ISO settings, and other ramblings

phil from seattle wrote:

Sigh. I have no desire to get into a long drawn out battle, especially when I see that you are more interested in insults.

I can see how you might feel insulted by how I phrased parts of my post. I suppose I didn't put a lot of effort into sugar-coating my corrections of your several errors.

However, insulting you wasn't my primary goal. In fact it wasn't a goal at all. My specific goal was to correct your several errors regarding the nature of EV, exposure, ISO, and Auto-ISO. My more general goal, throughout this thread, is to  help you and others reading get a better understanding of how cameras work, especially with regard to Auto-ISO.

I've been looking for threads about Auto-ISO recently, primarily to see if there are cases where I use it but would be better off without it. In doing so, I have discovered that Auto-ISO is widely misunderstood, and often gets blamed for things that are not its fault. So I'd like to de-mystify and de-stigmatize Auto-ISO.

I too see the ISO getting pushed when it doesn't need to be.

I have yet to see a properly documented case of it doing so by more than 1/6 stop, and in that case the real problem was that the camera had no convenient way of letting the user control lightness in 1/6 stop increments.

I've seen plenty of cases where Auto-ISO was blamed for the camera doing precisely what is was supposed to do under the circumstances, given its settings, but the user wanted some other outcome and failed to tell the camera..