Hello,

I getting used to my new micro four thirds Panasonic GF3. Im off on my holidays in a few weeks to Chicago and NY. Im struggling in my head more than anything.

I am trying to prepare myself for the best settings to use for different situations. Low light (Like in pubs), night streets, night city landscape, sports such as biking etc.

I know what each setting does, Program AE, Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority etc. I dont mind tweaking setings up n down to get the desired effect but i dont know which i should use and when. I want to keep it simple and not be the tit everyone is waiting for as im playing with settings.

This is my conclusion:

iAuto all day (it has aperture depth slide bar to play with aperture effects).

Aperture Priority in low light, evening/night cityscape landscape and when im walking around. I will use Auto ISO but cap it at 1600 or lower if i have a place to rest the camera.

When im watching basketball etc.. Shutter Priority. Set it so that it min without under exposing. Auto ISO.

Can anyone advice me on this. I dont want to be playing with settings on every photo.

Auto all day and just accept that not all photos will come out perfectly.
Enjoy the holiday and pop into B&H Photography NY.

Cameras are so clever now that ‘Auto’ will get it right 95% of the time.

Just use instagram.

Don’t be afraid to crank the ISO – not getting a shot is worse than a bit of grain

IMHO, having owned a GF3 (for a few weeks) and Canon S95 I’m amazed at how bad the ‘Auto’ settings are. Both appear to be very reluctant to increase the ISO to a level where the shutter speed is above 1/60th of a sec.

I ended up using aperture priority and (as you suggested) capping the ISO at 1600. I found it gave a lot better results than using full auto, and personally, I found it easier to work out what the camera was doing. The fully auto flash pictures were horrible….at least using AV you have some control over the flash.

Have a play around, but I expected ‘full auto’ to give sensible settings for most situations, but in reality AV proved to give a much more consistent output.

Hi Nick, another new camera eh? 🙂

I’ve only used the GF1 and had heard the auto mode had improved by the GF3, but I’m in A with manual ISO 95% of the time on mine. After a bit of experience flicking the exposure comp up and down in A becomes second nature. Good idea to learn about how metering works so you anticipate and overcome situations where the camera is likely to over or under expose.

I leave my camera on manual and get good results, except in particularly low light. By default it sets the max ISO to 800, which is fine because you don’t want it to stray into noisy territory. However if it’s going to be inside, I manually select 1600 or 3200. That’s basically all you’ll probably need to do.

I only go to shutter or aperture priority when I want to specifically control the DoF or motion blur. That’s not on a GF3 though 🙂

Interesting – always manual – Do you mean all options incl focus, dialled about all the time?

Shooting, hoping, snapping kodachrome on sunny sixteen 🙂