SYGADC: The Basics and Using Automatic

 Review:

1. The Camera as an Object
2. Manuals

The Basics:

1. To take pictures, hold the camera in your right hand and support the camera or lens with your left. Don't block the flash, autofocus port, or lens. 
2. Don't Drop it! - wrap the camera's neck strap around your wrist
3. Steady yourself - Always try to position yourself so you can lean on a table, against a wall/tree/etc.  If you don't have a tripod, improvise and make yourself a tripod
4. As you take photos, they are first stored in the camera's internal memory called a "buffer". When the buffer is full you'll have to wait until one or more of the images has been transferred to the memory card before taking any more pictures.
5. Don't open the battery or memory card access covers while an image is being saved. Doing so can not only damage the image being saved, it can also damage the card.
6. Some cameras will briefly display the image you just took as it is being saved. Usually you can turn this feature on or off.
7. You can usually adjust the brightness of the monitor. Make it brighter in bright light and dimmer in dim light.
8. Many cameras have a tripod socket so you can attach it to a tripod/monopod when you want sharper pictures.
9. Take as many shots of a given scene as you can think of; changing positions, distances, and angles. You may be surprised later at what works and what doesn't.
10. When done shooting, turn the camera off.

Using Automatic:

1. Getting ready. Turn the camera on and set it to automatic mode—usually spelled out or indicated by a camera icon. To conserve your batteries, turn off the monitor and compose your image through the optical viewfinder if your camera has one. (some Digital SLR cameras don't let you compose the image on the monitor and some point and shoots don't have optical viewfinders - always use the viewfinder rather than the screen if possible). If the camera has a lens cap, be sure to remove it. 
2. Framing the image (Don't be the human zoom and a YouTube statistic...). The viewfinder or monitor shows you the scene you are going to capture. To zoom the lens to frame your image, press the zoom-out button or lever to widen the angle of view and the zoom-in button or lever to enlarge subjects. If using an SLR's manual zoom, you zoom by turning a ring on the lens. 
3. Frame More/Edit Later. When composing a shot, always shoot a wider scene than you ultimately expect to use.  Use Photoshop or other editing programs to finish the composition. The camera captures time. Photoshop composes.
4. Autofocus. Cameras have one or more focus zones or areas, each of which is often indicated in the viewfinder with cross hairs, boxes or brackets. You need to know that default focus mode in order to accept or reject it.  Check the manual.  The part of the scene that you cover with one of these focus zones will be the sharpest part of the photo. Many cameras will focus on the center of the scene but others will focus on the closest part of the scene covered by any of the focus zones. How close you can focus depends on the camera and lens. (Photographing people is best with pin-point focusing, not broad areas).
5. Autoexposure. The camera's exposure system measures light reflecting from the scene and uses these readings to set the best possible exposure.
6. Autoflash. If the light is too dim, the autoexposure system will fire the camera's built-in flash to illuminate the scene. If the flash is going to fire, a flash lamp usually glows when you press the shutter button halfway down.
7. Automatic white balance. Because the color in a photograph is affected by the color of the light illuminating the scene, a camera automatically adjusts white balance so white objects in a scene are white in the photo and other colors are free of a color cast.