Another thing I’ve learned in this process of getting back to the 1980s is that chimping is extremely helpful (not that I could ever do that in the 80s, of course). The more I shoot in manual, however, the more I find that my exposure guesses (how far away from the meter I set the exposure) get closer and closer to the right values and that the chimping becomes less critical. Practice really does help here!

I agree that learning how to operate your camera and how all the exposure settings interact is vital. I now shoot manual about 95% of the time and only resort to aperture priority in tricky lighting situations where I need to use fill flash and don’t have time to muck with power settings on the fly. My Nikon D90 and D700 both do a great job in these cases (with help from me dialing in some base exposure and flash compensation settings). In this case, again, though it is vital to understand how the settings interact and know what you are doing to get the expected end effect.

True enough though, as a Nikon shooter, I had no idea Canon bodies would default to 400ISO – how strange. I was assuming that people using manual would also realise that they had to set the ISO themselves. I can’t imagine what auto ISO would do in manual mode (is that setting even available? I suspect not) since the whole point of manual is to give complete control to the photographer.