Learning Photography Course — 4. Every Control on the Camera

Module 4 of the Learning Photography Course. An hour on which button does what, and — more usefully — which ones you can ignore.

The module is built on an original drawn diagram of a camera nobody makes, because a photograph of a real body teaches you that body and nothing else. It starts from the observation that a camera's layout was never designed: it accumulated, one decision at a time, across about a century, which is why the wheel under your index finger sits where a film camera's winding lever used to be. Every camera arranges its controls into four zones — exposure on the top plate, focus behind your thumb, menus on the left, fast things on the front — and once you can see the zones, an unfamiliar body stops being forty mystery buttons.

The mode dial and what the letters actually stand for, including why Canon's Tv is the honest one of the four and why a Fujifilm body may have no mode dial at all; the command wheels, program shift, and the hold-a-button-turn-a-wheel idiom that unlocks about a third of the body; exposure compensation, and the single most common unforced error in photography, with three defences against it; metering, and linking spot metering to the focus point; focus split into the three separate questions people merge into one — when, where and what — with each manufacturer's subject-detection list read from its own documentation, and back-button focus set up step by step; drive modes, the buffer, mirror lock-up and electronic first curtain; bracketing, and when it is insurance rather than a habit; the five groups every camera menu divides into and the eight settings worth changing on day one; custom buttons, My Menu, and attention as the real scarce resource; and the three display elements that are switched off by default and worth turning on.

Subject-detection menu values are quoted verbatim from Canon, Sony, Nikon and Fujifilm's own published documentation. No performance figure, buffer depth, AF point count or exposure-compensation range is asserted anywhere, because every one of those is model-specific and changes with firmware — the module teaches the behaviour instead.

Educational documentary. Not financial or investment advice.