Quick Tip: Go Read Your Camera Manual

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Reading by schani

When we get a new camera, most of us will at least skim through the manual and play with the buttons. Some of us will read the entire thing in one night, but that's besides the point. After owning a camera for about a week or two, the manual gets filed away somewhere out of sight. This is all fine, and we generally don't need the manual to take photos and learn new tricks.

But if you've owned your camera for a while, you might consider digging out that old book and giving it a quick read. When your camera is brand new, you probably scanned over or skipped over some things that didn't seem important to you at the time. Things like advanced menu functions, external control settings, and camera specific quirks all seemed like unnecessary “extra fluff” — to a new camera owner anyways. You told yourself you'd go back to it after you got the basics down. But you didn't, did you?

So my advice is this: crack open the manual and look for things you might have skipped over when you first opened the box. You might just find something in there worth reading.