let me preface this by saying I no pretty much nothing about photography other than point and shoot. 2nd i have a digital basic camera and thirdly I would like to actually use my camera more so I have come here for a couple questions.


i know i could easily google this info but what they hey I havnt been on this forum in a while and I thought I would support it. So i have a Canon Digital Elf..i know it is THE camera all photographers dream of owning someday. (that was sarcasm, for those straight shooters). I have the option of changing my exposure from -2, -1, 0, 1, and 2. I was wondering what situations would I use the different types of exposures? Also shutter speed, is a slow shutter speed for when I want to capture an object with everything else being blurry?

thank you for any information

~theface

Well you need to change the exposure if you want darker or lighter than that camera automatics would make, think what you want from the picture before you take it, take one shot and if its too light or dark then adjust(if you shoot alot you will learn when you need to change it without trying it first). There is no shutter in point and shoot cameras the sensor just goes on when you take a pic and basicly it works like it would have a shutter, but doing it like that you cant make that short exposures. Enyways if you want to blur the background you need a dslr and lens with long focal lenght or small f-number or then focus really close. You can get some background blur with point and shoot allso, but basicly only when using the macro function(allso put the optical zoom to max, but digital zoom only fucks up the image quality and wont help on this). Its because sensor is so small in point and shoot that focal lenght needs to be really short to get same point of view than with dslr. background blur has nothing to do with exposure time

This post was edited by Tomes on Feb 19 2009 05:43am