Different cameras display the setting information differently.

The traditional SLR cameras have whole and half stops- the DSLR will have fractions of stops. Notice how many options you have, which means more control.

Same applies for shutter speeds- more options = more control.

We will be working primarily in JPEG, Largest setting, but be aware of how to set your camera to also capture RAW files, which we will talk about later in the semester.

This information is a review from color film, but applies to the white balance settings on your camera.

The Histogram is the digital read out of all of the lights and darks of a file. The far right of the scale displays the ‘high end’ or lightness, while the left side displays the information in the darkest part of the file or image.

1)Always FORMAT your card after you have downloaded the images from it rather than erasing the images one-by-one or taking them en’ masse to the trash. This cleans up the file system and greatly reduces your chance of a crash. 2) Don’t share cards with friends, or put them into other people’s cameras or computers. This can cause a crash since the other camera or computer may attempt to write a system, desktop or file of unknown format to the card. 3) The very large (16gb) cards, are prone to far more File Allocation Table (FAT)-like errors. For ultimate safety, stick with smaller cards until later this year, when the really big cards will be down in price and up in reliability. Not all cards are created equal- there are cards that ‘write’ faster than others. There are different sizes of cards. Most DSLRs take either a Secure Digital (SD) card or a Compact Flash (CF) card.

*Don't try to shoot beyond capacity of CF or SD card, trying to squeeze out last few images to the CF or SD card and "over shoot" CF or SD card will cause the card to try to write the last images to unavailable memory thus corrupting the last few images and this leads to the CF card lock up. This typically happens when shooting combos of Raw and jpeg, very easy to loose count on how much capacity the CF cards has left *Don't remove CF or SD cards before camera is finished writing. This often happens when shooting raw images since they take longer to write. It is advisable to wait a few extra seconds before turning the camera off or pulling the disk. *Don't remove cards from readers until properly dragged or manually ejected from reader depending on if is Mac or PC Windows system. It is good to wait a few extra seconds before removing the CF card from the reader after trashing or manually ejecting cards. *Don't mix cards between different camera systems. This can cause problems even with the same models of cameras. Remember, every camera is its own unique system. It can be done, but it is better to keep card to one camera system instead of swapping them around between different cameras.