If you find yourself in a museum and you have your camera on you and you want to take a couple of pictures, let me show you how to set up your camera for a museum scene. First thing, set your mode dial to the program mode. This is important because it allows you the flexibility you need to take pictures in low light situations like in a museum.

Let’s go ahead and turn that on. First thing, very, very important in the back is the flash. Make sure that the flash is turned off. Most museums do not allow you to take pictures with the flash so press the up navigation button or the flash button, scroll through the different flash options until you see this no flash icon. That’s the first thing. Second thing, let’s go ahead and walk through the function menu to make sure that everything is set up okay. Press the function button. And in the function menu, the at the top is your ISO. This should be set to 400. Usually, museums have very, very low lighting so 400 is where you’re going to want to be since you can’t use the flash. So set that to 400. Your white balance should be set according to the lighting used in the museum. Again, we’re indoors so probably not daylight unless they have a lot of skylights. But in most situations, it’s either tungsten or fluorescent and you can move between these options using the right or left navigation buttons. Just scroll through the different selection options and choose the one that produces the best color. You can see it immediately on the display screen as you change it.

Let’s keep going down. The rest of the setting should be fine by default. The drive mode is at single and that’s great. Effect is turned off. And flash compensation is irrelevant in this case because we’re not using the flash. Lastly, the metering mode, accentuated average is a good option because you probably want the subject, either the painting or the sculpture to be properly exposed and you don’t really care about the surrounding environment. So accentuated average or even spot depending on the size of the piece. So just use the left and right navigation buttons to go between those. Go ahead and press the function button at this point to escape the function menu. Now, we have our flash turned off and all our functions are set up as we would like them. And at this point, go ahead and press the shutter button halfway to focus on your target or on your subject. And your subject may not necessarily be on the center of the frame, so go ahead and center what you want to have in focus, press the shutter button halfway first, the camera will indicate that it is in focus when the focusing square turns green and then you can slowly move to recompose and then press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.