Other Camera-based Settings
Even if you don’t have manual controls on your camera, most of the following settings exist in some form on most current digital cameras. Play around with these and you may see a quick improvement in quality or usability.
Many cameras across the entire range of shooters have a timer mode, which is simple and fairly straightforward. You set up your camera on a tripod or stable surface, set the camera to timer mode, select how long you want the timer to run if you’re able, and hit the shutter button. Run back to your friends or other subject matter before the timer goes off, smile, and your picture essentially automatically takes itself. Who needs a stranger to take your picture anymore?
Quality settings have also run their way across the camera spectrum; most allow you to set something as simple as small, medium, or large, which will determine how much the camera compresses the images to store on your storage card of choice. The smaller the image size you choose, the more you can fit on your card, but the worse it will look when you try to print it out on 8×10 to give to your friends. The larger the image, however, the fewer pictures you can take at a time. It’s all about striking that balance – or having backup storage cards.
ISO settings may be making their way to smaller cameras, but they exist for sure in mid-range and high-end shooters. ISO harkens back to the film days, where it was a speed measurement that was based on the composition of the film and how quickly it could absorb light. If you can remember back when film was dominant, many shops sold (and many still do) “high-ISO” film for “high-speed shots” – often with a picture of a soccer player or other athlete on the package. ISO in digital cameras is essentially just a programmatic approximation of the film function: when you select a 400 or 800 ISO in your camera, the sensor’s just told to suck up that much more light as fast as it can. It is not, however, without tradeoffs; just as in the old film cameras, the higher the ISO, the more grainy the picture tends to be. There’s another bit of a balancing game to be had here. If you need to get the shot faster and you can’t do it via aperture or shutter speed, you can raise the ISO speed. The right balance between needed speed and the quality of the image afterward is what is left up to your judgment. Camera spec sheets here will tell you the full range of ISO available to you as well. The 30D runs from ISO 100, with no grain whatsoever, to ISO 1600 (or 3200 if you enable it in the firmware). Just find the one that doesn’t interfere with your shot much and go to town with it. For what it’s worth, I spend all my time in ISO 100; upping the ISO is the absolute last resort to me.
White balance settings are in a lot of cameras now, and this setting essentially recalibrates the sensor for a certain setting to make your colors look more accurate. Many cameras will have settings like tungsten, fluorescent, sunlight, cloudy, or variants thereof. Since a white surface under fluorescent lighting looks a different color than a white surface under tungsten (a regular light bulb), the sensor recalibrates the color curve such that white actually looks white. If your camera supports the RAW file format, you can play with the white balance after the fact, which makes this setting a little bit less critical. If you’re shooting in JPEG, however, it might well be good form to use these settings from time to time.
Go Shoot, Darn It
All in all, I think that about rounds it out. You’ve got automatic modes, scene-specific modes, play-around-with-it-yourself modes, and some of the settings that will help you get on your way to getting some extra use and some good shots out of your camera. I hope this was as informative for you as it was fun for me! If you’ve got any questions about this or any other techniques, leave them in the comments and I’ll see if I whip you up some good answers!
Also: Don’t forget you can use Icrontic’s Marketplace to do comparison shopping for Cameras and related gear!
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