It is so easy to get caught up in the excitement of a photo shoot or the adventure of an outing with friends and family. It’s so easy to get caught up and forget to check your camera settings while you are smiling and snapping away.

The result – you will find – as you check your pictures in the car on the way home or maybe only when you plug the camera into the computer to download all of your photos. The eager anticipation will crash the second you realize that your entire days shooting was completely overexposed because you didn’t check your ISO!

I am actually speaking from experience so I do know the feeling and yes, I made very sure that I learnt from my mistake! When I am out and about now I am on the other extreme and instead of forgetting about the settings I might be considered slightly obsessive compulsive. Hey – rather that than losing the perfect picture 

I would say that the most important setting to keep your eye on in your ISO. Especially if your camera tends to produce grain in the higher ISO settings, if you can avoid that, do.

A high ISO on a sunny day is going to ruin all of your photos by completely blowing all of the highlights (there will be way too much white in your photo)

If your ISO is too low you are going to end up with very underexposed images.

Other settings to double check:

White Balance
Shutter Speed (don’t want to end up with blurred photos)
Aperture (incase you need everything to be sharply in focus)
JPEG / File size (you don’t want to end up taking the best photo ever on a very low quality, you also don’t want to end up filling your memory card in two seconds with fun photos that will never be printed)

You can also pay attention to your metering mode, your flash strength (if you have an external flash) and which scene setting you are shooting in.

Before you start your trigger happy campaigned, take a few test snap shots of the area around you and then check those photos to see what needs to be changed.

Better safe than sorry!

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