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Priority Modes

You know those letters you have on your scene selection dial? Do you know what they do or do you just ignore it like I used to? Well there’s 4 letters, on Nikon they’re M, A, S, P and Cannon its M, Av, Tv, P. Because I use a nikon I’ll use MASP for the explaination. So M is manual, where you set everything such as your aperture, shutter speed and ISO. S is shutter priority which means you set the shutter speed and the camera sets the aperture for you, useful for things like cars at night (just watch your ISO isn’t to high). A is aperture priority where upon you set the aperture or f stop, this is commonly used to set the depth of field and with HDR. The final one is P which is where the camera selects a balance between your shutter speed and your aperture, on the D90 you can change the values that it sets, kind of like a more advanced auto. Go and have a play with all the different settings and experiment.

RAW

Shoot in RAW, Always! By shooting in raw you can manually adjust the white balance in Post Production and much much more. It may take up a little bit more space, but with 16gb SDHC cards going for $50 AU and 1TB Hard drives for $100 AU what’s your’ excuse?

ISO

Shoot on the lowest ISO possible, maybe this is just me but I have the D90 on ISO 100-250 nearly all the time. I’m a big hater of noise but if i must have an high ISO i wouldn’t take it above 2000. You can reduce noise using Noise Ninja or Topaz DeNoise (Photoshop Plugins) which generally work quite well, but be prepared to loose some detail.

Management

So you’ve been taking photos for a while now, you have upwards of 2000 of them, how do you manage them all? Just a folder, or two? You’re doing it wrong! Here are a few of your options

• iPhoto – Mac
• Aperture – Mac
• Lightroom – Mac & PC
• Picasa -Mac & PC

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