The Wild Photographer

Customizing Your Camera: A Deep Dive for Setting Up Your Camera for Wildlife, Landscape, and Nature Photography

• Court Whelan • Episode 73

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In this solo deep dive, I walk you through the exact camera setup I use before every shoot, every trip, and sometimes even check between battery or memory card swaps. These aren’t just preferences—they’re the important, yet often-overlooked settings that can make or break your ability to capture fleeting moments in nature photography. 

We get into the philosophy behind shooting in manual with auto ISO, why I prioritize speed and readiness for wildlife over anything else, and how I customize my camera to react as fast as the scene unfolding in front of me. From autofocus strategies and drive modes to white balance and RAW vs. JPEG, this episode is all about removing friction so you can focus on what really matters: making great photographs.

Whether you’ve just unboxed a new camera or you want to fine-tune your current setup, think of this as your field-ready blueprint for getting your gear working for you, not against you.

Not all things do I check and reset daily, but here is a quick guide for those that I do look at near-daily:

  • Double-check RAW is still active
  • Confirm drive mode it back to high-speed
  • Re-check autofocus settings for single point / single shot
  • Verify Manual + Auto ISO is set
  • Check exposure settings (and go back to an even exposure)
  • Image stabilization is turned on, both in-camera and on lenses

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Court Whelan (00:00)
Hey friends, Court Whelan here. Welcome back to the Wild Photographer. Today we're talking about customizing your camera. These are things from personal use that I do every time I get a new camera or if I rent a new camera, rent a second body or a third body for a photo trip ⁓ or simply just things that I check back in on from time to time to make sure that these things are all set up the way I want to be. In fact, one of my takeaways that I'll probably mention a couple of times is that on a few of these, I check these

throughout the course of a single photo trip. check these every time I start a new photo trip. Some of these I might check every time I change a memory card or change a battery because sometimes they reset and all these things are so germane to what I need to do and what I need my camera to do for me that they're sort of indispensable settings. So whether you are getting a new camera, you just got a new camera or you want to dial in your system to really closely match what I'm doing and how I set up my camera.

This is a pretty definitive list of all those different things. We're talking about manual plus auto ISO, how I deal with the drive motor, raw versus JPEG image stabilization, whether I use digital zoom or not, custom buttons, my auto focus points, my continuous auto focus points and tracking white balance, my picture style, any sort of added clarity I do and a few other things. So it's, there's a lot going on here.

with the overall intention of either A, getting you to set up your camera like I have my camera set up for wildlife, landscape, travel, cultural, general nature photography, or you might just be getting a new camera and know, what's the checklist of things that I need to do, or at least what's the list of things I need to be thinking about to get my camera ready if it's been factory reset or it's never been set up in the first place. ⁓ It's like truly setting up your camera for success in the field. Again.

under the guise of nature photography, wildlife, landscapes, travel, et cetera, et cetera. Before I get into the episode, I wanna thank sponsors of the show. First up, big thanks to Bayphoto. There's something really powerful about seeing your work off a screen and out in the real world, tangible.

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Next up, I'd like to thank MPB and let's talk about gear for a second. Because if you're a photographer, you know exactly what I mean when I say the desire to upgrade gear is real. Maybe it's because you're style shifting, you're switching from landscape to wildlife or vice versa, or maybe you're prepping for a specific photo trip and you need something new in the bag, a certain lens or a certain camera body to get the job done. Whatever the reason, the cycle of buying, selling and upgrading gear is something we all go through.

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Okay, so now let's get into the episode. So first up, and this is, I would say no particular order, but there is kind of an order to this. And, you know, at least for the number one thing I'm about to tell you, this is like my go-to. I actually check this just about every single day because I absolutely need this to be working on my camera. And this is my go-to camera setting for manual plus auto ISO mode. And so I've done whole episodes on this where I deep dive into a lot of the why and a lot of the technique.

But the basic gist is I do shoot on full manual mode. However, I employ auto ISO. So the brilliance here is that I can choose the shutter speed, I can choose the aperture, and then I let the camera choose the ISO for me, given the lighting conditions, given the need to get an even exposure. Not only does this allow a simple process and allow me to change the two things that I need most, remember ISO is really just a means to an end. There's almost no creativity involved in a high or a low ISO.

Of course we all want low ISOs, but it also allows me to very, very quickly make very small or big adjustments to exposure. I can quickly lighten or darken with a couple buttons or one of the dials on my camera. And instead of fussing with ramping ISO up or ramping it down and missing some shots, Auto ISO plus manual works brilliantly for me. And the idea, you know, is I would encourage

anybody to have their camera or at least start to learn about being on at least aperture mode because that is a very, very big creative part. You want to be able to dictate the depth of field. So I know I want to change aperture. The question is, do I want to change shutter speed? And through, you know, frankly, years of experience, I've gotten really adept at knowing what shutter speed I need to freeze motion or to blur motion. I know what shutter speed I need to freeze hand movement. I know that if I

shoot at one over 200 on a wide angle lens, I'm good. So I'm always gonna have that shutter speed at the minimum number, like the slowest I can go, as long as I'm freezing wildlife movement or people movement or my own hand movement. So I do that in conjunction with the creative aperture that I need, maybe a big depth of field, maybe a shallow depth of field, and the camera does the rest with ISO. Now, the second thing is setting your ISO range. And I go into my camera menu,

and I basically set my range because again, it is auto here. I set it to the biggest range possible. And this is partly because I'm afforded the luxury of using a full frame camera. So I can really ramp up the ISOs and get minimal noise. I can go to 3200, 6400, 12,800. I will shoot at 25,000 ISO if I need to get it. And the gist here is that for some people, especially if you're in a crop frame or especially if you just

Absolutely can't deal with high ISOs. You can set that range to be whatever you want You can set it so it will never do an auto ISO higher than 3200 or higher than 6400 I do choose and I do recommend to set it higher than you think or at least the full range So my camera goes all the way up to fifty one thousand two hundred ISO I do set it to that because if I'm shooting in those conditions, I'm either gonna need that crazy high ISO

or just not gonna get the shot, period. Because I know that in those dark conditions, I'm shooting at the lowest F number possible, I'm shooting at the slowest shutter speed possible, and my only possibility is to get a high ISO. And fortunately today with programs like Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom and Topaz Denoise, you can denoise those shots such that it reduces the grain, it reduces that noise in the photo.

So high ISOs, you always want to be wary of them. I'm not saying go willy nilly here. ⁓ For a lot of cameras, anything over 12,000 is going to be quite noticeable. A, there's really no other recourse. long as you're shooting at the slowest possible shutter speed and the smallest F number, the only way you can go is with a high ISO. And B, you can denoise it. And I've rescued shots that have been at, again, 25,000 ISO.

I'm photographing elephants at a watering hole after the sun has set in Zimbabwe. And I can use denoise. I can do a little bit finagling in my editing programs. And that shot turns out it actually looks pretty good. So ISO range is something that I do recommend. Again, whether you're going into a new camera or just revamping your camera to match my settings, increasing that range to at least 25,000, maybe even all the way up to 51,000 is probably a good idea.

Next up, we've got drive motor. So this is something that I look at almost every day that I'm on a photo adventure or definitely before every trip. You know, I like to spend, I don't know, 20 minutes getting my camera ready before every single photo trip. I do the little things like changing the date and the time to make sure it matches little things. You know, it's not hugely instrumental. Like I don't really categorize my shots too much by day and time, but I like it to be accurate.

but one of the key things I do at the start of every day is I make sure my drive motor is back to a pretty high continuous shooting, meaning I can take a lot of photos when I press that shutter button down. And my camera on the H plus drive motor, it's like the highest drive motor possible. It goes up to like 20 or 30 frames a second.

It's a lot. get it. It's, it's, I don't want to say it's too much, but it's getting on that verge. But the thing is, is when I'm walking out the door, maybe it's my safari camp, maybe it's a lodge in Alaska or Borneo or Madagascar, wherever the thing that I'm going to be dialing my camera in for is for wildlife that day. And yes, if we're leaving our rooms at 5 a.m. and the sun doesn't rise for another hour, the chance of getting a wildlife shot right off the bat is kind of slim.

But the thing is, you have to pick something and do you have your camera set up for landscapes or set up for wildlife? And the thing is, landscapes don't move, right? So I have not only my telephoto lens on my camera, but I have a very, very fast drive motor, even though I may get a landscape shot ultimately as my first photo, I can drop it down. The reason I say the drive motor switches between landscape and wildlife is that generally when we're shooting a landscape shot, it is the sunrise.

I don't want to get 20 shots of the same sunrise. I might do like three frames a second, but I don't need 30 frames a second. But if I see a lion hunting or something happening in the environment that I need a lot of shots for, I'm glad that I have that dialed in because the action, as you may know, gets really, really frenetic really quickly. So when I'm setting up my camera, I set it up for the fastest drive motor, at least the second fastest, maybe 15 or 20 frames versus 30. It

and just knowing that when I walk out the door, I'm ready for the quickest, most ephemeral action. Remember, landscapes, if you wanna drop it back down to a slower drive motor, you have the time to do that. You may not have the time to ramp up drive motor if a beautiful, incredible wildlife scene unfolds before you.

The next thing I set up in my camera is I make sure that I'm shooting in RAW. So very, very often when you get a camera out of the box, it could be even the fanciest pro camera out there, for some reason it's always set up for no RAW and mid-level JPEG or some sort of JPEG shot. And for me personally, I do not want to shoot in JPEG. I only want to shoot in RAW. RAW is the most editable format. It's a larger file size. It's anywhere from five to 10 times the memory usage. So it is a big file, but it...

captures the data in a much more raw, much more complex form. So when you go into Photoshop or Lightroom or Camera Raw and you do edit and you change the exposure and you change the contrast and all these things, it preserves the data integrity a lot, lot more. So if you plan to edit, I highly recommend shooting in RAW. There's a third option for lot of newer cameras out there to shoot in RAW plus JPEG. And I get it, like why not do it? Because adding the JPEGs only adds

I don't know, 10 % more memory usage by the time you shoot those very, very big RAW files. However, A, I don't want to be teased by having a quick access, easy, better looking photo that's ultimately less quality, i.e. the JPEG, because it's going to look better out of the camera. RAWs, as you probably know, they look very flat. They don't have the same sharpness and contrast. They look like a RAW version of the photo that you have to edit. The other thing is like, I actually don't want to sacrifice that extra 10 or 15 % of memory usage.

because not only is that memory usage in my camera, that stuff I have to deal with on the computer. And as a pro

I have terabytes upon terabytes

that I have to store, I have to catalog, I have to move from drive to drive if I'm upgrading a drive. And I will ultimately process all my RAWs into JPEG. So I don't have any beef against JPEG. JPEG's a great file format. JPEG is my friend. However, when I'm shooting,

I want to make sure that RAW is what I'm capturing the actual image on in my camera. And this is something that I make sure of every single time I change my memory card. If I'm downloading my photos every night of a photo trip, like I often do, every time I put that memory card back in, I've just trained my brain to go look to make sure it's back on RAW. Fortunately, most of the time it is, but for some unknown reason, every once in a while it switches to JPEG when you change that memory card. And I have gotten burned on that. I've seen things in photographs.

things that I will never see again. And it's only the first hour of the day, but I start to look at my files and as I review in the viewfinder, I notice a little .jpg after the file name and then my heart sinks. And I say, my gosh, I didn't check to make sure it was in RAW. So checking, if you do shoot in RAW, if you want to shoot in RAW, do check that often. It may not be something that you have to check daily if you don't remove your memory card. It shouldn't reset.

if you turn your camera off. However, it's something that's so important once you get used to it and once you get the merits and the benefits and you start to fall in love with raw like all of us do, it's very, very important to do.

The next thing I'm gonna check certainly before every trip or every main shoot, if I'm batching a number of days together, is I wanna make sure that all of my image stabilization is turned on in all my lenses. I very often, maybe at the end of a photo trip, will take a time lapse of the last night and when I'm on a tripod, I do turn image stabilization off. You don't want image stabilization on with a tripod because it's already stable enough and the image stabilization or vibration reduction in Nikon terminology,

it's going to actually work against the tripod and it's going to inject movement into the lens. I kid you not. It's like it's a really bad thing. So the point here is that sometimes I will turn off my image stabilization because I'm on a tripod and you know, I don't know if it's going to be the last night of the trip and I'll have turned it back on again after using the tripod. But I do make sure that my image stabilization is turned on on my lenses like all my lenses and also in the body. So this is one of the really great benefits of mirrorless cameras.

is that they have fantastic internal body image stabilization systems. So this adds more stabilization beyond just what the lens gives you. And sometimes it's twice as powerful as the actual lens stabilization. So make sure that it's turned on in your camera, make sure it's turned on in your lens, and that's what I'm gonna start with. I 100 % would rather turn it off for the handful of times in a trip I'm gonna use a tripod than have to remember to turn it on each and every day. So IS,

image stabilization, goes on as part of my checklist with a new camera, with a new trip coming up.

With that, there's one thing that I make sure isn't turned on. And every camera system, whether it's a point and shoot or big fancy DSLR or mirrorless, they have different renditions of this. And I can't say that's even available in all the cameras out there, but I do make sure that there is no digital zoom turned

a particular vulnerability of point and shoot cameras because they have usually like an eight times or 10 times optical zoom. So it's like actually like a lens focal length thing.

but then they have a digital zoom that allows you to zoom into like 30 or 50 times zoom. So word of warning, when you see those point and shoot cameras out there that say, you know, 30 times zoom or 80 times zoom, I've seen some that are like 120 times zoom now, that last chunk of it, maybe even the last half of that zoom is all digital. And here's why it's bad, is that using digital zoom for the most part, like 99 % of the time, does nothing different than just cropping your image.

the megapixel size is smaller, you're just cropping in on your image. And so to me, why not just shoot that image at the extent of the optical zoom, get in as far as you can if you really need to zoom further, of course, use the tools at your disposal. But if you find that you really want to fill the frame more with that animal or that particular part of the landscape, just crop in on your computer. Because if you digitally zoom and take that photo, you can never crop out. However, if you start with a wider shot,

you always have that original file you can go back to. Maybe you put it on your computer and find that, well, actually, now that it's in big size, like I might want to blow this up and put on my wall. I don't want it to be zoomed into the face of the cheetah. I actually like it being zoomed out. So I don't recommend digital zoom being turned on. Like I'm not even saying use restraint. Like just don't even have it on. Don't even allow the camera to use digital zoom.

because it's too easy in the moment of an exciting sighting, exciting sighting ⁓ to be tempted to use that digital zoom or just make a mistake and not realize that you're actually using it because you think you went to the 10 times zoom, but it eeked a little bit further. It's now 14 times. You're losing pixels. You're losing quality. Just don't do it.

I want to switch to a video topic real quickly is that on a lot of mirrorless cameras, this is one of the big benefits of mirrorless is that their video capabilities are fantastic. And a lot of them have an actual red record button. So you can be shooting photos one second. Like let's say you're primarily a photographer like myself. And then if you see something really cool, say you've gotten the shots and you just want to take some video, you can hit a red record button and automatically switches to video. However, usually at least for my Canon R5, it switches to a very specific

custom mode within video, meaning it doesn't just go to like auto video. It shoots in a very specific mode. And for the R5 again, it's the custom three, like they have C1, C2, C3, the custom three mode. So I know that before every photo trip, I need to change my custom three settings or maybe not change, but I need to ensure that my custom three settings are the video mode that I want. And when I mean mode, I mean it needs to be in manual plus auto ISO.

with the right frame rate, I usually shoot at 60 frames a second. Sometimes if I'm going on a specific wildlife journey, I'm only shooting wildlife, like no people, no vehicles, no travel photography, I'll be on 120 frames a second, but I make sure that my custom three mode is set on the right video settings. This also might be the type of video you shoot. Is it 1080p? Is it 4K? Is it something in between? Is it even smaller? Or now they're doing 8K?

⁓ And again, the caveat is that not all cameras are gonna default to custom three. This is specific to Canon, but I guarantee you your camera itself will default to a certain video setting when you hit that button, because it's kind of a shortcut. Like the camera has to decide, what do I do? there's eight different modes I could be shooting on. The shortcut of using that red button, it's great because you can instantly switch to video. The downside is that it's switching to a very specific mode that you have to pay attention to.

So pay attention to that. I don't check this every day. If I was primarily a videographer, I probably would, but because this is just kind of a backup secondary use case, like shooting video alongside photos, start of the trip is fine, but I do check it when I set up a new camera for the first time and I do check it when I start the next trip.

The next thing is much more open-ended, but I wanted to call your attention to this ability. And all these cameras have the ability to custom set buttons and dials. This is usually deep in your menu system. In the Canon system, it's all the way to the far right and like the little orange menu system. And there's literally a menu selection that can say, dials, customize buttons. and what I love about this is it gives me the ability to add more shortcuts. You know, I just mentioned this.

video record shortcut with the video red button, but you can start adding things like the ability to quickly toggle your drive motor. Like you can switch between three shots a second and 20 shots a second. You can have secondary or tertiary auto focus buttons. Like one focus might be for single point. One other button might be a continuous tracking auto focus. We'll actually get to this in a minute because it's very, very important, but knowing that you can customize those buttons and dials, it's huge.

If you have big hands or small hands and you can't quite reach or it's not comfortable to reach one of the dials, change it. If you find that you're changing aperture or shutter speed all the time, make that the easiest dial to reach. There's a great feature on Canon products now where they're mirrorless lenses at the very tip of the barrel. It's got a ring and it's just, it's just a custom ring. You can set it to whatever you want. So I set it to increase or decrease my exposure. So in real time as I'm holding my lens, I can actually

go counterclockwise or clockwise to increase or decrease my exposure. So these things are huge tools. far be it for me to say exactly what you should be dialing in custom. It's very, very subjective. It's to your own needs and your shooting style. But knowing that's there and then doing something about it, making sure to set something, because it's just gonna make your life easier. The easy aside, it's gonna make your photos better or at very least,

give you more photos because you're spending less time going through menu systems, dialing up or down the drive motor

choosing auto focus settings, et cetera, et cetera. So really, really big pro tip there. Customize those buttons and dials to your heart's content. And before I move on from that, the reality is like every button on a camera starts with some sort of purpose

However, you could change. Oftentimes there's a little button that I can change my picture style in my camera, like going from neutral to standard. We'll talk about this next as to what I go for as far as my picture style. But I am not changing my picture style ever. I'm not shooting in a vivid picture style one second and then neutral to next.

So that's an open button for me. Yes, it has a little logo and a little icon indicating the picture style menu, but I can change that to an autofocus. I can change that to an exposure lock, what have you. It's just really a great tool. So yes, the buttons have a default purpose, but you can change them.

The next thing I set is I turn on my blinkies. That's what they're sort of colloquially called, but they're essentially the zebra stripes or

a way to showcase highlight overexposure. And so what this is, it's again, it's usually deep in your menu system, but you can turn this on so that when your camera sees a scene and it's noticing that there are parts of the scene that are overexposed, maybe it's like reflection in the water, maybe it's the whole sky itself, it will blink these little zebra stripes, hence why they're called blinkies. And it just kind of looks like a little black and white stripe, zebra stripes as well.

So that's a really, really powerful tool. not that I necessarily always change the way I'm gonna shoot because these things are blinking, but it does give me the option. And I say, you know what? There's enough dynamic range here that I can adjust for the highlights, or I can at least tune down my exposure a little bit just to make sure that the whole scene isn't blinking. And it will change in real time. Those blinkies will go away or they'll lessen.

And it's really interesting that they look a lot like a mask that you'd have in Lightroom or Photoshop. And they really outline exactly where the overexposure is. You might be seeing an entirely white sky, but the camera only sees half of that sky is overexposed. So it's really accurate. It's really helpful to have.

A little caveat there is I've noticed on different camera bodies that I've used over the years, they don't always have this feature or they may have it for video, but they don't have it for photo.

I don't know why, but if I have it in my camera body, I do turn it on. It's a really nice thing to have. Again, giving me the information, giving me the decision to make as to whether I should dial down my exposure a little bit.

All right, I wanna take a quick break and thank another sponsor of the episode. And I wanna share something that's genuinely changed how I approach the business side of my photography. And that's my website through Art Storefronts. You can check it out at shop.courtwhelan.com just to get a visual and see what it looks like.

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The next thing I'm gonna make sure that I have on, and I do change this sometimes, but I wanna make sure I have on my full screen metering. And this means my entire screen is what the camera uses to determine how much light to let into the sensor. And so the basic gist is, is you can program your camera to choose just the very middle, ⁓ most of the middle or the full screen

in terms of what it actually chooses to expose for.

There are advantages of each of these settings. And I think if we were like model photographers or portrait photographers or wedding photographers, we'd probably be using the center weighted feature a little bit more. Sometimes for small birds deep in the brush where exposure is just going haywire, I will use a spot metering. So it meters just in the dead middle of my frame, but 99 times out of a hundred. And certainly what I set my camera on for default, when I get the camera out of the box, when I'm

prepping for a trip is I make sure it's on the full frame metering. For different systems, they're called different things. Like I know for Canon, it's called evaluative. For Nikon, it's called matrix. I think for Sony, it's also called evaluative or some sort of deviation of that. So yeah, in other words, you do want it to look at the whole scene when it's choosing metering. And because I'm shooting in full manual plus auto ISO,

the camera does choose how much light to let into the sensor. Like I'm letting it choose that for an even exposure, right?

the next thing I'll look at is I'll make sure that my exposure is back to zero. Sometimes, you know, again, at the end of the last photo trip, I'll have been shooting at night and I'm significantly under exposing my shots or let's just say I saw a cool artsy scene and I really overexposed my shot to bring a lot of highlights and create a really unique black and white look. These are all possibilities.

But what I don't want to do is shoot for the first 50 or 100 shots of my next trip or even my next day and find that I'm only metering for the dead middle of my frame. Because if you have a lot of lights and darks in your scene, which is very, common in nature and wildlife and landscape photography, what you point that dead middle on could be a really dark spot and therefore it's going to overexpose the heck out of your photo. Could be a very bright spot like the sky and it's going to underexpose like severely underexpose your shot.

So full frame,

your entire frame, your entire viewfinder, your entire LCD screen. And this usually is denoted by a full box versus a small point in the middle. So I do set that and I do check that quite often.

So the next thing I wanna talk about is autofocus options. And I'll tell you what I do, it works really well for me. I advise all my photo guests when I'm guiding and teaching photography to do this, there are a lot of options, right? So being on single point autofocus isn't for everyone. It's not always the way people wanna shoot.

but I do highly advocate that your default setting is single point autofocus. So definitely autofocus on, that's great, but you wanna have it so it's a small box in the dead middle of your frame. It's the smallest pinpoint in the middle of your frame. I don't want it to move around. I don't want the camera to choose where to focus. I don't know if you're like me, but I've had a tough time when I let the camera choose focus, even with these advanced cameras, because with nature and wildlife, you don't usually just have one single dominant subject in the scene.

Your photo will ultimately be showcasing one single dominant subject often, but there might be two or three birds. There might be a pride of lion. There might be a valley full of trees and wildflowers and letting the camera choose. It'll usually just choose whatever the closest thing to you is. And that's not always what I want to focus on. You know, for instance, for landscape photography, I want to focus about one third of the way into the scene to get everything else in focus. So single point autofocus allows me to choose where to focus. It's very predictable. It doesn't move.

And my method is when I find the place that I want to focus.

This might be the animal's face. This might be a third of the way into the scene. This might be a tree off in the distance. As I hold my shutter halfway down while the middle of my frame, while that single point is on my subject, hold my shutter halfway down, then recompose and then hold it all the way down to take the shot. Okay. So single point autofocus is definitely my default. And there are usually two options at single point. There's like a larger box and a smaller box. I highly recommend going to the smallest possible box for the most accuracy. So that way when

you are trying to photograph a lion and

frame with its face and you want

focus on the eye. You don't want to focus on the nose, which is very close to the eye. You want to focus exactly on the eye. That small, small little autofocus box is the ticket there.

So the next thing is, is a lot of these fancy cameras today have a tracking autofocus. And so I want to have that set up in my camera. I actually use one of these custom buttons for that. So I can hit a couple buttons and switch from just a single shot autofocus to continuous. That way, whatever is in the middle of my frame as I'm holding my shutter down is in focus. But then I'm also going to turn on tracking. Okay. So tracking allows the camera

sometimes with challenging results, but they're getting better and better at it. I'm allowing my camera to track the moving subject across the frame. Moving is the key thing. ⁓ But again, these things are getting so good. So I go into my autofocus settings. I set it for animals. I do turn eye detection on. And this is just brilliant. The camera will actually figure out where that pinpoint eyeball is and it'll lock onto that. So as I'm holding one of these focus buttons,

It's not only tracking and locking onto the eye, even if the animal's moving, rolling around, playing, sprinting across the tundra, it locks onto that eye. But then I make sure that I have another button that toggles between single shot autofocus. Single shot's different than single point. Single shot means every time you hold the shutter, it locks in focus and it doesn't change. I change it from single shot autofocus to continuous. That way, as I'm holding my shutter halfway, it's

Constantly refocusing whatever is inside the focus box and because I have tracking on it's tracking and refocusing and I've gotten some of most exquisite bird-and-flight photos Action shots behavior shots of wildlife and I credit the camera Honestly, like I I know how to use it and I've turned these couple of custom buttons on to make this happen But credit to the camera for tracking all that. It's just absolutely brilliant So I make sure that's set on and giving me the option to do this

But truly what I walk at the door with in the morning is the single point, single point, single shot autofocus, because that's the most predictable. That's the most consistent. I only switch to that tracking autofocus when specific things are happening in front of me. I would never use it for a landscape shot. I really wouldn't use it for a resting animal shot. It's really when I have good light, the animals moving and I've already frankly, I've already gotten one shot with a single point focus, or I'm just having way too much of a challenge tracking the animal.

like a bird in flight or like a breaching whale, et cetera, et But I make sure again to have those two options in my camera set up.

Next up, I'm going to set my white balance. And for most of the time these days, I've actually been setting it to a warm auto. Okay, so warm auto is like auto, but it's a little bit warmer, meaning it's a little bit more yellow. It's got a little bit more of those yellows and oranges in the tonalities of the scene. And I like that a lot.

There are times when I'm going to set it at the start of a trip or start of the day too cloudy if I want to inject real warmth into the scene. Like for instance, if I'm going to Borneo and I'm photographing in the jungles, there are a lot of greens and a lot of yellows and it's just a warm, hot place that really showcases that tropical vibe. And I want it to have a warmer look across my photos. If I'm going to cold areas, like if I'm going...

to photograph glaciers or go in a photograph polar bears photographing Arctic tundra scenes. I'm actually going to put it on daylight white balance in order to inject that cool blue tonality in the scene. But again, probably 80 % of the time I'm starting with a warm auto caveat there. Not all cameras allow you to have warm auto is just auto and there's nothing really wrong with it, especially if you're shooting in raw. can 100 % change this on the computer afterwards and there's no degradation of the image.

However, I've just found that if you're coming out of the camera with this shot of auto, it just looks pretty flat. It's not real saturated with colors. The colors are just muted and not very vivid. And then when you start messing around with this on the

it to cloudy or changing it to daylight, the amount of yellow or blue it injects in the scene starts to really look fake to my eyes.

once you get used to it for a little while, like once you come back to the photo a couple of times, you know, get up, make a cup of coffee, come back, look at it. Your eyes will get used to it, but it's such a stark change. Like, I don't know you've ever calibrated a monitor or changed the color settings of your computer and your screen is either very blue or very yellow from, from setting to setting. It's like that. ⁓ so I do like the warmer auto because I tend to like warmer photos most of the time, but sometimes I will.

100 % go into a photo shoot or go into a specific day and set it to daylight to force myself to have that cool blue tone throughout. Again, thinking of cool blue environments, cool blue scenes, more white wildlife that I don't want to look yellow, I want it to look white, ⁓ or the converse, I want the animals to look like they're in tropical jungle with those warm

Some photographers will actually set a custom white balance.

And they'll do this usually at 5,300 Kelvin or 5,600 Kelvin just to get something that's middle of the road because auto, even though it's middle of the road, usually it still moves. Like you're not going to always get 5,600 Kelvin on auto. It's going to move. It's going to be 4,500 for this shot and 6,200 for this shot because it's constantly trying to adjust as to what the camera thinks is pure white. So some photographers just for consistency, you know, I don't do this, so I can't really speak to it, but they will set it on

just a standard white balance across the scene at 53 or 5600, just so they're not getting big swings in color. And then they do all the adjustments in post. They do all those adjustments in camera raw, Lightroom, Photoshop, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay, we're getting towards the end here. One of the final things that I make sure of, this is especially important when setting up a new camera and this doesn't tend to change. Like I've not seen this ever change, no matter how many times I change the memory card or battery or format my memory card is the picture style. That's what it's called, picture style. And it's essentially akin to filters that you'd see on Instagram or filters that you might have on your phone. And usually the settings are something like, you know, six or eight different choices.

including neutral words like standard words like vivid or landscape. And these are basically ways of adding saturation and contrast and kind of the overall vibe of the photo.

I don't like setting my camera on anything, but minimal adjustments like I want it to be pretty neutral.

Standard is a pretty good one. Standard tends to be a little bit more vivid and a little bit more saturated when it comes out of the camera. Even RAWs, like we're not talking about just JPEGs here, but RAWs get these treatments as well. And I just don't like having my camera give me anything but the basics. So I don't adjust those. I never adjust them from trip to trip or day to day.

and I do make sure I stay on neutral or standard with any camera that I have.

The last thing I do is I'm going to make sure that my grid is turned on on screen. And so the grid is basically a rule of thirds grid that is overlaid on your screen that just helps you with composition. I think if you're a very experienced photographer and you have no problem finding balance in your

maybe you don't even strive to match the rule of thirds most of the time,

But I think for a lot of folks, really benefit by starting with the rule of thirds, breaking it when the opportunity arises. But having that grid on your camera, it literally is just part of your LCD screen. And with mirrorless, now your viewfinder. And it just helps you organize the shot from top to bottom, left to right. Helps you figure out where those intersecting points are, where you generally want to put your subjects just for overall aesthetics. I do like having my grid turned on. I'm not going to obsess about this one. I've fortunately have just been photographing enough over the years that it's not critical.

But I think for newer or intermediate photographers, it's a really, really nice thing to have.

OK, there's a deep dive. All my camera settings, how I set up my camera, whether it's before every shoot or sometimes daily, like I mentioned, sometimes changing batteries or memory cards will reset some of these things. So pay attention to these. think they're all very, very important. If you want to follow a play by play of everything that I do for my camera specifically.

This is it, this is the list. Now this is of course not a requirement on my part for you to do exactly what I'm doing, but I hope you learned something. A lot of tricks and tips, a lot of setup help, a lot of the nitty gritty of how to set up your camera to maximize nature, wildlife and landscape photography.

If you are interested in learning more on photo editing, specifically my photo editing workflow, I'm really pushing hard on my YouTube channel to give you real time screen recordings of how I take a raw photo and turn it into my final processed image. I'm trying to do this across the gamut from sun bears in Borneo to Arctic scenes in the Tundra to canyons in the Moab area of Utah to really just everything. And I'm adding them pretty routinely. So if you check out my YouTube channel, I think you'll like it, you know, within

five, sometimes maybe seven or 10 minutes, you're gonna learn all the sliders, all the masks that I use. You're gonna see it in real time and I'm narrating the whole thing. So I'm kind of giving you an insight into my interpretation of the shot and why I'm doing these things. Like, hey, I'm gonna try this. I didn't like it, let's go back. And I think with time, it gives you some real insight into how ⁓ I edit my photos and how others have perspective of editing photos in Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, et cetera, et cetera. So check that out.

and as always, I think a really good way to learn photography is to see other photographers work, see what they're doing, see how they're capturing, see what composition they go for, what color palette are they looking for? You can even discern what times of day they might be photographing. And so I'll invite you to check out my Instagram. I'm fairly active on it. I do a lot of videos and reels. I do a lot of example photos, do a lot of conservation stuff on my Instagram channel, and that's just at court.

underscore whelan as my handle and then YouTube is just at court whelan all one word ⁓ So yeah, check those out I look forward to hearing from you If you do want to drop me a note the best way to ask questions I would love to hear suggestions for future episodes is to head on over to my youtube channel again It's just youtube slash at symbol. So just a little at court whelan all one word and drop me a comment in

any episode. doesn't have to be this episode. It doesn't have to be anything specific. You can ask any question. I will see those. It's the most consistent way I've found to hear from you and be able to respond and have a little conversation. And also, like I said, get great ideas from you guys of what you want to hear more about in this podcast. So once again, thanks so much for tuning in and talk to you next time.


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Court Whelan

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