so I can't say anything about it's function here.

The Leica is pretty manual.

But fun.

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What got me thinking about all of that is that this image just got served by screen saver.

It was taken with my Sony AR7 II.

And I remember the day and circumstances of taking it.

With a fully automatic camera one would think that images like this would be the norm.

All you need to do is point and shoot.

But if you want best of breed depth of field, focus, and background lighting you better have done film with a Leica or a Spotmatic.

I put the Sony in manual mode and shot twenty or more images before I got the combination right.

I was in front of a neighbor's house and was beginning to worry about being arrested for loitering.

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After contemplating all of this after seeing this image pop up I had to laugh.

That flower wasn't moving, and loitering aside, I had all the time in the world to get things refined to the nth degree.

And I could look at each image as it was taken, evaluate it and and keep making refining decisions.

When out in the wild I make a couple settings decisions and let semi-automatic mode do the rest.

On moving subjects I get mixed results.