What Are the Right Camera Settings? It Always Depends

Mariposa Lily, Colorado, Canon R5ii, 100-500L @500mm, f7.1, 1/640th. ISO125

The most common question I hear when I'm out shooting with my workshop participants is some variation of "What settings should I be using?" And I struggle, because the answer is always - "It depends".

With all due respect to my fellow photo educators, I blame them for this. There are a million YouTube videos, articles, blog posts, and workshop instructors out there telling people what the "correct" settings are for different situations. But they aren't the correct settings, they were the right settings for that photographer, working with that equipment, at that time, with that light, and most important - with that INTENT. But their intent, their vision for the photo, may not be the same as yours.

Over the dinner table on a recent trip, I had a long discussion with a group of my workshop participants about this subject. And I thought I'd make the effort to drive home the salient points here:

F-Stop - Controls Light and Depth of Field

Shutter Speed - Controls Light and Blur

ISO - Controls Light

Those are the most basic concepts in photography, but they are hard to master, and damned hard to implement with intent.

My advice to my clients around the dinner table was this -

"Consider the image you want to create and then build your settings around that vision."

That's easier said than done, but with all modesty, it's excellent advice.

In the field, my vision for a photograph may not be the same as the photographer next to me. And it shouldn't be! Photography is an art. If we all created the same image, taking pictures would be SO boooorrrring.

Let's take the image at the top of this post as an example. I created that photo last week during my "Wildflowers of Colorado" workshop. We were photographing in a high alpine meadow at nearly 11,000 feet. Mariposa lilies like this one are fairly uncommon, but this meadow had many growing up amidst the paintbrush, asters, chickweed, and sunflowers.

My goal for the photo was to create a dreamy, flower portrait. So I laid down on my stomach for a low perspective (low perspectives are vital for achieving a compressed depth of field), I zoomed in as tight as my lens (100-500mm) would allow, and opened up the aperture all the way (7.1 at 500mm). The result was an image with a very compressed depth of field with only my subject flower in focus, and the rest of the scene blurred to vague shapes or washes of dull color.

I wasn't going for a high or low key shot, so I took the advice of the camera and set the shutter speed for "0" exposure.

Another photographer may not have seen the image the same way and created a very different photograph. In fact, I saw my next image quite differently (below).

For that image, I had a different goal, I wanted a sharp cluster of flowers, but I didn't want to lose all the detail and color of the surrounding meadow. What do you think my settings were? And how would you have done it differently?

The point is to go into your photography by using your settings with intent. There isn't a correct setting, it always depends on what YOU are hoping to create. So think it through.