Digital SLR Cameras and Settings

Today I'm going to be talking about shooting with a digital SLR cameras. Digital SLR camera's (SLR's I what I will be calling them) are what you see most professional photographers. The most common model of SLR's are the Canon Rebel Series, Nikon's D50, D60 and so on. The camera that I use most often is a Canon Rebel XTI. I love this camera because it is very user friendly. SLR's work very much like a film camera but instead of the image transferring onto a piece of film, the image is transferred on to a photo receptor. The photo receptor can be anywhere from 15 mm to the common 35 mm and even bigger (35 mm and bigger SLR's are very expensive and are usually for professional use) to catch a very wide area of view. These cameras can produce the clearest of pictures and have a lot of settings. Using the picture to left respectively, I will describe the settings on the setting selector knob (this is a very universal and general list of settings that are seen on most SLR's):
M- this stand's for " Full Manual" mode, this means that photographer controls the aperature and shutter speed.
AV- this stands for Aperture priority, this means the camera automatically chooses the best shutter speed for the aperture the photographer chooses
TV- This stands for shutter speed priority. This means that the photographer chooses the shutter speed while the camera automatically picks the best aperture.
P- This stands for "program" mode. This is where the shutter speed and aperture are automatically chosen by the camera but the photographer gets to set the white balance, the flash and the ISO speed.
AUTO- This is fully automatic in where the camera chooses every thing for you and the photographer does not need to think about anything on the camera.
Basic Scenery Mode- this is for taking pictures of people in a landscape scene.
Portrait mode- this is for taking peoples portraits.
Landscape mode- this is for just taking pictures of scenery.
Night Portrait mode- this is for taking peoples portraits at night, like at a party or event.
Art mode- this is for taking pictures of art works.
Stitch mode- this is for taking panoramic pictures. The camera takes several pictures and "stitches" them together making one long picture.
Video mode- this is for recording video.

Now that you know the basic modes play around with them a but and we'll go into depth on some neat technique with these settings.

Subscribe to my Podcast (iTunes)
Subscribe to my Podcast (RSS)

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Introduction and Types of Digital Cameras

>My name is Erin Curtis. I’m a freshman here at Trinity University and my passion is photography! I’ve been taking pictures not for about 3 years and I’ve decided that I want to make it my career. This blog is to show people different photography works and maybe give some people a little help with there own photography.
The first essential to photography is determining the type of camera you are going to be using. There are many types but for my purpose I’m going to be showing you haw to manage with a digital camera. There are 2 types of digital cameras. The first type is a “point and shoot”. Examples of this kind of camera are, the Nikon Coolpix series, the Kodak Easyshare series, and Canon Powershot series. These are camera where you point at the object and trip the shutter (snap the photo) and the camera does everything for you.

The other type of digital camera is Digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex). These cameras work similar to a 35 mm film camera, but instead of the photo reflecting on a light sensitive piece of film, the photo is reflected on to a light sensitive electronic sensor. These allow the photographer to have full control over every aspect of the photo being taken, whether its shutter speed, aperture, or ISO speed (we will talk about these terms later.)
Once you’ve decided which kind of camera you’ll be using, experiment with it and learn the manual, it will be helpful! After practicing and you’ve become comfortable with the camera, we’ll begin with some terminology.