Keeping Track of Camera Settings?

I'm a novice wildlife photographer, and I've wondered how advanced and professional photographers keep track of camera settings so that they can note the settings along with any photos that they submit for publication. When you're rapidly photographing birds (for example) and changing settings all the time, how do you know/remember what setting you were using for a particular image? Or do you shoot a whole role at the same settings and mark the exposed roll? Thanks for any advice on this.

Hi, dont know if advanced or professional aplies , but...
What I have done in the past is to use a small digital voice recorder. I believe some are even voice activated. This seemed more convinient than trying to write thre info down, I now use a Canon EOS 10D that records all the data for me.
Im sure others will have additional ideas. Hope this helps

To be honest with you, in the film world there are very few pros that actually keep track of this stuff. We do however know what we typically do in various situations so it is easy to come up with shooting data that is at least close to what we actually did. In the digital age, the camera keeps track of everything for you and actually embeds it into the photo file for instant retrieval anytime.

Believe it or not but very few photogrpahers actually keep track of their exposure data, most of us just know how we take certain images and can be fairly accurate from memory on how they took the image. It may not be exact, but it will usually be close enough!

Since I am still shooting film, I keep track of camera settings using a compact tape recorder, which uses the very small tape cassettes. I keep it in the upper chest pocket of my vest. I dont even have to take it out I just squeeze the talk button from the outside. I was going to buy a digital voice recorder but decided to save the $$ towards a digital SLR.

I should say that in actual practice I only do this around 3/4 of the time.

Hi Cheryl! It's good to see you here! The question you raise is a good one. As the others have pointed out, the more one shoots, the more automatic the skills become. And whatever works, works. For me it was to go digital.

When I started seriously paying attention to exposure and trying to learn all the variables, I was shooting film. I used index cards, sticky notes, notebooks and the backs of labels to write my notes. Then a month later when the film came back, I might try to match up the works. It was a depressing and cumbersome process and I could not remember my original purpose. I felt my progress was just too slow for words. I felt would NEVER get a high rate of on-the-mark exposures by film without wasting a lot of my life. I spent a lot of time testing and comparing and analyzing rather than shooting.

Inspired by the images of many long-time shooters, I tried memorizing various exposure theories and patterns. No success. Not my learning style. The only thing predictable was the monthly bill from the photo lab.

Then, I became so impressed by the zinging bird images of Canadian girl wonder, Ann Cook, and her smokin' scope, that I took up digi-scoping: photographing through a high quality spotting scope with a smallish hand-held digital camera. Well, that did it for me. My ability to learn from my mistakes was instantaneous and the exif data was right there for review, if needed.

So my solution to the note problem was to go digital. If I could have achieved the same results using film, I most likely would never have changed.

Thanks all for sharing your advice and suggestions. I'm already committed to a film system, so I guess I'll try the recorder or cards and hope that I reach a point when I just "know" what the setttings are (or pretty close). Thanks!