David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Take the Shot

All right. After that crash course in composition, you're ready to capture the image—but even that's not as simple as it seems.

The Half-Press Trick

The following information is extremely important. If you learn nothing else from reading this book, then—well, then it wasn't a very good book. But if the half-press trick is new to you, then your life is about to change.

Pocket cameras are awesome. The smaller a camera is, the more likely you are to have it with you when a great photo moment occurs.

But small cameras have one wildly annoying quirk: They take as much as half a second to compute the focus and exposure for each shot. In other words, if you just mash the shutter button, one of two things will happen:

• You'll get shutter lag. Shutter lag (Small, Medium, or Large?) may be less than a second, but a delay that long is death to photos of sports, action, and children. You'll miss the critical instant every time.

  Tip

  Camera companies define shutter lag as, "the microseconds between achieving focus and recording the shot." Normal people define it as, "the eternity between pressing the button and getting the shot." In other words, the manufacturers start the clock after the time-consuming part—the half-second it takes for the camera calculate focus and exposure! Thought you should know that, so you won't be fooled by camera-company specs.

  There's virtually no shutter lag in SLRs. (An SLR has a separate sensor dedicated to performing the prefocusing routine; a pocket cam is ...