Now that the camera is set up just the way we like it, let’s go ahead and take our first picture. And before we go ahead and take a picture it’s very important to look at the scene that you’re taking a picture off and see what you’re going to need to do in order to set the camera. The three things we want to set are your white balance, your ISO and your flash. So in my case right now I have enough light so I don’t need to use the flash. If I was outside for example and I was taking a picture of a person and it’s sunny outside so I want to use the flash in order to fill in the light so I wouldn’t want to force the flash. Press the flash button right here to access those flash buttons or you can just use the dial if you want or the left and right navigation buttons to move that around to what you want. Either you use flash off or flash on, automatic flash, I don’t like that because I want to tell the camera whether I want to use the flash or not. So when outdoors I want to use the fill in flash, I have to force the flash. When indoors and I don’t want the flash to fire, bring the flash off. I’m going to press this, turn the flash off, set. The wide balance is currently set to fluorescent and this is exactly what I want because that is the light source that I’m using. If you’re taking pictures outdoors, remember we set up our wide balance to the short cut button so I will just press the short cut button and move over to day light. In this case I’m just going to keep on fluorescent, set. Finally our ISO, because I am not using the flash, I need to set this ISO. Auto ISO may not get high enough or you’re going to be able to hand hold the camera.

So I don’t want to do that. Remember, because we’re using the program mode, I can set the ISO to whatever I need. I’m going to take if off Auto right now, 80 is great for outdoors, it’s going to give you the best smoothest colors possible. But because I’m indoors, I’m going to go with 100 because I do have enough light, so I probably don’t need anymore than that and I should be able to hand hold this shot. If I’m questioning this and I don’t really know, here’s what to do, just press the shutter button halfway, focus on your subject and look down here and see what your shutter’s speed is at. Right now mine is 1/250, that’s plenty fast, I certainly do not need a higher ISO than that to increase the shutter speed. So in fact in this case what I’m going to do is turn it down because I do want a little better quality. I’ll turn this down to 80, press the shutter button halfway, now I’m at one-two hundredth of a second and that also is just fine. So I know that I do have enough light for ADISO. I’ll leave it this way. Now that my ISO, my wide balance and my flash are all set, I’m ready to take my picture.

Now this is probably the most important thing in digital photography is to press the shutter button halfway first. You have to press the shutter button halfway to let the camera focus. So put your focusing square on your target, right now you can see my focusing square is the normal size focusing square, I can change that by pressing this button right here. This allows me to change the size and location of my focusing square, so I’ll change that. And down here it gives you instructions; just press this play to change that to the small size. You just press the button again to escape. What I’m going to do is take a portrait so I need to focus first on the person’s eyes. I’m not going to compose the picture the way I want to because right now I would be actually focusing on the back ground. So what I want to do is choose on of my subjects, focus on their eyes, press the shutter button halfway. Once the camera has locked focus, now I can keep that button press halfway and reposition the image, recomposing the picture and now that focus has been locked on the subject’s eyes and my picture has been recomposed so now I can go ahead and press the shutter button to the rest of the way to the picture. In order to play back the pictures you’ve already taken, go ahead and press the playback button right here.

Here’s the last picture I took, I can either use the left and right navigation buttons to scroll through pictures I have on the memory card or I can use this wheel to more quickly scroll through pictures I have. I you want to erase one picture at a time. What you can do is just press the erase button and you can see it’s indicated with the blue trashcan icon. You just press that and you can just press set to choose erase. I can press this again if I don’t want to erase this picture or move over to cancel and press set to cancel. If I want to erase, just press the button, press set and that picture has been erased. If I want to erase more than one picture, what you can do is go into the menu or here in the playback menu and go down to erase, press the set button to access the submenu and you can choose the pictures you would like to erase. If you want, you can select pictures by marking it with a check mark and then just press erase to the selected images. You can choose a range of images, for example if you know all the pictures between picture number 89 and 95 you’d like to erase, and you can go ahead and select those. You can select by date, it will show you little thumbnails so you don’t have to guess. You can erase by category and by folder or all images.

All Images is something that I don’t usually use unless I want to erase everything except for just a few images. So for example if I have 4 pictures that I want to erase out of 200, I’m not going to go and select 196 pictures, what I would rather do, I hit menu to escape this menu, I’ll go down to protect, hit set and I will choose select to protect a select few pictures. So now that I’m in the protect mode, I just press set and every time I press set, a little key will pop up in the corner. So I pres set to protect this image and you can see a little key that’s indicated that this image is protected and I can actually zoom out using my zoom lever right here, I’ll just push it in this direction as though I’m zooming out and I get these thumbnails. And now I can more quickly access different pictures on the memory card. So here is another picture and say I want to protect this, I’ll just press set and it has been protected and I want to protect this and press set and this two has been protected. Okay let’s press menu, now I want to press menu again to escape the protect menu, go back up to erase, choose the set and then go down to all images. Now I’ll press set and go over to okay, press set again and all the images are erased except for the 3 that I have protected.

If you want to completely erase all the pictures on the memory card, once you have downloaded the pictures from the memory card and you have safely put them on your computer, I would highly recommend erasing them by using the format options. So go ahead and press menu, move over to set up and go down, until you get to the format, go ahead and press set. Now format will erase absolutely every thing on the memory card including protected images so you don’t have to go and unprotect those images as well as any files that has been left on the memory card from your computer. So if you use a memory card reader, sometimes the computer will leave erroneous files on the memory and the camera sometimes doesn’t like those so in order to keep your cards as healthy as possible, I would highly recommend formatting the memory card.

So move over to okay and press set. Once that’s done, the entire memory card is clean; you can go ahead and take more pictures. Press the menu button and you can see no more images. Now once my lens has retracted, as you can see here I have been in the play mode long enough where the lens has retracted, if I want to keep taking pictures, you don’t want to press the play button because that will just turn the camera off, you can do that but then you’ll just have to turn the camera back on. If you press the power button, the same thing will happen because essentially the camera is on but just not in the record mode. So what you can do is you just press the shutter button halfway as though you’re taking a picture and your camera will turn on and every thing will be ready take another picture. To find out much more about Digital Photography and your Digital Camera, go to LBGuides.com.