Custom settings and how I’ve lost my love for the X-E series

gdanmitchell wrote:

About the "full manual" business... I've photographed long enough that I began on cameras without any automation at all — no meter, to AE, no AF, etc. My native mode is manual. However, for street photography and similar I'm actually a very big fan of aV mode at this point. I want control of aperture for obvious reasons, and I want to be able to change ISO without too much trouble... but I don't really need a manual shutter speed control. I go with the meter-determined value there, changing ISO and/or aperture if it goes out of range. To compensate for tricky lighting it is just as effective to use the EC offset as to change shutter speed manually.'

Heh. Actually it was street recently, specifically on a bright day with extremely strong contrast, that pitched me back into manual. I was using the X100V and found that I worked best with fixed ISO and SS, adjusting the aperture to tune contrast (partly because that offered third-stop steps on a single control, but a bit more because it used my left hand, leaving the right to the sole job of timing the shutter). I’ve spent a long time thinking aperture-first that I was surprised how well this worked. Had the light been less contrasty I probably would have stuck with aperture priority and the EC dial, but as it was the metering was all over the place depending on where I pointed the camera.

There is, of course, no “correct” way of working 🙂 And there’s a key challenge of design: creating something which achieves the goal of “don’t get in the any of the user’s process” when there are numerous viable processes. Let’s be honest, for the most part Fuji have done a pretty good job of that.