I just hate that acronym; W.I.F.E.  But I read it somewhere months ago and haven't forgotten it, which is an unusual thing these days.

I run through a pre-shoot check list before I leave the house.  Most of it involves cleaning lenses, charging batteries, formatting memory cards.  Before I leave (and again when I get there) I always check the W.I.F.E. 

Now, I'll introduce you:

White balance.  If you screw this one up but shot in RAW you can likely save the shot.  If you shot in JPEG, just tell everyone you were working on an artistic experiment with colour.

ISO.  Cummon, you've done this before.  Shot a dark scene one night and left the camera set at 800 ISO.  The kind of mistake that makes you scream the blood curdling words I'm such an idiot!

Focus.  Is your camera in auto focus?  I often throw the manual focus switch on my body when I use the macro lens.  The next time you pick the camera up, it might take a couple frames, but you usually figure out pretty quickly if your lens isn't auto-focusing.  Hopefully though, it wasn't the world's first shot of the Brangelina twins that you missed.

Exposure.  Okay, I didn't come up with the acronym so I can't say specifically what the W.I.F.E. person thinks we should check, but exposure is usually a combination of f-stop and shutterspeed.   It might be a reminder that if you were shooting fireworks or using the bulb setting last night, to set your shutterspeed to about 1/125.   I like to have my camera "resting ready" at f8 as well.  That way if an opportunity quicky pops up, you won't be as far from your ideal exposure.

So, there you have it.  If you have any tips on the subject, I would love to hear them.