Setting up Your Cameras

[Originally posted on 7/31/2018]

When you have many cameras from many brands, it adds a bit complexity to the point I made last time - knowing your camera(s) well. It’s important because that contributes to how efficiently you can use your gears under different situations.

Each brand has its own design philosophy, which is reflected on how the functionality, menu, and wheels/buttons are arranged and connected to each other. For instance, by now, many camera manufactures realize two control wheels on a camera body is almost inevitable. However, physically there are so many ways to arrange them. Canon decided to put two control wheels vertically, one on the top panel and the other one on the back of the camera. Olympus decided to put both of them horizontally on the top panel of the camera, one is facing towards the lens and the other one is towards the photographer. Some functionality will then be controlled by the wheels under different situations. The wheels are meant to be operated by your thumb (back wheel) and index finger (front wheel).

This could be overwhelming for the new photographers who are just about to abandon the full auto mode and regain the full control of the camera. For simplicity, let me continue on with my two-wheel example under one specific situation: Aperture priority mode (A mode in short). In A mode, two things you will constantly control: aperture (duh!) and exposure compensation. If you don’t know about A mode and exposure compensation, don’t worry, this won’t hinder you from getting my point (and I will get to those in the future). Just assume you are going to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (PB&J), you have to control the amount of PB and J.

Each brand assigns default function on the control wheels even under the same situation. In our case, under A mode, Canon assign aperture control on the front wheel and exposure compensation on the back wheel. Olympus is opposite: front wheel controls exposure compensation and back one controls aperture. How can we memorize and work with so many different hardware and software arrangements? Fortunately, most manufactures make these wheels programmable, meaning you can customize which function you want to link to which wheel. For me, I’ve been a long time Canon shooter, I get so used to Canon’s two wheel set up, I customized my Olympus wheels to be like Canon’s. Although physically the setups for the wheels are different (vertical vs horizontal), they don’t really cause trouble because they are still controlled by the thumb and the index finger. This is my 2 cents for you today - try to customize all your wheels or buttons on all the cameras in the same (or similar) way so when you take your camera, regardless of the brands, you can get to your shot fast!

I want to thank you for reading up to this point so I want to give you one extra grand tip to take away today. That is : Read Your Manual!!! From first page to the last. Believe me, once you do that, you will see your camera(s) in a whole new way.