Nikon D10

Why cant we make a completely manual digital.
Set the speed f-stop and fly.
Why make it complicated.

Why can't we just turn the dial to get to Manual mode?

Having those other modes just makes the camera more flexible for other users. Granted, when I had automatic camera I didn't really learn much about photography until I switched to a manual FM2.

Nowadays, I couldn't see adjusting things manually except in very rare occasions. Maybe it's because back in my manual days I took lots of lanscape shots, and today they are of my kids.

pa_fubar said:

Why cant we make a completely manual digital.
Set the speed f-stop and fly.
Why make it complicated.

Click to expand...

Because flexibility is important?

--

'Life is not measured by how many breaths you take, but by how many moments that take your breath away.' - A friend

It just seems to me, company by making things easier has made it way more difficult.

20 years ago if you had a built in meter you could shoot anything. You didnt have to be a pro. Just have a iq over 90.

If it was over exposed, you remembered it and next time it wasnt. after a bit poof...you could figure 90% of the situations.

Now you need a degree to figure out what your doing wrong. That makes no sense.

S mode is extremely useful in action shots

A mode is extremely useful when you know you have adequate light and u want to use the sharpest part of the lens. It is also useful when u want a specific depth.

Having the computer do some or all of the work is a lot quicker than doing everything manual, and in many cases, can help u get shots quicker, and therefore you will not miss as many shots as you do with manual.

It is very similar to an airplane. Obviously elevators and the wings controlled by pulleys is all that's needed to fly an airplane. But for long trips, u'd want autopilot of some sort.

Hmmm, are you having trouble figuring this stuff out? Seems to me anyone that could shoot film 20 years ago shouldnt have any difficulties working with a modern camera. Unless they are just technologically challenged. Some folks never want to work with computers and shy away from them whenever possible, but that doesnt mean computer companies should just start making abacuses. Those that cant adapt to technology find other ways, if you want a manual camera like the good old days I see them by the truckloads on eBay for VERY cheap. Heck, I had one guy just give me an old Nikon FE, he said he knew I was into cameras and he never used it anymore, had a 50mm f/1.4 stuck on the front.
Good luck, Ted

pa_fubar said:

It just seems to me, company by making things easier has made it
way more difficult.
20 years ago if you had a built in meter you could shoot anything.
You didnt have to be a pro. Just have a iq over 90.
If it was over exposed, you remembered it and next time it wasnt.
after a bit poof...you could figure 90% of the situations.

Now you need a degree to figure out what your doing wrong. That
makes no sense.

Click to expand...

--
http://photobucket.com/albums/y260/tdkd13/

BigfootsMonk said:

S mode is extremely useful in action shots

Click to expand...

BigfootsMonk said:

A mode is extremely useful when you know you have adequate light
and u want to use the sharpest part of the lens. It is also useful
when u want a specific depth.

Click to expand...

1975

Nikormat el (Put digital capture in it and now you have a real camera.)

A lense a camera..... nothing can happen short of running it over with your car. 30 years later it still works great. The computer or mode on your camera has been gone for 2 decades.

I set the speed and f-stop to the lighting (Depth of field at this point is useless in either camera if you dont know how it works.)

Hell a pro aint letting the camera decide. And it aint hard.

I sit and wait.

Time to shoot...one hand on button the other on focus.....click click click
It doesnt get any simpler.

All I see here is every trying to figure out their computer. Its makes no sense.

BigfootsMonk said:

Having the computer do some or all of the work is a lot quicker
than doing everything manual, and in many cases, can help u get
shots quicker, and therefore you will not miss as many shots as you
do with manual.

It is very similar to an airplane. Obviously elevators and the
wings controlled by pulleys is all that's needed to fly an
airplane. But for long trips, u'd want autopilot of some sort.

Click to expand...

tdkd13 said:

pa_fubar said:

It just seems to me, company by making things easier has made it
way more difficult.
20 years ago if you had a built in meter you could shoot anything.
You didnt have to be a pro. Just have a iq over 90.
If it was over exposed, you remembered it and next time it wasnt.
after a bit poof...you could figure 90% of the situations.

Now you need a degree to figure out what your doing wrong. That
makes no sense.

Click to expand...

--
http://photobucket.com/albums/y260/tdkd13/

Click to expand...

Well photo buckets
Challeged im not.
I have both film and digital.

If you learn to use a camera (It aint hard) The computer is nothing more than making it point and shot for those that didnt figure out how to use one.

tdkd13 said:

tdkd13 said:

Seems to me anyone that could shoot film 20 years ago
shouldnt have any difficulties working with a modern camera.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

It's not a technology issue; it's the fact that one has to unlearn manipulations acquired over many years and adopt new ones that offer no apparent benefit. For this reason, I fully sympathize with the original poster.

Yes, a modern dSLR has a manual mode, but I find it terribly inconvenient to use. My first SLR (in the early 1970s) was a Minolta SR-T-303 (I believe it was called SR-T-102 in the US). It had a built-in meter; two "needles" were visible in the viewfinder: one ended in a circle while the other was just a straight line. The hand with the circel moved when one changed shutter speed and/or aperture, the straight hand moved with the intensity of the light. If you put that second needle through the circle of the first one, your exposure was spot-on. If the needle was above or below the circle and just touching it, you were + - 1/3 of a stop. Most importantly, the needles were overlaying the viewfinder scene so you never had to take your eyes of your subject in order to read an indicator in the area below the image.

Most manual SLRsl worked on a similar principle. With practice, one learned to operate the camera very quickly; the left hand set the aperture by turning a ring on the lens, the right hand the shutter speed by turning a knob on top of the camera. Both values were visible in the viewfinder. Why can't I have a camera that works like this digitally? I ifind the automatic exposure modes very helpful, but on my D70, manual mode is such a pain in the neck that I hardly ever use it. Front dial, rear dial, squinting trough a way-too-small viewfinder to get the exposure right... let's just say that if I'm shootinhg a landscape, I'm fine. If my subject is moving, I will most likely miss the shot if I'm in manual mode.

I understand that people who start out with a dSLR won't have this issue because they are not forced to un-learn anything. Would I trade my D70 for one of the old SLRs? Of course not. On the other hand, if I could buy a camera that worked like my old SR-T-303 but digitally, I probably would. I simply fail to see why going from film-based to digital must mean using a camera on which aperture and shutter speed have to be set differently, especially since in terms of usability, the new way is hardly an improvement.

Daniel

Challenged has an N in it and point and shoot has two O's, I'm glad you took the time to learn all this stuff, I'd hate to see what this thread would have been like had you not.

I too shoot film and digital, have for 35 years off and on. In your original post you stated that you had to have a degree to figure out what you were doing wrong, since its obvious you dont, I figured you might be having some difficulties and offered a solution.
Have a good one, Ted

pa_fubar said:

Well photo buckets
Challeged im not.
I have both film and digital.
If you learn to use a camera (It aint hard) The computer is nothing
more than making it point and shot for those that didnt figure out
how to use one.

Click to expand...

--
http://photobucket.com/albums/y260/tdkd13/

Yes todays cameras are considerably more complicated than those of twenty five years ago, but you need look at any photo taken with a ttl flash and see how much better the performance is than ANY camera from that era could produce, using the camera mounted flash. As to the front/rear dial combination, honestly I don't understand how that could not be regarded as an improvement. It makes exposure selections so much easier. Certainly, having to learn the computer/camera interface is often complex and sometimes unnessarily so but it's not impossible to learn and in combination with photoshop it vastly explands your photographic possibilities. I've recently got back into photography with the purchase of my d80 (I had most of my film gear stolen a number of years back) and I'm finding it to be a fantastic tool. I for one would never go back to the 'old school' type of camera.
--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/petenator

I will agree that the viewfinders on most modern DSLR's is way too small. Oddly I too had an old Minolta in the mid 70's. An SRT 101 with the Rokkor lens. On yours did the meter move the opposite way you would think it would? When it got brighter the needle went down, I found that kinda wierd.
Ted

--
http://photobucket.com/albums/y260/tdkd13/

tdkd13 said:

Challenged has an N in it and point and shoot has two O's, I'm glad
you took the time to learn all this stuff, I'd hate to see what
this thread would have been like had you not.
I too shoot film and digital, have for 35 years off and on. In your
original post you stated that you had to have a degree to figure
out what you were doing wrong, since its obvious you dont, I
figured you might be having some difficulties and offered a
solution.
Have a good one, Ted

Click to expand...

Well photo buckets my secretary has the night off but I can hire you.
Then you can earn a decent living and give up on the spelling bee cicuit.
Funny how the brain dead go towards spelling and and not the issue brought up.
Ill make a deal.

You stick with your 30000 dollar job correcting spelling, and let the thinkers buy you lunch.

I actually did speak to the issue brought up, you simply chose to discount what I said by asserting that you werent "challeged".

Might be time to lay off the sauce for the night sparky, brain cells cannot be replaced once destroyed. Sure there is a deal of plasticity to neuronal activity, but relearning takes time and evidence shows the older we get the slower that takes place.
Take care sport, Ted
--
http://photobucket.com/albums/y260/tdkd13/

Yes, the meeter needle went down as brightness increased, but that's just a convention; it never bothered me. In fact, it probably is an advantage because the darker it gets, the more the needle is in the upper part of the frame which tends to be less cluttered (sky) and therefore easier to see in low light. In retrospect, I still cannot believe how fast I was with the thing. I'm much, much slower with the D70 in manual mode.

By the way, the 303 was just a slightly enhanced version of the 101, with some convenience features added. Later I got a used 101 as a second body and it was pretty much the same. When I added an XD-11 a few years later, I got aperture as well as shutter priority auto-exposure, and a manual mode that was, you guessed it, a royal pain in the neck to use.

I still have all that gear, by the way, including several lenses and the last Minolta camera I ever bought, a Maxxum 9000.

Daniel

tdkd13 said:

I actually did speak to the issue brought up, you simply chose to
discount what I said by asserting that you werent "challeged".
Might be time to lay off the sauce for the night sparky, brain
cells cannot be replaced once destroyed. Sure there is a deal of
plasticity to neuronal activity, but relearning takes time and
evidence shows the older we get the slower that takes place.
Take care sport, Ted
--
http://photobucket.com/albums/y260/tdkd13/

Click to expand...

No p0roblem Ted

When you want to learn how to improve on the boring picture a turtle can draw come see me.

"Hell a pro aint letting the camera decide. And it aint hard."

This is pretty weird. It seems -according to the many posts- people in the US seem to think professionals use manual settings all the time.

Anyhow, in my part of Europe most professionals use A or T settings and dial in for over or under exposure. I don't see any advantage in using manual at all, morover, I always used the A-setting on my 35 mm cameras as soon as I went pro, about 35 years ago.

Leen Koper
http://www.fotografieleenkoper.nl

pa_fubar said:

Why cant we make a completely manual digital.
Set the speed f-stop and fly.
Why make it complicated.

Click to expand...

Probably because the market in general doesn't want that. The kind of people that want an all manual camera with no wizardry usually don't want it to have digital wizardry either. They go and buy an old FM2 or FM3a.

Alternatively, there is the Epson RD-1 - I believe that is pretty much what you want ; you'd have to look at the specs on this site, but I think it's manual aperture and shutter with real dials. Even has a film wind lever.

peter taylor87568 said:

peter taylor87568 said:

Yes todays cameras are considerably more complicated than those
of twenty five years ago, but you need look at any photo taken with
a ttl flash and see how much better the performance is than ANY
camera from that era could produce, using the camera mounted flash.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

No doubt that's true, but then there's more to photography than flash technology (or any other kind of technology, for that matter). I am humbled when I see what some of the great photographers of the second half of the 20th Century accomplished using equipment so much less sophisticated than what we have at our disposal today. For instance, what Henri Cartier-Bresson was able to capture with his Leica rangefinder cameras is absolutely amazing, and it's all in the eye and in the speed with which he was able to capture the "decisive moment".

Or take Ansel Adams' landscapes. He used very large view cameras that yielded enormous negatives (especially compared to our puny sensors), but in terms of technology, these were downright archaic even when compared to Cartier-Bresson's Leicas. The results, however, were stunning because of flawless compostiion and exposure coupled with peerless darkroom technique. In other words: art and skill, not technology.

Most of the technology we have today allows us to get shots we could not have gotten before; it also allows us to produce bad photographs that are technically perfect or close to it. This is a common phenomenon when technology empowers the many to do what was once in the realm of the few. For example, when the first Macs came out in 1984, people started producing documents with myriads of fonts just because they could. Many thought that they had all of a sudden become designers, but there is a great deal more to document design and page layout than constantly changing fonts! Don't get me wrong: I think it is good that technolgy empowers the many; what is bad is that most of the newly empowered feel that they are as good as the few just because of technology. It's not quite that simple.

Do I want to go back? Of course not! But I do think that in paying way too much attention to technology, we run the risk of forgetting that there is so much more to photography. Just look at all the people who say that they need to upgrade to a D80 or a D200 because they have "outgrown" their D50 or D70. I find it amusing. Hey, I would love to upgrade to a D200, but that's because I'm a technology junkie who likes to have the latest toys. One of these days, I might just go for a D200, but certainly not because I will have outgrown my D70. The sad truth is that I'm not nearly good enough a photographer to ever outgrow something like the D70.

Daniel

Full manual?

I used to have a full manual film SLR once. I never got the shots, because when the aperture, shutter speed, framing and focusing had finally been done, the photo opportunity was lost allready. I exprerienced a HUGE boost in image quality when I witched from my 35mm SLR to pocket sized APS film camera. Technically it was sometimes worse, but the quality of content was on different level.

If you insist on manual operation (and have some extra cash), then take a look at this:

http://www.leica-camera.us/photography/d_system/digilux_3/