Check settings before snapping

The great thing about cameras is that once you set them to something other than automatic mode, you gain increasing control of the composition of your picture.
The downside to this is that when you switch the camera off, it will not default to an automatic setting but will retain whatever the last setting you used was. If you draw your camera quickly to shoot and fail to check the settings, you may then be stuck with something you did not want. My own weakness is forgetting to change the shutter time from 30 seconds back down to a shorter exposure. Thirty seconds works well for night time shots but not as well in the daytime when you will produce a very bright image of light and not much else.

I took the image below early one morning. I used a variable neutral density (ND) filter which I set initially to be virtually see-through (in order to focus). I depressed the shutter button half-way to set the focus and then set the filter to as opaque as it would go (which was virtually impossible to see through). The exposure was three minutes and I used a tripod and cable shutter release to keep the camera as steady as I could.

However, the setting I had not checked before taking the picture was the white light balance. In place of auto white light balance (AWB), I had left the camera set to use Tungsten light. This created the sense of a moonlit image, as opposed to an early morning. In hindsight, the result was effective as a night time image so I had not wasted the shot, but it did remind me of the importance of checking all the settings before snapping.