In general, I appreciate the developments and improvements that the camera designers have come up with the give us better tools and extend our creative reach.
At some point, it becomes problematic when they try to remove human judgement from the equation. For instance, the developments in auto-focus. At one point the human would pick the point in the image on which to focus, line up some little focusing aid in the viewfinder, the camera would then adjust the lens to focus on the point. Making that happen faster and more accurately were welcome developments. At some point, picking that point in the image was deemed too hard to teach and too much for the typical photographer to know. So, we came up with some algorithms to have the camera pick that focus point. Some worked better than others, but none of them worked (or work) all that well because every photographer is not trying to do the same thing in every image. So, we came up with custom functions that let the smarter and more persistent guys pick between super-duper-autofocus, spot focus, pick-your sensor focus and any number of names the marketing guys came up with. Now, instead of learning the simple act of aiming and focusing, we have to learn all of that stuff. After that, some genius figured that most of the time, if there is a face in the picture, that will be the place to focus the image. Cameras got smarter and learned how to detect and focus on faces. Of course, we got one more mode to pick from. And besides, it didn't always actually detect the face, and sometimes we took photos without faces in them. Even worse, sometimes there was more than one face in the photo and they were at different distances from the camera! Engineers, being smart, said we can fix that. Now we have face detection that detects every face in the photo, picks one of the faces for focus, highlights it in a different color so that we have the option of picking one of the other faces, if only we can remember what combination of buttons is used to pick a different face. All of that automation and stuff to learn just so that we don't have to learn how to focus. Wow. Take this example and apply it to histograms and jpg and raw as you wish. I'll step down from my soapbox now. GS George Sinos -------------------- [email protected] www.georgesphotos.net plus.georgesinos.com On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 6:29 AM, Paul Stenquist <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Jan 29, 2012, at 12:16 AM, steve harley wrote: > >> on 2012-01-28 21:57 Paul Stenquist wrote >>> That's basically what today's best meters do. But they still can't gauge >>> reflectivity and color as well as the human eye can. The meter makes a call >>> and a good photographer makes the necessary adjustment. Most of the time >>> the meter will come close enough for all practical purposes. for those >>> times when it can't the photographer has to lend a hand. It wouldn't be >>> much fun if machines did all the work. >> >> i submit that most of us don't have "today's best meters" > > The K-5 comes somewhat close, but no it's not at the top of the heap. But > it's more than good enough when photographers use their brain as well as > their meters. > Paul >> >> -- >> PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List >> [email protected] >> http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net >> to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and >> follow the directions. > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
