The Beginners Questions Area

EV is variable and you can set it to what you want 😂🤣

I was not talking about Iliah, he was the only one that gave me the answer , the rest had no idea. I laughed all the way to the job and back again 🤣

That is not true. JimKasson gave you the right answer before Iliah Borg's post.

If you look through Iliah's posts you will see that even he told you that JimKasson had given you the correct answer. For some reason you did not want to accept it and kept banging on for an answer. Eventually Iliah Borg stepped with the same answer as Jim but with more detail.

In any case, the answer to your question is in the manual, as Iliah Borg mentioned to you, as well as the online user manual. It seems to me you are not a believer of RTFM 😎 and maybe prefer to be spoon fed answers.

www.rawdigger.com/usermanual/histograms

"Auto: automatic calculation of grid zero (gray point position) and setting grid step to 1EV. The zero is located at the level that is 3 stops (8 times) lower than the maximum pixel value rounded up (ceiling) to the nearest power of 2. For example, if the maximum value of all pixels in the photo is 3000, then the nearest power of two greater than this value is 4096 and the EV0 value for this photo will be automatically set to level 512."

This is effectively what JimKasson posted even before Iliah Borg's post.

I was about 6 or 7 in preschool when I argued with the teacher that the Sun is a star. "No", she said, "the Sun is the Sun, and the stars are the stars, the Sun is not a star".
"But the Sun is a star just close to us, I read it in a book" - "No, the Sun is the Sun, and the stars are the stars" - etc.
I was put in a corner for that, although not for long.

Ignorance and injustice go together! :)

Jim's answer to you was correct because you were using the default setting, and also because you insist on simplicity ;)

Yet, because a camera in full auto, or just controlling for one variable mostly yields very good results, one is not invited to explore.

And because automated operations are more opaque to the user, and are likely not understood by a beginner. Does anybody really understand matrix metering on their camera?

I had a similar experience. We learned negative numbers in third grade. My family then moved and I started fourth grade in a new school, where I was marked down for answering a subtraction question with a negative number. I got something quite like "you can’t subtract three from two". Odd the things that stick in the mind many decades later.

It depends on the particular beginner, but many just bought a “real” camera because they are looking to exercise more control over their photography than their phone was giving them (and frankly, phones often do full-auto better than “real” cameras, anyway).

Matrix metering (who cares what it does so long as it works) along with Aperture Priority/Auto ISO/minimum SS (adding exposure compensation for fine tuning brightness later on), is pretty easily comprehensible (most folks) and offers real creative control in most situations with really just the effects of controlling the Aperture to worry about/play around with (and it’s arguably the most creatively important parameter).

Initially focusing (ha ha) on just a single exposure parameter (Aperture) also allows you to see how the camera responds with complementary settings for SS and ISO which, it you pay attention, will gradually paint a pretty clear picture about how the whole process works without you having to worry about learning how to make sense of everything all at once.

If you want to explore beyond this, great, but if this as far as you want to go, with a little experience and gradually acquired know-how you will still be able to shoot almost anything (and shoot it well) with this simple methodology (One many pros use much of the time).

I see lots of folks being presented with “full manual” right from the get-go and being completely overwhelmed - with their phones still taking all the pics and their incomprehensible “real” cameras gathering dust. Some people are fine with jumping in on the deep end, but many are not. If you could hop in a car as a kid and easily learn to juggle using the steering wheel, the accelerator, the brake pedal, the clutch, and the stick shift all at once, and really want to understand all the inner “workings”, then this approach is probably for you but, for many others, semi-auto is the way to go, IMO.

I think initial, ahem, exposure to full manual for a newbie should be in a controlled setup. Camera on a tripod, lighting fixed, subject immobile, no time constraints. I once spent a month taking pictures of eggs, which is kind of a classic, and learned a lot.

I've never figured out precisely what it's going to to when the situation changes. It's like trying to reverse engineer a software program when you can't look at the code.

At least I'm consistent. Our kids (and me, too) learned how to drive with stick shift cars. I taught them how to double clutch, but not how to heel and toe.

Over here, manual gearboxes are still in the majority, so almost everyone learns to drive manuals. It's usually some elderly person learning to drive late in life who learns automatic only. I guess with the increasing shift to EVs, automatic car learners will be on the increase. My daughter has just received her provisional driving licence and will be able to start lessons soon. I wonder what she will opt for.