What's on Camera

The first time you buy a camera, it is strongly advised that you read the manual book given. Otherwise you may not make full use of your camera. Whats written in the manual are made with purpose, and to make sure that you use your camera correctly thus avoiding any damage on it. If you refuse to read from the book, you may search the manual in the internet as many manufacturers have prepared it online.

Lets have a look on a very simple DSLR camera from Nikon, D3100.

Basically all cameras will have same look as this camera except for the professional one because they are getting a bit complicated. As you can see the name of the buttons above here, so they have a different functions. But I want to talk only about Shooting Mode Dial and Main Control Wheel buttons. 

Shooting Mode Dial

This is the view from above. M,A,S,P, they are buttons for Manual Mode, Aperture Mode, Shutter Speed Mode and Program respectively. I have talked about aperture and shutter speed in previous entry, so now it is important for you to know how to use them. When you choose  'A' you will only control  the aperture and the rest will be done by the camera automatically. Same thing goes to the 'S' button, meaning that you will only control the shutter speed. But what about M ? As it stands for Manual mode, you have to control all the settings from A to Z, and that includes controlling aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance and other things. It looks difficult but this is the strong reason why you buy a DSLR camera instead of compact camera. Not forget to mention, Program mode or 'P' is just like auto mode, where everything is automatically controlled by the camera.Main Control Wheel

The control wheel is used to adjust the setting on the camera. Let say you choose to use Aperture mode, so use the wheel to adjust how big the aperture you want. You can see in the image on left, where the yellow circle and the number 'F5.6' are showing current aperture size. In case you forgot what aperture refers to, click here.

When using shutter speed mode, the same thing happens where you adjust shutter speed using this wheel. As you can see below those numbers, there is an indicator which has positive and negative signs. While adjusting the Main Control Wheel, refer to the indicator to make sure that you make indicator goes around the point 0. (Positive = overexpose , Negative = underexpose)

For other buttons and their functions, please read the given manual booklet because i am not going to explain that as they are not as important as these two(Shooting Mode Dial and Main Control Wheel buttons) when shooting photos.