I humbly disagree.


M is up to the photographer to decide using the meter as a tool knowing that center is not always the best place on the meter and where to have it is based on a lot of variables. Every other mode attempts center on the meter which you can adjust what is center with exposure compensation but that takes precious time and as soon as you move on to another composition that changes. On very rare ocassions I will shoot Av when clouds are rolling in and out faster than I can keep up with it but also count on having far less keepers and images that lack "POP" because I had to attempt bringing back dark detail on an underexposed image or recover blown highlights in an overexposed image. An example when shooting sports is something as simple as jersey colors. Say you are shooting a game that one team is in white and the other in black and using spot metering. and shooting Av ot Tv. If no exposure compensation is used the shots where the white jerseys are metered the images will come out underexposed as more reflected light affected metering and the inverse for the black jerseys. OK so now you try and use exposure compensation but which one do you choose? The white or the black? Which ever you do choose the other is not going to work well and as soon as a cloud rolls in its all out the window as the white is not as reflective and the black is even darker. The reason I chose the above image as an example is the meter changed drastically during that entire game from one end to the other but I never changed the settings from ISO400, f4, 1/3200 using a neutral place in the grass to set up before the game started and clicking off a few and viewing the histogram to make sure. In this particular image the meter was actually about a stop up from center becasue of the white jersey, move the camera to take that white jersey out of the metering area and catch the background and it goes 2 stops down. Either would have resulted in an incorrectly exposed image in an auto mode with an underexposed image on the white and severely over exposed and uselessly blown image if on the shadows.