Why it pays to know your gear


I'm going to interrupt the series I recently started briefly in order to share a recent experience that I had with my camera that is of utmost importance: knowing your gear.

I was doing promotional photography work for my best friend and his band. For some of the shots, he wanted me in the picture, and I figured I'd drop it on a tripod, set the self-timer, and then be off. The problem was...I didn't know how to use the self-timer. I never had used it before. I knew that it was somewhere in a menu, but it took me like 5 minutes to find it. When somebody is waiting on you and you have limited time, 5 minutes can feel like an eternity. To make it worse, my best friend knows that I shoot professionally, so he was probably really confused on why I couldn't operate my camera. it was rather embarrassing and stupid on my part.

We should know our cameras. Especially if we are asking someone else to give us their time or a child to stick around. Nobody wants to wait for us to fiddle with controls. You at least owe it to yourself to prepare for the shot ahead of time with running through our manual, etc. If I would have spent just 5 minutes before the shoot making sure I knew how to control my self-timer on my new camera, I could have looked like much less a fool and felt less frustrated.

In the end, the shots came out and I DID eventually find this setting sitting right in front of my face the whole time (I looked for it a little too hard, and kept missing the obvious). So don't do what I do, really know your gear. You can't ever go wrong with that.

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