One of the worst situations a photographer can find themselves in, aside from being forced to fight a Bengal Tiger with nothing but a tripod and a lens filter, is getting back from a shoot only to realize that his or her photographs are compromised because of a simple setting they forgot to adjust. Perhaps the ISO was left at 3200 from the night before and you just spent all morning photographing the sunset with an ISO of 3200, or maybe your file format was left in JPEG and you were shooting difficult lighting conditions that because they were JPEG you aren’t able to recover detail that you would have otherwise been able to with RAW. Either way, sometimes it helps to have a simple checklist in your bag that you can run through before setting out with your camera.
The charts below are just a quick, but important, run through of key settings in a few situations you may find yourself in at some point. Each chart’s title will detail the shooting conditions and should only be used in those situations.
Click Charts Below To Enlarge
If you like these checklists and would like to see more, let me know in the comments and I’ll add to these. Enjoy!