Manual verses automatic shooting is a topic that burns brightly in photography with strongly held opinions both ways. The difficulty in this topic is that there is no right answer. Whether you shoot manual, automatic or some compromise setting in between, there will always be someone else telling you that what you're doing isn't right. It can be both confusing and frustrating for those new to photography, so lets look at both sides of the issue.
There seem to be fewer photographers these days claiming you have to shoot all manual all the time. The image processors and AF systems in cameras today are actually small computers with quite a lot of processing power. Over the years they have gotten better and better at reading a scene and calculating exposure. Multi-point AF systems allow the shooter to cycle through various focal points simply by repeatedly pressing the shutter button half-way down.
All the same, the one component of the camera that computers will not replace anytime soon is you. Your creative vision, your composition, your unique way of looking at a scene. While camera computers are fantastic at reading scenes and comparing them to an theoretical 18 percent gray card, what computers can't do is figure out when the best exposure is not always the most optimum. Sometimes the "best" exposure will be a stop or two above or below what the computer calculates. If you leave your camera on automatic all the time you will have pictures of average exposure and be limited to the changes you can make in post processing software.
While those shooting manual all the time will get very good at calculating exposure in their head, they will miss shots because they're fiddling with settings. The exception to that would be in the studio and other controlled shooting situations. There you have time to dial in the exposure with greater accuracy and usually a light meter to validate the lighting. Shooting outside is an entirely different animal.
If the majority of professional photographers were honest, most would admit to using the automatic or semi-automatic settings outdoors and in rapidly changing shooting environments. The common approach is setting either the shutter speed or aperture to the scene and letting the camera handle the other settings. At an automobile race, you would want to set the shutter speed and let the camera handle the ISO and aperture. For outdoor events you might want to control the Depth of Field (DoF) by selecting aperture priority mode and let the camera handle ISO and shutter speed. For very quickly changing shooting situations you might choose Program mode and let the camera handle all the details while you focus on framing the shot.
The right answer about manual verses automatic then is the one that balances out the demands of the job with the skills of the photographer. While it's good to experiment with manually adjusting the controls of your camera, it should not be an impediment to taking pictures and no one should make you feel bad because you choose automatic or some other setting that assists with one of the exposure calculations.
Understand that automatic settings are fluid and that technology is a moving target, so what's true today might be different with the next generation of cameras.
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