In 1888, George Eastman coined the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” Up until then, picture-taking was a laborious undertaking where one had to be able to process and develop their film.
BTW, this slogan made Eastman a wealthy man with the advent of what was basically point-and-shoot cameras; in other words no controls. You didn’t have to set the shutter speed and aperture, or even be aware of the speed of the film…didn’t even have to focus!!
Sound familiar? It’s 2021, and that slogan is still an effective catchphrase with the emergence of the digital era. You still don’t have to do anything except push the button.
In my online class with the BPSOP, I would guess that eighty percent of the students have no idea what shooting in the manual mode is all about. In fact, it scares the pea-waddens (a term my wife says) out of them at the mere mention of doing things for themselves. During my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops, I encourage everyone for the week to shoot on manual…I have also told them that autofocus is a luxury, not a necessity…oh the horror!!
I come from the age of film and manual focus, where the word Adobe was a type of house in the Southwest part of the country. The new generation of cameras has so many buttons and programs that my poor little (old) brain would shut down trying to figure them out. When I’m shooting I carry a Canon 5D Mark 3 with a 17-40 lens and a very small Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX7 with an electronic viewfinder and a 24-90 lens. That affords me everything from 17-90mm, and my photos come out pretty good.
Last, in the fifty-three years I’ve been shooting advertising, corporate, and editorial photography, I have never cropped one of my photos. Although I do work somewhat on my images in post, my goal is to get whatever I want to say before I click the shutter. To each his own, but I would rather spend my time being a good photographer, than a proficient computer artist.
So, my fellow photographers, the next time you go out, try shooting on manual and do your cropping in the camera. It will make you a stronger shooter.
Visit my website at www.joebaraban.com, and check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.
JoeB
I switched to shoot with manual exposure after meeting Bryan Peterson and do it happily for the last 15 years. I don’t actually know how my cameras perform in other modes. But this is all thanks to the built-in exposure meter, and now a visual representation within EVF. I use autofocus though. Since my first digital camera, about 20 years ago, I wanted to have autofocus that focuses on faces, or eyes. And guess what, camera manufacturers delivered. Even my old Panasonic gh2 had enough autofocus performance to shoot the entire dance class without deliberately focusing even once. And new cameras are modern-day miracles in this regard.