camera menus

Photography Tip - go through all your DSLR menus and recheck settings

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To start out the year, the first photography tip of 2014 is to go through each and everyone of your DSLR's menus and confirm that all the settings are what you want and to refresh your memory about where less often used settings are.  Deep in the menus are things that basically only ever need to be set once (like number of auto-focus points beyond a single point), but gremlins do exist and even though you may never remember changing any of these lesser used settings, they might have on their own somehow!  

Going through all the menus will also help you remember where things are that do occassionally need to be changed.  It's better to refresh you memory home at your desk than when out in the field already shooting.  

If you find something in your menus you are not sure of what to set at, or even what it does, leave a question in the comments and I will try and answer it for you.

Good luck shooting in 2014!

Photography Tip - Enable Highlights mode

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Go to Highlight alert on Canon DSLRs to show any overexposed areas when reviewing your shots.One very useful feature that is often not on by default in DSLR cameras, is the view highlights mode.  Enabling this mode allows you to see which areas of a photograph have blown out highlights.  The areas will flash giving a clear signal that part of the photograph is overexposed and that you may want to adjust exposure to bring back detail in those highlights.

Nikon offers many types of review views including highlights.As usual, Nikon does highlights mode much better than Canon.  No matter what review mode you look at on a Canon DSLR, the highlights will always be flashing.  This gets annoying when you just want to see the composition of the shot and you may have intentionally overexposed some areas.  On Nikon highlights have their very own review view.  

The black areas in the white sky are the flashing highlight signalIn the image above the large black areas in the sky indicate the portions of the photograph that are overexposed, or blown out.  Those black areas will flash on and off clearing letting you know, "hey, the sky is totally blown out, did you really intend to do that?"