The importance of presets

Some days ago I shot a friend’s work on jewelry. It took me hours to get the place and lights ready for the session, and after MANY hours of shootings inanimate objects (which means you can’t ask them to move 5cm right, you have to do it yourself), I ended up pretty tired but happy with the pictures. 

When I finished, I just packed my camera and all the other stuff (tripod, picture box, lenses, flashes, and so on) and went home. Today, I wanted to take some pictures at the park, so I changed the lens and took the camera with me. I was lucky enough to have some battery left, but by the 5th shot my card had filled up.

Too bad. I didn’t have a spare card (I seem to have lost all my spare cards, truly sad :(), so I had to borrow a computer to delete some pictures I had stored in folders (thus making them inaccessible from the camera to be deleted) which some guy that was with us had gracefully brought with him. I made some room there, and continued shooting. Soon I noticed by accident I was storing not only JPGs but RAW also. Yes, yes, I know, I should shoot RAW all the time. But I don’t have that much hard disk, plus I still find difficult to delete the amount of pictures I should be deleting after every session. 

I changed the settings. Those first pictures looked a bit strange (and I even managed to realize looking at that small LCD screen with the sun brightening upon our heads!). So I remembered the custom white balanced I’d been using and changed it as well. Now that I’m home looking at the pictures I see that ISO was set to 400 instead of 200, which is my regular ISO value for pictures with enough light.

And, of course, I feel like a fool. I really should get used to reset all the camera settings after a session, so I leave it ready for the next one. And I should get some extra SD cards too :-/