With copy pictures, what you want to do is try and avoid using the flash. The flash would copy pictures because you’re so close to your subject, you may blow out the text in the paper or the picture whatever you’re taking a picture off. It may get over exposed because the flash is so close, so what you want to do is make sure your flash is turned off. In your case, if you don’t see the flash off. You can just press the little flash button there, get to the flash options and use the dial or the left and right navigation buttons to choose the flash off icon. Hit set or you give it a second to go away.

Now, that the flash is off, you’re going to want to set your white balance. Again, remember in the getting started how we set the white balance to the shortcut button, press the shortcut button and set your white balance accordingly if you are outdoors and I would recommend. If you can be outdoors in the shade that will get you, enough light and you can set this to the daylight. If you are indoors for example, in the library and you’re copying a book or the only light source you have is a tungsten light bulb. You would want to use tungsten, so choose the right white balance setting for your needs, go ahead and press set.

Now, what you want is the macro mode, go ahead and press the little macro button right here. Your left navigation button and either move the wheel or press the left and right navigation buttons to choose macro. Once you have that little flower icon that means you can focus very, very close. Now, it’s very important when you focus close, do not zoom in. You don’t want to zoom in your subject like this because you actually won’t be able to focus quite as close. You want to zoom out all the way and physically get closer to the subject, so you will be able to focus on anything at about two feet away up to a few centimeters away maybe even a centimeter away from your subject. So, keep that in mind.

Finally, make sure your ISO is setup properly and the way you test this is by simply pressing the shutter button halfway. Go ahead and press the shutter button halfway. Now, we’re not using the flash, so right now, mine is set to 80 ISO and I can see that I have one over 160th of a second, which I can hand hold and that should not be a problem. In your case, if you are in a very low light situation, for example that library situation. You may want to increase the ISO, so just turn your ISO dial, keep in mind we are in the program mode not the auto mode, the program mode allows us to control over the ISO and the white balance. Turn that ISO dial up as high as you need, you can keep testing it every now and again, to see that you are over 160th of a second. Anything slower than 160th of a second is going to be pretty difficult to handhold but not impossible, so if you’re close to 160th of a second, 130th of a second or 145th of a second that can also be fine. And I would again just test and you cannot definitely take a picture and then look at it in the playback mode and see whether it’s in focus or not.

If increasing the ISO is not enough and you absolutely have to use the flash, what I recommend doing is two things. One, go ahead and turn the flash compensation down, so press the function button to access the function menu and go down to the flash exposure compensation and turn this down to two will get you a very, very low power flash as to not to blow out the subject, so hit set.

Next thing because we’re using the flash, you don’t want to be too close to the subject because the lens will actually leave a shadow. Sometimes you can get to close that this lens will block the flash from getting to scenarios of your picture. So you don’t want to get too close to the subject when you’re using the flash in this case. Of course, make sure that the flash is turned on, press the flash button and move that over to flash on, hit set. Just like with other pictures, press the shutter button halfway and make sure the focusing square has turned green indicating that the camera is in focus. If the focus is very, very critical, I would recommend testing this in the playback mode. What I mean by that is go ahead and take your picture, press the shutter button halfway, remember this is very important, wait for that double beep and that little green square in the center. That means that the focus has locked and I can go ahead and take my picture. So, I’ll take the picture and then in the playback mode, you can press the play button to go there and make sure this picture is in focus, right now even though it looks like its in focus, I can’t really tell because I have not zoomed in to see the pixels. So, with your zoom lever, magnify the image just by zooming into it, zoom in as close as you can and you can move around and I can actually see the texture on the plastic, so I know that this is in focus. Zoom out and that’s it.

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