Now that you’re ready to take your first picture it’s important to properly hold the camera. Support the camera with your right hand, your thumb should be back here and your index finger should be hovering over the shutter button right here. Your left hand should be cupped underneath the lens so you can turn the zoom as well as the manual focus if you choose to use that. And this is the best way to really support the camera. I’m used to using the big LCD screen in the back, but if you want you can also use the view finder right here.

By default its set to automatic so anytime you put this up to your eye you can see the view finder will turn on and the screen will turn off. But in my case, I like to use the big screen in the back. And when you take your picture it’s very important to think about what kind of picture you’re taking. Most of the quick menu items have already been set up just fine. So basically, it’s important to know whether you want to use the flash, what the ISO should be set to and what the white balance should be set to.

You may want to use the flash and pictures such as outdoors and daylights when there are hard shadows being cast on your subject. It’ll help fill in the shadows. Obviously when there isn’t enough light in the scene you can use the flash to brighten the scene. Keep in mind the built in flash is only good for about 15 feet. So choose whether you want to use the flash. I’m assuming I’m taking a picture of a person, its outdoors, broad daylight, so I want to use the flash in order to fill the shadows. So I’ll pop that. In the back I’m going to press the ISO button and move this from auto ISO down to 100. 100 ISO is the least sensitive ISO but since we have so much light in our scene remember I’m assuming we’re outdoors, we don’t need a high ISO number. Also, 100 ISO will maintain the smoothest color possible.

So I’ll press set and then finally, I want to press the WB button right here. This stands for white balance and I want to change this to daylight, for outdoors and daylight. If it’s cloudy I’ll go ahead and use cloudy or if we’re in the shade I’ll use shade. The shade and cloudy options will help warm up the cool tones in those situations. Since I’m assuming we’re outdoors and daylight, I’m going to set this to daylight because I’m assuming we’re not in shade nor cloudy. So I’ll go ahead and press set. Now my white balance is set to daylight. The ISO is set to 100 and my flash is turned on to fill in those shadows.

Now, this is true for every picture. You want to align your focusing brackets with your subject on a focus on the subject eyes. So I’ll place them over the subject’s eyes or face, press the shutter button halfway, they’ll turn green. I can also see a green dot up here in the corner that indicates the camera has locked focus. Now, I can reposition the camera to recompose the image properly. I’m still pressing the button halfway so the focus remains locked on that initial target which I focused on. Now I can go ahead and press the shutter button the rest of the way to take a picture.

Now, I went ahead and already took some pictures outdoors just to show you an example of what this looks like. I press the playback button right here. Here’s an example of a portrait taken with the flash and you can see that the flash was able to fill in some of the shadows. I go back. More of the shadows were filled in with this portrait because the flash was set to a more powerful setting. Here the flash is set to default whereas here the flash was set to minus two. I go back one more this is the picture with no flash at all. So you can see how the shadows on the subject’s face are very hard and can be a little distracting.

Now, there’s something that you want to keep in mind anytime you use the flash with any picture using this camera. When the flash is being used, a shutter speed of 160th of a second is the maximum possible. And what that means is that the camera can only compensate using the aperture. So where if I wasn’t using the flash I would be able to press the shutter button and get a shutter speed of 200th of a second with a 6.3 aperture which means my depth of field is not going to be that narrow and because this is a portrait I want to change that, I can do so just by using the dial again.

We’ll these numbers are still active and in yellow and we press the shutter button again to activate them. Just roll the dial and you can see that I can change these settings. I want to go with a 4.0 aperture which will get me a shallower depth of field. So the background is blurry and now my shutter speed is 500 or 400. If I use the flash and press the shutter button halfway you can see that it’s not possible to get that. So I’m forced to use a more narrow aperture which means the background will be a little bit sharper. So this is the downside to using the built in flash with this camera. But in most cases as you saw with my picture taken previously you should be just fine with using the flash in outdoor situations.

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