Originally posted by ShawnH Thank you! I was wondering about that too. In any case, Ricoh would be wise to introduce a mode that would organize this method under a single setting.
Or would it be better to just understand that the lowest ISO is the best Dynamic range.
What happens when companies start building in these presets, is people lose track of what they can accomplish.
Say you have an bird , you're already shooting pretty wide with a 200mm lens, a camera company preset would insist on at least 1/400s just to help compensate for FL and motion blur.
Guess what happens?
The camera sets the shutter speed to 1/400 instead of 1/30s to be safe, because to a computer this shot is not advisable, and I don't get this image.
Instead, I shoot at 400 ISO, and get this shot, because I understand what I'm doing and how my camera works, and I know I will have a much better image if I go against convention and shoot 200mm at 1/30s.
There is just no excuse for not understanding how your gear works, or trusting a camera company to get it right for you by inventing a one setting to work in every shooting senerio type situation.
It's a mistake to think a camera preset will compensate for what every photographer should know. Guys like me who are always willing to take risks to get the best possible image would suffer if they used it.
No doubt you are seeing the reasons why they should have a maximize DR preset. But there are also reasons why they shouldn't'.
This shot is what it is because
I understood how much DR was required,
I understood how much I could "cheat" on the exposure.
I was willing to gamble to get a great shot, not a correct but un-impressive shot.
Those presets don't let you gamble, and if they did use the same settings as I used on this image, there would be other images where they would mess things up for you.
Presets are convenient, but they don't always make the best use of you camera's abilities.
There's no getting away from learning how your camera works if you wish to maximize the potential. The thing with people who get comfortable with presets is, they often think "that's it". They don't realize how much better their image could have been.