dmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Martindale) (02/22/85)
The talk of various automation systems reminds me of my favourite gripe about automatic cameras: compensating for unusually-lit scenes is a pain. All of my early photography experience was with a match-needle manual camera (Minolta SRT-101). With it, providing any amount of compensation for scenes with snow or backlighting or other non-average scenes was easy, since you set the aperture (and changed shutter speed if necessary) yourself anyway. And I found that I did this a lot - I was always judging what the meter was reading and compensating if I thought it was wrong. Now, auto-exposure systems are nice from one point of view - they eliminate the need for making one of the necessary settings before releasing the shutter, particularly nice if you are in a hurry. But they make this "tweaking" of exposure more difficult. Some cameras DO have special exposure compensation dials that you can use while leaving the camera in automatic, but I have yet to see one that is even as convenient as my old SRT-101. There, you could see in the finder how far the exposure you set was different from the exposure the meter recommended. Ideally, I'd like to see an indicator in the finder telling me that exposure compensation was in use and HOW MUCH I'd selected, and have a dial or other control for setting it that is as convenient to use without removing the camera from my eye as the aperture ring and shutter speed dial are. After all, I won't consider buying a camera unless it has aperture and shutter speed visible in the finder in all modes; why shouldn't exposure compensation have the same status? Are there any cameras being sold that do this right?