Читать книгу Digital Photography For Dummies - King Julie Adair, Julie Adair King - Страница 33

How much artistic control a camera offers is closely tied to its choice of shooting modes, sometimes called exposure modes. Usually, shooting modes are represented by letters and symbols like the ones you see on the camera dial in Figure 1-12.

FIGURE 1-12: The various symbols on this camera dial represent shooting modes.

If you fall into the “not that into photography” category, you'd be happy with a basic camera that offers only automatic shooting modes. Along with standard Auto mode, this level of camera typically also offers scene modes, which automatically dial in settings deemed most appropriate for specific types of photos, such as portraits and sports shots. (These modes are usually represented by symbols such as the ones you see in the figure — the woman’s head represents portrait mode, for example.)

The problem with scene modes is that they're geared to producing a certain effect, and you can't deviate from that result. For example, in Sports scene mode, the camera can only freeze action; you don't have the option of blurring motion. And in Portrait mode, the camera blurs the background as much as it can. That's fine for most portraits, but you may have times when you want the background to be as sharp as your portrait subject.

For more photographic control, I suggest a camera that offers these three shooting modes: shutter-priority autoexposure, aperture-priority autoexposure, and manual exposure. These modes enable you to precisely control not only exposure, but also all the other characteristics I discuss at the start of this chapter and more. Many cameras also offer P mode, which stands for programmed autoexposure. This mode typically enables you to choose from different combinations of exposure settings, so it’s a step above full auto. But it's not quite as convenient as the the other three modes I just mentioned when you know exactly what settings you want to use. Check out the first part of Chapter 2 for specifics on these and other common shooting modes.