In order to take a basic picture with this camera, first thing you need to know and you probably already know this but I’m going to over it anyway. Hold the camera properly, this can be a very heavy camera and you need to support it very, very well. So with your left hand, cap the lens from underneath. This way, you can turn the zoom and the focus if you need to. You also have your thumb free to press the Flash button and the Depth of Field button.
So underneath the lens, we’ll give you access to all these different features as well as supporting the camera from, below you don’t want to hold it like this. This is no good for support and this is very good for support. So hold it like this back here, your thumb can press on all these different buttons if you need to and your index finger will control the shutter release, this dial to change your aperture setting or shutter setting or both, and you can click the ISO button if you need to change that.
Now, just about anything you need to change for example shutter, aperture, ISO, you can keep looking through the view finder and do all that without even looking at the screen in the back. So if you know the camera well enough, you can just press the ISO while you’re looking through the button and then move up and down and you can see that figure changed in the view finder at the bottom. So that’s how you hold the camera.
Now, in order to take your basic picture, you want to use the program mode. So your mode dial should be on P. I’m going to zoom, we’re outdoors so I’d like to have the ISO set to 100 or in broad daylight so I really don’t need the camera to be anymore sensitive than that. So I press ISO, use my up and down navigation buttons to get to 100 and then press Set.
My white balance should be set to daylight, press White Balance right here and move this over to daylight. If you’re in the shade, you can set it to shady. If it’s cloudy, you can set it cloudy. This will warm up the image a little bit to compensate for the cool colors in the shade. Go ahead and press Set. One shot is fine, I don’t need the camera to continuously focus so I’m not going to set that.
My metering mode is here, it sets to evaluative, this is also fine and my drive mode is set to single shut which is good. This means that I press the button and I’ll just take one picture. Now you can see most of this information when you look through the view finder at the bottom in green. So basically just go ahead and go to through the view finder, zoom in, in order to compose the image. Remember, you have your focusing square set to the center focusing point. Center that focusing point on your subject. Press the Shutter button half way, the camera will flash a red dot in the center focusing point so you’ll know that the camera is locked focused. And then, you can move the camera slightly to recompose the image while the shutter button is press half way, maintaining that focus on your subject and then when the composition is the way you like it, just go ahead and press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.
If you need to use the flash in order to eliminate some shadows, go ahead and press the flash button right here since we are in the program mode, remember that the flash is not automated, this is either on or off.
Now that the flash is up, it will fire. It’s not going to guess whether you want it to fair or not, it assumes you know what you want and the camera will use the flash. And same as before, compose the image, move that center focusing square to the subject, press the Shutter button half way, you’ll see the red dot in the center and you’ll hear the double beep, keep pressing the button half way, recompose the image and press the Shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.
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