[semiquaver]

I know that modern systems like aperture priority or full auto make things easier, but I maintain that the many photos I took with a fully manual film camera (Canon AE-1) were simply better than those taken with any subsequent DSLR. The simple act of calibrating the shutter speed, aperture size, and manual focus before and during shooting helps you slow down and think about composition and framing, making the end result more valuable. Same goes for the limited number of shots on a roll of film.

Nowadays it’s easier to just take lots of shots and fiddle with the setting and do bracketing and such. But I maintain something important was lost by the move to automatic cameras.

[mmh0000]

Don't worry! We're moving away from automatic cameras, too. Soon, you'll just use ChatGPT to generate your vacation images on demand.

I'm being a little hyperbolic, but it really seems like, for a non-insignificant portion of the population, that will be true.

[blacklion]

Friend of mine suggested "vacation camera" concept when Panoramio was established (around 2006): box with compass, GPS and Internet connection. You point it to the sight, press button, it downloads photos of this sight. If you have premium subscription, it downloads professional photos with professional post-processing.

Inserting user's mates was a problem in 2006.

[sixothree]

The rate at which people are currently posting AI enhanced or modified images of themselves is a bit surprising to me. Apparently people very much like wearing different outfits or travelling to new places without actually having to put them on or actually leave the house.

[geraldmcboing]

One thing that is lost when using auto cameras is using focus & DOF as part of composition. With an auto-everything camera, the only part the user does is frame the shot. But composing requires thought about where you choose to place the focal plane, and the depth of field. Also lost with auto digital is pre-visualisation. No need for it as most people just bang off shots & look at the result. The delay of seeing film developed means film prohotographers learn to previz their shots. Less and better.

[shakow]

> One thing that is lost when using auto cameras is using focus & DOF as part of composition

That's why virtually all cameras have aperture-priority though, right?

[omoikane]

I agree with slowing down and taking my time if I am shooting something static, but if I am outdoors taking pictures of anything that moves (e.g. birds), I am going to shoot in full auto burst mode until the buffer/SD card is full.

I understand I am relying more on luck and not being as deliberate with composition when I do that, and I have high respect for people who are able to get great wildlife photos with film. But for amateurs like me, it's far easier to get better pictures simply by taking more pictures.

[gyomu]

Yeah, digital is just a game changer for wildlife photography, especially when considering the extremely fast smart autofocus / high shooting frame rates / top tier stabilization modern systems have.

“It was night and day. Six minutes instead of six years tells the story,” McFadyen says. “Instead of 12 frames per second, I can now shoot at 30 frames per second, so when a bird dives at 30 miles per hour, it makes it so much more likely you’ll capture it at the right moment.

McFadyen says that the focusing system is also “incredibly fast” on mirrorless cameras. “It can lock on the kingfisher’s tiny eye at these super-fast speeds,” he adds.”

https://petapixel.com/2025/11/27/photographer-recreates-king...

This is a bit of a marketing puff piece, but the core insights are correct - the kind of shots the photographer is talking about here were insanely hard to pull off on film, still very tricky to achieve with digital bodies in the 2010s - but modern tech makes them almost trivial.

[moon2]

That's why I love fiddling with analog cameras for a bit, or even experimenting with old lens on newer DSLRs. I have a Canon Rebel from 2011 and sometimes love to use my soviet Zenit Helios 44M lens in it. I do have the Zenit which came with this lens, but I have yet to develop its film.

[RankingMember]

I've started fiddling with an old Canon 30D again just because it's completely devoid of all the automatic post-processing I've become so used to with my phone camera. It's nice to just see the image as it is.

[asdff]

Well, to be fair, you see the image how the proprietary jpg engine chooses to automatically post process the raw file. Even this age canon cameras there was some controversy in that regard. And even if you view the raw file you are looking at how your raw file viewer chooses to post process a minimal preview for you to view for that raw file.

You want full control you fall into the rabbit hole of dcraw where you can option out how that raw processing engine actually works, what algorithms are used and what parameters for those algorithms. Even lightroom you are just using the algorithm they decided for you already with parameters they decided are fine.

[asdff]

I used to have an old rebel xti, how do you actually confirm focus shooting like this? as far as I remember there were no aids for manual focus like film slr ground glass or modern mirrorless live view focus peaking.

[moon2]

You don’t confirm focus… pictures are always a bit blurry, but I kind of like the aesthetic (not very practical though).

I did a bit of research, for better results you can try:

- focus peaking

- focus magnifier

- aperture priority (so that it would choose the shutter speed for you)

- and you still would need to confirm focus manually with you naked eyes

I like to capture shots with subjects in an ideal distance where I can have some interesting bookeh but still capture the subject. The bookeh on the Helios lens is beautiful!

[Wolfbeta]

You're romantacizing the tinkering, but you're absolutely right.

That friction of adjusting machinary to capture what we felt against what we saw was part of the process.

It slowed us down just long enough to appreciate the patterns, the textures, the form, the haesscity of a moment that seized our attention.

[caseyohara]

> Same goes for the limited number of shots on a roll of film.

You can approximate the same limitation on digital cameras by simply using a very small SD card.

[jacobgkau]

Approximate, sure, although you can still go back and delete photos from a small SD card, whereas film's more of a consumable resource.

[kqr]

Or put a large file on a regular size SD card.

[caseyohara]

I guess it depends on what "large file" and "regular size SD card" mean to you.

The best selling SD card on B&H is 128 GB. Let's consider that "regular size".

Fujifilm's GFX100 II is a popular medium-format mirrorless camera. Its sensor is 102MP. So each 14-bit RAW image is about 170 MB.

102M pixels x 14 bits = 1.428B bits = ~178M bytes = ~170 MB

So a 128 GB SD card can hold ~771 images that are 170 MB. That's a lot more images than a standard roll of film.

[Toutouxc]

I think they meant that you can pad your regular SD card with random data and leave just enough space for a few photos.

[nayuki]

Or even use a computer to custom-format the card with a hilariously small partition (e.g. 128 MB on a 128 GB card).

[caseyohara]

ahh that makes a lot more sense!

[asdff]

Even today you are better off shooting manually once you have metered the scene.

Otherwise your meter will pick up on color differences in a given framing and meter slightly differently. Shots will be 1/30th of a second, 1/25th of a second, then thanks to the freedom of aperture priority you might get little weird 1/32ths of a second you don't have discretely on a dial. How about iso. same thing, one shot iso 200, another iso 250, 275 this other one. Oh this one went up to iso 800 and the meter cut the shutter speed. Aperture too. This one f2 this one f4 this other one f2.5. This wasn't such a big deal even in the full auto film era since 35mm film has such latitude where you can't really tell a couple stops over or underexposed.

All these shots, ever so slightly different from one another even if the lighting of the scene didn't really change.

Why does this matter? Batch processing. If I shot them all at same iso, same shutter speed, same aperture, and I know the lighting didn't really change over that series of shots, I can just edit one image if needed and carry the settings over to batch process the entire set of shots.

If they were all slightly different that strategy would not work so well. Shots would have to be edited individually or "gasp" full auto button which might deviate from what I had in mind. Plus there are qualitative trade offs too when one balances exposure via shutter speed, vs via aperture, vs via iso.