Camera Controls and Creativity

Serious digital cameras give you creative control over your images. They do so by allowing you to control the light and motion in photographs as well as what's sharp and what isn't. Although most consumer digital cameras are fully automatic, some allow you to make minor adjustments that affect your images. The best ones offer a wide range of controls-in some cases more than you'd find on a 35mm SLR. However, regardless of what controls your camera has, the same basic principles are at work "under the hood." Your automatic exposure and focusing systems are having a profound affect on your images. Even with your camera on fully automatic, you can indirectly control, or at least take advantage of the effects these controls have on your images.

In this chapter, we'll first explore how you use the camera in various automatic modes and see what effect each of the settings has on your images. In the chapters that follow, we'll explore in greater depth how you take control of these settings, and others, to get the effects that you want.

Automatic All the Way

All digital cameras have an automatic mode that sets focus, exposure, and white-balance for you. All you have to do is frame the image and push the shutter-release button. You'll find that this auto mode of operation is great in the vast majority of situations because it lets you focus on the subject and not on the camera.

• Getting Ready. Turn the camera on and set it to automatic mode. To conserve your batteries, turn off the LCD monitor and compose your image through the optical viewfinder. If the camera has a lens cap, be sure to remove it.
• Framing the image. The viewfinder shows you the scene you are going to capture. To zoom the lens to frame your image, press the zoom-out button or lever to widen the angle of view and the zoom-in button or lever to enlarge subjects. If the image in the viewfinder is fuzzy, see if the camera has a dioptre adjustment dial you can use to adjust it.
• Autofocus. The area you place in the focus area in the centre of the viewfinder is used to determine the sharpest part of the scene. How close you can focus depends on the camera you are using.
• Autoexposure. Programmed autoexposure measures light reflecting from the scene and uses these readings to set the best possible exposure.
• Autoflash. If the light is too dim, the autoexposure system will fire the camera's built-in flash to illuminate the scene. If the flash is going to fire, a flash lamp usually glows red when you press the shutter-release button halfway down.
• Automatic white balance. The colour cast in a photograph is affected by the colour of the light illuminating the scene so the camera automatically adjusts colour balance to make white objects in the scene look white in the photo.