White balance is a digital camera setting that allows the colors in your photos to appear accurately. White balance gets it’s name because if a photo has correct white balance, things that are white in reality appear white in the photo. All other colors appear accurately too – blacks are pure black and gray are [...]
Archive for October, 2009
Lesson 12: Semi Automatic and Fully Manual Modes
October 28th, 2009 
Andrei APERTURE PRIORITY MODE (A or AV): This mode is really a semi-automatic (or semi-manual) mode where you choose the aperture and the camera chooses the shutter speed so as to ensure you have a well balanced exposure. Aperture priority mode is useful when you’re looking to control the depth of field in a shot (usually [...]
Posted in Beginner's Tutorial 
Tags: aperture, depth of field, manual mode, semi automatic modes, the beginning 
No Comments »Lesson 11: Exposure Time and Aperture
October 27th, 2009 Andrei I’ve decided to talk about Exposure Time and Aperture in the same lesson because it is a strong relation between them, which I’ll explain later. First I will discuss about each of them to help you understand them better. EXPOSURE TIME: The Exposure Time is the period of time in which the sensor will be [...]
Posted in Beginner's Tutorial Tags: aperture, depth of field, dof, exposure, exposure time 5 Comments »Lesson 10: Automatic modes
October 25th, 2009 Andrei So now you have your digital camera in your hands and you are about to take the first shots. Most beginners in this situation will put the camera into full auto mode, or into one of the auto mode presets. In this lesson we will talk about these modes so you can know their advantages [...]
Posted in Beginner's Tutorial Tags: automatic modes, landscape mode, macro mode, night mode, portrait mode No Comments »Lesson 9: Batteries
October 21st, 2009 Andrei Batteries are another very important aspect that you will have to take into consideration. Some digital cameras (mainly the DSLRs) come with their own rechargeable batteries, so the only thing you can do after you get your camera is to see if this one is enough for you and if not, you can buy another [...]
Lesson 8: Memory cards
October 18th, 2009 Andrei Choosing a memory card is actually an easy task. All you have to do is to follow a few easy steps: 1. Memory card type: To find out what type of memory card does your camera support, all you have to do is to look into camera specifications. Nowadays there are a lot of memory [...]
Lesson 7: ISO
October 17th, 2009 Andrei Digital cameras have an ISO rating indicating their level of sensitivity to light. The normal setting for most cameras is ISO 100, although some go as low as ISO 50. The sensitivities can be increased to 200, 400, 800, or even 3,200. High-end digital SLRs also allow some intermediary values. When increasing the sensitivity, the [...]
Lesson 6: Optical vs. Digital Zoom
October 14th, 2009 Andrei When buying a digital camera one of the factors that you will be looking at is the power of the zoom function. People who are not very experienced in this field are starting to be a little mislead because manufacturers are often claiming a zoom function called digital zoom, or they add this zoom to [...]
Lesson 5: Optical Zoom
October 13th, 2009 Andrei To define optical zoom, first I’ll have to briefly explain you what is focal length (or focal distance). If you look on the lenses of any decent camera you’ll see written there something like this: 5.8 – 34.8mm (or any other pair of values like that). This is the focal length specification and it is [...]
Lesson 4: Megapixels
October 7th, 2009 Andrei Now you have an idea about the differences between point and shoot digital cameras and DSLRs and you know which one is best for you. The next step is to actually buy the camera. In the next few lessons I will explain to you a couple of very important technical aspects that are essentials in [...]
