.........If you're the typical digital photographer, you have to wonder if there is a faster way to learn how to use your camera. The owner's manual is written by a technical writer often not a practicing photographer.

Follow these step-by-step, using your manual as a guide and you should be taking pictures in no time.

 

1. Take some pictures on automatic, program, aperture or shutter priority
2. Download the images onto your computer
3. Format the card
4. Change the ISO
5. Change the Shutter speed and Aperture
6. Change the White Balance
7. Change the Compression or Quality
8. Choose which Auto focus Sensor in your viewfinder to use.

Once you've mastered those 8, learn how to do these next:

• Enable the histogram for image preview. You might be asking yourself what this does. The histogram is the most reliable way to determine if you have properly exposed your image. How that picture you just made appears on that tiny LCD monitor is not a good indicator. Under dark surroundings the image may look great and in bright sun, it will look underexposed. Learning to interpret what a good histogram is the best method and not at all difficult.
• Change the metering mode. Essentially these settings allow you to tell your camera's meter what you want it to favor when taking a light reading. Since light meters are "dumb" and tend to want to average out every scene, they can get fooled in tricky lighting situations.
• Set the output of the flash. Some digital SLRs have built-in or pop-up flash units which remind me of a crab's eye.

• Set separate buttons to trigger auto-focus and shutter release. Canon and Nikon and possibly other camera makers understand the necessity of splitting the function of actual shutter actuation and auto focus. Other camera manufacturers may have this capability as well, but I can't speak to that since my experience is limited to those 2 brand names. Why is this useful you might ask? When you just want to follow focus or track your moving subject like in sports photography, use your thumb to hold down a button on the back of the camera and activate the auto focus. When your subject stops moving, all you have to do is remove you thumb from that button momentarily, then press the shutter release button with your index finger. Disable shutter actuation if there is no memory card. Fancy speak for setting your camera so that you can't take a picture when you don't have a card. This is a throwback to the days of film. Many a photographer have been burned thinking they had film in their camera, so just make sure you can't trip the shutter if there is no memory card. You may not have to change this, if this is already the default setting.

 

• Reset to factory default. When things go awry, learn what happens if you have to do this. Your owners manual will tell you what the default settings are. The layers upon layers of options under the myriad menus in today's digital SLR makes card-counting by professional Black Jack players seem like child play. So sometimes starting over may be your only option. As you customize your camera, write notes on your owners manual on what you've enabled or disabled.
• Disable the beep when auto focus is achieved. This is probably more my pet peeve than anything. As the photographer you can see or confirm your subject is in focus, you don't need to hear an audible signal. It's distracting, amateurish and drains the batteries.
• Disable auto focus. This may not be so obvious but there are times when you want to pre-focus at a particular spot. And switching to manual focus is the best way to make sure the camera's auto focus sensor doesn't get fooled. This switch is usually on the lens.
• Drive mode. Or how quickly the camera fires after it attain focus. This is different from the old film days because it is dependent on how quickly the camera can write to the memory card which is in tern dependent of the brand or calibre of the memory card you use.

Other less used functions which apply to flash photography might include high shutter speed sync, automatic flash bracketing and rear curtain sync. But those features are only available if you happen to cough up the big bucks and buy a brand name speedlite or flash units from Canon and Nikon.

:: Do you really need a flash? read the next page and find out.