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Good Perspective: How to Take Effective Site Photography

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Equipment Preparation

Being very familiar with your camera, and working through the following steps before traveling to your photography location can help maximize your efficiency while onsite.

1. Clear the memory card: Be sure any existing photos on the memory card are saved and delete them from the card so maximum file space is available for your project.
2. Fully charge the battery and backup battery: Note that lithium ion batteries, the type most commonly used for digital cameras, start to lose their ability to hold a charge after about five years - regardless of how much they have been used. Be sure you have enough power and backup power for your shoot.
3. Adjust camera settings: The following recommendations are often best for site photography, but each photographer will have to make their own judgment based on their own knowledge, needs, and site conditions. Note that not all of these settings are available on all cameras:
   1. Manual focus: While auto focus may be appropriate in many cases, it is vital that the main subject of your photography be in sharp focus. Your judgment of this will usually be better than the camera's would be.
   2. Matrix exposure: This setting allows the camera to use all available light to best judge exposure which is often the best choice for site photography. Use a different setting only if you are very confident in why a different choice is necessary.
   3. Highest possible image size and quality: And if your camera offers a RAW format, use it. RAW files capture visual and metadata (metadata is information included in the photo files, like camera and lens type and date/ time) that jpg and TIF formats to not. Note that RAW files will probably require a plug in to open with Photoshop, but such plug ins are usually free and easily acquired from either the Abode website or the camera manufacturer's website. When opening a RAW format photo in Photoshop, an adjustment panel will let you fine-tune settings such as exposure, white balance, image contrast, and more.
   

   Always take photos at the maximum quality and size that the camera offers or image detail quality will suffer

   4. "Auto" mode: Opinions on this differ, but unless you are an expert photographer, using Auto mode will save you the time and trouble of selecting shutter and aperture settings for each shot you take. Auto mode on modern cameras will very likely give you useable images and color/contrast corrections can be made later with imaging software such as Photoshop. An exception to this is focusing, which should be manual instead of auto because while cameras can accurately judge lighting conditions, they can't always judge what element of a scene is most important.
      1. For the advanced user: A long depth-of-field is usually desirable for site photography because the goal is to capture as much precise visual information as possible as opposed to highlighting specific subjects with focal variance. Towards this goal, an aperture-priority setting with the highest possible numerical aperture may work best. The tradeoff of course is that a slower shutter speed may blur moving objects such as cars. So this option should be considered carefully before being used.
   5. Turn flash off: In field photography a flash is essentially useless. It may even make uniform lighting more difficult, and it consumes battery power.

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