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Here’s everything you need to know to ditch Auto mode forever

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Modern cameras are pretty damn amazing. Charge the battery, pop in a memory card, attach a lens, switch to auto and you are good to go. Not much more work is needed to start getting decent images. But to get consistently better images you need to turn that dial away from Auto and on to Manual.

Before we begin, I believe there is absolutely a time and a place for automatic or semi-automatic modes on the camera. I have shoot over 100 weddings and most of those were on Aperture Priority for the majority of the day. The same goes for corporate events or location portrait shoots. Yes, I will ensure that my minimum shutter speed is set to 1/125 or 1/250 and I have a capped ISO (dependent on camera) but once I have done those things I only need to worry about my aperture, which for weddings and portraits, is the creative element of the exposure triangle.

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7 more Nikon camera tricks to help you make shooting more efficient

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Photographer Steve Perry has shared some great tricks for Nikon shooters before. They help you customize your camera, and it looks like many of you liked the first video. Steve has now published another set of Nikon camera tricks that will make shooting more efficient and enjoyable. So grab your Nikon, and try out the customization tips from the video below.

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You can all stop asking about camera settings now. Here’s all of them

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If there’s one thing of which we can be sure, it’s that if we post a photo to social media, somebody will ask us what settings we used. Tony Northrup recently put out a video begging people to stop asking for the settings used to get a shot. Why? Because it’s useless information. The settings were unique to those circumstances. The camera, the lens, the amount of light available

Now, though, he appears to have caved, and posted this one, showing off around 50 sample photos, along with settings. But don’t think for a second that this means you can go and use those settings to replicate the shot. Tony talks about his thought process for each photograph, and why the settings were what they were. Understanding the why

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7 tricks to customize your Nikon camera and make shooting more efficient

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There are plenty of ways to customize your camera. And this time, I’m not talking about adding bling to it. This is something far more useful, and intended for Nikon shooters.

Steve Perry goes through seven Nikon tricks for customizing the controls. They work on most Nikon cameras, and they will make your shooting faster, more efficient and more enjoyable.

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Why the Technical Stuff Matters in Photography

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Along with normal how-to articles and essays, I’ve always liked reading and writing very technical, nitty-gritty articles about photography — sometimes, articles on topics that rarely come up while actually taking pictures. In fact, I usually don’t even use my own sharpest aperture charts in the field, as useful as they are, since I don’t like carrying around charts. So, then, does all that technical stuff matter? Is it even worth talking about in the first place? These questions are very important to ask, since most people don’t want waste their time on topics that are unnecessary for their photography — do these articles actually help? There are no easy answers, but a recent trip I took to Death Valley makes a compelling argument for why some of this highly-technical information really does matter.

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Glow or sparkle? Two artistic aperture choices for sun flare & specular highlights

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When you think of lens aperture on your camera – do you think about exposure, or do you think about artistic interpretation?

Yes, aperture is one third of the exposure equation (with shutter speed and ISO making up the other two variables), but your choice of aperture should primarily be an artistic choice.

If you’re moving up to a DSLR from a mobile camera, you probably haven’t really thought about aperture too much (since phones have a fixed aperture) – or if you have, it’s in terms of bokeh (wider aperture = more bokeh…yay bokeh), but your choice of aperture has a big impact on the look of your captured image (beyond just bokeh).

In this article, I will show you the difference between using a small, closed aperture and a big wide open aperture when it comes to sun flare and specular highlights.

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