I’m a big fan of photography magazines. There’s nothing like seeing someone’s successful photo and reading, right next to it, how they did it. You learn so much so fast.

(Actually, what was even better was the Popular Photography monthly feature where they’d show you the outtakes — the photo right before and right after the winner. You could see the muffed versions of the fantastic shot. You learned what not to do — and you learned that even the pros don’t get every shot right. Unfortunately, the magazine eliminated this feature with its recent redesign.)

Anyway, the caption always gives the specs for the photo: “Taken with a Nikon D90 at 1/200th second, aperture f/2.8, exposure +1, using Sigma 18-200mm lens” or whatever.

It’s always bothered me that often, the camera came up with these settings.

Plenty of shutterbugs use Auto mode or Program mode, where the camera computes the shutter speed and aperture size.

Others use Aperture Priority mode or Shutter Priority mode, where the photographer dials up one variable (the f-stop or the shutter speed) and the camera calculates the other one (the shutter speed or the f-stop).

So publishing all of those stats, as though the photographer manually calculated each one, is a little deceptive and unhelpful! I think they should SAY what the photographer did (“set aperture to f/7”) and what the camera did (auto shutter speed 1/20th sec).

I’m not about to start a national campaign for this, but you know — in a parallel universe, this revised system would be more helpful to those of us trying to master this complicated art.