Auto settings
Settings cameras do for you
Digital cameras are able to help you out in a variety of ways. Determining various settings automatically is one of them. This is a list of some settings that the camera tries to get right for you
At least for me, these are the main things that the camera controls for me. I usually use an Aperture priority mode, this explains why exposure is here.
Exposure
Let's face it, for a decent picture, you need to make sure you get the amount of light that your camera captures correct. The camera can determine this quite easily and give you a very good estimation about the exposure.
If you are not happy with the auto exposure, in most cases you want it a bit darker or a bit lighter. This could be because of the lens, the mood you want to set, or the relative angle to the light source. This is why all cameras will allow exposure compensation as one of the primary tuning parameters (this is the most basic adjustment you can make in a cellphone). You still use the auto exposure, but consistently over/under expose by a certain amount.
The other issue is how the camera determines the amount of light it captures. It can average it over the entire field, or pick the light from the center where you are pointing at.
The next trick is to use one of the Lock buttons on the cameras. If you think the auto exposure is playing tricks, point it to a direction that you see/think that the exposure is better, press the auto-exposure lock (AE-L) button, keep pressed reframe and shoot.
All of these still use auto exposure but tune it a bit. If nothing else works, check the last shot you made, note the exposure, then move to a shooting mode that will let you control exposure and set it directly.
White Balance
What you see (or know to be) white should also appear white in your pictures. That is the theory, but the light that your camera captures is not always the same. Furthermore digital cameras do not really capture color. They capture light intensity at different colors (red, green and blue) and combine them together to give you the picture. The combination they use depends on the light that you see. A candle illuminates the scene differently than the sun. So it is important to get the temperature of the light right to be able to compose the colors correctly.
In most cases, your camera will automatically get the light source right and you will not notice it. But when they get it wrong, the results will not be pretty. Indoors and shadows can create quite tricky situations for the electronics to determine what is what.
Even more frustratingly, newer cameras even have multiple auto white balance settings (My latest camera, Nikon Z FC, has the following three: reduce warm colors, keep overall atmosphere, keep warm lighting colors).
Of all the auto settings, this (at least for me) is the most frustrating one if it does not work right. Especially problematic are the cases where slight changes create wildly different results. For these it is better to set some manual white balance setting. As long as the setting is consistent, it is easier to adjust it in post processing. In fact I have some friends that never even bother with white balance, they just make sure that the setting stays consistent and then post process all to correct them.
One thing that I do when I get really frustrated with white balance, is to switch to monochrome. Photography is supposed to be fun, and spending minutes fighting to get the white balance can be annoying at times. When you are in monochrome, it is just light and dark. It is not a permanent solution, but I always loved the black and white pictures I had when I switched for this reason.
Focus
Autofocus is great, it will save you a lot of effort and allow you to make better pictures with less effort. All is good.
There are still cases where the autofocus can be easily fooled. After all the camera has to know what you are interested in. There are many ways to tell the camera how the focus should work.
You can adjust the focus point in practically all cameras. Usually this is the center, but can easily be moved around, so you do not have to have the focus on the center all the time.
The other trick is to make use of the lock buttons. Point to where you want to focus, make sure it is in focus, and then press the auto focus hold (AF-L) button and reframe as you want.
Newer cameras with touch screen (and cellphones) will allow you to focus on points that you select on the screen as well.
The default autofocus setting in a camera will practically re-focus everytime you take a picture. This is great if you are trying to track something that is moving (i.e. a car coming closer) but it can be tricky when there are many things moving but you still want to stay focussed on a specific part (i.e. children running around but you want to focus on something in the background). For this the camera settings can be adjusted to allow back button autofocus where you only autofocus when you press a button that is easy to reach.
This again is a personal preference, these settings are also usually automatically adjusted, but I use Shooting modes where I control these more than the others.
ISO
The ability to tune the ISO is one of the big differences between analog and digital photography. In addition to the exposure and aperture, you have a third parameter to help find you a setting that captures the picture properly.
This is why many shooting modes will allow the camera to pick an appropriate ISO value automatically so that the exposure and aperture that you want can be realized.
Since higher ISO will start to introduce some noise (although much less than what purists think), some people want to have more control on the ISO or at least set a limit to the maximum ISO the camera should allow for these adjustments. This is actually very practical, especially if you do not want to be burdened with the technical aspects too much.
I use this feature less, not because I am worried about noise, but fixing the ISO forces me to think about the aperture and the exposure more. If I realize it is not working (either exposure is too long to hold steady, or aperture is too small), most cameras will easily allow you to adjust ISO manually without you taking your eyes off. So I try to see if I can manage, and if it is not working, I can manually increase ISO to make my life easier. This allows me to get a better feel of the capabilities of the lens and emulate (sort of) the analog photography.
Aperture
For most of my shots I will use aperture priority as I usually care about the aperture more when taking pictures. It is also one of the easier or more direct adjustments you can make in a camera. However different shooting modes will adjust exposure automatically, and for many cases this is great. Unless you are in bright bright sunshine, the camera would anyway pick the largest aperture that your lens supports.
As lens design is always a compromise, some lenses at their wider apertures have more issues like falloff and sharpness which is less pronounced at smaller apertures, and they have other sharpness issues due to diffraction at smaller apertures. If you see that you are suffering from these, you may want to control aperture directly.
I would argue that more specialized lenses with large apertures (f/2.8 and larger) or macro capabilities benefit from more direct control of exposure and probably when using such lenses it is a good idea to control them directly.
Color modes
This is a tricky one. The color modes of a camera can substantially change the picture. Newer cameras (for example Nikon Z FC) have a lot of smart electronics to choose the mode that they think works the best. The problem with this setting is that most people are not aware that it exists. It works fins most of the time, but sometimes it may end up switching from shot to shot (due to small changes in the environment), and you get very different looking pictures from frame to frame.
Note that this is on top of the white balance settings.
Not at all. For 95% of the cases the auto settings will be spot on. You just need to know what they are and how you can manipulate them when necessary.
There are many ways to get things right. Is the picture too dark, you can play with exposure compensation, or you can point the camera at a darker part of the scene, hit the exposure lock (AE-L) button so that the auto exposure picks a longer exposure and move back to your original shot, or read out the exposure from an info screen, turn into manual mode (or speed priority) and set the exposure you want directly.
These pages are for Amateur Photographers and not really for seasoned photographers and professionals. I have no affiliation or commercial interest with any brand/make. I write from my own experience. I ended up using mainly Nikon, so I am more familiar with this brand than others. See price for notes on pricing as well as photography related links.