ISO settings, and other ramblings

Humansvillian wrote:

My wife asked me if there was some automatic setting on the camera that would set everything just right, every time, according to what Olympus thought was best.

i replied that was Automatic.

Yes the iAuto setting is much the same as on Auto modes on other cameras.

Not P mode where the metering determines the settings, and things like contrast saturation and sharpness stay where you put them.

I'm talking iAuto or Premium Auto or some name like that where the camera has a sneak look at what you are framing and the focal length being used and makes a wild guess what the heck you are shooting and quickly rustles up a suitable Scene Mode to fit the situation. If it fails to guess what you are trying to shoot then it defaults back to a safe P mode.

The problem lies in the fact that you may take two shots of whatever and due to slightly altered framing the camera may make two wildly different guesses as to the content, so shot A may turn out quite different to shot B, due to altered contrast etc used in the different Scene Modes.

To remove the vagaries and variability of iAuto then it is probably best and safest to always use P mode as the most auto mode, making sure that it is set at auto ISO with a sensible top limit.

She asked if I was smarter than the people who made the camera.

There's no way that any of us here are smarter.

i said I pretended to be, otherwise I could just use the iPhone.

We all pretend we are smarter of course.

But really, a compact camera or a smartphone does most of what the world wants for photography anyway.

Regards..... Guy