Read the Manual - Easy Camera Settings Everyone Can Use

Probably the easiest thing anyone can do to begin the process of taking better photos is to get to know your camera. The first step in doing this is to read the manual. When you take the time to do it, have the camera in your hand and follow along. You don't necessarily to have try to remember everything all at once and there are some things that may be of no interest or use to you. As you go through it those things will probably become easily identifiable.

Every manual is laid out the same way to try to naturally guide you from the easiest things to the more advanced things and it is up to you to decide how far you want to go. There are some easy initial setup things that you can try. First is deciding what quality and how big should the file size be. If you only plan on posting things on the web and/or emailing photos, then Normal, which is the default size should be just fine. If you want to get more serious and process the images using some kind of software like Photoshop, then you will want to use the Fine setting and make as big a file as possible.

I like color and have set my camera to enhance the 'saturation'. Saturating colors brings them closer to their purest form by eliminating gray. I like the way my camera processes this setting and enjoy the more vibrant color I get. Experiment with it and see if you like it. Some cameras use this adjustment better than others. On a lot of point and shoot cameras, the enhanced saturation setting may be called 'Vivid'. In general, I don't make any other changes to the menu settings.

The above menu settings are more or less permanent settings that I set and forget. However there are more dynamic settings found on the 'Shooting Menu' that I use regularly that are easy and quick to use and you can see immediate results and every digital camera has them.  The first is 'Exposure Compensation'. All this does is slide back and forth to make a picture lighter or darker. If you use one thing on your camera it should be this. Take a picture. Look at in the monitor. Too dark? Lighten it a step and take another. Still too dark? Do it again and of course do the opposite if it's too light. Experiment. Don't be afraid to take a lot of shots of the same thing with different exposures.

For the more advanced, I will often take graduating exposures of something knowing that later I will take pieces of the various photos and put them together to make one better photo. Often times there are instances where one object is brightly lit while other objects are dark. It isn't always possible to take one photo and have both areas exposed correctly. The solution is to take two photos where the the trouble areas are exposed correctly and then combine them putting the best parts of each into one photo. Details of how to do this will be in a later essay. Here is an example. The brightly lit cathedral is much brighter than the other buildings and it is impossible to take one photo and have everything exposed correctly. Because it is a night shot, I had to use a tripod. I could have pointed my camera in a dark area for one exposure and then the light area for another exposure, but I knew I would try to put them together later and didn't want to move the camera. So I used the Exposure Compensation to make several exposures lighter and darker and put the best two together.

Another quick and easy setting is controlling the flash. This can be as easy as turning it on or off depending on the situation. When the camera is in Auto mode, it will sometimes want to use the flash and a shot may look much nicer if we can figure out a way to not use it. The opposite can also be true. There may be plenty of light so the flash will not fire but if we force it to, sometimes it makes things look much better. The picture above is a long exposure. I took some without using the flash and then I took some with the flash. The flash lit up the tree and the grass bringing more bright green into it which compliments the green color of the buildings. The buildings are green because the type of outdoor lighting being used. In this case the camera accentuates its green properties. Different kinds of artificial lighting give of different colors that the eye adjusts for but the camera can magnify. Anyway, the point is without the flash the tree and the grass would just be a dark area and the picture wouldn't have the same balance.

Another way of using the flash that isn't always obvious is using it in the daytime. It's a bright day but our subject is in the shade. The camera sees the abundant light and will adjust itself for it and the subject is too dark. Using the Exposure Compensation will lighten the subject but now the bright areas are too bright. Solution; use the flash to brighten the shady area. In the photo below, the subject is in front of the sun. The surrounding background is extremely bright. The camera wants to adjust itself to the very bright light that is all around so the subject will be too dark. To light the subject properly, I fired the flash and it looks great.

Reading the manual will show you where these adjustments are and with a little practice they become second nature as they are usually easily accessible with just a touch on a menu.