Using your camera - simple tipsCamera settings

Image quality

Image quality is a mix of Resolution and Compression.

The higher the photograph image quality, the more memory card space will be used up.

Choose a high enough resolution for your purpose. Viewing images on the computer requires only a very low resolution, under 1Mp is normally fine, on the other hand printing 10"x8" photos requires high resolution (ideally 7.2Mp).

As a rule of thumb, try to keep compression on the highest quality setting, eg Super-Fine or SHQ, unless you want to minimize file size - for example if you're struggling for space on your memory card. This highest quality setting is known by different names on different cameras.

Flash

In auto mode, the camera measures how bright a scene is and decides whether flash is needed.

If you use flash to shoot something that's more than a few metres away, it can create a hazy effect and leave the subject in the dark, ruining the picture, so in this case turn the flash off.

Digital cameras also have a forced flash mode, called fill-in flash, which lets you turn on the flash in any light. It's handy if there's a lot of background light, such as when taking a picture of somebody standing in bright sunshine. Without flash, the subject might appear too dark.

Since flash works within a range of a few metres only, the brightness in the background won't become too bright.

Light from flash does sometimes make your subject appear unnatural however - flesh can appear excessively white. You can use exposure compensation (on the camera's menu) to counter this by increasing the exposure value manually, step-by-step, to make the whole scene in your photo brighter. Decrease it to make the whole scene darker.

Another flash mode is slow-sync flash. This is good for night time shooting of a person in front of a landmark, say, where you want to brighten both foreground (person) and the background (landmark).

The camera will automatically flash to highlight the foreground and choose a slow shutter speed to let in more light to illuminate the background. Keep the camera as still as possible and turn on image stabilisation, if available, or use a tripod to minimise any camera shake that may cause your image to be blurred.

Deleting photos

Digital cameras also have a playback mode, normally indicated by a little arrow (often a green one). Switch to playback mode, and you can view all the pictures on your memory card one by one, or on most cameras, miniature versions of several at a time.

You can zoom in on them, view technical information or delete them to create more space on the memory card.

Battery life

The battery life of a digital camera is much shorter than that of a film camera. If you're short on battery life, shoot with the LCD monitor switched off and use the viewfinder instead to compose your shot.