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ost people nowadays own a digital camera or digicam for short. Fast development of materials and components for making these cameras are becoming cheaper by the minute, manufacturing costs are lower thus digicams become much affordable.

Consumer models of these digital cameras already delve into the semi-professional range, although still being labeled as a generic point-and-shoot.

Here are some primer (basic introductions) to effectively choose and use a digital camera.

TIP 1. Buy the Right Camera

Don’t just settle for the “Auto” mode, it can’t be the end-all solution to taking better pictures. Most modern digicams have more than a point-and-shoot function. It now comes standard for these cameras to have numerous shooting modes and manual options. These shooting modes take into consideration all the situations you might find yourself in when taking pictures.

TIP 2. Long Zooms don’t mean Squat

Not unless your digicam has a carl-zeiss lens or lens attachment option, don’t be swayed by the built-in long zooms of some of these digital cameras. It does look cool to have longer zooms, but their main boon is that these long zoom cameras often collect less light thus forcing its shutter to open for a much longer time. Moving or Shaking the camera while taking a picture at long zoom results in blurred pictures. Shorter zoom digicams don’t have this problem.

TIP 3. The Flash

If you have money to spare, and don’t mind a bulkier camera, then get a digicam with a hot shoe. A hot shoe is a flash attachment slot which allows you to fit an external flash that uses its own power source and minimizes the red eye effect. Some may argue that theres always photoshop to cure the red eye, but stronger flash makes vibrant and less washed-out pictures when you know how to use it.

TIP 4. More Flash

If you happen to want smaller cameras without the hot shoe, just make sure that the model you choose has its flash as far away as possible from the lens, This gets rid of the glaring and red eye. New cameras already have a cure for the dreaded red eye, see the cameras that flash a few times before getting the picture, these are the cameras that have a pre-flash function to condition your eyes and open the iris larger before it takes the picture to get rid of the red eye.

TIP 5. Spare Energy

Prioritize the purchase of spare batteries. Also, always charge your spare ones, remember that digital cameras belong to the power-hungry gadgets/devices list.

TIP 6. Memory

Use high capacity memory cards. It is now more affordable to purchase these high capacity cards as compared in the past. It is always good to just carry for example a 4 Gigabyte SD card than carrying a bunch of eight 512 Mb ones, reloading your camera with memory cards takes the advantage off of reloading the same way as the heydays of film cameras.

TIP 7. Why buy a 6 Megapixel Camera when You’ll just use 3?

Getting high capactiy memory cards means you don’t need to worry about the amount of pictures you’re going to shoot. Always set your camera to the maximum resolution. It’s simply foolish to think of getting more photos as possible by shooting at a lower resolution. A 6 Megapixel Camera at maximum resolution makes better poster prints than a 6 Megapixel Camera set at 640×480 resolution.

TIP 8. These signal Graphs are not from E.T.

A commonly ignored feature of most modern digicams is it’s histogram function. Learn to read it. It shows you if your shot is either under or over-exposed. A simple way to understand it is that if the shot is under-exposed the histogram shows a curve skewed to the left, while an over-exposed shot skews to the right.

TIP 9. Bag it

It’s convenient to have one, so why not get one? It allows you space to carry extra batteries, memory cards, AV Cables, a charger or an external storage device. Choose a water-proof ones for the rainy days. Carrying some Ziploc could prove useful at these times.

TIP 10. Shooting Tip

Your camera sensor isn’t that too advanced yet. It can’t record all the light the human eyes can see. If you have a bright background and a dark foreground, the digicam will compromise by either getting the foreground exposure right or the backgrounds exposure. It normally can’t do both. My personal tip is to use pre-focus. Most digital cameras have a pre-focus that has an exposure lock feature accessed through half-pressing the shoot button before actually taking the picture by fully-pressing the shoot button. In bright background dark foreground instances, lock the exposure to the background then move the target to the foreground and use a forced-flash. This technique can be summarized as “fill-flashing” or “flash-fill”.

TIP 11. The Strength

Learn your Cameras limitations, some take mediocre standard shots but takes exemplary macro shots. Most digital cameras with built-in flash can’t reach that far so don’t shoot zoomed images at low lighting conditions.

TIP 12. The Strength of Your Arms

A normal human being cannot hold a camera longer than 1/30th of a second without shaking, that’s why it’s always a good option to put it on a flat surface or anchoring it when taking pictures. You might also want to look for an extra feature of image stabilizer, but the easiest solution is to invest on a tripod.

With this simple tips, I hope I turned you into an informed consumer. Now go buy that digital camera you’ve been lusting for.