Lesson One: Master Your Camera

The camera I am using for this assignment is my old digital camera. I am currently waiting for my new phone to arrive. I had gotten this camera when I was around ten years old so it is roughly ten years old now and not very high tech or of good quality.  However that was okay because at the time I was only a little kid and the purpose behind this camera was for me to take silly pictures.  However, there are a few different modes and features of this camera.  First and for most there is a wrist strap attached to the camera so if I was about to drop it ( which I did often) it would not fall to the ground and break it would stay attached to my wrist! Now to the technical modes.  There are only a few of these because as I said this is not a very high tech camera.  First there is a video mode.  This mode I could use to take videos of my friend doing funny stuff, or a concert or whatever I wanted to take a video of rather than a series of pictures.  However, this is only a 1.3 mega pixel camera so taking regular photos posed enough of a challenge let alone videos...this mode did not get a lot of use.  Next is a playback mode.  This mode got a lot of use.  This allowed me to go back through my pictures and videos and make sure they were really something that I wanted to have on my camera.  This camera could only hold roughly 50 photos at one time and I needed to make sure I used those spaces carefully so I had everything I wanted.  Next is just the regular old camera mode.  This was the mode that I used the most often.  I could take all of the pictures I wanted with this mode.  Within this mode there were a few different things I could do.  First of all I have a switch on the side of this camera that allows me to go from taking landscape pictures to portrait pictures.  I did not know anything about the difference between these two modes when I was younger...in fact I did not even know what that switch did until I began doing this assignment.  Next are the flash settings I have.  There are three different ones.  The first one allows me to have the flash go off every time I take a picture.  I did not use this mode very often.  The next flash mode allows me to make it so the flash never goes off and every time I take a picture it is just the outside natural light that is being used.  Finally the mode that I typically left this camera on was the automatic flash mode.  If the camera decided it needed flash then it would automatically go off.  Again because I didn’t know much about taking pictures when I was younger this was just the easiest and automatic setting.  There is also a two time zoom on my camera.  Looking at this now I find it funny because even the camera on my cell phone has a better zoom (and mega pixel for that matter) than this one.  Finally last but not least there is the PC mode.   This mode also got a lot of use.  This is the mode I would switch my camera to and put all of my pictures and videos (if there were any) onto my computer.  Later on as I got older I really liked this mode because it allowed me to upload photos to facebook, myspace, and xanga.