More Hindrances

    Last time I talked about a few things that could hinder your photography experience, including eye cups, bright light on your cameras LCD, and weather. Those are some obvious troubles that many photographers deal with in various ways, but what about some less obvious things that get in the way of enjoying our photography?

Camera Straps: 
    Camera straps are nice to have if you walk around with your camera all day, at least if you have a light lens attached. I shoot from a tripod most of the time, and when I am walking around I often have my 300mm F4 AF-S attached, which needs to be carried by the lens, rather than the camera anyway. Not carrying such a lens by the lens could warp the lens mount, which wasn't designed to carry 1.5 pounds. In that case, I found the camera strap to be in the way a lot, so I no longer use one. A comfortable strap can be very nice if you are shooting with light weight crop sensor lens on a long walk, but generally speaking I find camera straps to get in the way far to often. If I don't want to carry my camera by hand I just put it into my bag.

Forgetting to Change Settings:
    Your out shooting and you get some great action shots, or at least you think you did. You look at your shots and they are all bad, blurred, over/under exposed. What happened? Did you leave your camera in many mode, from that series of city night shots you were taking a few days ago? Did you leave your camera on ISO3200 from that low light indoor family photo? Yup, we have all been there. Is there anything we can do to prevent this? Try your best to set your camera to a default set, how you shoot most often after every shoot that you do. So for example, after a shoot I normally set my ISO back to base ISO (ISO200 in my case), and white balance back to auto. Drive mode back to single, focus mode back to single, aperture priority, etc. A big item that can easily be forgotten about is exposure compensation, if you use it, remember to set it back to 0 after each shoot, otherwise you could really mess up some shoots! That goes for flash exposure compensation as well.

    I have different shooting banks in the D300, so it can be a little easier for me to get back to he set of settings that I want. I also have different settings in different banks for different situations. I have a bank for bird photography, landscapes, 14bit images and for when I hand the camera off to a family member. If your camera has different settings banks, use them, it helps!