THOMAS SCHOENWEITZ

I tend to remember these little tidbits of knowledge that make your life easier, things that seem so obvious, but I never thought about them until somebody mentioned it and spoke it out loud. Those are the bits and pieces that make my work easy and speedy every day.

I have collected some of them here:

• Exposure Compansation: If you look at a britht scene, you dial in + compensation, if you have a dark scene, you dial in -. It all seems perfectly obvious and logical: If the subject is bright, your camera still thinks it’s some 18% grey thing, and will underexpose it. Dial in + and you counter that. On the other side, if something is dark, the camera again thinks its 18% grey and will make that black a grey, so by underexposing it (dialing in – compensation) we counter that.
• If you set your camera to continuous drive mode in dark situations, you might have camera shake in the first frame from pressing the shutter, but you increase your chance for getting a sharp second or third shot.
• Long focal lengths compress the image and make objects that are at a distance behind oneanother look closer together (like subject and background)
• Use a tripod. Seriously. If you have to move around a lot, at least take a monopod.
• When you are using that tripod, and dont need full leg extension, you want to start extending from the top, which is the pipes with the larger diameter, which give more stability. If you are in sand, snow, water, dirt etc., go the other way around and start extending the thin parts from the bottom first. The idea is that you dont get too much dirt/water into the other sections of the legs since you are keeping the connecting part and joints from the ground.
• Look at your pictures in black an white. What I do is set my camera to shoot large RAWs and small/fine jpegs with B/W picture style. What happens is that Adobe Camera Raw will discard the PictureStyle in the RAW file, but it will be in the jpeg and on the preview on the camera back. That way you get the best of both worlds.
• Re-Format your memory cards in your camera. Dont just erase them, format them. That way any errors in the file system get fixed and you dont get any corrupt data. I have shot over 100.000 frames and not had a single corrupt one off the card.

If you have similar experiences and tips, please leave them in the comments below.