GUEST FEATURE IWACA
48 | IWACA
YOUR CAMERA
By Craig Brown
O
NE OF THE MOST COMMON STATEMENTS I HEAR WHEN I AM
OUT PHOTOGRAPHING IS, "WOW, YOU MUST BE ABLE TO TAKE GREAT PICTURES WITH THAT CAMERA!"
So you ask, “why then Mr. Smart Guy do you carry all that fancy gear?”
The answer is quite simple for me. When I am out in the field perched on a rocky ledge with a 500-foot drop off below me, or out in the pouring rain, or in a cold desert in the middle of winter, I want my camera and all the components to work and to keep working. When I am hiking 5 to 10 kilometers a day, I want a lightweight, yet sturdy tripod that will hold my heavy camera and lenses. When I am taking a picture of a crocodile from 500 feet away, I want to be able to see
This comment has always amused me. Honestly what does the camera do? It captures what you point it at on some form of media. Period. If I take a picture of my foot with a $100 Point & Shoot or a $10,000 SLR, I will still get the same picture of my foot. Maybe from the P & S I will get a compressed jpg version and from the SLR I will get a 25mb RAW image, but who really cares? It is still just my foot.
its eyes. I want my equipment to be reliable and to work in every situation that I place it in. That is why I buy the gear I do.
YOUR CAMERA
Whether your camera is a P & S or an SLR, READ the manual!! I cannot emphasize that enough. I have lost count of the number of people over the years who have come to me asking, what this button or that switch on their camera does, or how do I do that with my camera? Every time I purchase a new piece of photography equipment, I fully read the manual or instructions that comes with it. For my camera bodies, I keep an electronic copy of the manual on my laptop that I carry with me on my photo adventures.
Sadly as I get older, the memory gets worse and no matter how much you use your equipment, there are functions you may forget and a quick look at the manual the night before is never a bad idea.
I am most certainly not going to go into every different camera model here. Every digital camera out there has pretty much the same buttons and the same functions.
You might know them as something different or they might be located