The popularity of digital photography has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years. As top-end digital cameras come down in price, they continue to add features and greater capabilities. It is truly a buyers’ market for digital photographic gear and more people are happily channeling their inner shutter bug. This has led to a corresponding explosion of social media sites and online graphics storage and manipulation web sites.

Grabbing a camera and shooting pictures is a viable plan, but like everything else you learn in life, repetition improves your photography skills. The more pictures you take, in different conditions and with different camera settings will improve your skills and take your photos from boring and similar to everyone else’s to a higher level with better composition and technical quality.

The best method to learning the technical capabilities of your camera is reading the manual. You don’t have to read it from cover to cover, but you want to know the basic information about how your camera operates and if it has any quirks compared to previous cameras you may have owned. Once you have a good idea of your cameras capabilities then you should take a lot of pictures.

Getting the Baseline

Every camera is different and you don’t want to find out that yours has a special setting for low-light setting, for example, after you have taken a passel of photos during a holiday festival. Knowing what your camera can do before you need it will make your photographs better and, in some cases, save you the embarrassment of technically bad pictures.

Since these are test photos, the subject matter is not nearly as important as being able to vary the lighting conditions, the focal range and other technical aspects. The goal is to take multiple pictures in every kind of lighting condition. Once you have these pictures, upload them to your computer and figure out which ones are the best. Since most photographic software tags your photos with the settings on your camera, you can quickly and easily figure out the best settings for different lighting.

Learning the Camera Modes

Changing the way your digital camera takes pictures is easy. Most amateur photographers leave the mode in automatic and, while there is nothing wrong with that, it limits what your photographs will look like. Experimentation – prior to you needing to take perfect pictures – will allow you to explore what different camera modes do without the loss of time or the need for explanations about why your pictures look unusual.

While taking your pictures, switch the camera mode off of ‘automatic’ and try the other settings. Most digital cameras, such as the Canon digital cameras, have both basic and advanced settings. Using your camera in landscape, sports or portrait mode can make changes in your photos that you might not have considered. The advanced controls can also be used, but you should spend some time reading your manual and understanding what they do.

Your digital camera can capture and preserve events of great importance, joy and exaltation. When you pick up your camera, you should want to take pictures, want to have fun and want to share the feelings of the moment with others A little work and perseverance when you first get your camera will make a huge difference in the future.