Making the best pictures You could possibly make

Digital Cameras Point and shoot

Digital Cameras dSLR - Digital Single Lens Reflex

Comparative sensor sizes

CCD sensors

What a sensor sees

dSLR

The sensor

Let's talk mega-pixels

The trap

Cropping in the field Composition withOUT Photoshop

Composition

Aperature - F/Stop

Shutter Speed

Motion Blur

Action-blur trick

Depth of field Relies upon the Aperture. The smaller the f-stop number, the wider the lens opening, and the more NARROW the depth-of-field.

Depth of field

Camera settings - Controls

M = Manual Mode, you control all the settings S = Shutter priority mode, you set the shutter-speed and the camera attempts to compensate with the Aperture A = Aperture priority mode, just the opposite than above P = Program Mode. The camera will set anything you don't. Sort of a "super auto" mode M = Manual Mode, you control all the settings S = Shutter priority mode, you set the shutter-speed and the camera attempts to compensate with the Aperture A = Aperture priority mode, just the opposite than above P = Program Mode. The camera will set anything you don't. Sort of a "super auto" mode

Camera settings - Controls What do those weird icons really mean, anyway?

Portrait Setting Automatically sets a wide aperture (small f-stop) to narrow the depth of field

Landscape Setting The opposite of Portait, shuts down the aperture to allow for a wide depth of field.

Action or 'Sports' Setting Sets the shutter-speed as high as it can to stop motion.

Night Mode setting Sets the shutter-speed as slow as it can go.

Macro Mode (Close-up) Allows for close-up focus

Lenses - 28mm vs 100mm

Lenses change the picture

Flash aka evil Only works for about 6 to 10 feet. Can’t help in a dark room. Only works for about 6 to 10 feet. Can’t help in a dark room.

Fill - Flash

More than 10 feet...

Speaking of exposure... ISO - What does it mean? ISO 100ISO 800

If you can’t get detail in the brightest and darkest areas in the scene, you are better off UNDEREXPOSING the scene by 1/2 to one stop. If your whites are blown out (no detail) there is no way to ever add information that isn’t already there. In this picture it would be better to lighten the darker suit, than it would be to darken the lighter suit. There are no details in some areas of the white suit.

File Formats RAW: The RAW file format is digital photography's equivalent of a negative in film photography: it contains untouched, "raw" pixel information straight from the digital camera's sensor. JPEG: Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and pronounced jay-peg. JPEG is a lossy compression technique for color images. Although it can reduce files sizes to about 5% of their normal size, some detail is lost in the compression. TIFF: Acronym for tagged image file format, one of the most widely supported file formats for storing bit-mapped images on personal computers. TIFF graphics can be any resolution, and they can be black and white, gray-scaled, or color. PSD: Photoshop's native, layered file format. The layers enable an photograph to be built with individual graphic elements that can be moved over and over to obtain a desired result. When the PSD format is converted into a TIFF, JPEG, GIF or other graphics format, the layering is "flattened" into one bitmapped image.

I know you have questions...