Autofocus

I have an entire page on this. See D300 AutoFocus Settings, page 85.

Metering

I have used Matrix for everything since I got my first Nikon FA back in 1992. You set this on the rotary switch (Rear Controls, page 23) on the back. Matrix is the middle position that looks like a rectangle with a dot in the middle. I also discuss the other modes at Rear Controls, page 21. I use the Exposure Compensation control (Top Panel Controls, page 20) if I need to lighten or darken the pictures. For more details, see my All About Exposure page at http://kenrockwell.com/tech/exposure.htm.

Lens Settings

Many lenses have no switches or settings. If so, dont worry. If the switch says M/A - M then use M/A. This gives autofocus, and if I grab the focus ring it instantly lets me make manual corrections. As soon as I tap the shutter button again I get autofocus. This M/A setting, if the lens has it, provides both kinds of focus without ever having to move any switches. Its the best. Older lenses may have an A - M switch. Leave those at A. To get manual focus you must move the switch on the lens, and/or the switch on the camera. Its not automatic. Different lenses require different settings on the camera and lens to get manual. Some, like the old 300mm f/4 AF, required moving both the camera and lens switches! That was a pain. Non-G lenses will have an aperture ring on the base of the lens where its attached to the
camera. Set this ring to the smallest aperture (largest number), usually in orange and f16, 22 or 32. There usually is a lock to keep this ring set there, since if it comes off that setting youll get an error message ( which displays as fEE ) from most cameras.

Front Controls

Front Dial
Used for all sorts of settings. You knew that. It usually changes the aperture setting.
Depth-of-Field Preview Button
The preview button lies naturally under your middle finger. Tap this to stop the diaphragm down to the taking aperture. The viewfinder gets darker, but look carefully and you can see whats in focus or not. This is a legacy feature from film days. Today most people look at the LCD playback. You can program this button do other things, as explained in Custom Functions (page 61 onwards).

The default apertures and shutter speeds are unchanged in Program mode, unlike in the D70. Red-Eye SLOW (eye and SLOW icon) This is the SLOW mode and redeye. I dont use it for the same reason I dont use Redeye mode. REAR (REAR on the top LCD) When youre shooting with flash and long exposures, this makes the blur come from behind moving subjects. Normally the flash goes off the instant the shutter opens. This makes sense, but looks stupid if you have motion blur because the blurs will be in front of the moving subject. Select REAR mode to have the flash go off as the shutter closes. Now youll have motion blurring from behind the frozen flash image, which looks great. Another reason to select REAR is because people presume photos are made the instant a flash fires, then they leave. This wreaks havoc with long exposures, since people will leave at the beginning of the exposure! Use the REAR mode and the flash doesnt go off until the end of the exposure. Youll also want to select flash lock to eliminate the preflash. Read about programming the FUNC button to do that on page 61. REAR doesnt do anything with short exposures. REAR also engages SLOW, but SLOW doesnt light up on the LCD until you take your finger off the flash mode button. Trick Flash Exposure Lock Mode: You can set your FUNC button in the Custom Menus (page 61) to lock flash exposure and eliminate preflashes which make people blink.

Studio Flash Connector

Pop open the tethered rubber cover to connect a PC cord from your professional flash system to your D300. PC stands for Prontor Compur, a popular German shutter back in the 1930s who invented this connector. The PC connector has nothing to do with personal computers.
Idiotic Remote Terminal Connector
Pop open the tethered rubber cover to connect one of Nikons expensive electronic remote controls, like the $55 MC-30 and $130 MC-36. Since Nikon overprices these, you can buy counterfeits cheap, but honestly, the release you buy today will last you far longer than any digital camera. I still use the one I bought back
in the 1990s before the practical DSLR was even invented. These work on just about all motorized Nikon film and digital cameras. Sorry, but the D300 wont work with the superb pocket-sized $17 ML-L3 wireless cable release, as the cheaper cameras can. Since Nikon knows youre a big spender with the D300, youll have to buy the clumsy $175 ML-3 wireless release system. Nikon doesnt bother to thread the shutter release, so you have to buy one of these gizmos instead of a standard $6 cable release on a tripod.

Lens Release

Push this button and turn the lens to remove it. It locks automatically when you attach and rotate a lens.

Focus Mode switch

See my complete Guide to Setting the D300's AF System (page 85).

Top Panel

Top left controls
Advance Mode Dial (S, CL, CH, [Lv], clock and Mup)
This circular dial (on the top, left-hand side, under the QUAL, WB and ISO buttons) doesnt turn unless you press the release button just above it. It sets the frame advance rate, Live View, the self timer, and the mirror lock up. S: Single Frame One frame for each press of the shutter button. CL: Continuous Low I use this setting. Press the shutter once and you get one photo. Hold it down and the D300 takes pictures continuously at any speed you choose in Custom Function d4 (page 55). The default is 3 FPS, which I use. You can set this to any integer between 1 FPS and 7 FPS in Custom Function d4. If I need one shot I get one shot. If the light is dim and I want a few shots to ensure I get a sharp one, I hold the release down and make several from which Ill pick the sharpest. Faster selections make it more likely that Ill get two shots when I want just one.
CH: Continuous High The D300 runs at its top speed (6 or 8 FPS depending on grip and battery) as long as you hold down the shutter. I dont use CH because its so fast that I often get 2 or 3 shots when just one will do. [Lv] (Live View) Unlike Canon, its easy to use Live View. Set this and press the shutter. Press the shutter again to get out of Live View. Ill explain the various Live View options under the Shooting Menu (page 30). Self Timer (clock icon) Press the shutter and the D300 takes a picture some seconds afterwards. We can set the delay in Custom Function c3 (page 52). Mup (Mirror Up) Press the shutter and the mirror flips up. Nothing happens until you press the shutter again, at which time the picture is taken and the mirror flips back down. Note 1: The Self Timer and Mirror Up modes are defective in design. If you forget to set either back to the other modes (I always forget) youll still be in these weird modes tomorrow! Worse, the Mirror up mode is still stupid, since just like the D700 you need to buy a $100 cable release to release the shutter after the mirror goes up. The correct design for these two functions, as done on the Mamiya 7, is to add a dedicated self timer button. Press this button and the shutter fires several seconds later. On an SLR the correct implementation is to have the mirror flip up at the beginning of the self timer interval. Youd get sharper pictures, not have to screw with screwing and unscrewing expensive electronic cable releases, not have to remember a cable release, and not miss tomorrows shots because you forgot and left the D300 selector in last nights position. Note 2: If you have no cable release, you can use the Mup mode and wait 30 seconds. 30 seconds after you press the shutter, the mirror flips up and the D300 fires the shutter anyway. Note 3: At default, the D300 needs perfect locked focus to take a picture in S mode, and locked focus to start the Mirror Up or self timer modes. If you dont have perfect focus, the D300 ignores you in these modes. Sometimes bad lenses may not be sharp enough to get good enough focus to let the D300 take a picture in these modes, especially with other than the center AF sensor. You can set the D300 to shoot even if its not in perfect focus at Custom Setting a2 (page 47). By default, the D300 takes pictures whether or not its in focus in the AF-C modes.

WB, QUAL, and ISO

Hold any of these and spin the control knobs on the right to adjust.
This is critical to getting the photos you want right out of your D300. Spin the rear knob for broad changes. Spin the front knob to fine tune. See my White Balance Examples page (http://kenrockwell.com/tech/white-balance- examples. htm) and also my White Balance page (http://kenrockwell.com/tech/ whitebalance. htm) for the specifics of each setting. Here is a run down of the individual settings from left to right, as shown along the bottom of the top LCD and as set with the rear dial: Auto (A) I use this all the time. It makes its best guess for WB. Its usually very good. Indoor tungsten can be too orange unless you have some bright tungsten light also in the image. If you do, it removes the orange and compensates completely. If not, the D300 only partly compensates and you have a nice warm image instead. Tungsten (hanging light bulb icon thats easy to confuse with the sun) This makes the picture very blue. Use this only for deliberate freezing Arctic effects, or under conventional tungsten light bulbs. Fluorescent (glowing tube icon) Used to make crappy fluorescent light look less crappy. These settings rarely work; use the preset setting below for better results. Direct Sunlight (smiling sun icon) Use this outdoors with sun shining directly on the subject.
Flash (lightning bolt icon) I never use this. Its almost the same as direct sun. Im told its really for studio strobes, since the Auto mode compensates magically for flash if you use it on-camera. The reason to use this is if you use a different trim value for your strobes than you do for sunlight. Ill get to trims in a bit. Cloudy (cloud icon) Warmer (more orange) than the sunlight position. I use this in shade, too. Shade (house casting a shadow icon) Very warm. Adds orange to your photo. Use this for sunset shots, or shots in open shade lit by the sky. Continuously Variable (K) This setting lets you choose any amount of blue or orange. Once you select K you choose the value, from 2,500 to 10,000, with the front knob while holding WB. The calibrations are abstract in what we scientists call Degrees Kelvin. More degrees look warmer. There are no rules in real-world photography: use whatever setting looks best to you. 2,500 K is very, very blue. Ill use something around 2,650 K in dim home lighting to get neutral results. 3,200 K is the same as the tungsten setting above. 5,400 K is the same as direct sun above. Ill use something around 4,000 K indoors with a mixture of sun and tungsten light. 10,000 K is very, very orange. The shade setting is similar to 7,500 K, and 10,000 K is the warmest (most orange). Preset (PRE) You use this setting with a white or gray card to get perfect color matching. The D300 can recall five settings: just hold WB and spin the front know after choosing PRE with the rear knob. You can use menus to save the five settings. I never use an actual card. I always grab a napkin, t-shirt, back of a menu or other piece of white. Black text makes no difference, so long as the background is white. If you choose a bluish piece of paper (like a glossy printed piece), your results will be warmer (more orange), and if you use a more orange piece of paper (like a cheap paper napkin), your results will be more blue. To set your white balance to something white: 1. Ensure your card or other neutral object is in the same sort of light as your subject. Changing the angle of the object often will favor one kind of a light or another in mixed light, which will greatly affect your result. 2. Hold WB and spin the rear dial to get to PRE. 3. Release WB. 4. Press and hold WB again for a few seconds. 5. PRE starts to blink. 6. Release the WB button.

Power Switch (right side)
Tap it past ON to turn on the LCD illuminators and the meter. Theres no need to turn OFF the D300 except to prevent accidental operation when squashed in a camera bag. The D300 turns off by itself after a few seconds of ignoring it. The only thing the OFF position does is act as a lock against unintended operation.
Exposure Compensation Button (+/- and a green dot)
This is the most important control on the D300 or any other camera. Hold the button and spin the rear dial. + makes the next picture you take brighter, and makes it darker. If your photo is too dark or light, just change the setting and try again. Easy! Remember to set it back to zero when youre done. If you dont, youll see a big bar graph on the right of the finder and on the top LCD. See more at How to Set Exposure at my web site (http://kenrockwell.com/tech/exposure. htm). Ignore Nikon when they suggest you dont use this with Matrix Metering; I do it all the time. Hint: You can see the + or minus value displayed in the finder as well as the top LCD, so you can adjust this without taking your eye from the finder. The two displays only read the value when the button is held, otherwise those digits read exposures remaining. Hint: This changes the setting for the next photos you take. It doesnt change any photos youve already made.

Rear Controls

Play [>] Button
Press it to see your pictures. Press again to turn them off. There are a lot of trick play modes, like zooming all the way in with the center control button and being able to scroll around with the dials. My favorites are explained under the settings for the rear thumbswitch (page 60) and the Command Dials (page 66).
Trash (also doubles as one of the two FORMAT buttons)
With an image on the LCD, press once. Youll get an Are you sure? message. Press again and the shots gone. The D300 ignores this button if its not playing back. Hold this along with its brother (the MODE button) to format a memory card (page 19).
This gets you inside your D300. Ill cover what you can screw up with this in the pages that follow.

? / Key icon / INFO

While in Menus: ?. Press for more information about whatever youre setting, if you see a gray ? on the lower left of the color LCD. If no gray ?, then there is no help available. While in Playback: Key. It protects (locks) the image from erasure. Warning 1.): It marks the file so well that it wont empty out of my trash on my computer unless I go in and remark the file on my computer first! Warning 2.): These images are erased from your memory card when you format anyway. Now you see why I dont use the lock feature. While Shooting: INFO. It calls up a display of just about everything you might want to know on the huge rear color LCD. I find this far more useful than the vestigial top or rear LCDs.

Checkerboard ()

Multiple Fluorescent options Unlike tungsten lights, fluorescent lights have awful color balance, and each bulb type and brand is completely different than the next. Once youve selected Florescent, Nikon provides seven different settings for different types of bulbs! To select among these, just click right once youve selected Fluorescent Hint: These types of bulbs always look awful. I never use these options since they never match the bulb anyway. If I have to shoot under them, I use the PRESET option as described at the WB button (page 14). Green/Magenta bias I never use this. To add or remove a little green or magenta to your photos, simply click right once youve selected any of the WB settings in this menu. Youll get a chart on which you can adjust both green/magenta and amber/blue bias. The D300 is awesome in that you can set different biases for each WB setting. Last I tried, a severe limitation of Canon DSLRs is that this adjustment affects every setting. IN other words, the D300 has nine different WB settings, each of which will remember its own G/M and A/B tweak, while with Canon, the one G/M and A/B setting affects them all. Worse, you have to use a menu to set any of this, while on Nikon, the far more important A/B setting is at your fingertips without menus. Managing the Preset White Card Settings Well hidden, you also can set the green/magenta and amber/blue bias for white-card preset WB. Since the front dial selects among the five memorized settings, you have to use the menus even to set A/B bias. To do this in the menus, MENU > SHOOTING > White balance > PRESET and click right. Select one of them, then hit OK, or hit SELECT (center of Big Thumb Button, page 25) and SET. This is also the menu in which you can save, move and name your various preset white card WBs. This is another big advantage with Nikon: I save these and call them up using only the dials for various difficult conditions, like indoor home lighting. To save and rename, select one and hit the center thumb button. Each time you hold down the WB button in PRE, get it to blink and press the shutter, you store that value in d-0. To save it, MENU > SHOOTING > White Balance > Preset > (click right) > Select a location (d-1 through d-4) into which you want to store it, press the center of the Big Thumb Button, select Copy d-0, OK. You just saved that setting into d-1, d-2, d-3 or d-4, and can call it up with the front dial when youve selected PRE with the rear dial.

d11 Battery order

If you change this and youre using the grip, this lets you run down the battery in the camera first, so you have to remove the grip to change it. Leave this setting alone, so it runs down the battery in the grip first, and only then uses the battery in the camera. This makes much more sense, since its a lot easier to change the battery in the grip, and when you pull the grip, the battery in the camera is going to have a lot more charge.
Custom Setting Menu: Bracketing/Flash
e1 - e7: Bracketing/flash
How to get here Press MENU, go to the left and select up and down to the pencil icon. Youll then see CUSTOM SETTING MENU on the color LCD. Click down to e BRACKETING/ FLASH and click to the right. What it does It sets flash function and completely unrelated bracketing options. What I change I change e4, and leave the rest alone.

Flash Sync Speed

This lets you select a slower maximum flash sync speed. You might want to choose a slower speed to let in more ambient light, but I select that with the next option. This menu lets you select 1/60 through 1/250. It also is where you must select AUTO FP if you wish to use the trick FP high-speed sync modes. For more on this topic, go to http://kenrockwell.com/tech/syncspeed. htm#fp.

Flash Shutter Speed

This selects the slowest shutter speed with flash in the P and A modes. 1/60 is default. I usually set about 1/30 or 1/15 to let in more ambient light to prevent my backgrounds from blacking-out. Slower speeds like 1/8 let the backgrounds stay much lighter, but greatly increase the chances of motion blur.
Flash cntrl for built-in flash
This sets what the built-in flash does. TTL (default) By default it works like a TTL flash. Thats good; it works great. M (Manual) You set the flash brightness manually. I use this mode if Im shooting my studio strobes and using the built-in flash to trigger my power pack. RPT (idiotic repeating strobe mode) Har har, you can start you own hamster disco with this one. C (commander mode) This is how to set the built-in flash to become the commander to talk to a wireless remote flash, which today is the SB-600, SB-800 and SB-900. Under this menu you can set two groups of external flashes separately, as well as how much light comes from the built-in flash. Comp is the exposure compensation (brightness) for each of these groups of lights. You can set lighting ratios of remote flashes, right from the D300! Trick: You probably have to set Channel 3, not the default of 1, to get this to work! My SB-600 defaults to channel 3. You can use any channel, but the flash and camera have to match. Different channels are handy if you have a lot of photographers shooting in the same arena. No, I have no idea why the D70 defaults to 3 as does the SB-600, and the D300 defaults to ch. 1. Leave the rest of it alone. Set your flash for remote operation, and away you go. See my page (http://kenrockwell.com/nikon/ittlslave.htm) on how to use remote flash. Its an incredible feature, and its free if you have an SB-600, SB-800 or SB-900.

Release button to use dial
This lets you tap a button once to adjust instead of having to keep holding it. You can keep adjusting until you tap the shutter, at which time it cancels. I dont use this.

No memory card?

Nikon defaults this to the wrong position so that D300s can be shot in camera stores without CF cards. Be sure to set this to LOCK so that youll never be shooting blanks! If you dont set this away from the default of OK, you could shoot for a week and, if you dont try to play back other shots, might not notice you have no card! Nikon does put up a red DEMO warning flag on playback, and the fact that they call it Demo means that you know it was done to help old-style retail camera stores that no longer exist, not to help photographers. Earlier model cameras used to default to the correct LOCK position, but this meant that retail camera stores needed salespeople who knew how to use a camera to set it up so it could shoot in-store. Those days are gone: the default of ENABLE is so these can be put
out by the janitor at Best Buy today for people to try. Dont forget to set this to LOCK!

f10 Reverse indicators

Nikons exposure meters have always read backwards. More exposure goes to the left, and less exposure goes to the right. Huh? Nikons rangefinder cameras of the 1940s had shutter dials and aperture rings which rotated in one direction. No big deal, but when Nikon added meters to cameras in the 1960s, the meters had to read to make sense as you moved the dials, so Nikons meter needles and bar graphs have always gone in the wrong direction. (The superior vertical bar graphs of the D3, D2 and F6 dont have this problem: up is more.) Thankfully Nikon has never changed this, since in whatever decade they do, there will be massive confusion among all Nikon users familiar with the (wrong) way its been forever. For newcomers, you can use this menu to flip things back to normal, as Canon has done it since their EOS cameras of the 1980s. If you do, more goes to the right.
Custom Setting Menu: Setup Menu (wrench)
How to get here Select the Set Up Menu by pressing MENU, moving to the left and then up or down to select the wrench icon. Youll then see SET UP MENU on the color LCD. What it sets This sets the usual housekeeping like rotation, the clock and file numbering. What I change This menu contains the secret message mode I use to encode my and contact information into every file shot with my D300. I also read the Battery Info often. You cant change it, just read it.

Format memory card

This duplicates the function of the two red FORMAT buttons (see page 19). I format my card every time I put it in my D300, and every time I go out shooting. Its always best to be using a freshly formatted card. To be safe, always reformat the card in the D300 after the D300 has been connected to any computer. Of course formatting completely wipes any photos off your card. Be sure to have these photos transferred and backed up to at least two locations before formatting. See my Field Workflow page at http://kenrockwell.com/tech/field-backups.htm for more.

D-Lighting

This lightens dark shadows. It doesnt touch highlights. You have three levels of lightening: Low, Normal, and High. If you set ADR to NORM for shooting as I do, you shouldnt need this. Remember: shadows are supposed to be dark.

Red-Eye Correction

This attempts to rectify flash-induced red eyes. This filter is sneaky enough to know if you used flash or not to make the image, and wont let you use this filter if you didnt use flash. Ive never had a problem with red-eye with my D300, so all the better. When I was able to cause red-eye, this filter only corrected half of the eyes!
This creates cropped versions of images. No pixels are moved or changed in size. Trim removes unwanted pixels from the sides of an image and saves a smaller image.

Monochrome

This creates black-and-white images. It has three modes: Black-and-White Sepia (Brown-and-white) Cyanotype (Blue-and-White) Have fun!

Filter Effects

This creates images with warmer colors. Youve got your choice of: Skylight: Skylight Very slightly pinker. Warm filter: Slightly warmer (more orange). The Warm filter usually improves casual filter images. You can forget the skylight filter.

Color Balance

This ones slick. It calls up a better control panel than Photoshops color balance tool, which dates from the 1980s. Nikons tool reminds me of what we have on million-dollar Hollywood telecine color correction machines used to color correct motion pictures. The Nikon D300 shows three histograms (reminiscent of Tektronix WFM700 waveform monitors) and the D300's Up/Down/Left/Right key becomes the color correction track ball. Click it left and right to alter blue-red, and up down for magenta - green. If you have something neutral, watch the waveforms, oops, histograms, until they are about equal. Left - right on the Up/Down/Left/Right key slides the red and blue in opposite directions, and green - magenta slides the red and blue equally left or right. The green stays put. This allows you to correct in any color, and if you want to warm an image (that I do most often in Photoshop), allows more flexibility than the fixed Warm filter above.

A. Picture Control Settings
My Nikon D300 and Nikon D3 let me get wilder colors than any previous Nikon, including film cameras loaded with Fuji Velvia 50. For examples, see my web page at http://kenrockwell.com/nikon/d300/picture-control.htm. Not that you may want colors as wild as mine, but I do. Art is the expression of imagination, and I dream in very vivid colors. You probably prefer more a polite color rendition. This will show you how to set your D300 as you like. Wording Last year, Nikon called the settings for saturation, contrast and sharpness Optimize Image. As of late 2007, Nikon now calls these settings Picture Control. Dont let Nikons typical lack of clarity confuse you. Picture Controls are simply the settings for contrast, sharpness, saturation and etc. Canon also calls them something else each year, like User Defined (2002-2006) and now Picture Styles (2007).
How to Set Color Saturation
1. Press MENU. 2. Select SHOOTING MENU (camera icon on left). 3. Go right (into the menu selections) and go down to the next page to SET PICTURE CONTROL. 4. Go right to the four standard options, and click two down to VIVID. VIVID is a good option. VIVID on the D3 and D300 is as vivid as the wildest way I could set earlier first-generation Nikons. Since I want colors loud enough to deafen a heavy-metal drummer, I crank it up from VIVID. Once at VIVID, click right to the menu with the sub-options of Saturation and Contrast.
Click down to Saturation, and peg it three clicks to the right. Hit OK, otherwise your modification isnt remembered. You now have altered the VIVID setting to its maximum. In the menus youll now see it called VI*, the * signifying that youve messed with Nikons default for VIVID. I always set Adaptive Dynamic Range (ADR, mislabeled as Adaptive D-Lighting by Nikon in the menus) to NORMAL. See my web page at http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/ d300/ dynamic-range.htm. This sets the contrast and brightness automatically based on the Zone System, removing those choices from your menu options. For more on the Zone System, visit http://www.kenrockwell.com/ tech/zone.htm.

My Favorite Settings

I always shoot with ADR at NORMAL on the D3 and D300, or AUTO on the D700 and D90. This eliminates the ability to control the brightness (gamma) and contrast settings, since they are optimized automatically by the ADR system. For things I set the sharpening to 5. For photos of things, I usually start at VIVID and crank the saturation all the way up to +3. This gives me the psychedelic look I love. For accurate product colors in the studio I use STANDARD. I prefer sharpenng set to 5. I honestly have no idea if Nikons ADR can work with studio strobes, so I turn it off and set contrast down to -1. For people For photos of people, I use NEUTRAL and set the saturation to +1. I prefer sharpenng set to 5. STANDARD is less wild then VIVID, and NEUTRAL has even lower contrast. You may prefer STANDARD and +1 or +2 Saturation. Play with this: we all will prefer something different.

Day into Night

There is a sweet spot of only a minute or so when the sky and land have just the right balance as day fades into night. With practice youll learn when conditions are the most spectacular. As an assignment, set up your camera and make shots of a landscape every minute during and after sunset. Youll be astounded at how things change from minute to minute, and how some of these images are so much stronger than others in the same sequence. You wont see this while youre shooting, which is why its so important to do this exercise. It becomes obvious when you play back the photos. Photograph a landscape from sunset (or before) until its completely black, which is about an hour after sunset. Also try this photographing an actual sunset. Sunsets vary from second to second. Pay rapt attention! Doing this has shown me that as the sun rises I make photos before the sun comes up, but I never like the results compared to when the sun has risen above the horizon.

Schedule

0 dark 30 (predawn) Typically I have to get up well before dawn. This gives me enough time to get to wherever I need to be at dawn. Im showered and fed from last night. Dawn Shoot. 8AM Have breakfast on my return at a reasonable hour. Shower for the day. If Im tired from being up since 3 AM Ill nap. Day Scout new locations, goof off. Afternoon Have lunch and/or dinner. Sunset Shoot. After dark Later dinner. After dinner Shower and get to sleep early. This way I can arise well before dawn tomorrow, all showered and fed.

Technique

Technique is the easy part. 90% of my work is being at the right place at the right time. If youre there, then technique is easy: just make the picture. Since Im there I make a lot of pictures and pick the best later. You never know if the light is going to get better, or if haze is going to roll in and kill the party. If you missed the sunrise by 5 minutes then no amount of photoshop jerking around will replace the shot from the other guy who woke up on time. Shooting Digital Cameras I set my digital cameras saturation to whatever looks right, usually plus on SLR cameras like my D200 and D70. I set my Canon point-and-shoots (like my A70) to Vivid. My Casios are saturated already, so I leave them at 0. Exposure is tough with digital cameras. The slightest overexposure destroys saturation.
The best way to determine correct exposure is to look at the color image on the LCD. Ignore any single-channel histograms. Be sure your bright reds are red, and have not started to blow out towards yellow, orange or pink. If you need a lighter image, lighten it later in Photoshop. If you lose your highlights you can never get them back. Its fine to underexpose and lighten later. Its futile to attempt recovery of an overexposed color image. There is no highlight latitude in digital. If you blow it (hee hee) youll have to revert to painting color back into the highlights the hard way! Photoshops Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlight is the most practical way to attempt recovery of blown highlights, but its not going to restore lost color. Histograms are useless unless they include separate red, green and blue curves. Single-channel (curve) histograms, like those in the Nikon D50, D70s and Canon 20D, are worse than useless because they will indicate correct exposure while saturated colors are overexposed! Saturation, by definition, is when the three RGB channels have different values. The greater the saturation, the greater the differences. Single channel histograms usually only show the green channel (not the sum), so they ignore the red and blue! I love saturated reds and yellows, and the histograms in the D1X and D70 and D100 are completely blind to any saturation in the red channel! Your histogram may say everything is fine while your red is completely blown out. Blowing out the red channel both desaturates and shifts the color! With these cameras look at the image itself on the playback LCD. The newest cameras, like the Nikon D200, Canon 30D and all my Casios have four-color histograms. I use these histograms. Be sure none of the graphs for any of the colors run off the right-hand side of the graph. See my page on RGB Histograms at http://www. kenrockwell.com/tech/yrgb.htm. When you use these, youll see one or another channel has much greater values than the others. Dont worry that some of the channels appear much lower. Thats good and means you have saturation! Shooting Film I prefer the look of Fujis Velvia 50 professional slide film over every other film, including the new Velvia 100s. Choose a film that sees things they way you want to see them. If you want bold hit-you-in-the head color, then use Velvia as I do. Almost everything you see on this site was photographed with Velvia 50, without filters and without playing in Photoshop. I get similar results in digital; however you folks ask for articles like this which keeps me too busy to keep my Gallery up to date. As of 2006 I shoot both film and digital. Printing I scan my film. I print digital and film images the same way.

I use the glossiest paper I can get. Glossy prints retain vivid color. Matte prints lose it. I prefer Fuji paper over Kodak, and prefer Fuji Super Gloss polyester-base paper to the usual Fuji paper. Super Gloss only comes from professional places, you wont get it unless you look. Super Gloss base has a pearlescent 3-D look. You can see depth, just like a pearl! Super Gloss always looks like its still wet. I send everything up to 12 x 18" to Costco to print on regular Fuji glossy paper, and bigger prints in Super Gloss to Calypso. Inkjets went obsolete in 2003. Current HP. Epson and Canon inkjets are bad because the gloss of their prints varies from light to dark! Look at an inkjet print at an angle to se the gloss and youll see it vary all over the image. There is expensive polyester based film for inkjet printers which can look good, but costs 4 times what a real print does. See my pages on printing at http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/ printers.htm. A transparency, slide or computer screen glows with color and can be more vivid than a reflective print. Artists make their tools do whatever they need to to create the final image. An artist directs his or her efforts to create based on whats available. Casual photographers have the misimpression that they are at the mercy of whatever tools they have. Snapshooters dont realize that its up to them to take charge and make the tools do what they want, not the other way around. You cant get these colors from print film unless you make your own prints. If you have a lab make your prints the colors are usually interpreted incorrectly. Prints from negative film usually come out the wrong colors unless you print them yourself.
Being there is 90% of getting great color. If you dont see great colors when you make a shot, no amount of photoshop is going to fix it. Cranking saturation or contrast in Photoshop makes an image more vivid, but wont make a so-so image sing. You have to go out and seek color. You cant make it, unless youre a painter.