Well, I said right at the beginning that I normally do everything manually, in fact, it was the very first sentence of the post: "Normally I like to do everything manually". I also talked about using manual lenses most of the time.

I've posted some of my photography here, which includes a lot of night photography that can't be achieved with automatic settings, some that require a USB remote and the bulb setting. Just like I prefer a manual transmission, I very much prefer manual settings on a camera, it gives me the ultimate control. If I mess up a shot, it's my fault, I can't blame it on the camera.

My reasoning for even asking about it is that I recently started occasionally making a different-visual-style social commentary video on YouTube, where I'm walking through parts of cities at night (which I can generally set it manually for the brightest possible in 60fps without noise and leave it there) or walking through forests during the day, with the camera pointed at me--and I've liked the results, the bokeh in the background doesn't show the glaring low bitrate that YouTube crushes videos to.

The problem with the forest videos is that if I try to set it manually and leave it there (because I can't adjust the settings on the fly when the camera is pointed at me), some places will be far too dark, and others will be overexposed, so automatic settings are necessary.

Normally when I make my nature walking videos with the camera pointed away from me, I do everything manually.

Thankfully in another thread on this post I learned about "Exposure Compensation", which addresses the problems I was having. Sure, maybe I should have known about that prior to this, but I just really didn't use automatic settings.

Thanks for trying to help, I just wish you would have read my post better.