Outdoor Photography How To

There are settings on our cameras we use on a daily basis and some we rarely employ. There are probably even quite a few camera settings we don't even know about.

That's a shame because some of these camera settings can come in quite handy during a shoot. Landscape photographer Mark Denney wants to recommend one feature he calls "the best camera setting you're not using."

"This is something that I just started to apply to my on-location workflow within the past year and it's really helped me with the visualization process when composing a photo," Denney explains. "There aren't many camera settings that I'd consider to be real 'game changers,' but this is one setting that I'd make an exception for as this is something that I think all photographers should try...at least once."

So what's the setting? You'll have to jump to the 5:45-mark in the the below video from Denney where he explains it all.

"Something that has helped me is to actually change the aspect ratio in the camera to visualize and help me conceptualize what a potentially different type of crop might look like in post to help me to see if this is a composition that's worth sticking around for," he notes.

At around the 6:05-mark in the video, he shows you what he means by playing with the Aspect Ratio setting on his Fujifilm camera (similar Aspect Ratio adjustments are available on most cameras) to see how his landscape photos will look with different simulated "crops": 4:3 vs 16:9 vs 1:1 (square) formats, for example.

"I think that's really cool because you don’t have to wait until you get home to crop it into 16:9 or one-by-one ratios to see exactly what it looks like," he says. "You can do it in-camera while you're on location. And I find that to be incredibly helpful especially in on location situations like this. Because a lot of times you might have it in your mind that this might look good in a nice square, one-by-one crop and you might be thinking about that. But being able to visualize it in-camera and to be able to make those composition changes while you're on location in real time, in my opinion, is a real game changer."