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"Norm Dresner" wrote:

I want to use P-Mode becuase it generally gets me "close" to the
speed/aperture combination I want. Not always, but generally close.

I've recently tried P-Mode again with my newest Canon DSLR after not
using it since I first tried out my Sony F707 in early 2002, and I was
rather impressed with the choices it made (compared to my expectations).

What I've been wishing for, for a while now, are user-programmable
modes, where you supply a list of Av, Tv, and ISO combinations for
absolute EV levels.
[BIG SNIP]

Using P-Mode in the newer Nikon cameras, the camera's choice of shutter
speed is definitely biased by the focal length of the lens (or zoom
setting). That already removes some really pressing need for user
customization.

Perhaps if the camera's "brain" also used input from the focus subsystem on
the motion of the "subject", it might go a long way toward making a really
intelligent choice of shutter speed -- but that's too much to ask for in
today's market where the cost of things like the CPUs and their associated
memory and communications channels are a not insignificant percentage of the
total manufacturing cost of a digital camera.

I don't think that a really intelligent automated choice of F/stop can be
made because it's probably going to be impossible for any reasonable image
analysis software that could run in an embedded processor in a camera is
able to distinguish between a portrait of a person for which shallow D-o-F
is usually desirable from a photograph of a similarly sized mechanical
product or large botanical where much larger D-o-F is preferred.

These comments are based on my decades of experience in the computer field
as both a hardware and software engineer, not just on my preferences as a
photographer. Sure, in, say, 20 years we'll probably have 100 GHz embedded
CPUs with terabytes of program memory that will analyze everything the
camera is pointed at and make a really intelligent selection of exposure
parameters. But certainly not in the next 5-10 years. For that, we'll
still need the old Mark 1 Grey Matter to make the "right choices" (more
properly, to chose the best compromise).

Norm