In previous Beginners Photography articles I talked about the Automatic Modes available on your Digital SLR. In truth there will be times when the Automatic Modes are useful, but you want more control over your image. This is where Creative Auto mode comes into the equation. Creative Auto doesn't give you total control, but enough to be able to adjust elements such as brightness, flash, background sharpness and drive modes.
The setting can be found on your Shooting Mode dial as the letters 'CA'. Changes are made via settings on the LCD display. These, in turn, are adjusted by using the camera's Multi-Controller (to highlight the function to be changed) and the Quick Control/Main dial (to scan through the options). Below are the options available from the LCD screen.
Flash - You can set flash to Auto, On or Off. In Auto, flash will fire whenever the camera determines there is insufficient light for the exposure. To fire the flash for every shot (e.g. when filling in shadows) choose the On option. The Off setting will prevent flash from firing.
Background Sharpness - This allows the camera to select a larger or smaller aperture to influence the depth of field. A small aperture (such as f/22) results in greater background sharpness. Moving the index point to the right gives you a sharper background, and to the left produces more blur.
Exposure - If pictures are lighter or darker than you want, select exposure setting. Moving the point to the right increases exposure, producing a lighter image. To the left exposure is reduced with a resultant darker image.
Picture Style - Choosing this setting allows you to affect the sharpness, contrast and colour saturation levels. Four Picture Styles are available. Standard is most commonly used to achieve a sharp, vivid picture. Portrait produces smoother skin tones. Landscape produces vivid blues and greens. Monochrome can be chosen to shoot in black and white.
Quality - This setting allows you to adjust the quality of the JPEG image, or to choose RAW format for ultimate quality. RAW produces larger files, but allows for intense levels of adjustments in post-production. You can refer to my previous Beginners Photography articles related to Photoshop post-production techniques.
Drive Mode - This allows for three options. With Single-shooting, the camera takes one single shot when the shutter has been fully depressed. In Low-speed continuous shooting (sports or action shots) the camera continually takes photos until you release the button. The rate of photographs taken will vary from camera to camera (a Canon50D, for example, takes around three frames per second in this mode). In Self-Timer the shot fires around ten seconds after the shutter is depressed. This allows you to get in the picture yourself, but is also useful for Landscape or Macro work, in conjunction with a tripod, to prevent camera shake.
So hopefully you can see that, once you are using Creative Mode, you are beginning to assert some influence on the resulting image - rather than using full Automatic Mode and allowing the camera to dictate. For beginners, photography can be about trial and error, and the beauty of digital is that it doesn't matter how many attempts you need to get it right - any images that are not up to standard can be deleted later.
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