I want to set this camera up the way I like it in order to take just about every picture I need. I use the same setting for 90 % of the pictures I take and before we do that, let me just go ahead and show you a couple of the main dials on the camera. Here you have your exposure compensation, just make sure this dial is set the way you want to before taking the picture because it is very easy to accidentally bump this dial. Here we have two dials, the bottom of the two being your ISO setting; right now mine is set to automatic. And usually I do like to choose my ISO but for now I’m going to leave that on automatic. And my top dial is the mode dial, this current is also set to automatic but I don’t like that so I would highly recommend moving that over to the key mode, this stands for program. And this is actually very similar to automatic where it is out of exposure but I do have control over very important things such as wide balance and ISO if I like to change that.

Here is your zoom lever, just pull it to the right in order to zoom in your subjects or bring your subject closer or push it to the left in order to zoom out or further back from the subject. Down here we have your tripod mount and here we have the battery and memory card door cover. Go ahead and just press with your thumb down firmly on that and push it out. Here is your battery, just move that little brown locking mechanism over and the battery will come out. This is a lithium ion battery; it’s actually quite powerful and will last considerably long time compared to a lot of other digital cameras. I would say you can usually go a whole weekend without recharging but it will start dying after about a year and a half to two years. So take that into consideration and if you do notice that after about a year and a half to two years it’s no longer holding the charged that it used to, you can just go ahead and replace that. The memory card is also right here, go ahead and press that in, in order to eject it. This camera does use and SD memory and the face of the memory card should be towards the front of the camera so the little metal contact points are towards the back and it goes in just like that. Press it all the way in until you hear a click and then release and it should stay in. Press the battery door cover against the camera until it’s flushed and push it back to lock it, let’s go ahead and turn the camera the on. Now with this camera you have two menus, you have a main menu which I pretty much to set up once and leave it that way and the function menu which hosts a list of items that I need to access much more frequently. Let’s go ahead and go into the function menu, just press the function button right here on the center. Here is the function menu and because I’m in the program mode I do have access to my wide balance and a few other settings that I would not have access to that I’ve been in the automatic mode.

Let’s go ahead and go down and you can use your navigation buttons right here to move up and down. This here is your down navigation button, MF is your up navigation button, whereas the right navigation button and the left navigation button and you can also just use the up and down navigation buttons and within each menu item, you can use this wheel to move the selection over. So in the wide balance currently by default it is set to auto wide balance but I want to set this to the wide balance that suits my needs. So I’m going to change this to fluorescent and this best suits my current needs. I would highly recommend it not using the auto wide balance, it is pretty close to day light but it is not good enough for indoor use if you have fluorescent or tungsten as your light source. Let’s go ahead and go down to image quality. Image quality by default is set to fine and this is okay but it is not the highest quality the camera can produce so I’m going to choose super fine, again I’ll just press the left navigation button. With super fine, the number of pictures that I can take on any given card does drop. However the image quality is better and I’m willing to sacrifice those pictures. This is the camera’s resolution, by default it is set to large. This is the highest resolution the camera can produce and this is usually what I choose. I can always reduce the resolution in the computer later on but I like to take advantage of the full resolution just in case I do get a picture that I want to print very big and put on the wall. I would recommend choosing a lower resolution if you need to take more pictures on the memory card as oppose to reducing the image qualities. So keep that image quality high and reduce the resolution, especially if you know these are pictures that you’re just going to look at on your computer screen or send via email or anything like that. Your option is also something that I’m pretty much never use, the file is very large, you can see here. Now I can only take 38 pictures, if you want to know more about the difference between Raw and Jpeg, go to the glossary section at LBGuides.com. I’m going to stick to the large resolution and the super fine quality.

Go ahead and press function to escape the function menu. Press the main menu button here, that’s just the main menu, I’m going to go down. Digital zoom is apparently to set the standard, this is the default and I’m not happy with that because I don’t even want to accidentally access this mode. This is going to significantly decrease the image quality and I can crop the image later in the computer and end up with much better results so I’m going to just press the right navigation button to turn this off. We’re down to flash control, I’m going to press set to access that sub menu. Go down all the way and right here my red eye lamp is turned and this is something that I want to turn off. You don’t want to use the red eye lamp mainly because it actually doesn’t seem to help at all. Red eye Correction however, as you can see by default is turned off and this is something that is very debatable. You can turn it on and it actually will help with the red eye but it will take a little bit to process those images. So in my case I’m going to leave that off as well. And lastly is the safety flash exposure. This is something that by default has turned on but I like to have the control over this so I’m going to turn it off. Press menu to go back to the main menu and we’ll keep going down. Custom display is something that I like setting up because I want to see the information but I don’t necessarily want to see all the information so I’m going to press set and I’m going to choose to show the shooting information. I’m also going to choose the 3 x 2 guide, this is something that I can ignore but it’s handy so I don’t have to come back in here again.

Go ahead and press menu to escape. At the very bottom, I have this set short cut button, option and this allows me to set this, your short cut button to access different features of the camera. And I like this very much, I can press set button here to access this. I need to use the wide balance very frequently so I like this to be set to wide balance and as oppose to going to the function menu to access wide balance, you can just press my shortcut button and set that very quickly. Press set and that’s it. Now I’m going to go over to the set up menu, I can either go all the way back up to the record tab and then move over, I can go all the way down because I am at the very bottom of the list then move over or I can just use the zoom lever, pull it to the right and the set of the tab is highlighted. I’m going to go on the volume, press set. I don’t need to start up the volume, turn that off. I don’t need the operation volume; I’m going to turn that off.

The others may be helpful so I’m going to leave those on. Just press menu to go back. It’s very important to set your date and time, make sure this is set. Your image organizing applications use this information to organize the pictures so set that information, it is very, very important. And everything is really set up just fine; down here is a reset all. If by chance, anything does get setup in a way that you’re not familiar, and you’re not sure how to set it back, you can always come here to reset all and put set and change that back to their factory default. Go ahead and press menu, now since I set up my custom display, I can see all the information of the camera’s currently set up to. You can see here my wide balance is set to fluorescent as I set it, ISO’s currently set to auto and my flash is turned off and all these are very important. I want to know how many pictures I have left as well and focusing square is in the center the way I like it. To find out much more about Digital Photography and your Digital Camera, go to LBGuides.com.