Photo How To

Out of the box, your new camera comes with all kinds of factory-assigned settings. Some of these default camera settings are useful, while others you'll quickly learn are counter-productive and even incredibly annoying: "How do I turn that infernal beeping off???"

Photographers Tony & Chelsea Northrup test a lot of cameras and they've learned what to turn on, turn off and/or adjust immediately on a camera right when they put the battery in and turn it on.

"Because we review cameras, we are always getting in a brand new (camera) body," Tony Nortrup says in the video at the bottom of this post. "Here are the ten settings I change on every new camera I get right away."

In the YouTube description to the tutorial below titled "ALWAYS change these 10 camera settings," Tony runs down all the adjustments he makes immediately:

#1 Disable the beeping. Beeping is annoying, especially at events like weddings.

#2: Enable back button focus (BBF). When you press AF-On, the camera focuses, and when you don’t, it won’t focus, even if you press the shutter. This is helpful for night photography - when you manually focus and then take a picture.

• You can use BBF to “lock” the focal plane, enabling your camera to take a faster burst of pictures for sports photography.

#3: Set up your camera to take Raw photos, instead of just JPEGs. Raw files allow you to recover blown-out highlights and dark shadows.

• If your camera has dual SD slots, you can configure it to write Raw images to slot 1 (usually the faster slot) and JPEG, as a backup, to slot 2.
• Not only does card 2 (with the JPEGs) serve as a useful backup, it can quickly be edited on your laptop/iPad due to their smaller file size.

#4: Max out the ISO/Auto-ISO limit. This enables your camera to try to expose pictures properly (with a higher ISO) than underexposing the image if it’s too dark.

 #5: We also configure how each camera handles AF points, too. Most cameras seem to randomly pick AF points that don’t make sense. As a photographer, this is aggravating.

• First, choose a single AF point. Use your touchscreen/thumbstick to choose the AF point you want to use. EOS R drifts out of focus...consider filming new b-roll of touch-screen focusing/using thumbstick to move AF point around.

 #6: Use AF-C mode. Most cameras default to Single AF mode, where the camera won’t hunt to establish focus. With most modern cameras, it’s probably better to use AF-C nearly all the time.

 #7: Prevent the camera from shooting without the memory card.

 #8: Enable 4K video. 4K ain’t enabled by default, but it’s great for cropping and it looks so much better when exporting to 1080p.

 #9: Customize My Menu - Nearly all cameras have a “C1, C2” function that allows customization. We switch cameras a lot and remembering the various menu options can be challenging.

#10: Default to “Delete” instead of “Cancel”

Watch more of Tony & Chelsea's helpful videos on their popular YouTube channel.