Almost every modern camera has some form of an “automatic” setting that decides the focus, aperture, shutter speed and flash exposure. This kind of automation should help you quickly get shots that you’d otherwise miss, at least in theory. My experience has been the opposite. Even the best digital cameras botch the exposure in a scene with extreme contrast (high or low) or struggle to focus well in a fast-moving scene. You can beat the machine with practice.

My young nephew was handing me this daisy at dusk. I quickly opened my aperture to f/1.4, set my shutter speed to 1/30th of a second and turned my focus ring as far to the right as it would go. This extreme way of focusing made the entire scene a blur, but then I was able to move the camera closer until the flower morphed into the only thing in focus. This allowed me to take the picture and live the moment, because I didn’t spend any time fussing over a misbehaving camera that couldn’t decide what to focus on.

Postscript

The photo of Positano, Italy at the very top of this article may be the best one that I’ve ever taken. Every time I’ve tried to “improve” the photo in Photoshop, it looked worse. The lesson is to leave well enough alone sometimes. The other lesson is that sometimes you get a beautiful shot when you put yourself in a less beautiful place. The photo was taken from a dark street corner in the neighboring village of Praiano, Italy. Here is the full panorama: