roomurdock.com

Priority Modes

You know those letters you have on your scene selection dial? Do you know what they do or do you just ignore it like I used to? Well there’s 4 letters, on Nikon they’re M, A, S, P and Cannon its M, Av, Tv, P. Because I use a nikon I’ll use MASP for the explaination. So M is manual, where you set everything such as your aperture, shutter speed and ISO. S is shutter priority which means you set the shutter speed and the camera sets the aperture for you, useful for things like cars at night (just watch your ISO isn’t to high). A is aperture priority where upon you set the aperture or f stop, this is commonly used to set the depth of field and with HDR. The final one is P which is where the camera selects a balance between your shutter speed and your aperture, on the D90 you can change the values that it sets, kind of like a more advanced auto. Go and have a play with all the different settings and experiment.