5 settings to change on a new camera | Articles | Photo, video, optics

Just bought a new cam­era and can’t wait to try it out? Wait! Before the first shoot­ing, let’s go into the set­tings menu and tweak a few things.

Turn off audio signals

In most cas­es, audio sig­nals on cam­eras are not need­ed. These are, for exam­ple, a timer, a sig­nal that a pho­to has been tak­en, and a sound dur­ing aut­o­fo­cus. All this only drains the bat­tery and pos­si­bly annoys those around you.

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Disable auto browsing

Autoview is enabled by default — and this not only con­sumes more bat­tery of the cam­era, but also dis­tracts. This will not both­er you if your sub­ject in the frame moves slow­ly or does not move at all — for exam­ple, if you are shoot­ing a sun­set. But it can cost you a good shot when shoot­ing scenes with fast mov­ing objects, such as at a wed­ding or in the wild.

Set up custom buttons

Almost all DSLRs and mir­ror­less cam­eras have cus­tomiz­able but­tons. You can usu­al­ly change almost any but­ton on the cam­era. For exam­ple, you can recon­fig­ure the wheel to con­trol the ISO to the bright­ness con­trol.

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The more you cus­tomize the but­tons on the cam­era, the less time you spend on it in the field. This means you can spend more time tak­ing amaz­ing pho­tos!

When you get to set­ting up cus­tom but­tons on your cam­era, explore all the options and choose the best one for your style.

Set date and time

Although it’s not the most inter­est­ing point, the date and time are real­ly impor­tant because these data are writ­ten to the infor­ma­tion of your pic­tures.

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When you down­load your pho­tos to your com­put­er, they will be sort­ed by date. This is use­ful — this way you can quick­ly sort and find a spe­cif­ic shoot­ing. If the date is set incor­rect­ly, it will be hard­er for you to find the pho­tos you want.

Change the file format

By default, most cam­eras are set to cap­ture JPEG files.

You can change this set­ting to RAW or RAW & JPEG if you need both. RAW images take up more mem­o­ry than JPEG images, but they retain more detail and pro­vide more edit­ing options.

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This set­ting should be left alone if you do not have enough mem­o­ry or if you do not plan to edit pho­tos on a large scale.

The names of some set­tings may dif­fer for dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers of pho­to­graph­ic equip­ment. There­fore, care­ful­ly study the menu in your cam­era. All of these set­tings are avail­able on most cam­eras.

Chang­ing these set­tings will only take a cou­ple of min­utes, but will save time on shoot­ing. You’ll thank your­self lat­er for get­ting your cam­era set up right!