3. White balance. Tweaking white balance can give you better color balance control for the specific lighting in a scene. But forget to set white balance back to Auto when you're done, and your photo might look like it was shot on Mars.

4. Exposure compensation. That's the control that lets you over- or under-expose a photo in small increments. This is handy for adjusting for a strong backlight, for example. But leave the camera set to overexpose by one stop, for example, and all of your subsequent pictures will be overexposed.

5. Image stabilization. Many cameras have an optical stabilization mode that reduces camera shake when you don't use a tripod. The effect is like shooting with a shutter speed up to three stops faster than you really are. If you have a digital SLR, this is often built into the lens. It's generally a good idea to turn off this mode when you use a tripod. If you don't, the camera might introduce "ghost vibrations" into your photo. It's easy to forget to re-enable this feature. Trust me: Vibration reduction doesn't do you any good if it's turned off.

6. Bracketing. Sometimes you can be too clever for your own good. You might occasionally use your camera's bracketing mode to take a series of photos at varying exposures, like one stop underexposed, one stop overexposed, and the ordinary exposure. This can help you nail the right shot in tricky lighting, or you might use the feature to make a high dynamic range photo. Regardless of why, don't forget to turn this feature off when you're done. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally left this on and spent the rest of the day taking photos that were alternately under- and overexposed.

7. Focus. The majority of the time, you probably leave your camera in autofocus mode. That makes it hard to remember to turn autofocus back on if you ever disable it, such as to take photos of aircraft or fireworks (which are "infinitely" far away to your camera lens).