My 2 Favorite Function Button Settings for a Camera

Besides Back Focusing

If you have a camera made anytime in the last few decades, it likely has customizable buttons that you can program. Many forego this, understandably. It proposes to make shooting life easier, but between programming it and then remembering what you’ve put there, the juice often doesn’t seem worth the squeeze.

Most of you who’ve been shooting for a while already know about programming the rear button, near where your thumb rests, for focusing and then disabling that function on the shutter release button. This is known as back focusing and some swear by it while others think it much ado about nothing. But because it’s already so well-covered, I’m leaving that one alone, and choosing to offer up the other two menu items I nearly always allocate to a function (Fn) button somewhere on the camera. They may surprise you, but I’ll get into why I do it and how it helps my photography, too.

Before understanding my top two programmable button items, you’d need to understand my overall menu strategy. All digital cameras these days have some kind of quick-access menu, which is in essence a shortlist of one’s most-accessed menu items.

My choices for a quick access menu are the standard ones: White balance, shooting modes (high speed, low speed, timed, etc.), metering options, wifi, noise reduction, image quality options and focusing options. I also have an option for in-camera stabilization, for some tricky handheld shots in low light.

The nice thing about my Nikon is that these menu options change if I’m doing video. So, by switching over to video, I’m suddenly offered up frame rates, resolution sizes, sound options, stabilization and focus tracking features.

This is all great, but also means that a function button should do something different, and not act as a spillover for quick access menu items. Here is my take on the two things that a programmed button should do for you:

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