Are you a digital neophyte, too scared to turn off the Auto mode on your fancy new digital camera? Think of me as your online support group. I want you to start exploring what your camera can really do. And for success, what you know is a whole lot more important than which specific camera you're gripping. Let's start by thinking about digital SLRs (D-SLRs), an increasingly popular type of digital camera.

These tips originally appeared on Gearlog.com. Check out Control Your D-SLR for more.

Lenses

If you've had your D-SLR for any length of time, you've probably pondered buying a new lens—and been floored by the choices available. A friend of mine who worked his way through college selling men's suits says he used to bring the suits out one at a time because with too many choices people would buy nothing at all. It's that way with lenses. It would be easier if there were fewer to choose from.

So, what's it going to be? I'm not going to steer you toward a specific brand or size, but I do have some advice to help you narrow your choices. Let's start with prime lenses versus zoom lenses. A prime lens has a single focal length; a 50mm lens is a prime lens, for example, while a 17-to-55mm lens is a zoom lens.

Why would anyone ever buy a prime 50mm when that 17-to-55mm or 18-to-125mm zoom covers its function and a lot more? It's simple. Prime lenses are less complex, make fewer compromises, and are more often than not faster and sharper.

Faster means that the lens aperture can open wider (indicated by a lower-numbered f-stop—I'll get to that in a bit), allowing more light to hit the sensor. Simply put, fast lenses are better when the light is low or the action is fast. Faster lenses also have a shallower depth of field, as it's called, meaning that the portion of your shot that appears sharp in the image will be smaller. If you're new at this, that might sound bad. Trust me here, shallow depth of field is mostly considered a good thing—it draws attention to what you want the viewer to see. You'll also appreciate that prime lenses weigh less—especially if you'll be carrying one all day.

Zoom lenses are more versatile. A lens that can cover 18-to-125mm scratches a lot of itches. In most cases, the greater the range between longest and shortest focal length, the slower the lens (and the higher the lowest usable f-stop) will be. You're almost always giving up lens speed with a zoom. You need a long lens (telephoto) to shoot photos of birds or sports events under varying light conditions. In short, lens speed is often the difference between a good or great shot and no shot at all.

Then again, in some brightly lit situations you might not care. Bright sunlight was the only way I could get this football photo with my cheap and slow zoom. All the professional photographers at that UConn/Army game were carrying much faster glass. They don't wait for perfect weather to shoot as I did. I had a terrible case of lens envy. Size matters.

Nowadays many lenses and some camera bodies come with built-in optical stabilization, which buys back some of what a slow lens costs you. Stabilization keeps unsteady hands from ruining shots, but it won't stop the action you're shooting! It wouldn't have saved my football shot on an overcast day. When a slow lens forces a slow shutter speed, the action will be blurry—period.

Your decision about which type of lens to get depends on your needs. The good news is when you figure out what you need, there is undoubtedly already a lens that can do it.

—Next: Three Fundamentals >

Three Fundamentals

I suspect most people are frozen with the photographic equivalent of training wheels because they don't know what a few camera adjustments can yield. Let me help. There are really only three adjustments to think about (I'm assuming your shots are already in focus and you don't want to change that): shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Each of them acts to control the light or the effect of the light that reaches your camera's sensor.

Shutter Speed
Shutter speed refers to how long your camera's sensor is exposed to light. When your camera's shutter speed reads "100," the shutter is open for 1/100th of a second. At "50," it's open twice as long, 1/50th second. With shutter speed, lower is slower.

When your shutter is slower, or open longer, more light will reach the sensor. Slow the shutter speed and your shots will be brighter. Of course there's also a downside. If you're shooting in Auto mode, you've probably already seen this and cursed at your camera: Say you're indoors, somewhere without a lot of light. Your camera wants you to see the shot, so it slows the shutter to brighten things up—and your shot gets blurry. Most blurry shots aren't out of focus; they're the product of a slow shutter speed showing motion—like small lens movements as you hold the camera.

A very fast shutter speed captures a very brief moment: It can stop motion. A slower shutter speed allows that motion to be seen. Faster shutter speeds almost always bring sharper pictures. Unfortunately your camera's shutter can be set so fast that there won't be enough light to take the shot.

Getting confused? Stick with me. I know I've put you between a rock and a hard place. Too fast, dark. Too slow, blurry. Luckily there's a simple rule of thumb. Under most circumstances you can slow the shutter to 1/lens focal length. So, if you have a 300mm lens, that means you must shoot at least 1/300th of a second. For a 50mm lens it's at least 1/50th. If your camera has a multiplier for focal length (most D-SLRs do), you need to factor that in, too. My camera has a 1.6 multiplier (you'll find yours in your camera manual); 300mm times 1.6 means I need approximately 1/500th second.

Take your camera and put it in shutter priority mode (so you can adjust the shutter speed while the camera controls everything else), point at anything and take a bunch of shots while adjusting the shutter speed. Don't look for artistry, just look to see how you've changed the shot. I promise, once it sinks in, you'll be doing shutter speed by instinct.

Aperture
The aperture controls the volume of light that hits your D-SLR's sensor by reducing the area through which light flows. It works a lot like your eye's pupil. Unfortunately some mathematical show-off decided to measure it with f-stops. The f-stop may be the most confusing concept in photography. It's a real number, and it does make sense mathematically, but it could have been presented in a way that was clearer and easier to understand.

Sit down for this. F/2.8 is the f-stop between f/2 and f/4. It gets worse: f/11 is the midpoint between f/8 and f/16. Here's a progression of f-stops available on most lenses: 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16. Every time you move up by an f-stop, you halve the light going to the lens.

The lower the lowest f-stop your lens can use, the "faster" your camera is. Photographers are constantly lusting after faster lenses. The 30mm f/1.4 lens is my absolute favorite. Luckily, you can be a great photographer without remembering exactly which f-stop fits where. But you do need to remember that each lens has a limit over how wide or narrow the aperture can be set. The higher the number, the less light you'll get. Lenses vary. Fast lenses are always more expensive, and are usually worth it! In most cases those guys on the sidelines at the football game are using lenses that can operate nicely on 25 percent of the light the lens that came with your camera needs.

If all the aperture did was control the light to the sensor, it would be a big deal. But the aperture does something more—and once you understand it your photos will be changed forever. The higher the f-stop, the larger the in-focus area of your shot. If you need a large area in focus, choose a higher f-stop number. For shallower depth of field, choose a lower f-stop. Large apertures (represented as lower-numbered f-stops) are often used for portrait work, leaving the subject sharp and the background pleasingly blurry.

These two photos were taken at f/1.4 and f/16, respectively. But try the experiment yourself: Put your camera in its aperture priority mode (it's Av on my Canon) and shoot the same object with different apertures. In aperture priority the camera will attempt to compensate by automatically adjusting shutter speed to match your chosen aperture.

ISO
Setting your camera correctly for a shot begins with making sure sufficient light passes through the lens to the sensor. Within reason, you can control how much or how little light gets there with your aperture and shutter controls. Those are physical controls: The aperture is the opening through which light passes into the camera, and the shutter speed controls how long light can pass. ISO is a little more ethereal, because it's a totally electronic parameter. When I was a kid, film sensitivity (more commonly called film speed) was measured by an ASA number. When the International Organization for Standardization got involved, the name was changed. Name aside, the scale itself remained the same. I mention this in case you find an ancient but working light meter. ASA equals ISO. Have no fear, the meter is still good.

Of course, increasing the ISO doesn't come free—there's always a price to pay. With ISO on a D-SLR, the price is noise, or distortion. Turning up the ISO brightens your photo and amplifies noise from your camera's sensor. This noise fades into the background when amplification isn't necessary. My opinion is that if higher ISO buys you a faster shutter speed or the narrower aperture you're looking for, the extra noise is worth it. I'm not shy about shooting at ISO 1600. Sharpness is more important than noise, and I'm willing to make that trade. I understand my shot will be different in a way that's not always good.

Price does matter here. Cameras with larger sensors usually have lower noise figures. To know how ISO will affect shots with your camera, shoot the same object under the same light so you can compare. I've done this with the water bottle sitting on my desk under a halogen light, and uncorrected in any way. (This is not artistry.) The first was shot at ISO 200, the second at ISO 1600.

Because these pictures are full size, they're the proverbial worst-case scenario. Seen on a screen or printed in a smaller size, the noise will be less noticeable.

—Next: Quality Control & Raw >

Quality Control

Now that you've got the fundamentals down—or at least on their way—there are a few more basic issues to consider. For starters, if you're using the default file format to save your photos, you're starting off with less photo than your camera took in. Then we need to have a little talk about your camera's cruddy built-in flash. Finally, you'll fix many an Auto mode problem by learning about white balance.

Raw

By default most cameras save photos as JPEG files, because RAW-format files aren't always handled natively by PCs. Imagine shooting photos and not being able to view them! I'm here to convince you that RAW is the way to go. Let me make my case.

When a PC used to come with kilobytes of RAM, megabytes of hard drive storage, and a CPU clocked in the dozens of megahertz, large files were daunting. Today? Not so much. Still, saving JPEG files can typically cut an image file's size by 90 percent—not an insignificant number. That's because JPEG is a lossy compression method. A JPEG image is different from the original. You might not see that difference in a 4-by-6-inch snapshot, but you will if you enlarge your photo or splash it across a widescreen monitor.

(Attention, purists: I'm about to simplify. Give me a little slack.) At its core, a JPEG file takes advantage of your eye's reliance on brightness, sacrificing color detail you shouldn't notice. It also cheats in areas of sharp contrast, corners, and straight edges. The bottom line is that it does what it's supposed to do: save space. It just does it at a cost.

A RAW file contains the image that goes into the JPEG before processing. Lines are clean. Contrast is maintained. It's as close to what the sensor saw as possible. It is virtually lossless. That sounds too good to be true—and it is. RAW's simplicity makes it more complex for you. Every manufacturer has its own idea of what a RAW file should look like. Wikipedia notes that "several major camera manufacturers, including Nikon, Canon and Sony, encrypt portions of the file in an attempt to prevent third-party tools from accessing them." To play with RAW files you might be forced to install a codec that lets your software make sense of the RAW files—if your software can deal with RAW files at all!

So why would I recommend it? Easy: RAW gives you more creative latitude. Because you can adjust color temperature, tweak levels, and crop before doing anything else, your adjustments will produce a cleaner output that's truer to your original. Photographers can even compensate for shooting conditions by manipulating a RAW file, with little bad effect. If you need to "push" an exposure, doing it with the RAW file will leave you happiest.

Yes, you will have massively larger files that will tax your computer's CPU, strain your camera's ability to write data to your memory card, and fill your hard drive. Yes, you will have to check carefully whether your photo manipulation programs will handle it. But as you learn to love your photos more, you'll want only the best for them and you. And RAW is best when quality counts.

Built-In Flash
Is the built-in flash on your D-SLR (or any camera, really) awful? If you don't think so, I have two words for you: red-eye! It's the bane of amateur photographers worldwide. The pros don't have the problem, because they move the flash away from the lens so that a bolt of light doesn't illuminate the very red back of your eyeball. But red-eye is only one of the many bad features built into every on-camera flash.

The light from on-camera flash units falls off very quickly. So if your subjects are far from a wall, the photo's background is poorly lit and looks awful. If they're close to the wall, the single source of light produces harsh shadows and looks awful. Awful is built in with an on-camera flash!

If you're shooting in Auto, there is one situation where you should be using the on-camera flash—and of course, it's where you're not using it. A camera's flash can be a life-saver outside in bright sunlight. That's my dad in the photo above. Without the daytime flash, he'd be a mere silhouette against the brightly lit Connecticut River.

If you're within a few feet of your subject, pop the flash. It will help fill in harsh shadows—in other words, it will undo what it normally does. In my case, the camera didn't want to fire the flash. All its sensors said there was plenty of light. There was—just not where I wanted it. Auto modes are dumb in this way, so I overrode my camera's suggestion and said "flash away," even though it was a bright and sunny day.

A little improvisation can buy you better photos. On nearly every camera I've seen (from D-SLR to point-and-shooter), the flash can be discretely told to fire or not, regardless of whether it's needed. Look for a lightning-bolt icon and work your way from there.

White Balance
One typical problem with Auto mode is bad white balance—also referred to as color cast—in which your shot looks reasonable, but the colors aren't what you remember. Maybe you've seen an indoor shot with a reddish tint; that's a common example of bad white balance. The camera has improperly guessed at the color temperature of your shot's light source.

Color temperature—there's something you've probably never thought about before. Who knew color could be measured that way? It's tough to explain the concept without getting into the physics—and I won't. You're welcome. Simply put, different light sources have different color temperatures, measured in degrees Kelvin. To our eyes, higher color temperatures look cooler, and lower color temperatures look warmer. This is all good to know should you ever make it to Final Jeopardy, but unimportant to us right now. Just remember that color temperatures vary with the light source.

Back in the 35mm days, you could buy film suited to particular light—daylight film, say, or tungsten film. Your digital camera is more adaptable. It looks at your shot and guesses the color temperature based on some common assumptions that are usually (but not always) right.

Here's a shot of an AA battery atop a piece of paper on my desk, lit with a halogen bulb. The paper is white in real life. In this shot, the paper looks dingy and reddish, like the "before" picture in a Tide commercial. That's easily fixed!

Most photo-editing programs, even the simple and free ones, have a control to correct improper color balance. In Photoshop, you click a black, white, or gray eyedropper on a corresponding black, white, or gray area to fix things. In Picasa, you click the Neutral Color Picker and then a neutral spot in your photo. Here's the result:

I've taken advantage of the fact that black, white, and gray have equal amounts of the three primary colors: red, green, and blue. These white-balance fixer controls just equalize those numbers at the point you've clicked and let everything else fall into place proportionally. This isn't a perfect fix, because color temperature can vary even within a single shot, but it's a darn good start.

—Next: Play with Your Shots >

Play with Your Shots

Most of us remember when it was verboten to waste film—and processing costs!—by playing around with panoramic shots, long-exposure experiments, and the like. Now that we have reusable memory cards and, at the very least, the ability to get our photos off the card and into printable form, there's simply no reason not to try.

Panoramas
Want to impress your friends and family? Try shooting panoramas—composites from multiple photos showing a wider field of view than a normal lens would provide. Because you're using multiple shots, they often have astounding detail. A panoramic shot of 100 megapixels or more isn't that hard to achieve, and you (yeah, you) can do it with virtually any camera and free software.

Panoramas are much easier if you're not shooting in Auto. Admittedly the purpose of this story is to get you to explore the other modes in your camera, but not using Auto is a necessity in this case. You want your snaps to match shot to shot in depth of field and exposure, and Auto won't let you do that. You need to be in Manual or an aperture-priority mode, where your f-stop setting won't change between clicks.

Decide what you're going to capture, brace your elbows, and then methodically snap away, overlapping your shots by 20 to 30 percent. If you're wondering whether you've overlapped enough, overlap more! There's no such thing as too much overlap, but you're sunk if there's too little. Don't be scared to shoot multiple levels so that you capture all the action up and down as well as left and right. Because panoramas are usually wider than tall, maximize the height of your composition by holding the camera vertically. This isn't critical, just helpful.

Once you've got your shots, software like Hugin, Microsoft's Image Composite Editor (ICE), or Autostitch will do the rest! Photographers have always taken wide panoramas, but it's so much easier now. This is a great place to let your creativity run wild. Try it next time you've got your camera out.

Long-Exposure Photography

With a little creativity you can use your D-SLR to capture or create something impossible to catch in a short exposure or in Auto mode—such as the movement of stars across the night sky—by using a long-duration exposure. A wide-angle lens and small aperture gives you a huge depth of field, which makes focusing (often difficult in the dark) a lot less critical. The picture above was shot with an 8-second exposure at ISO 200, using a 70mm lens at f/22.

To take long-duration exposures, you're going to need a steady brace such as a tripod. Setting your camera on a steady surface works just as well. One of my favorite nighttime shots used a trash can instead of a tripod with my wallet under the lens to tilt it up a little!

You'll also need a device to hold your shutter open. Most D-SLRs allow for long exposures timed by the camera, but only up to a point. Longer exposures may require a shutter release cable designed for your camera. Because long exposures often have such immense dynamic range and provide many unreal views, there's no one correct exposure. It's only your interpretation of the scene that counts. Experimentation is cheap and easy when all you're doing is filling a memory card.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.