Let me show you a couple of things with the Panasonic LX-3 to maybe help you get started.

First, here is your how to and this can be used to attach an external flash, the built in flash if I just pop that by moving the switch over, as you can see is very, very small and there for non very powerful.

This is probably good for about 10 ft, if your subject is more than 10ft away. You will really need to avoid using the flash to increase the ISO or use an external flash that is a lot more powerful, here is your mode dial, you have a scene mode if you turn the mode dial to SCN and be able to choose from 24 different scenes that will help you optimize the camera. And you can see how I set each one and the scenes page at LBguides.com.

Normally, I used the program mode because it is very versatile, I can control the entire camera. Here is the zoom lever; you can also use this zoom lever when reviewing images in the screen. The same way that you used this to zoom in or zoom out of a picture, you can use it to magnify an image in the screen and doing so is really great if you want to see whether your picture is in focus or not.

So once you’ve taken a picture bring it up in the screen on the back and the zoom into with the zoom lever to see pix of a pixel whether it is in focus before you loose the scene. This focusing button is not for focusing but more for moving the focus brackets, so you press your shatter button half way to focus but if you press this focus button it will be able to move the brackets to a different location in the screen.

Down here is your tri pad amount and the battery door cover, just move this locking mechanism back and the door will spring open. This camera uses an SD memory card, just press that in to pop it out, the sticker of the memory card should be towards the back of the camera, press it in all the way until you here a click to know that it’s locked.

Remove the battery by moving this gray locking switch over, this is a lithium ion battery that should last year about a hundred and fifty to two hundred shots. Press it in all the way until the gray locking mechanism moves back into place.

Close the door and move the switch over, lastly here you have your aspect ray shield switch and your focusing switch, if you want to shoot a micro picture of use the manual focus option you can move this switch an if you want to use a different aspect ray shield you can use this switch. Now what this means is if you choose the three by two aspect ray shield, it means that your taking a picture that is slightly crap at the top and the button. It is not going to be the full resolution of the CCD but if you pointing four by six, your going to have to crap at the top of the button, anyways so this is not a problem.

If your pictures are, intend for viewing on a wide screen TV that can be slide show presentation for example and you can choose the sixteen by nine-aspect ray shield. Because I don’t know what I am going to do with my pictures, and then you want to print some four by six and then you want to display some in a wide screen TV. I am going to go with the four by three-aspect ray shield and then just crop the images in the computer depending on what I do with them. This will give me the highest resolution the camera can produce ten mega pixels and I can choose to crop the image depending on its intended purpose. Turn the camera on with the switch and most of the time for any regular picture I just stick to the program that gives me the full flexibility of the camera, I go over the menu briefly. Just press the said button right here to access the main menu, and there are a lot of features here, most of which the will relate to you image quality can actually be access using the quick menu button right here.

So I am not going to change anything in the menu just yet, but I want to show you how you can navigate this menu, first you have your navigation buttons right here, left right, up and down you can always move the high lighted portion using this navigation buttons. You also have pages for each menu, this menu happens to have five pages and that can quickly move between the pages by using my zoom level. If I pulled it over to the right I move down to page two, page three and so on.

If I push it to the left, I will go back to page three then page two. In order to select an item I actually have to press the right arrow button not the said button, so if I want to set the ISO limit for example, I just pressed the right n navigation button and go down in said maximum of 800 ISO for example. Then press set, or I just can press set again to escape from the menu. The one thing I like to change in this menu is actually located in the set up tab, so I move to the left go down to the set up tab and then move over t the right and go down to beep. Because the camera makes a beeping noise every time I move the harder square or press any button it gets you rather annoying you after a while. So what I like doing is quieting this beep.

Press the right navigation button and again to access the beep level, go up to mute and press set. Now the down side of this is that also the focusing beeps are turned off. Meaning, usually when I press the shatter button half way if the cameras locked focused it will gives me a double beep, if it can’t find the focus point then it will beep four times, and that is a nice audible way of letting me know whether the camera is in focus or not. How ever, I can see in the display that my focusing square and focusing that it will turn green if the camera is not focused. You are focusing brackets are red if the camera was not able to find focus. So that Is good enough for this case.

Go ahead and press set to escape the menu and press set again to get out the main menu. Up here, you have the quit menu, press is in hold it for just a second until the quick menu comes up, and here you actually have access to most of the things you need when you are taking a pictures. Here is the white balance for example and move over, here is ISO and I can just move down to ISO 80, which I normally use in daylight situations, go back to white balance, move that one to daylight.

I move over one more just to make you aware of the focusing options you have here, normally I use the standard area focusing option, and if you want, you can have a spot focusing option to choose a smaller focusing point. It is also facing detection and auto focus tracking, it allows you to lock focus using the AF lock button right here and the focus will remain lock on the target. Usually I do not use any of these. I stick to the regular area focus, press the quick menu button or set to escape this menu and you can see if have brackets in the center indicating my focus point, and basically to take a standard picture of just position we focus point over my subject, press the shutter button half way, wait for the camera to find and lock that focus point, where you can compose the image and press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.

To find out much more about digital photography and to your digital camera, go to LBguides.com.