More About Your Camera’s AUTO Setting

More About Your Camera’s AUTO Setting

by William Lulow

I thought I would talk a bit more about the AUTO setting on many cameras and camera phones these days. Today, taking pictures is made much simpler than it ever was before. Now, you can touch a button on your camera phone or just set your digital camera to AUTO and, “presto” you have a picture. But, if you are at all serious about what you want to photograph and why, you will need much more than that. You can use your camera phone to record whatever is in front of you, but if you want something more, something that has some staying power, something that you will be proud to look at in the future, or something you might want to print to hang on your wall,  you will demand better quality than your AUTO setting will afford you.

Why is this? Well, it’s largely because when you let your instrument do your thinking for you, you will often be disappointed with the results. They won’t always be what you envisioned because you are trusting your pictures to a computer chip! Camera phones and digital cameras using their AUTO settings are basically trying to give you, the user, an overall average and otherwise usable image. Many times these images won’t stand up to enlargement, are often not sharp enough to be pleasing to the eye and don’t always render a subject the way you would like.

The reasons are easy enough to understand if you take a minute to examine what happens when a picture is made. First of all, by definition, a photograph is a “light picture.” It usually takes light to make an image. Some images can be made with the infrared portion of the light spectrum (these images are made by heat and not by light) and some can be made with x-rays or CT scans. But for our purposes, we are talking about the light we can see. So, given the visible light spectrum there are several factors that control the quality of the image your automatic device records:

1. The sensitivity of your digital sensor (ISO setting)
2. The speed with which the shutter opens and closes to allow light in
3. The opening of the lens itself, usually measured in f/stops
4. The quality of the glass used in the lens
5. The precision with which the camera is made
6. Whether or not the camera can be held securely so that it doesn’t move when the picture is taken
7. The quality of the computer and processing elements that make the picture (software)
8. The skill of the user

When you ask a computer to figure something out for you, you have to be careful about what you tell it to do. It will do exactly what you ask of it; no more, no less! So, if you’re asking it to make a picture for you under “normal” lighting and posing conditions, it should do a decent job. However, if you ask it to make a picture in low light, make an image of a moving object, make a photo that can separate subject from background, take a picture with backlighting, make an extreme closeup image or even make an image in monochrome or black&white, you may not get what you might expect from a regular camera.

So everyone is familiar with this little device now. It is pretty small and lightweight compared to a regular, full-fledged DSLR. It also has an amazing chip in it that really can do wonders. But, as in most instruments, you have to know how to use it. Whenever possible, one thing I always do is to attach my iphone to a tripod. I have mentioned this before, but there are a couple of very neat little attachments you can get just for that purpose. One is this one:

I also have attached this to one of my regular tripod quick-release plates so that I can switch between regular cameras and my iphone when I need to. Putting your camera phone on a tripod does a couple of things that will improve your images immediately:

1. It slows down the image-making process and makes you think a bit more about what you are shooting and:
2. It makes your camera much more steady and will yield much sharper images.

The other thing you need to learn about, if you intend to do a lot of shooting with your camera phone, is how to control exposures by tapping on the screen and moving a set of slider bars to vary the exposures a bit. Anything you can do to make the instrument listen to what you want instead of doing what IT wants, is helpful in making better images.

Here are a couple of images made on fully AUTOMATIC mode with my iPhone 13 Pro:

This image had plenty of light so that the chip set the shutter at a fast speed and the aperture small enough to render detail from the foreground all they way to the background. Here’s another one that worked well:

Obviously made from a moving boat of another moving boat. Note how everything is sharp. There was enough light to have the settings, again, at a fast-enough shutter speed and the lens stopped down enough to render everything sharp.