More and more people are buying digital cameras, from point-and-shoots to the high-end DSLRs. Whether you have a digital camera just to record the moments or shoot professional and artistic photographs, maximizing your digital camera's features is paramount. It's this simple: you paid for your camera's features, so use them and get fantastic photos along the way!
Study the manual. More often than not, we get too excited with our new digital camera that we neglect to browse through the manual. In fact, merely browsing through will not do it - spend the time to read each and every page from cover to cover. By the time you are comfortable with the camera and are churning majestic pictures one after another, you'll thank the time you spent with the manual.
Get familiar with the switches, knobs, and buttons. Digital cameras, especially DSLRs, feature a plethora of them. Make sure you know where they are and what they do, so you won't go fumbling for the controls right at the moment when you want to take a picture.
Experiment with the various settings. Read: don't settle for the automatic setting of your camera. Use the manual override, which lets you manually focus your photos and set the shutter speed, aperture, white balance, exposure, flash, and more.
Choose the resolution best for your photos. Simply speaking, pictures with higher resolutions sport a greater degree of detail, but take up too much memory space. If you're shooting an event just to document it (and thus you need a lot of shots), set your digital camera to take low-res pictures. If you're going for high-quality, artistic, and professional photos, high-res should be your choice.
It's all about memory. Memory card, that is. Because there's no film inside a digital camera, the photos are stored electronically in a tiny wafer called the memory card. It's a good idea to buy and bring along an extra memory card in case you have to take a lot of photos and you can't download them into your computer until much later.
Acquaint yourself with transferring photos to your computer. Master the software that comes with the camera. If you like editing your photos ("post-processing") and jazz them up, you'll need to study photo-editing software such as Photoshop.
Get a tripod. If you like taking self-portraits or pictures in dim light, a tripod will be your best friend. It doesn't have to be the sturdier, expensive ones, especially if you just own a point-and-shoot.
Take further photography studies. Self-study is not bad, but you can also enroll in photography workshops and read photography books. It will set you back some bucks but it will be worth it. The Internet is also teeming with resource material, and often for free.
Go back to film. Shooting photos on film is a lot more difficult than digital photography, as it forces you to master the ‘manual' and forego the automatic. Also, you can't be that trigger-happy because you've got film to buy. All of these make for a better training, and once you return to your digital camera, you'll find that it's now child's play.
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