Once you’ve decided on the price range and image sensor type that fits your budget, it’s time to look at other features. Although every camera shares some common characteristics, each company adds its own unique touch to the cameras it sells.
Every dSLR camera, regardless of cost or skill level, includes at a minimum the major shooting modes:
- Aperture Priority lets you control the aperture (and thus depth of field) while the camera selects the appropriate shutter speed.
- Shutter Priority (or Time Value) lets you set the shutter speed while the camera selects the aperture.
- Program chooses both shutter and aperture for you.
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What makes a camera a digital SLR, anyway? And how is it different than a point-and-shoot camera?
If you’re familiar with film cameras, then you know that SLR stands for single lens reflex, a system which uses mirrors and lenses to capture an image. When a photographer looks through a lens on an SLR camera, the image he sees enters the camera, hits a mirror, and then bounces through a prism onto a focusing screen. Just before the shutter is snapped, the mirror swings out of the way to expose the image onto a piece of film. With an SLR, the photographer sees exactly what the camera sees.
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One more useful feature many digital cameras offer is an automatic file (and sometimes folder) numbering feature. You realize how valuable this feature can be after you start storing and archiving your digital photos. If you have the option, I recommend that you set automatic file numbering to “On.”When this feature is on, image files will be sequentially numbered—even when you remove the digital photo storage media and use a new one. The camera remembers the number of the last photo regardless of which digital photo image media was in the camera last.
If you don’t have, or you don’t use this feature, you will find that you have files with the exact same filename! Each time you remove a card and download the images to your computer, the digital camera starts numbering at 1 again. This means that you have to rename files if you want to put them in the same folder with another file with the same name. Additionally, sequentially numbered files just make keeping track of when you shot particular photos easy.
The world is full of VCRs set to the wrong time and wrong date. They are owned by people who either don’t know how to set them, or by people who don’t need to set them. Unlike VCRs, where a correct date and time is not often needed, setting the date and time correctly on your digital camera is more than worthwhile.
Each time you take a picture with your digital camera, a digital image file is written to the digital photo storage media in your camera. This file contains the “picture,” plus it contains “metadata.” Metadata is a fancy term that means data or information about the picture. Most digital camera vendors conform to an industry standard; the cameras write this metadata in the EXIF format in each picture file.
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Today’s digital cameras are both rich in features and highly capable of helping you get good photos when used in one of many “auto” modes—without requiring you to know much about your camera or photography. However, learning how to use your digital camera and its many features will enable you to get even better photos and do things you never even imagined could be done.
READ (OR GLANCE THROUGH) YOUR MANUAL
Most digital camera users have proven over and over that they can take good pictures without reading most of the written documentation that came with their camera; some never read any of it at all—ever! Not reading the documentation that came with your camera when you get the camera is okay. Not reading it at all just means that you won’t be able to take advantage of many cool and useful features your camera offers.Not only does reading the manual help you to more fully enjoy your camera, but it also
enables you to take better pictures. It is also quite likely that you will be more than compensated for your investment in time because your effort may help you avoid missing good shots of those important events that you get only one chance to shoot.
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Photography is all about light. These days, most digital cameras have an electronic flash unit built right into the camera body. The flash is designed to fire for a very short period of time and illuminate your scene in one of two ways:
- As the main source of light indoors or in the dark
- As a secondary source of light to fill in shadows when you’re shooting in bright light, such as outdoors
In general, your flash will probably know when to fire and can illuminate most pictures without your direct intervention. When your camera is set to the fully automatic exposure mode, the flash will probably come on as needed and not fire when it is not needed. On the other hand, you can probably figure out when you need a flash more effectively than your camera can. There will be situations when you may want your flash to fire when it would probably stay off, and vice versa. That’s why your camera has several flash modes to choose from. We’ll talk about those later in this & the following post.
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All that talk about f/stops, shutter speed, and ISO settings may seem irrelevant to your digital camera, but it’s not—all cameras use these concepts, even though they’re sometimes disguised fairly well. The main difference between a digital camera and a chemical film camera, of course, is the fact that digicams don’t use film. That means you never load anything that has a specific ISO value into the camera. So how does the camera actually work?
Simple. When light enters the camera at the moment of exposure, it doesn’t hit light-sensitive silver halides that are fixed in a chemical broth. Instead, the light hits a computer chip called a charge coupled device (CCD). The CCD is light sensitive, and each of its many pixels register changes in light just like the film’s many grains of silver react individually to light. In other words, the silver grains in film and the pixels in a CCD are essentially the same thing. They contribute to your picture in the same way, and both are the smallest components that make up your picture. The CCD makes a picture by noting the variation in light rays that travel through the camera lens. The CCDs pass this information on to the camera’s microprocessor in the form of varying electrical charges. The image is transformed into digital bits and stored on a memory card.
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Some people think that photography is akin to magic. They turn on the camera, snap a picture, and a day or two later they’ve got a mystical re-creation of the scene they saw in the viewfinder. With a digicam, it’s even more magical—the pictures are available instantly! How does it work? Who knows?
The best place to start is often right at the beginning—how on earth does a camera take a picture, anyway?
All cameras, regardless of type, work more or less the same way. They open their shutter for a brief time, allowing light to enter. That light then interacts with a sensitive photo-receptor (like film, or perhaps a computer chip), and an image is recorded. Let’s start by looking at a traditional 35mm camera to give us a little perspective.
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Every hobby has its accessories. I sometimes joke that my dive buddy only became interested in scuba diving after she discovered that scuba gear was a whole new way to spend money.
While there’s no doubt some truth to that, it’s also true that there are some things you really need to buy to accompany any activity, and digital photography is no exception. Here’s a short shopping list of things you might consider buying as you get more into shooting digitally:
1. A camera
It goes without saying that you need a camera, but don’t rush into the purchase. You can even use a 35mm camera to begin with, and scan the images into the PC for editing and printing. If you’ve read the previous post of this blog and decided what features are important to you, you can shop like a pro.
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No two digital cameras are the same. Each camera maker is known to some greater or lesser extent for implement-specific kinds of features—like interchangeable lenses, swivel bodies, and movie recording features. If you cut through all those goodies, though, you’ll find that most cameras share many of the same fundamentals. Let’s start at the top and cover your camera’s fundamentals.
A. The Optical System
At the heart of every camera, no matter how it stores its images, is an optical system. Most digital cameras have two distinct viewfinders—an optical one and a digital one. In most cases, the optical viewfinder is composed of a glass or plastic lens that shows you your subject directly—it’s just a plain window that lets you see through the camera to the other side. The digital viewfinder is an LCD display that reproduces what the camera’s CCDs are actually seeing.
Which one should you use? Whichever one you like. You’ll get better results, though, if you understand the difference between the two. The majority of digital cameras are point-and-shoot designs. With a point and shoot, you do not actually see what the camera sees when you look through the optical viewfinder. The optical viewfinder is a parallax-inducing viewfinder, a popular low-cost mechanism that dates back almost all the way to the invention of the camera itself. No doubt you have a point-and-shoot camera lying around the house with just such a viewfinder.
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