Modern cameras have a whole lot of features and using the right feature at the right time can make the difference you seek. Many of the features are hidden away in menus and configuration keys, so much so that you even forget they even exist. It is seldom that you use more than 4 or 5 features of your camera.

Read the instruction manual and make yourself familiar with the capabilities of your camera. Features such as exposure control, flash control, ISO setting, white balance etc are basic but can give you good options to experiment with and hone your creative skills.

Having the manual handy makes it very easy for you to make the right settings under a wide range of shooting conditions as the need arises. Not only will you become familiar with the controls of your camera, you will also find yourself using more and more features of your camera. Get what you paid for!

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I have often seen people taking point and shoot snaps without much thought into exposure. A little bit of experimenting with exposure, and you can dramatically improve your snaps.

Simply put, exposure is ensuring your photos have the right amount of colour, brightness and contrast. This ensure that the primary subject(s) in your pictures are neither too dark nor too bright. While its very easy to ‘photoshop’ your images to get unrealistic colour, it takes a good camera and a better photographer to capture colours as close to reality as possible.

Conditions like bright direct sunlight, snow, sea water, night photography, sunrise and sunsets etc. provide difficult shooting conditions. Some cameras have settings that let you preselect an environmental condition, others allow you to manually increase or decrease the exposure.

Most automatic cameras have one or more small highlighted blocks (usually a small red rectangle) that comes on screen/ viewfinder when you press the shutter release button. This block is also used to read the image information and make calculations required to ensure correct exposure.Often these also have a half-lock position that is used to lock the exposure information and then compose your focus to do a full click. Some of the expensive cameras also have a dedicated exposure lock button.

The simplest thing one can do is to ensure that this block collects information about the small area that you really want to show lighting and colours correctly for.  Remember, this is not necessarily what you want to focus on!

In the example of the sunset here, the exposure was set to reflect the setting sun – This helped in masking the trees (which were actually visible to the normal eye when the shot was taken). Thus the colours of the sunset and the brightness of the sun itself were captured accurately.

In the example of the sunflower, a flash and exposure compensation setting was used to override the harsh direct sunlight entering the camera. As you can see here, the background is completely white (overexposed) while the colours of the sunflower have been captured accurately.

It is possible to capture almost the entire image in its best form without really compromising on the exposure of the darker and brighter elements. HDR (High Dynamic Range imaging) is one such method fast catching up. We shall save that for sometime later.

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