Remember when you’d go to pick up your pictures not knowing what to expect? You may have thought you got some pretty good ones but you really didn’t know if the color would be right or the lighting would be good of if anyone’s eyes would be closed?

Aren’t we thankful for digital cameras and LCD screens? I don’t miss the film days at all!

I was going to combine white balance and ISO in one post but I changed my mind. Let’s just work on white balance today.

Go ahead and set your shooting mode to P or Av or M if you’re daring. Don’t be afraid to experiment with these settings. Remember, you’re using digital. There’s nothing to lose!

Now you can adjust the white balance. You can change the white balance in any of the creative zone settings. It’s usually identified by wb on the back of the camera.

What does changing the white balance do?

It helps the camera reproduce the colors more accurately. Have your pictures ever turned out too blue, too yellow? That’s a white balance problem.

Miz Booshay who writes on The Pioneer Woman Photography blog, has illustrated different white balance settings using American Girl dolls and gives a far better explanation of it than I ever could.

Your white balance choices may include:

AWB (auto: let’s the camera decide)
Sun (day light, bright outdoors)
Clouds (cloudy day)
Light bulb (tungsten-indoor without flash)
Light (fluorescent lighting)
Flash (for when you want to use the flash)

Here are some examples. This first group of pictures were taken inside the house with no natural light and without a flash.

The first picture the white balance was set on shade. You can see that the lighting turned out terrible.

The last shot where I set the white balance to tungsten (and pumped the iso up to 800 which we’ll talk about next week) looks much more natural.

Here’s another example. It was a cloudy day so I set the white balance on shade.

Sometimes the pictures I take indoors with natural light do best with the camera’s white balance set on auto. I have to do a little more experimenting when I am shooting indoors to find the best white balance setting.

I hope you’ll take lots of pictures and try out all the settings in different situations. Can’t wait to see what you discover.

Thank you all for participating in the show and tell Monday. I loved seeing and reading about what you had learned about your camera. Isn’t it fun?!

I’m going to tell you about two things today that your camera can do before we move on to manual settings. I didn’t realize my daughter’s Kodak Easyshare camera does not have any manual settings. So I will not be practicing with hers anymore after today.

Macro

The first feature is the Macro setting. On most cameras this is represented by a flower. It will either be on the shooting mode dial or a button on the back of the camera.

When using the macro setting you can get really close up to flowers and insects. I loved this setting on my Canon Powershot s2is because it also had image stabilization. I could get very nice pictures of insects with this setting.

I took both of these using the macro setting on the Kodak Easyshare.

Timer

The next feature you should know how to use is your timer.

For this setting you may actually have to get out your manual (I’m so sorry) and turn to the page on how to set the self-timer because every camera is different. But they are probably all represented by a symbol that looks like this:

The number in the circle represents how many seconds before the timer goes off. You can usually choose between 2 or 10 or set it manually.

Why do you need to know how to use the timer setting? To take pictures for your blog profile and family Christmas photos, of course. Or, just when you need to be in the pictures every once in a while for proof you were there.

It may be tricky to get the tripod set up or rig up something to set your camera on (I rarely get the tripod out, usually I find a stack of books and make do) and make sure you are all the way in the shot. On the s2si (I am constantly singing its praises), you could swing the LCD monitor around and actually see yourself. I loved that!

DSLR Users

On my Canon SLR, the symbol on the back of the camera which turns on the self-timer also controls the continuous shooting mode. Press the timer button and the arrow button to select self-timer.

Using this setting you can also get a remote timer and have more control over when the picture is taken. The remote timer is a little cheap fun.

I took this on the 4th of July while nursing under my hooter hider with my remote while demonstrating to friends how easy it was to use.

Ready to try some of these yourself? Start practicing and get ready to show and tell on Monday.

Hello! I’m so excited about doing this series and so glad to hear that some of you are too. I hope you’ll learn something about your camera and have some fun along the way.

Let’s get started.

Getting to know your shooting mode dial.

We’re going to begin with something easy. But I hate to assume what anyone knows how to do, so I’ll just begin with the basics.

Here’s how the shooting mode dial looks on the Kodak EasyShare.

This is the Canon Powershot.

Your camera may look slightly different, but just about any model has the dial with various choices, one of them being auto. If you’ve been shooting primarily on auto, it’s time to make a change!

Shooting with digital makes it so easy to experiment. If it doesn’t work out you can always delete it. So don’t be afraid, try those other options and change things up.

On your dial you might find options such as these:

Landscape mode represented by a mountain

Night mode represented by the dark square with a star in it

Portrait mode (the face)

Action (the running man)

And something called scene (scn).

(Your camera may even have a lightening bolt with a line through it. This setting will keep your flash from coming on).

These modes are considered automatic because the camera automatically selects the settings based on the image composition you choose. But they can still dramatically change the way your image looks even without moving to the creative settings.

You will also find on many models the creative zone choices: P, TV, AV and M. We will discuss each of those later.

Most of the modes are self-explanatory. If you are shooting people, choose the face, if you are shooting landscape, choose the mountain. But the feature I found most useful on my Canon was the scene option.

Using the SCN mode:

When you choose scn, you can then scroll through options (using your buttons on the back of the camera) like snow, fireworks, beach, indoors and maybe others. Each camera is slightly different.

Choose this setting on your camera and take a picture of the same subject using each choice. See what difference it makes with each shot. I found that the indoor setting really made a big difference when I was shooting inside.

Yes, you have to change the setting for each situation you are in, rather than just pick up the camera and shoot, but it’s time to get used to making proper adjustments for each individual picture situation.

DSLR users

The digital SLR doesn’t have the scn mode. But it has many of the same automatic choices as the point and shoot.

If you choose any of these options that fits the specific circumstances you are shooting in it will make your picture better and still keep your camera safely on full automatic mode (you can’t mess anything up!). So go ahead and try it.

On Monday

For our first show and tell let’s move out of the green zone. Try one or all the other settings in the automatic part of the dial and post one or as many pictures as you want.

Tell us what kind of camera you’re using. It would be helpful (to you too) to tell us what mode you shot in. The more you can remember about what you did to get that great picture, the better chance you’ll be able to do it again.

Practice, practice, practice then post your best results here Monday so we can all take a look at what you learned.

edited: I wrote this up last night and this morning practiced with my dslr. I could not tell much difference between the portrait mode and the auto mode. However, when using the scn feature on my Canon Powershot I could see a big difference. So, this may not help dslr users, but try anyway. I’ve heard that the action setting on the dslr does make a difference.

So I panicked a bit that I’m starting out too easy. But I keep thinking about my aunt who has no idea how to even move from the green mode and it’s better to begin at the beginning than somewhere in the middle and lose folks, right?