Even "food"?

[John Wright]

These days, compact digital cameras come with "Scene Mode" options like "Landscape", "Flower", "Portrait", "Night scene", "Surf", "Snow", "Self portrait",  "Museum", "Pet", "Foliage", "Soft", "Sunset", "Firework" etc. Pentax even provides one called "Food".

 

Are these simply fixed presets of aperture and shutter speed combinations only, or is there anything else to it (e.g. metering? ISO? Color balance?)? What does the camera actually do when set to these modes?

 

Regards - JW

 

 

[ed]

If you study the manual, you'll find that one of the advantages of shooting
in the "Food" preset mode is that the camera salivates. Its tummy grumbles
too.

[bob]

"John Wright" <notpr...@something.com> wrote in
news:412dbbd7$0$5449$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au:

All of the above, and perhaps more.

Most (all?) of the better cameras have some form of "matrix" metering.
They meter more than one part of the scene for each shot. If you tell it
you are shooting "snow" then it knows the foreground is white and bright.
If you are shooting "surf" then it knows the foreground is probably beige
or off white, and bright. If you're shooting food, you probably own a
restaraunt, and you are probably indoors under incandescent light, and
you probably want over saturated colors.

Basically what happens is some guy (guys?) at the camera company think
about various conditions that average users might be shooting in, and
then they decide how to make all the settings the camera has available,
and maybe some it doesn't (to the user).

If you know a lot about photography, and if you have time, then choosing
all the settings for yourself will probably always be better than or the
same as the choices some guy in Japan made for you. But then again, if
the scene of a lifetime is unfolding in front of you, you might get the
shot if you simply choose a mode, and miss the shot entirely if you try
to work out all the settings.

In other words, if you learn what they do, program modes can be a useful
tool, just like manual mode or aperature priority mode.

Bob

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[Ron Hunter]

It would depend on the camera, and the choices made by the manufacturer.
I can see that a setting like 'foliage' might be useful if it
decreased the compression, and sharpened a bit. 'Snow' might be useful
for imposing a special processing to prevent 'blowing out the
highlights'. 'Food'???

[Robert Barr]

'Snow' might be useful for
> imposing a special processing to prevent 'blowing out the highlights'.
> 'Food'???

Flambe'?