Ok, I thought I would share some of the hard lessons I have learned about making your little consumer digital camera actually take good pictures. I have a little Canon A40 that has a 2 megapixel sensor. Not anything special. I have had it for about three and a half years, and have learned to push it to it’s limits, which I think are surprisingly few considering the age and cost. So, here are the things that I do to get the best out of my little pony of a camera:

• Use the lowest ISO I can. I pretty much keep it at 50 at all times. This will give you the most detail, and clarity of picture, when your hands are stable enough not to blur the subject. It used to be that people did not use ISO 50 film in their cameras because the likelihood of blur is so high. Well, today we can take as many pictures as we want, and toss the blurry ones without thinking about the cost. So I just keep it at 50 as much as I can, hold real still, and take lots of pictures. Those that turn out can look great. The other thing about higher ISO on digital cameras is that you get tons of noise (digital equivalent of grain) as soon as you take it up to 200, a common speed for normal photos in film cameras. The exception is the dSLRs, which have better sensitivity without noise, but some still hit the usability ceiling at ISO 800. The dSLRs also have far more pixels so prints at smaller sizes can hide some of that noise more easily than our little consumer cameras.
• Get to know my white balance settings. The automatic WB does not always do the best job in every situation, and there are usually several options. Both incandescent and florescent lighting indoors tend to look awful when you use auto WB. The tungsten setting is better usually for incandescent, and many cameras have a florescent option as well. Use them and see what they look like. If you are familiar with your WB settings, you drastically improve your ability to take pictures that look closer to real color.
• Use my zoom for normal shots. When your camera is fully zoomed out, it is at wide angle and will cause some distortion in your subject. If you are taking portraits, you definitely will want to step back and zoom in so that your kid, or spouse, does not look like a chipmunk.
• Use my program mode. Depending on your camera, you will have a program mode that lets you use either aperture priority, or shutter priority. This means you can set one or the other and the rest will be automatic. I have mine set to a constant ISO, and I can adjust the shutter to get more or less exposure. This makes it easy to bracket shots and pick the one that has the best exposure. Someday I also hope it will allow me to create HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos, but that is another post.
• I get close. Most subjects look better if you can make them intimate. One of the great things about photography is that it allows you to capture scenes or subjects that we are not used to seeing. In our busy busy world we usually do not take the time to inspect the things around us. A photo can put you there immediately, and draw your eye to a special feature. Not everything looks better up close (the unshaven cheek of a man, for instance, looks pretty nasty).
• I take lots of pictures. This is the biggest difference between film and digital. Unless photography is your career, or you have plenty of expendable income, you think about the cost of each film image you take, and the resulting prints. for a long time this paralyzed me, since I was not a photographer, nor did I have expendable income. We had rolls of film that had been in the camera for an entire year. So once I had a digital camera, I took pictures all the time. I still run into memory limits on my card, but it is not a cost issue. Once I felt freedom to capture everything, I was able to hone my 1337 s|{1||z.

Well, I think that is about it. I love taking pictures, and my little camera has done pretty well for me. I miss my SLR, but that can wait. I love my Canon A40 too.