Originally posted by bluebronco I am a newbie trying to get a handle on photography.
I usually shoot in Ap. priority or Manual.
What are the other functions used for? Program, Bulb etc. (I know the icons are for point & shoot. I don't use them.
Sorry for the newbie question. Be gentle.
No need to apologize. You gotta learn somehow. You've gotten good basic answers already. What you might do know is get a basic book on photography.
I want to add a couple more things, though.
I urge you to continue using manual mode as much as possible. I gather you do not have a K10D/K20D. (You said something about the icons and the K10D/K20D models don't have those scene mode icons.) If you've got a K100D, K200D or something earlier, forget about the explanation of TAv mode, as your camera lacks that mode. It's really easy to use manual mode and I believe it's almost the only way to really get into your bones an awareness, at all times, of
all of the camera's settings. When you use one of the options to control just one setting and let the camera do all the rest for you, sooner or later you will confuse yourself and overlook something you should not have overlooked. Another advantage of shooting in full manual mode is that you can call things by their right names. You can think of the actual shutter speed and aperture, instead of setting an aperture, say, an an EV adjustment of half a stop, which leaves you wondering what the heck the shutter speed was.
On the K10D/K20D, if you had one, you also have "hyperprogram" mode, which is a remarkably brilliant form of P in which you can move from letting the camera set both the aperture and the shutter speed for you, into aperture priority or shutter priority mode, simply by adjusting one parameter or the other. In other words, you don't have to switch the mode dial from P to Av to get into aperture priority. I
never use either the aperture priority or shutter priority mode settings any more when using either a K10 or a K20D.
Now, since you said you're a newbie, I hope you'll forgive me if I answer a question you didn't quite ask, namely, WHY would you want to use Av mode or Tv mode instead of either P or M?
You would use Av mode when you want to control the aperture, and you want to control the aperture in good part so that you can control depth of field. (I'm thinking here only of available light photography, by the way. Flash complicates these explanations.) So for example if you were taking a photo of a woman, sitting on the park bench, with a lake behind her, and you wanted it all in focus, you'd want to stop the aperture down a good ways, to f/11 or perhaps even f/16, for maximum depth of field. You need of course to be aware that when you stop down the aperture like this you're going to need to compensate with a slower shutter and/or higher ISO. Big depth of field shots generally require bright daylight, or a tripod and a subject that doesn't move. But in full sunlight, you might be able to shoot at ISO 100 and a shutter speed of 1/100th sec even with the aperture at f/16.
You would use Tv (shutter priority) mode when you're more concerned with freezing the movement of your subject than you are with depth of field. For example if you're taking photographs of a kid doing a somersault off a diving board into the pool, you will want to use a fast shutter like, oh, 1/1000th sec, to capture an sharply frozen instant of the dive. Alternatively, you might use a deliberately somewhat slow shutter - slow here means "slow relative to the action" - like 1/30th or 1/60th or 1/100th sec, to get some deliberate blur into the shot, which can be rather nice. If you find yourself, as I have found myself from time to time, shooting a swim meet, and you want to get a sharp photo of swimmers in six different lanes, well, you will pretty much need to be outdoors in bright light, so you can use both a fast shutter and a small aperture.
What I don't like about thinking in terms of aperture priority or shutter priority, however, is that they suggest that there are times when one thing is important and the other is not. Not true, never true. Even if controlling depth of field by adjusting the aperture is your primary concern, shutter speed is never unimportant; and conversely, even when freezing the action is paramount, depth of field doesn't cease to matter, too.
Will