These are my settings for everyday shooting. Regular shooting is more photojournalistic for me, and I use many available lights and lenses from the 14 – 300mm range.

The first thing I do is select my shooting menu bank in the menu. I have saved two primary shooting setups.

I have normal for most average situations and shooting using studio flash. You can rename these to whatever you like to use. I have occasionally set up a sports menu bank as well. Once you select this setting, everything you set in your menu will be saved here.

My primary slot is the XQD, and the secondary slot is overflowing. I am usually shooting in RAW in this setting. This means I can change the white balance later, with more control than I would have in JPEGs.

Also, I have set the bit depth to the highest setting of 14-bit to give me the most significant possible data capture from the sensor.

I set the picture control to standard, affecting only the RAW previews. If you are saving as JPEG and RAW, then the JPEGs will be a little more punch than the Neutral, which, for me, is too flat.

I shoot in the ADOBE RGB color space, and after editing in Lightroom, I output to sRGB. I have the most significant color space in Adobe RGB; therefore, I will have more information when editing, giving better color in the final image.

I prefer to shoot in AUTO ISO. The ISO sensitivity is set at ISO 100 and set to max out at ISO 12,800. I will go into this setting and often tweak the minimum shutter speed, especially when shooting under fluorescent lights, to 1/100. I wrote about Auto ISO in an earlier blog post here. The concept hasn’t changed since the article about the Nikon D3S was written. Earlier, I wrote about why we should shoot at 1/100 with fluorescent lights here.

I only changed a few things from default to custom settings.

I use the autofocus points of 51 with the auto setting on single. It will look for faces automatically. I may override this if the auto setting isn’t locking in where I typically want it to. Often, it is faster than I am, and sometimes, I need to override who I wish to be the focus point when many people are in a photo.

I also like to embed my name in all the photos, so I put my words in the Image Comment and Copyright Information.

I will write more in future posts on studio strobes and sports settings.