When you first enter the world of dSLR, once of the first questions that you may have: What’s that round thing on top that turns and has tiny pictures and alphabets that make no sense? It is called the mode dial. Simply put, it is a dial to change the camera’s mode (no pun intended).
The tiny pictures that you see on one side are the preset modes that you can switch to quickly when you can’t be bothered to tweak your settings manually. Selecting one of these modes allows the camera to do all that for you. For example, turn the dial to the “mountain” picture when you are taking landscapes and the camera might adjust the aperture, contrast, vividness by itself to give you the best results you can get. Some main presets are: landscape, sports, portraits, macro, and night shots. I will not go into these as they are more or less pretty straightforward.
Instead, I will be talking about the other half of the dial: P, S, A, M (for Nikon. Canon uses P, Tv, Av, M). Let us start with P. I will be addressing each of the other modes in subsequent posts. P stands for Program and it is similar to Auto in the sense that the camera does almost everything for you, but also allows you to adjust some settings, namely the flash, ISO value and white balance. When you enter this mode, you are free to tweak the aperture value (this is discussed here) by rotating the wheel near the mode dial and the shutter speed will be adjusted based on this value. In short, Program mode allows you to select an appropriate combination of the shutter speed and aperture value with a turn of the thumbwheel.
However, unlike the Auto mode, the flash will not be activated automatically despite having the shutter speed dip below a certain value. In other words, you are entrusted with the decision of whether or not you would like to use the flash. The same goes with the ISO value and white balance.
Other camera modes: Aperture priority, Shutter priority, Manual
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