Photography Basics Camera Settings

If you’re getting to grips with a new camera, probably one of the first questions you have regards what settings to use, and that’s no surprise – even the most basic of today’s digital cameras have lots of different settings that you can change. In this lesson we’ll focus on ‘mode’, as this is a top-level setting that has a big effect on what your camera does.

If you’ve used a camera before, chances are you used it in fully automatic mode. This mode is normally represented by a green square, a tiny camera icon, or the word ‘auto’ or ‘automatic’. If you don’t already know where to find your camera’s mode setting, it’s time to find it! On a digital SLR and some smaller cameras it’s a prominent dial, usually on the top plate but sometime on the back of the camera. On really tiny point-and-shoot cameras, the full range of modes might be only accessible through the menu system, but they shouldn’t be hard to locate.

Once you’ve found out how to set the mode, try switching it to aperture-priority mode. This might be represented by an ‘A’ or an ‘Av’ or something else entirely – check your manual if you need to! Now that your camera is in aperture-priority mode, you’ll find that you’re in control of the aperture. Don’t forget that a low number (like f/2.8) means a wide aperture, and a high number (like f/11 or f/16) means a narrow one.

You should experiment with aperture-priority mode by taking photos at different apertures (NB: turn the flash off first – it’ll be represented by a miniature lightning bolt). You’ll find that when you use a wide aperture and focus on something that is close to the camera, things further from the camera are blurry, and that this is less the case at narrow apertures. On the other hand, you’ll find that your camera selects faster shutter speeds at wide apertures, and if you have a camera shake warning feature on your camera, it triggers less when you use a wide aperture (NB: it probably won’t trigger at all unless you’re indoors or otherwise in dim light).