Pre-Workshop Checklist

Useful Camera Settings for Your Photography Workshop

In order to get the most from your upcoming photography workshop please familiarize yourself with the camera settings below before the workshop. Knowing how to find these settings on your camera before the workshop will help you get the most from the workshop!

You can download the owners manual of your camera and install it on your smartphone.

Smartphone apps can help you in the field if you need to reference your owners manual. Always test these at home, with your phone in airplane mode, before venturing out of cell phone range. We will be out of cell phone range during the workshop/tour.

Below are some apps that I use to have a searchable copy of the owners manual with me in the field:

Nikon Manual Viewer 2 (Android)

Nikon Manual Viewer 2 (iPhone)

Canon Camera Handbooks (Android)

Canon Camera Handbooks (iPhone)

Fujifilm, Pentax, Panasonic, Sony, and others

Please familiarize yourself with these settings on your camera

You may not yet have experience in using these camera settings in the field. That is perfectly fine! We will learn how to use them during the workshop.

These are settings that I use almost daily. For example, shooting in fully manual mode. Not everyone prefers these settings, and that is fine. We will discuss tradeoffs and options during the workshop.

Manual Exposure Mode

In manual exposure mode the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO can be set independent of each other. When your camera is in manual mode it helps to be able to adjust the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO while looking through the viewfinder at your camera’s light-meter. Ideally you should be able to do this without taking your eye away from the viewfinder, or having to look at any menus.

Spot Metering Mode

Adjust the exposure metering mode so that the light meter in your camera is only measuring a small spot in the field of view. In spot metering mode your camera measures exposure from a well defined spot in the scene, that you control, instead of taking a spatial average exposure measurement over the entire field of view.

Other exposure metering modes are known as “evaluative”, “matrix”, “average”, etc. These other modes “help” us by adjusting the exposure to what the computer inside the camera thinks is best. We can do better by using spot-metering mode, manual exposure, and a small amount of thinking. The camera may not realize that small brown patch in a sea of bright white is a beautiful red-fox in the snow. If your camera is in spot-metering mode, when you set the center spot of your viewfinder on the fox, we then force the light meter in the camera to record the exposure from the fox alone, and we set the exposure to get a nice red fox (versus a dark black fox if we let the camera decide for us) .

View the Exposure Histogram Quickly

It is useful to view the exposure histogram on the back of your camera for an image you have already taken. I like to see this automatically after each image is taken. To save battery power you can have the histogram screen show for 2 seconds or so and then turn off automatically.

For digital photography the exposure histogram displays the number of pixels that recorded a given range of light intensity when the image was taken. The vertical axis is the number of pixels that measured a light intensity within a given range (bin). The horizontal axis indicates the light levels in the image with the lowest levels on the far left and brightest levels on the right.

Rear LCD screens for a Nikon D5000 histogram (left) and Canon 5D3 (right). Setup your camera so this automatically shows for 2-3 seconds after each image is taken.

If your camera model is capable of viewing the histogram in real-time during live view, this can be very useful. On a DSLR the “live view” mode has the mirror up. This reduces vibrations from mirror movement when a photo is taken. Mirrorless cameras do not have to worry about this issue. While your camera is in live view (that is you can see the scene on the rear LCD panel of your camera) turn on the histogram to see what light intensity all the pixels are measuring. This is the best way when doing landscapes to optimize the exposure.

An example showing the histogram in live view on the rear LCD is shown here. The histogram is in the upper right corner.

Exposure Bracketing

Most cameras have exposure bracketing modes. In this mode your camera will take a number of sequential images in one burst where the shutter speed varies between the images, and the aperture and ISO are held constant. Best to do this in the fastest burst mode your camera has. If your camera does not have this function, no worries, we can achieve the same effect manually. Note that this mode is not “in-camera HDR”. It is also good to use a 2 second shutter delay/timer, or cable timer, to avoid any movement during the burst.

The “brackets” (each image taken during the sequence) can be combined later on the computer using either Photomatix Pro or Aurora HDR. You can also combine the images using Photoshop or Lightroom, although I find the small investment in Photomatix Pro or Aurora HDR software is well worth it! (My favorite is now Aurora HDR).

Continuous Tracking Autofocus Mode

Autofocus mode. Be able to set your autofocus mode for continuous or tracking (i.e. AI Servo for Canon, AF-C Continuous for Fuji, Nikon, Sony, etc.). We will use this mode for photographing wildlife movement.

Shutter Release Modes

Switch between shutter release modes of burst, single shot, and delay (2 second, 10 second, etc). Burst mode is what we will use for wildlife action. We will use the 2-second delay for slow shutter landscape captures, especially if you do not have a remote / cable shutter release.

Read the Camera’s Built-In Light Meter

Know how to find the light meter (exposure meter) on your camera. Ideally while looking through the viewfinder. This will look like a scale { -3, -2, -1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 3} — show here the range from -3EV to +3EV. Exposure Value = “Stop” = EV.
In spot metering mode the light meter should be moving around as your move the center spot of your lens throughout the field of view. This is what we want.

If your aperture, shutter speed, and ISO are set correctly (i.e. perfectly exposed) then the light meter will show an EV =0. Underexposed gives EV values < 0 and over-exposed EV > 0.

Live-View Mode

For those with DSLR cameras, versus mirror-less cameras, learn how to take exposures in “live view mode”, that is with the mirror locked up. We will use this mode for slow-shutter landscape images taken on a tripod to avoid vibration on DSLR cameras due to mirror motion.

Store Images in Raw File Format

Be able to set your file format to RAW. Storage cards with large capacities are relatively inexpensive these days. Taking your photos in RAW format significantly makes it easier in image post-processing.

Show shooting settings on main LCD automatically.

Be able to use your “Quick Menu” or “Quick Control” — this is the menu that shows on your LCD on the rear of the camera and allows you to see and change the camera shooting parameters.