Photo by TylerDurden1

Note: This is a three-part series exploring various digital camera settings photographers may not be aware about on their digital cameras. Part of getting the best value out of your digital camera is knowing exactly how it works, and photographers often spend a lot of time and money on trying to achieve an effect in their photos that is a lot easier than it looks. Friday we explored digital camera settings for beginners, with digital camera settings for intermediate photographers covered yesterday and advanced photographers covered today. All three parts are included in this final article.

Please note that most of these settings can be found on midrange to advanced digital cameras. Entry-level digital cameras typically have only the most basic features, leaving most of the decision-making to the camera itself. Nevertheless, reviewing this section may give the beginning photographer an idea of the functionality available today. More and more digital cameras are getting more and more features, so expect settings like these to become more commonplace soon.

Digital camera settings for the advanced photographer…..

Exposure Bracketing

What it is: A way to force your digital camera to take multiple pictures at different exposure compensation levels to ensure a good photograph.

Where to find it: On the sub-menus within the settings on high-end digital cameras. Typically, there is either an auto exposure bracketing mode or an option to set exposures manually by hand.

What it does: You’ve tried your digital camera’s auto settings and you’ve tried to key in shutter speed and aperture manually, but for whatever reason, you still aren’t getting a good exposure. Exposure bracketing is here to help. What exposure bracketing does is forces your digital camera to take multiple exposures in one quick burst, each with a different exposure compensation setting keyed in. Typically, this is accomplished by taking three different shots with the exposure compensation set at -1/3EV, 0EV and +1/3EV. If the lighting is even more challenging, you may alter this range even further on many digital cameras, taking three shots at -1EV, 0EV, and +1EV for example.

Exposure bracketing can help in the trickiest lighting conditions.
Photos by Ambitious Wench.

When is this useful? Some scenes - those in direct sunlight or harsh lighting conditions, for example - are just plain tough to expose. Exposure bracketing ensures that you have three different options to choose from when it comes time for post-processing. You may even be able to combine the three exposures into one image file with exceptional dynamic range by using GIMP or Photoshop. Exposure bracketing is just one more tool to ensure a pro photographer gets the best shot possible.

Things to watch out for: Taking three separate exposures of every shot can chew up memory card space quickly, especially if you are shooting in RAW mode. Also, if you hope to combine the images into a single exposure later, you should probably use a tripod as even a slight variation of your hand will ruin the alignment.

Histograms

What it is: A way of judging the exposure of an image on camera, without relying on minuscule and often inaccurate LCD screens.

Where to find it: Typically, histograms can be found by changing the display mode during image playback on your digital camera, or by enabling live histograms in your digital camera settings.

What it does: An image that looks perfect on the digital camera doesn’t always turn out that way. It’s frustrating to take a photograph you love when you see it on your digital camera’s LCD screen, only to get home and find the highlights are blown or the detail is lost in the shadows. Histograms are one way to get a better idea of what you are actually seeing.

A histogram is a way of visually displaying the image data within a photograph. It is a graph of the pixels within your image based on brightness. Darker pictures are crowded on the left-hand side, with brighter pictures on the right. A good exposure has no brightness data that touches either of the outside boundaries of the graph on the right or left side - that indicates clipping. By looking at your histogram, you can judge whether there will be any clipped highlights or shadows. If there is, adjust your shutter speed or aperture accordingly and retake the shot.

Images that are overexposed (like the flower above) will have a histogram that has brightness data clipped on the right-hand side.
Photo by btobin.

Many digital cameras today are beginning to have live histograms that will indicate the exposure setting before you take the shot. This can be immensely helpful, so check to see if it is an option on your digital camera.

What to watch out for: Chewing up your battery life looking at the histogram display. Otherwise, there really is no downside to using histograms.

Burst Mode

What it is: A mode that enables you to take many individual frames per second.

Where to find it: Typically, a button on the outside of your digital camera with several squares stacked on top of each other. May be a setting inside the digital camera menus.

What it does: Ever get frustrated while shooting photos of a moving object? Just as soon as you get your focus and exposure locked down, the object moves just out of your frame, ruining your shot. Burst mode may be the remedy.

When burst mode is enabled, the camera takes several photographs per second - typically 3-5 FPS on most modern SLRs - until you either remove your finger from the shutter or the camera runs out of buffer memory. This can be a big help when photographing sports or some other type of fast-paced action — just push your finger down and pan your camera along with the subject as it is moving. A lot of your shots may wind up to be losers, but sometimes burst mode helps you get that one, perfect photograph.

What to watch out for: Your digital camera can only take so many shots in burst mode before it runs out of a place to store them. Because your digital camera cannot write to its memory card at the same pace that it can fire off photos, your shots taken in burst mode are stored in buffer memory until they can be written to the card. Buffer memory is fairly small, meaning you may be able to use burst mode only for a few seconds until it fills up. Buying a memory card that operates at faster speeds is one way of getting a bit more out of burst mode.

Digital camera settings for the intermediate photographer….

Full Manual Mode

What it is:
A way of setting both the aperture and the shutter speed at the same time.

Where to find it:
Typically, on the dial on top of your digital camera. On most Olympus digital cameras, it is the M within the A/S/M mode. On most Nikon and Canon cameras, it is labeled by an M as well.

What it does:
The manual mode is a way for the photographer to control the digital camera’s exposure settings completely. In aperture and shutter priority modes, the digital camera is responsible for half the thinking. But after spending a while in these modes, photographers often realize that the digital camera is a lot less smart than it should be. Tricky exposure situations often throw the digital camera off, resulting in images with blown highlights or lost shadow detail.

The sun was just outside of this frame, taken in the mid afternoon in the Grand Tetons. The camera struggled to find a good exposure combination on its own, but shooting in full manual mode enabled a better shot to be taken.
Photo by Dan Fletcher.

Manual mode is a way of ensuring more consistent results in these situations. The photographer sets both the shutter and the aperture, regulating both how long the sensor is exposed and how wide the lens opens. In this way, the exposure can be fine-tuned exactly to your specifications. Play around with manual mode and get an idea of what aperture and shutter speed combinations work in certain lighting situations. After a while, you’ll get an intuitive feel as to what works well, and your photographs will begin to have more consistent exposures.

What to watch out for:
There’s no hand-holding from your digital camera in manual mode. If you screw up, it’s your fault. The only way your camera helps out is by indicating its guess as to your exposure settings on the exposure compensation meter. If the arrow on this meter strays too far from the center, your chosen settings are probably not right.

RAW File Format

What it is:
An uncompressed image format that preserves more information than the common JPEG.

Where to find it:
On the image quality and size submenu. Typically, there is a shortcut button to this on the digital camera body.

What it does:
In most cases, your digital camera isn’t done with your photo once the shutter closes. There’s a whole slew of adjustments that go on behind the scenes - sharpening, exposure compensation, color balance and contrast to name a few. What the RAW file format does is skip those final adjustments, forcing your digital camera to save only the data taken directly from the image sensor. All those other adjustments are left for you to deal with later, giving you a lot more control over how your final photograph looks.The RAW file format is also lossless, meaning the final image is not compressed at all either. This results in a higher-quality result, free of any artifacts that the JPEG format introduces.

Unfortunately, a RAW file isn’t all that useful when it comes off the digital camera. Think of it as an image that is 90 percent done and requires some final tweaking. It becomes your job to go in and set the sharpness, saturation, exposure compensation and other attributes that the camera usually handles. It’s a perfectionist’s dream. With RAW, the photographer has control over literally every stage in the photographic process. You can adjust exactly what you want to adjust, and many software packages allow a fine level over control over the most menial of details in an image. With more advanced RAW editors, there’s even ways to adjust for things like chromatic aberration — the purple fringing that occurs in high-contrast areas of an image.

There’s a whole slew of software packages out there than are designed to edit RAW files, many of which are free. Check out Silkypix for one fine example. Both Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3 also include a native RAW editor.

Things to watch out for:
The RAW format has become more popular lately, but it still is usually an option only in higher-end digital cameras. While the RAW format allows you a great deal more flexibility in an image, it isn’t a cure-all solution either. If the image has problems coming from the digital camera - overexposure, for example - you won’t be able to salvage the missing data using RAW. Also, digital camera manufacturers have no set file standard for RAW images, as the format may differ from camera model to camera model from the same manufacturer in some cases. Make sure the RAW editor you invest in is capable in handling the RAW images from your digital camera.

Custom White Balance

What it is:
In the course of working for my college newspaper, I was assigned to write a story about a speech being given at our law school. This was before I was that into photography so I only had to write the story — not take the shot as well. Before the speech began, I remember I was mystified by a routine that the photographers went through. One man went up to the podium where the speaker would be and held a piece of paper up in the air while all the other photographers snapped a photo of it. I couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on.

Now I know that it was a way of setting the custom white balance on their digital cameras.

What it does:
Custom white balance is a more precise way of gaging the color temperature in an image than using the manufacturer’s presets, but it requires a bit more effort. What the photographers were doing before the speech was taking a picture of the piece of paper in order to help the to detect the color casting that was present. The camera uses the neutral area from that photograph and creates a general white balance rule to be used in photographs from then until the setting is changed again.

Some companies sell specially-calibrated white balance cards like this to provide a neutral reference for your digital camera, but a piece of white or gray blank paper works as a cheap solution.

On nearly every digital camera, setting custom white balance is a two-step process. First, you need to take a sample image. Using a piece of paper is a common solution, but some photography companies sell specially-calibrated cards that can offer more precise results. After the sample frame is taken, go to the white balance menu and select custom white balance. The digital camera will then prompt you for the location of the sample image on the memory card. Select it, and you’re set.

Things to watch out for:
Just as with any other white balance setting, your digital camera doesn’t recognize when lighting conditions change. If you forget to adjust your white balance after you move locations, all your images will suddenly have a strange cast to them. Custom white balance isn’t perfect, either. While it can usually get you closer than the other presets, your images still may have some color casting that the camera was unable to compensate for.

Digital camera settings for the beginning photographer…

Aperture and Shutter Priority Mode

Where to find it: Usually on the dial on top of your digital camera. On Olympus digital cameras, the mode may be represented by A/S/M. On Nikon digital cameras, shutter priority mode is symbolized with an S and aperture priority mode is an A. On Canon digital cameras, generally shutter priority is represented by Tv (strange, I know) and aperture priority is Av. Other digital camera manufactures generally use some sort of similar lettering.

What it does: Let’s get really basic, to make sure we are all on the same page. Any photograph has both an aperture and a shutter speed. The aperture regulates how wide the lens opening is, while the shutter speed regulates how long the shutter was left open. These two items, in tandem, regulate the exposure of a photograph.

In an automatic mode, the digital camera chooses its own combination of aperture and shutter speed to create a good exposure - you don’t have to do any of the thinking. But sometimes, you want more control over your digital camera, and that’s when shutter and aperture priority come into play.

These two modes allow you to wrest control of either of the two variables away from your digital camera. In shutter priority, you control the shutter speed while the camera determines the aperture. This allows you - with sufficient lighting conditions - to set a shutter speed fast enough to freeze sports action or slow enough to create a motion blur.

A fast shutter speed allowed the camera to freeze the ball and the player without much blurring.
Photo by Dan Fletcher.

Aperture priority mode allows you control over the depth of field of an image. The more open the lens is, the more shallow the depth of field is. Generally, for portrait photography large apertures are used so as to create a silky-smooth background behind a person kept in sharp focus. Conversely, in landscape photography small apertures are used to keep as much of the scene sharp as possible.

By choosing a low aperture, the background is out of focus while the girl remains sharp.
Photo by Wiseacre Photo.

What to worry about: Using higher aperture numbers requires more light in a scene for a proper exposure. If you set your aperture to a higher number - f/8 or f/10, for example - the camera may need to choose a really long shutter speed to ensure a proper exposure. If your hands are shaky and if you aren’t using a tripod, this could result in a blurred photo. Similarly, your digital camera may not have a low-enough aperture number to support very fast shutter speeds - 1/800 or 1/2000 of a second, for example. If that’s the case, either the digital camera will refuse to take the picture or your photo will be underexposed.

ISO

What is it: ISO is a carry over from the film days. Film used to be rated at a certain speed, indicating its sensitivity to light. Now, the ISO setting on your digital camera is a way of setting the sensor’s sensitivity to light. The higher the ISO setting, the more sensitive the sensor on your digital camera becomes.

Where to find it: Most digital camera manufacturers hide ISO on one of the submenus within the camera settings. On some digital cameras, it may have its own button labeled ISO.

What it does: Ever become frustrated by your inability to take a photo indoors without blurring it because of your hands shaking? ISO may be the fix you are looking for. By setting the ISO higher, the camera is able to use faster shutter speeds or higher apertures, allowing you more creative freedom and more ability to keep shooting in challenging lighting conditions.

What to worry about: The higher the ISO setting on the digital camera, the more noise in the resulting image. Noise is represented by strangely-colored pixels present throughout your photograph. Especially on older or more compact digital cameras, noise can become a real issue. Take a few different photographs at different ISO settings and learn how much noise you can tolerate.

High ISO noise manifests itself as noise within an image.
Photo by lorZ.

White Balance

What it is: A way of telling your digital camera how to compensate for the color of the light around you.

Where to find it: Like ISO, white balance can either be set through a sub-menu or through a button on the outside of your digital camera.

What it does: Every light source has a color temperature to it. Florescent lighting emits a greenish light, while the normal household lighting is orange. This creates a challenge situation for your digital camera. While you might not notice the lighting color just walking around, you’re sure to notice it in your photographs. To prevent this, the camera tries to set the white balance of the image as a way to compensate against the lighting color.

Lighting in a gym gives my digital camera’s white balance fits.
Photo by Dan Fletcher.

The problem is that the digital camera isn’t very good at this. As a result, there’s typically a number of white balance settings you can adjust to clue your digital camera in on the lighting conditions in the photo. Typically, there are settings pre-created for tungsten and florescent lighting, as well as for conditions as specific as cloudy or sunny days. By evaluating the scene yourself and keying it in, the resulting white balance in your photograph should be a lot more accurate than if you had left it up to the digital camera alone.

What to worry about: Always remind yourself to check the white balance setting when lighting conditions change. If you forget and leave the digital camera set on tungsten, for example, you’ll be wondering why all your photos from the baseball game suddenly have that strange hue to them. The digital camera isn’t smart enough to recognize when the light has changed.

Like what you see? Join our newsletter.