Periodically, Spend Time with your Camera’s Manual!

Your camera's manual has a wealth of information that can make you a better artisan.

Today’s musing may seem a bit trite but, if taken to heart, it will make a better photographer out of you. Regardless of the type of camera that you have (point and shoot, digital SLR, or even a film camera), undoubtedly there are tons of features embedded in it. The more modern and “advanced” the camera is, seemingly there are a great number of features embedded in menus. Most of these features do not even provide an on-screen or in-viewfinder indication of their being turned on or off!

The objective of this short post is to urge you to pull out your camera’s manual once or twice a year and re-familiarize yourself with it as if it were newly purchased. This is even more important if you have more than one type of camera. If you want to be the best you can be as a photographer, you need to know exactly how to wield your camera like an artisan knows his/her tools. Knowing how to access the perfect feature at the right moment will make the difference between a so-so shot and a great shot.

Do you know where your camera manual is? I carry mine with me in a zippered pouch in my Tamrac camera bag just in case. You certainly would want to balance convenience and care for the manual(s) with ease of access. Having mine along for the ride has occasionally paid dividends though.

Consider these questions and see how well you can answer them for each camera you own:

1. How would you set the self-timer? This may be easy on most cameras but some present some challenged. I found myself having to think really hard on how to do this on my D-100 just this week. “Ah! Yes! It is on the command knob on the left side of the camera.” If you cannot find or use a cable release, the self timer is the next best thing to eliminate camera shake on a tripod.
2. How do you bias your metering 1 or 2 stops to compensate for a bright scene or an unnecessarily dark one?
3. Do you know how to set your camera to autobracket shots? Can it? How do you set the number of shots and the bias for each shot? More importantly, how can you tell if you are in autobracket mode?
4. How to you change the program to capture a sunrise or sunset scene?
5. What features exist in setup only and are not available for changing on-the-fly?
6. How do you (or can you) show histograms alongside your exposed images?
7. How do you change the date and time? This may seem insignificant until you take a trip that crosses timezones.
8. How can you change the quality and type (raw, jpg, etc.) of image stored to the memory card?
9. How can you lock an image on the memory card so you don’t inavertently delete it?
10. Do you know how to move from full flash to fill-flash modes and back?
11. If you put a lens on your camera and the display flashes f/EE for the f-stop, what are the things that could cause it? While on this point, what types of errors does your camera display and what do they mean?
12. On your advanced SLR, how do you change from one bank of presets to another? Have you set up more than one bank of settings?

These are just a few tickler questions. Depending upon your rig there are numerous features that you may not ever access, not because you made a conscious decision to not use them, but because you never knew they were there. This problem is compounded when you add advanced flashes and other gear like remote triggers. Each of these normally sports manuals describing many obscure yet neat features. For example, my old Nikon SB-26 has a nifty strobe (multi-firings at a defined rate) mode which has been helpful in some scenarios. Configuring it, however, is not for the feint of heart!

So, sit back with your camera manual for a few minutes and see how many features you forgot were there for the choosing.

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