When I'm dealing with a "modern" camera, I honestly dislike using manual mode other than in very, very specific circumstances. Those specific circumstances are either in "tricky" light where it would be easy to fool the meter and I instead work out the exposure that works and stick to it, and second when I'm using studio strobes(in general, the aperture and ISO determine the exposure-the shutter speed doesn't matter as long as it's at the sync speed or slower and longer than the strobe duration, and not so long as to allow ambient to have any impact).
Truth be told, I see many folks who want to "brag" about using manual mode but all they're doing is just pointing the camera at the scene and nulling the meter reading-if that's all you're doing then you might as well be using one of the automated modes as you're still just letting the camera guide you to do what it thinks is right.
On the other hand, I know others who prefer to use manual mode in place of dialing in exposure compensation-I can actually understand and appreciate that philosophy, and have actually done it myself on occasion. Of course, when doing that, it CAN certainly be the case that relatively simple lighting you can use the meter reading indicated, but there again you also need to be able to judge when that's correct or not.
I tend to use aperture priority for most "normal" situations for myself, and on digital use auto ISO.
With that said, I have plenty of cameras that I use regularly that only work in manual mode, or work best in manual mode, or in some cases don't even have a built in meter. I learned on Canon's "match needle" system, and when I first switched to Nikon I was actually somewhat uncomfortable with the "center the needle" meter on the F/F2, or the 3 LED system used on the FM/FM2/F2SB/F2AS. I've since come to appreciate both systems a bit more, especially now that I know that the "notch" is 1 stop wide(so 1/2 over/under is easy to set). Also, the 3 LED system illuminates two LEDs for 1/2 over or under, so it's quite easy to extrapolate a full stop over/under from that.
All of my Hasselblad lenses are "EV lenses" which are actually designed for you to directly set an EV value rather than a shutter speed and aperture. The Minolta meters I prefer are easy to set to read out directly in EVs, and of course depending on what I'm doing the EV scale makes it easy to apply appropriate compensation(incident readings rarely if ever get compensation, while spot meter readings are considered in aggregate to arrive at an appropriate EV for the scene). Once you've set an EV, it's almost like having a "shiftable program" mode on a mode modern camera, since the shutter speed and aperture ring are locked together and turning them doesn't change the exposure.
So, I guess for me the answer is it depends on the exact situation and the camera I'm using, but in a round about way I'll also say that, where possible, I typically use aperture priority.
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Zoom into this photo, and you can see that his speed graphic is set to f4
Of course, it is
possible that I'm spoiled by Nikon auto lenses.
Perhaps he'd just been composing on the ground glass-the glass on most Graphics is pretty poor, and good luck seeing much of anything at f/8.
That aside, I can't SEE the aperture scale on the lens, but my best guess would be that it's a 127mm Ektar, which has a maximum aperture of f/4.7. The other common "standard" lens on Graphics was a 135mm Wollensak Raptar, which is also f/4.7, and 4x5 lenses often get even slower as you move away from these focal lengths. I'm nitpicking, though
Not too long ago, I picked up a fun little Auto-Nikkor-a 55mm f/3.5 Micro with a "compensating aperture." Like most other MF Micro-Nikkors, it focuses to 1:2. This has an extra feature, though, of opening up the aperture as you focus closer to compensate for the light loss at close distances. Of course, it only works at less than maximum aperture. The lens design dates to the days before TTL meters, and was intended to make getting the correct exposure at macro distances easy. Nikon quit doing it right around the time they started shipping a TTL prism for the F. I went looking for one because I'd been told that it's optimized for around 1:10(newer and newer "micro" lenses have moved their optimization closer to infinity both from my research and actual testing), but the compensating aperture IS a nice feature since I'm often shooting macro under studio strobes with an external meter. The compensating aperture makes in-camera metering interesting.
