Auto ISO - Yay or Nay

[unpopular]

Honestly Greystar, I think we're arguing the same points and the only issue is preference at this point. Maybe it's been so long since I've even had AE available I've lost track of its merit - the last camera I had with AE was my Contax, and that was when Kyocera was still building them - you make valid points, though I still prefer making the changes myself. I am extremely "exposure oriented" in my process - this isn't to say that exposure isn't important to you, but I do think I spend more time thinking about it as part of composition.

 

[unpopular]

I tend to be old school as well, but more black and white than color slide. I don't like to think of the camera as the end, and think of raw processing more like black and white processing. I do ETTR to the extreme right, and compensate in the RAW processor. It's helpful to think of the RAW as unprocessed film, the processed TIF file as the negative and the finished working file as the print. Though thats another topic for another day.

 

[sovietdoc]

Using Auto ISO in Manual mode does mean you're giving avay the exposure control to the camera. If you had set your shutter speed, aperture and ISO manually, the camera would never change the exposure regardless of what the exponometer tells you. But when you set it to use Auto ISO, it will adjust the ISO setting based on the exposure readout the camera gets while keeping your manually set aperture and shutter. This can obviously lead to not obtaining the correct exposure you might want in a given situation but you can still "control" this by using exposure lock for "hard control" or exposure compensation for "soft control" So in the end, if you utilize AE lock, for example, yes, you do get complete control over how your camera will shoot, even in automatic or semi auto modes.

I thought DNG could be referenced to as "unprocessed film" although not being the same. While to RAW, there is no analogy in film. I could very well be wrong about these two.

 

[belial]

I thought DNG could be referenced to as "unprocessed film" although not being the same. While to RAW, there is no analogy in film. I could very well be wrong about these two.

I thought dng was just adobes universal raw format but I could be wrong. As a matter of fact doesn't Leica use dng in place of a manufacturer specific raw format?

 

[unpopular]

I thought DNG could be referenced to as "unprocessed film" although not being the same. While to RAW, there is no analogy in film. I could very well be wrong about these two.

I thought dng was just adobes universal raw format but I could be wrong. As a matter of fact doesn't Leica use dng in place of a manufacturer specific raw format?

DNG is just adobe's nonproprietary RAW format. I agree that there is no 'real analogy' to film; rather this is a mindset or philosophy in how I approach exposure and processing, rather than a literal or technical comparison. How I see it is that, like the latent image, the RAW file contains data about the scene which is of little use until it is processed, and how it is processed determines various qualities - in particular gamma. However, the way I approach exposure and processing is not "mainstream", and is, including processing, heavily influenced by the zone system.

As for AE, I did attach my only AE/AF lens to play around a bit, and found that on my a350 anyway, I can still engage AEL in manual mode. Once engaged, it acts as if in either Av or Tv modes depending on if aperture or shutter is changed. I found this very useful, I could meter for the brightest region as I always do unlocked, and adjust aperture according to shutter while maintaining the exposure compensation previously chosen while unlocked. Once AEL is disengaged, it behaves as if in full manual again. So, at least on a Sony, and I'd imagine others as well, you can have the best of all worlds within manual mode by locking exposure.

I still think auto ISO is unneccesary and just sloppy. But that's just my take on it.