The Camera Settings a Working Family Photographer Actually Uses

Plenty of working portrait shooters still feel a flicker of guilt every time the mode dial leaves M, as if aperture priority or auto ISO were a confession. Choices about mode, file format, and aperture decide how quickly you can work with clients who won't hold still and how much room you have to fix things later.

Joseph Blake shoots between 100 and 150 portrait and family sessions a year, along with weddings, events, maternity work, and headshots, and he uses this video to push back on the rules that short-form clips tend to hand out. He works mainly on a Canon EOS R5 alongside a Canon EOS R6 Mark II. He's quick to say brand is a nonissue. Every current system from Canon, Nikon, and Sony is capable, and switching rarely makes financial sense. His firmest position is on file format. Blake hears a surprising number of people at conferences say they shoot JPEG, usually to save card space, and he considers raw non-negotiable for the latitude it gives you in highlights, shadows, and noise cleanup. On his Canon bodies, he uses C-RAW, the compressed option, since it takes up less room on the card and fills the buffer more slowly.

The bigger fight is over shooting modes. Blake draws a clear line. Full auto and program mode are off the table for paid work, while aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual each have a legitimate place, and judging someone for working outside M misses the point. He walks through how each mode locks one or more corners of the exposure triangle and lets the rest float. He also explains why a large family walking toward the camera through patches of sun and shade is a bad moment to be spinning an ISO dial between frames. His own default is aperture priority with guardrails: a minimum shutter speed of 1/250 s, because the kids he photographs move fast, and an ISO range of 100 to 1,600 to keep noise in check. Below roughly 1/100 s, he warns, handheld shake starts creeping in, especially at longer focal lengths, and in-body stabilization helps without always saving the frame.

Every major system now builds those guardrails into its auto ISO menus. Canon's recent R bodies have a minimum shutter speed setting inside the ISO speed menu, including an automatic option that scales with the focal length you're using. Nikon and Sony offer the same control under their own auto ISO settings. The old handheld rule of thumb, one over the focal length, only accounts for your own shake. A child sprinting across a lawn moves just as fast whether you're on a 35mm or an 85mm, so when people are moving, let subject speed set the floor. When they're still, let focal length set it. Pick a floor for the fastest thing likely to happen in the session. Cap ISO at the point where your particular sensor's noise starts to bother you in the edit. Wedding and event shooters have relied on this setup for years because it frees their attention for timing and expression while the camera handles the middle.

Aperture gets a similar treatment. Blake addresses the two contradictory messages floating around, that you need a fast lens and that shooting wide open is a cliché. He carries a Canon RF 50mm f/1.8 STM for fun because it's light and inexpensive. He's comfortable with wide open work as long as you accept that one eye, or one person in a couple, may fall out of focus. He also defends shooting at f/8 or f/11 and treats the whole range as a creative choice. On flare, he points out that modern lens coatings make some lenses hard to flare, while an older lens with a big front element flares easily. With a backlit subject, he suggests watching the flare through the viewfinder and making small position changes, since a slight shift moves it around the frame.

Blake's thoughts on editing software and more are in the video above.