Chapter . Basic Setup

Knowing what you most frequently photograph helps to determine what base control settings you might want to keep set on the camera. Think of these as your personal default settings. That way you will know what needs to change, depending on your photographic circumstances.

In every situation, a basic consideration is, how much control do you want and how much automation? You probably want to take control of only those things that help optimize the image capture for your purpose. And as with any computer-aided activity, you want the camera to help with the difficult or the tedious wherever possible. For digital photography, the primary predictable problem areas are exposure, focus, and white balance.

Many of the following suggestions ...

Get The Digital SLR Guide to the Nikon D80 now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.