So you've just brought home that shiny new digital camera (at a great price too!) What's the first thing you should do? Well of course, you rip open the box, put in the batteries, and start taking pictures! That's human nature, but for the best pictures, take some time in the first week or two to check out these tips. Digital cameras have lots of handy features, sometimes hidden in menus, that can greatly improve the quality of your pictures.

Read the Manual
Yes, most camera manuals are written in impenetrable gobbledygook. But they're also the only place you'll find out things like how to put the camera in macro mode, and use some of the other special features the camera offers. Try this strategy: After you get your camera home and you've spent a bit of time with it, go on the Web and find an in-depth review of the camera.  (see our list of digital camera Web sites in the last article
http://roxio.sfi0.com/index.cgi/roxt-mm2-w-009 ).A quick scan over the review should reveal information about how the camera works, and more importantly, its functionality. Most good reviews will have tables listing the major features of a camera, such as exposure modes, macro settings, video capture capabilities, etc. Then sit down with the camera and the manual and figure out how the features that interest you work. Start with the ones you are likely to use most. Divide things into two or three sessions, the first to get a handle on the basics, and another later on when you're more comfortable with the camera.

Pay Attention to Composition
The same composition rules apply to taking pictures with a digital camera as with a regular camera. If you haven't already been 'exposed' to photo theory, and have never heard of the Rule of Thirds, then it might be a good idea to do a search on the Web or find a good photography book. One good explanation can be found at PhotographyTips.com
For most people digital photography provides much more freedom of composition, because after the picture is taken you can crop the image in different ways on your computer. You can do that with film as well, provided you have a darkroom, but now everyone with a computer has a digital darkroom, and it pays to know how to use it. Once you've mastered your camera, it's time to master an image-editing program so you can take your pictures even further.

Exposure is Everything
Once you're composed your image, three elements have the greatest impact on your finished pictureexposure, shutter speed and aperture. As with film cameras, changing shutter speed and aperture affect your results. Slow shutter speeds blur moving objects, while fast ones will "freeze" them. Aperture affects depth of field, or how much of the depth of the scene is in focus. Shutter speed and aperture theoretically define exposure, since how long the shutter opens, and at what aperture, determines the amount of light that enters the camera. But since you can let more or less light in when you take the picture, exposure is still something we need to consider separately from shutter speed and aperture. Digital cameras offer a number of advantages over film, but in some areas they still don't perform as well as film cameras. Exposure is one of them. Digital cameras are not as sensitive to light as some high-speed film, and therefore produce much noisier images for a given amount of available light. They also have a narrower dynamic range; that is, they can't capture the bright and dark areas of a scene as well as film. Film has limitations, but it has a wider latitude than digital devices.  Here are some tips on getting the correct exposure with a digital camera. Note that not all digital cameras have all the features described here. Some inexpensive models offer limited or no exposure controls. For this reason, particularly when taking outdoor photos, it's important to consider exposure during composition. Don't take pictures with the sun behind your subject, for example, unless you can use "fill flash" or manual exposure lock to correctly expose the subject, otherwise the sun will dominate the picture, and your subject will be in the dark.

Manual Exposure Lock
All cameras with automatic exposure must 'guess' at the correct settings for a given picture. In its simplest form, this means measuring the amount of light entering the lens, and then letting in enough light to produce a correct exposure. Cameras may also let you choose between several exposure modes, add exposure compensation, or manually choose the aperture, shutter, and film speed settings. Many digital cameras provide a manual exposure lock. This means you can point the camera at your subject (putting it in the center of the frame), depress the shutter button halfway, and the camera will measure the light, choose aperture and shutter speed, and then lock these settings. As long as you keep the shutter depressed halfway, you can then reframe your picture with those settings. Once the shutter is released, the camera returns to automatic mode. http//roxio.sfi0.com/index.cgi/roxt-figure1-w-009
demonstrates the use of manual exposure lock. All three pictures were taken using a Canon G1, but you would see similar results with other cameras. The picture on the top was taken in bright sunlight (with the sun behind the tree) by simply pointing the camera and taking the photo. The second photo was taken by manually locking the exposure setting --first pointing the camera at a shadow area in the scene, and then pointing the camera back at the subject. As you can see, in this particular case we¹ve gone too far in the other direction; the image is too dark (though the sky is nice and blue!). The bottom picture uses exposure compensation to produce a better image, as we¹ll discuss below.

Exposure compensation
Cameras that offer exposure compensation let you override the settings that the camera has chosen. This lets you, in a sense, add or subtract light from the scene. Usually the adjustment is measured in stops, and it¹s fairly common to be able to add or subtract up to two full stops. In our example above, the exposure has been adjusted down a couple of stops.(For the technically inclined, the word stop comes from F-stop, which is a measure of the aperture opening and is calculated by dividing lens focal length by the aperture diameter. Increasing the f-stop by one, halves the light entering the camera. Decreasing it by one doubles the amount of light entering the camera.
http//roxio.sfi0.com/index.cgi/roxt-figure2-w-009 shows the same scene taken in auto mode (center) and with adjustments; two stops down (top) and two stops up (bottom) Clearly, the middle picture is the best overall exposure of the three (and also happens to be the automatic setting). However, look at http//roxio.sfi0.com/index.cgi/roxt-figure3-w-009
The flowers on the left are overexposed, while those on the right look good. Yet these two blowups come from the automatic (Figure 2 center) and underexposed (Figure 2 bottom) photos respectively. Being able to manually override the exposure settings can help you get much better pictures. But many cameras offer other ways to improve the quality of the pictures that you take.

Exposure Modes
Better digital cameras offer multiple exposure modes that assist the automatic exposure system in making correct decisions. For example, Nikon¹s new cameras feature many modes, including party/indoor, backlight and portrait. By choosing the appropriate mode you help the camera better determine what¹s going on. For example, in backlight mode the camera looks at the scene and finds the darker regions (the person who is backlit) and then exposes for that region, rather than averaging the entire scene. These settings can be pretty intelligent, adjusting exposure, flash and white balance (see below) all at once. If you¹re lucky enough to have these modes on your camera, use them!

Flash adjustment
Some cameras also let you adjust the power of the flash, which can be very useful when taking close-ups. http//roxio.sfi0.com/index.cgi/roxt-figure4-w-009 shows the same scene taken with the flash power set 2 steps down (left), auto flash (center), and 2 steps up (top). In this case, a half a step down might have been the perfect exposure, the automatic version is a little bright

White Balance Setting
Many cameras also provide a white balance adjustment. This is provided because the color of light is not consistent; sunlight has a different color temperature to flourescent and incandescent lamps. Our eyes usually adapt to this, but film and digital cameras don't; they record the image as it is. So we end up with orangey pictures when we take photographs inside at night, or bluish pictures in the snow. To compensate for this, the White Balance setting lets you tell the camera what the light color is. Some cameras just provide automatic settings for indoors, sunny and overcast. Others let you manually set the white balance by pointing the camera at a white subject (a piece of paper works well) and pushing a button to tell the camera to measure the color. That said, I often like the slightly orange results you get when taking pictures inside, they look warm.

Review Your Work & Bracket
Digital cameras have a couple of special advantages film can't match. First, you can review the picture you just took on the LCD screen and see the results immediately. LCD screens aren't perfect, and it's often hard to judge focus and contrast on the small screen, but you can avoid gross errors and get correct exposures. Digital cameras also make it possible to bracket; that is, take multiple pictures of the same image with slightly different exposure settings. This is a trick professionals use (why do you think they use so much film?!). Now you can do it too, and just keep the best pics when you get home!

One Final Tip
Once you start experimenting with these controls you'll find that you produce much better results. But, here's an important lesson to rememberif you change your settings, don't forget to change them back after you're done. Otherwise you may end up doing what I did once--taking thirty images with the white balance set to indoors when I was actually outside. I had a lot of very blue pictures!