automatic, but you can manually correct by setting the light bulb option when the pictures are coming out too yellow. You can also override auto to force a colour cast. A photo of children blowing out candles on a Christmas cake will look better with its natural orange colours.
With more experience, you’ll be able to switch to manual exposure mode and set the exposure to suit the subject. The exposure from the candles will make the background dark. Using the manual exposure setting or exposure compensation will improve the lighting and you can check the result using the LCD.
If you go into manual or aperture priority and select a large aperture, you can reduce the sharpness of the background to make your subject stand out.
Try using the camera’s zoom lens at the telephoto setting to magnify the subject and home in tightly on the face. Entry-level cameras have a 2x zoom while more sophisticated models have more powerful ranges often up as high as 8x.
Snow fun
The first sign of snow and children will be out sledging, building snowmen and throwing snowballs. Take this opportunity to get some great candid pictures (see our candid feature for some great ideas). But watch out for the pitfalls, snow is very bright and will fool the camera. We explained how to overcome this using your camera manually in an earlier article. The latest Nikon Coolpix cameras have a useful program scene mode called Snow that compensates automatically ensuring the snow appears lovely and white.
You could also consider using fill-flash by switching the flash on and forcing it to fire. This will ensure harsh shadows from reflective snow or bright sunlight don’t appear black across the face.
With all your