The Viewfinder Status Display
When you press the shutter button halfway down, several things happen inside the XS's viewfinder. As I already mentioned, the camera shows you which focus points it has selected for autofocus. It also uses the readout at the bottom of the viewfinder to tell you about its exposure choices and to give you some additional status information.

Figure 1-7. The Rebel XS's viewfinder shows all the settings you need access to while shooting.
From left to right, the readout works as follows:
If the camera has chosen to use the flash, then it will display the flash icon. The flash icon will blink on and off, and the word busy will be displayed, until the flash unit is charged and ready to go. If your battery has a good charge, this shouldn't take very long.
Next, the camera displays its chosen shutter speed and aperture. You'll learn more about these in Chapter 5.
The Exposure Compensation display is shown next. It has a range of −2 stops to +2 stops.
Next comes ISO choice. For now, all you need to know is that the higher the number is, the grainier your images will be. Don't worry about this now; we'll discuss it in more detail later.
Finally, you'll see a number showing how many shots you can shoot before you will have to wait for the camera's buffer to empty. The camera has enough onboard RAM to shoot nine images when in Full Auto mode. While this may not sound like ...