Setting up your camera for either a dusk or a dawn lighting environment picture is really quite simple. It’s very similar to just about any picture with just one or two exceptions. First thing, go ahead and set your mode dial to P for program. This will allow you the flexibility to optimize the camera. Let’s turn them on. Let's go ahead and just walk quickly through the function menu. Just press the function button to access this menu. My ISO is set to 50 and this is great. This is exactly what I want because I want those nice, smooth colors in the sky when taking this picture. Any higher than 50 and you may see a lot more image noise and graininess, so I would recommend just sticking to 50. You may need to use a tripod. It really depends on how much light is available. So, let's go ahead and go down, white balance, set that to daylight. This will get you the most accurate color in this case and let's keep going down, the drive mode, set that to single shot. That’s fine.

Again, unless you end up having a very long exposure, you can use the timer mode but I would say in most cases, you should be okay with a single shot and just holding the camera. The effect turned off, flash is not going to be used, everything is much too far away, the flash is obviously not going to have any kind of effect. So this function is irrelevant and the metering mode is set to evaluative which also—this is great because you want the camera to look at the entire scene to judge the right amount of light.

So let's keep it there. I’ll just press the function button again to escape the function menu. Notice at the top, my flash is indicated as being off. If yours is not indicated as being off, just turn or use the flash button, this up navigation button to scroll through the different flash options until you see that no flash icon.

Since we’re using the program mode, really, everything is set for us. So at this point, all you need to do is just focus on the subject, probably the sky in this case. Just press the shutter button halfway to lock that focus. You may to focus on the horizon if you have more contrast there and then reposition the camera to the way you like it and then just press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.

Now, if you can't find the focus point, if there isn’t enough contrast in the horizon or there isn’t enough contrast in the sky, then you’ll probably want to use the manual focus mode and that is very, very simple. Just go ahead and press down the navigation button or the manual focus or macro button until you get to MF or Manual Focus and use the right navigation button to set your focusing distance to infinity. Infinity will allow the camera to focus on anything farther than about 5 meters or roughly 12-15 feet. So anything at about that distance and farther, infinity is what you’re going to want to use and in this case, if it's the sky, certainly infinity is what you want to use.

So now, the camera should have no issues focusing. Just go ahead and press the shutter button halfway. Again, not to focus but to set the exposure of the picture and then just press the rest of the way to take the picture.