Absolute Beginner Digital Camera Tips & Tricks

A number of you wrote to say how much you enjoyed the digital camera advanced tricks post I wrote last week, but a few offered a complaint: What about tips for absolute beginners who can barely figure out how to turn on the flash, much less do a long exposure and muck with the white balance. I talked to my pals at Digital Photography School, and together we came up a good list of beginner photography topics. (All of these link to DPS pages for extra detail, so click away.)

Here's how to get the most out of your digital camera.

• Learn the basic digital camera modes. Master the icons on the dial and you're off to a good start.
• Learn how to hold your camera. Camera shake: BAD!
• Learn how to compose a shot by understanding the rule of thirds. The sample photos in the pictures on the linked page speak volumes.
  
• Understand the "three elements of the exposure triangle": ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. ISO (light sensitivity) and its effect on your photos is easy to understand. Shutter speed is fairly simple (faster = less motion). And aperture (which affects focus in interesting ways) is pretty darn complex. Start putting the three together and you can get confused quickly. Start slowly by focusing on one at a time, experimenting with different shots at different ISO or shutter speed settings.
• Learn how to tell your camera to control these settings. You can only do so much with a point-and-shoot camera.
• Muck with the white balance. Hey, I just said that was an advanced topic, didn't I? Well, dealing with white balance is actually pretty simple, and it allows you to tweak your camera to account for the kind of light you're working under in order to get realistic color. It gets fun when you intentionally change the white balance to get odd colors on purpose.

OK, you made it this far, you're probably a better photographer already. Now you need to practice. Luckily, camera memory is cheap and can be reused thousands of times. So get out there and shoot some photos and you'll soon find your skills improving markedly.

Special thanks to Digital Photography School for collaborating on this list for Yahoo! Tech readers.