New to Digital Photography?

Read the cameras manual.!! Please note that some cameras don’t come with a printed manual, you must read an Acrobat file from the CD-ROM that came with the camera. Take your time and find all the controls and learn how to use them. Make sure you understand how to load batteries, plug it into your computer, and turn it on and off.

Also understand which buttons you don’t want to push. (I recently watched someone wonder aloud what one button did, so they pushed it — and watched their rechargeable battery fall into the Pacific Ocean.)

Typically speaking, the better the camera, the harder it will be to operate. Inexpensive digital cameras rarely support more than “point and shoot” technology. You point the camera, push the button, it takes a picture. The camera will try to auto-focus the image and adjust the exposure according to available light.

You will find that more expensive digital cameras will enable you to manually adjust focus, focal length, lighting, and countless other settings which will help you turn a good picture into a really bad picture — if you don’t read the manual.