“What is the point of knowing f-stop on a digital camera?” Well, learning how to control your aperture makes just as much sense on digital as it did with film…no difference at all.

And your camera only functions automatically if you set it on automatic. And when you do that, you are totally enslaved to what some little computer thinks about the lighting in a scene, and camera don’t know squat! They can sometimes light a scene right, but they cannot know if you need to freeze action or add a little blur or adjust your depth-of-field.

Not that there is anything magical about it, but I tend to notice most folks functioning in aperture priority (A on the Nikons). That is my normal setting, though it is not best for every situation, of course. I set my aperture and keep a constant eye on the speed as I am composing the photo.

Many times, though, I switch to manual metering. And now that I think of it, you really have to know WHAT your camera is metering too, meaning, how much of the scene. There are (sometimes under different names with different brands) basically three kinds of metering: full scene, center-weighted, and spot. I usually use center-weighted, and sometimes spot. Cameras just do not have the dynamic range of brightness to be able to choose the right settings when given an entire scene with all the brights and darks, especially when compared to our eyes. I highly suggest using the human brain for that choice.

Now, that is a very simplified explanation and based on some knowledge of how a camera meters, but short of writing an entirely new post, I will keep my answer to that for now.