I’ve had the Nikon D300 since August 2021, it was a gift from a friend, the camera was her late husbands. Fortunately the camera came with the manual and three books dedicated to the D300. I was also given quite a few accessories and lenses too.

I’ve since added an additional lens the Nikon 10-20mm wide angle zoom to go with the 18-200mm I regularly use on the D300.

I was surprised how many accessories are still available for the D300 given how long it has been discontinued. Although I suspect the accessories are common to later cameras.

I bought a couple of new batteries as I didn’t know the history of the original ones that came with the camera.

Having got over the initial steep learning curve of discovering where all the settings where located on the camera. Manual in one hand camera in the other!

I enjoy using the camera, but I feel like I could get more out of the camera with some fine tuning of the settings.

Another dive in to the manual and books showed me that the Nikon D300 as well as other Nikon’s have a set of memories called ‘Shooting Banks’ and ‘Custom Setting Banks’ These let you set the camera up with different parameters for different types of shots and then you can easily change from one set of settings to another by just going from one ‘bank’ to another ‘bank’

None of my Canon cameras have this type of feature you have to change all the individual settings to your choices.

In the book: David Busch’s Nikon D300: Digital SLR Photography he has dedicated a long chapter on how to set up the memory banks with a set of suggested settings for the camera in different scenarios.

I will be going through this chapter in detail to optimise the settings on my camera. I think it will be time well spent.