Mirrorless Shooting: It’s Intuitive

• noun: intuition
• 1.
the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.

How does intuition apply to photography and particularly mirrorless systems? Since I can carry a mirrorless camera or point-and-shoot camera with me almost everywhere I’m able to quickly shoot almost anything that catches my eye (and for my blog) and you can see that I do exactly that. I find it even faster than using my iPhone to take a photo and the quality is much, much better

When I was shooting film I noticed when looking at the proof sheets that the first photo I took of something was frequently the best one of a series. I realized that my intuition is what made me see the subject and lighting and any second-guessing of a better angle or a different camera setting frequently did not lead to a better photo.

I watch photographers carefully choose their lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO and then look up to see that the subject is gone or the light has changed before they even take their first shot.

My advice is just set your camera to Auto mode so when you see something interesting you take a shot as quickly as possible. Then you can futz with all those settings and see if you can make a better photo. It’s a lot easier and faster to do this with a small camera from a mirrorless system that’s small enough to always be with you.—Mark Toal