"paying attention to what the camera is doing and taking charge when necessary"
Exactly. But that is also the reason that the teacher is touting your mother to shoot in manual mode. It is much easier to take charge when you know what you are doing.. Be forced to do it manually is a quicker route to understanding the relations between time and aperture than having the camera doing it automaticly, to get a natural feel for it. I guess he is also recommending use of centerweighted and spot metering, not using the evaluative mode. The same reason goes here, it is hard to learn if something is doing the hard part for you.
I recently gave some advice to a newbie here on DT regarding cameras. In that post i wrote: The more knowledge you get, the more you will like cameras that puts you in control and let you use them manually, but that also translates to things harder to use for the newbie.
Ease of use is way different between the expert and the newbie. From a technical standpoint the most advanced camera is the green-rectangle point and shoot, and the most simple is a 70 year old large format camera. But for the expert the p&s is harder to use since it do not give the expert even the possibility to use his full knowledge, the p&s will just restrict him.
The same thing can be observed in other fields. You will never be a really good car driver if all you ever drove was automatic cars on good roads. A driver like that would quickly get into deep trouble with a manual gearbox, no ABS and such systems, on a small icy winter road.
The same goes in software. Paintbrush is easy for the newbie, but in the same time impossible hard for someone used to Photoshop. Windows is made to be able to be used by people with no computer knowledge, but quickly restricts for example a Linux-nerd used to all the possibilities with all the tools usually present in those completely open systems.
The problem lies in personal development, we are all lazy and want to get job done quick and easy. Why do something standing if we can do it sitting and so on. The backside is: Design for idiots and idiot users is what you get. If people do not have to learn, they wont. It is quite sad but we can all see it around us in way different areas, especially in areas where people is not really interested, just want to get the job done.
If i was a photography teacher, i would also try to get my students to use fix-focals, no zooms. With zoom-lenses people tend to forget to think about the perspective, they just zoom to fill the frame. But there is a big difference between a close distance wide-angle shot and a long distance tele-shot where the subject fills the frame equally. We get much more of the background with the wide angle. With only two different fix-focals, the photog. have to think and make a decision. Yes, it is harder, but from a learning-standpoint that is better since it forces you to think and from that you gain knowledge. Learning is not always easy.
I even guess that many photo-techers actually curse over the cameras of today, none of them is really ment to be used fully manual, they do not even have view-finders meant for manual focus. It is just a framing device today, in DX format even a bit small for that. There is hardly even lenses meant for manual focus. In this environment it is harder to teach people to focus and where to put focus.
Today we all throw away tons of misfocused images. We did not miss focus, the camera did, and we did not even see it in the view-finder, we saw it afterwards viewing the pictures. Back in the days before autofocus, we did miss pictures where we did not have time to focus. But the shots we got where in focus, the focus errors of that time where very very small, not like today when the camera misses and puts focus way off.
posted in Auto modes versus manual
