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The most basic manual exposure control you can exert over your camera involves setting both the aperture and shutter speed. Some digital cameras allow you to set these controls as if you had a fully automatic 35mm SLR. There are two kinds of cameras you may run into with this capability:

• Point and shoot Most point and shoot digicams that include manual settings for aperture and shutter speed require you to use the LCD display to make onscreen menu changes. The Epson PhotoPC 3000Z, for instance, uses a pair of buttons on the right side of the LCD display to adjust shutter speed, and another set of buttons on the bottom of the screen to change the aperture settings. It isn’t hard to do, but you need to remember first to set the camera to its Manual Exposure mode, then remember which buttons do what for fine-tuning exposure.
• SLRs A few digital cameras—pro-style SLRs, for the most part—use traditional SLR controls for making manual adjustments to exposure. Specifically, you can turn the aperture ring on the lens to change the f/stop or use a control on the camera to accomplish the same thing, as you can see in the following illustration. Shutter speed is likewise affected with a dial on the camera body, and you can look through the viewfinder to keep tabs on the setting.

To set exposure manually, you must choose a shutter speed and aperture combination that will properly expose your scene at a given ISO. This is a great exercise for new photographers who are serious about learning photography theory.

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