Manual or Auto mode?

I love taking photographs, ever since digital technology and the wonderful auto mode became popular. I do not have the patience to do what most proper photographers (including my husband) enjoy doing - setting aperture, exposure and all those myriad settings before taking a picture.

Yes, I love to point and shoot. My husband did make some weak efforts to convert me into a proper photographer, but all that ended up happening is that I've made him lazy too!! And yes, I definitely do not want to carry those large gun-like lenses, like many of my young MNS friends, like Sripad and Skandan do.

So I still do not know why I signed up for the Basic Photography workshop that Dr TP Alaganantham offered through MNS. I think some of it was to do with demystifying the whole process and understanding what the camera was actually doing when I pressed that button.

What an enjoyable weekend it was! First of all, its so uplifting to interact with people like Dr TPA, a surgeon by profession, but whose passion for photography has led to much tinkering and self discovery, and the interest to communicate to others like me.

Elbows close to the body brings greater stability...hmmm, I had not thought of that. I now am aware of specular reflection, catch light, spot metering, white balance, CCD and CMOS, depth of field, ghost shadows and the reasons for red eye! A great tip for me was the suggestion to use flash in daylight to counter the effects of backlit people - I always seem to be having this problem.

For me, the most interesting part of the weekend, were the sessions related to composition and framing. The rule of thirds and the Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci spiral. My Ikebana training immediately identified with this asymmetric sense of aesthetics.

So am I likely to move out of auto-focus? Unlikely. But there may be 10 reasons to turn off that auto-focus. And now I know what to attempt to do, when my Ikebana arrangements develop ghost shadows, when those mid-day photos look all washed out and when there is low light at dusk.