Need advice with Canon Powershot S5 IS

[Dexter]

Hi All,
I am a newbie to Digital Photography.. i recently bought a Canon Powershot S5 IS camera. Does it come under compact digital camera ?!

it has plethora of options which i find it hard to cope up.. hope i will get it by and by.. is anyone here familiar with PowerShot S5 IS ?! Any suggestions on utilizing this Camera effectively would be appreciated.. Thanks!

[McQ]

I do not have that camera in particular, but I do have the Canon PowerShot G9, which is very very similar in terms of the options/settings it has available. They are both excellent cameras, with the primary difference being that the S5 IS does not support the RAW file format, but it does have the tilt/swivel rear LCD. Anything in particular you need help with?

I would start by familiarizing yourself with the basic settings on the top dial...namely auto, landscape, portrait and sports mode. Once you're comfortable with when to use each of these, you can move onto understanding shutter and aperture priority mode (and the concept of aperture and shutter speed in general). Take a look at the tutorial on this website for an overview of the basics of camera lenses. The manual for this camera is actually pretty decent as well, so that's worth reading through.

Overall, I prefer to learn by necessity rather than delving into the camera manual right off the bat. For me, this would involve just playing around with the camera in auto/portrait/landscape/sports mode, and then looking at the resulting pictures to see why they did not did not turn out well. Get comfortable with when to use each mode. Then once a problem is identified, I would dig into the manual to find an answer. This way it does not seem so overwhelming, and there's a hands-on experience to relate to what you read.

Note: While these cameras are certainly not super small, they are not SLR's, and hence fall into the "compact digital cameras" category. Maybe it should be called non-SLR

[Dexter]

Thank you very much indeed.. Let me explore the camera in the settings you have mentioned and will get back to you...