If you have an SLR camera, whether it be digital or not, you have the option to choose different settings with which to take your photos. This gives you much more control over how your pictures turn out.

However, a lot of people buy a good camera and then just use it on the automatic setting so that the camera itself decides what speed and what aperture the lens will fire at. It may also choose the ISO setting for that shot. It is very easy just to keep using the camera on the automatic setting and you can get perfectly good shots by doing this, but if you want to be a bit more inventive with your photography then you need to take that step to learn how to use the manual settings.

So, if you want more control over how your pictures turn out, and you want your pictures to look more professional, then try experimenting with the different settings. The best idea is to actually read the instruction booklet that came with your camera but some of those are hundreds of pages long and realistically how many people do that?

So, there are some different settings on your camera – you may have the picture icons which will customise the kind of settings that you might use – for example if you choose the sport option you will get a faster shutter speed at the expense of depth of field and it may also automatically turn on the multi-frame option.

Otherwise you may have the following setttings:

Av – Aperture priority – where you choose the width of the aperture (this controls the depth of field)
Tv – Shutter priority – where you set the shutter speed and the camera chooses the aperture
M – Completely manual – you choose both settings which means that you need to make sure that you have the right combination that will let enough light in for the picture to be correctly exposed.

I will explain the first two options below.