Spoiler alert: I prepared this a few months ago, as you can tell from the images and clips (we are in winter here in Canada). Things have changed a bit in terms of the equipment used since this was prepared but the message is the same. Read on to the end to find out…

One of the things I have always found a bit ironic in photography is that as you become more and more proficient in the craft, you might seek out better equipment typically, and then, also typically, you TURN OFF all of the advanced automatic features of that better equipment and go “full manual”. I’ve never really understood that. Why would anyone do that?
I decided to try a totally different approach with an area of activity that is growing for me: vlogging. Instead of turning everything off, I’ve put together a basic but decent rig and turned ON all of the automatic functions I could find. I’m doing nothing manually. I think it’s working really well so far. Read on to see what I’ve done. I’ve included a few video clips as well for your entertainment.

Modern digital cameras, particularly “prosumer” quality and above, include several different modes or ways of interacting with the camera settings. Although labelled differently for different manufacturers, all good cameras have modes that range from fully manual (where the photographer picks all of the settings) to fully automatic (where the camera evaluates the scene and picks the settings).
Skylum announced the upcoming release of Luminar 4, scheduled for sometime in the fall. Originally released in 2017, the company and the product have gone through some interesting evolutions.