A typical camera manual can run more than 200 pages long.

It will tell you all the things that the camera does — if you can understand half of what’s written there — but it will tell you nothing about how or when you might want to use certain features.

Our ebook, Understanding Your Camera, is different.

At just over 60 pages, it’s less than 1/3rd the length of your camera’s user manual. With more than two dozen example photos and illustrations, it’s much easier to understand too.

No matter what kind of camera you use — SLR, point-and-shoot, bridge, cameraphone, even old film cameras — Understanding Your Camera is written with you in mind. The book starts by ignoring technology for a moment. We first make sure you have a deep grasp of all the fundamentals of the photographic process. Here’s an excerpt from the section on understanding exposure:

What is “exposure”? Exposure, in a nutshell, is the picture you are taking (or the one you took.)

When you press the button on your camera, you are literally “exposing” it to light. All photography is captured light. Without light, there is no picture. Again, boiling it down to the absolute most fundamental level, we don’t see things we see the light reflected off things.

Let’s take something simple like a rock. Hold it in your hand. Go outside and look at it in bright daylight and you see a rock. Take it indoors under artificial light and you still see a rock. Take it into a blackened room in which there is no light at all. You can feel it so you know it’s still there but you can’t see it because there is no light. All along, what you were seeing wasn’t the rock itself but the light reflected off the rock.

When we take a picture, what we’re really doing is recording the light reflected off whatever it is our camera is pointed at.

That is the exposure.

The whole ebook, all 64 pages of it, is just as straightforward and plain-spoken. We won’t get you tied up in a jumble of jargon. And we won’t make you feel like you need an engineering degree just to read it.

Once you have a solid grounding in the core principles of photography, we go to the heart of just how the technology works. Here’s another excerpt from the section on apertures:

The size of the aperture is never measured in direct units. For example, you’d never hear someone say “my aperture is 10mm”. Instead, it’s expressed in relation to the focal length, or zoom length, of the lens. It also follows a logarithmic scale, making the whole concept even harder for non-rocket scientists to follow. So, for example, if your aperture opening were 10mm in diameter and you were using a 100mm lens, you would actually say your aperture was f10. This means that the diameter of the aperture opening was 1/10th that of your focal length. That same 10mm opening on a 50mm lens would be f5 because the diameter is only 1/5th that of the focal length. (The “f” in that expression is short-hand for “focal length”.)

Typical aperture settings are: f1.4, f2, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f11, f16, f22. Also, your lens may not even have the full range listed here. On the front of the lens, you should find a marking such as “17mm f5.6” or possibly “17mm 1:5.6”. The f5.6 in this example represents the widest aperture that is available on that lens. So you could use any of the settings from f5.6 to f22.

So just why are apertures measured the way they are? The reason boils down to standardization. A diaphragm opening of 10mm would be extraordinarily wide on a 12mm lens, only modest on an 80mm lens and very small on a 300mm lens.

That would be like saying that a meter means one unit of measurement in Singapore, a completely different unit of measure in Norway and another unit still in Australia. Without standardization, a unit of measure becomes meaningless. So instead, the measure is expressed as a percentage of the focal length of the lens. This provides the needed amount of standardization so that the effect on your pictures (at least as far as aperture is concerned) is the same no matter what lens you are using.

By the time you’re done with Understanding Your Camera, we guarantee you’ll have a better understanding of how to use your camera than when you started. It’s an absolute must. If you are not completely 100% satisfied that this ebook helps you better understand your camera’s settings, then we don’t want to keep your money.

Of course, when you like it as much as we know you will, we sincerely hope that you’ll come back here and write a comment so that others can see it isn’t just us who think this ebook is the best on the market at getting photographic beginners up to speed.

We cover everything you really need to know without bogging you down in arcane stuff that simply isn’t important or super advanced stuff that will only make you feel lost when you’re just starting out.

We made our ebook user friendly with a detailed table of contents (below) and cross referenced it with a complete index of terms. We even included a special photo index where you can review the settings used to take every example picture in the book. Check out the table of contents.

• General Notes about Photography
  • Keepers vs. Rejects
• The Absolute Basics
  • The Fundamentals of Photography
  • Making the Exposure
  • Recording What the Camera Sees
  • How the Shutter Works
  • Bringing It into Focus
  • Fine Tuning the Light
  • Depth of Field
  • Controlling Brightness Through Exposure Time
  • Sensitivity to Light
  • Wrapping it all up
• Accessories and Technique
  • Camera Support
    • Tripod
    • Monopod
    • Beanbag
  • Basic Technique
    • Camera Holding
    • Shooting
    • Using Autofocus
• Shooting Modes
  • Automatic & Semi-Manual Settings
    • Automatic
    • Program (and Program-Shift)
    • Aperture Priority
    • Shutter Priority
    • Manual
  • Preset Shooting Modes
    • Portrait
    • Landscape
    • Action or Children
    • Close-up or Macro
    • Night, Night Portrait and Night Landscape
  • Specialty Menu Settings
    • Fireworks
    • High Key (also “Beach”, “Snow” or “Beach & Snow”)
    • Low Key
    • Candle, Dawn and Sunset
• Special Camera Functions
  • EXIF
  • Noise Reduction
  • Anti-Shock
  • Image Stabilization
  • Exposure Compensation
  • Flash Compensation
  • Metering Modes
  • White Balance
• Index
• Photography Index

With a no nonsense, no risk 100% money back guarantee, this ebook is a bargain at only $24.97. What’s more, as a PDF file it’s available for instant download. (Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view the file.) So click here now to order and start taking More Satisfying Photos today!

Have questions? Contact us and we’ll try to answer them.