Gruber quotes Fraser Speirs: ‘The Second Step in Photography’:
[C]onsider making heavy use of your camera’s Program mode. Then, all you have is your camera position and your sense of timing to play with. That’s really stripping photography back to its beating heart.
How is using Program mode — the camera makes all the exposure decisions, little details like depth of field and shutter speed — “stripping photography back to its beating heart?” The great photographs I have enjoyed — the likes of Adams, Weston, Cartier-Bresson, Capa — were all made with a complete understanding their equipment, their media, and their subject.
You wanna strip it down? Stop by your local Goodwill or Value Village and grab one of the throwaway 35mm cameras you’ll find there, fixed focal length and f/stop, no preview, and run a roll of off the shelf drugstore film through it.
I don’t say there is no place for fully-automatic cameras — I’d love a D50 or the like — but to say that surrendering the decision-making process to the camera is somehow getting back to basics is just silly.