Men, as many of you will know, are curious animals. For example, we know we are at least an inch taller or a stone lighter than the most accurate measuring-devices say we are; we don’t need to use a map to get anywhere because we just know the route already; and we seem to think that if we poke or prod something hard enough it will start working again. We also seem to believe that no machine yet invented is so complex that we won’t understand how it works simply by picking it up and “playing with it for a bit”. And when it comes to cameras - well, who needs to actually read an instruction manual…? Pick it up, turn it on, and - hey presto - the photos will practically be taken for us.

The truth is that the tape-measures and scales are correct, the company that invented the sat-nav is now worth a fortune, and there’s a reason mechanics and plumbers train for so long and are so well-paid. It’s also true that a modern digital camera is a remarkably sophisticated piece of machinery which can achieve photographic results far better than we imagined even a decade ago. Having said that it’s also also true that no camera yet invented has a brain and instinctively knows just what photo you’re trying to take. They simply don’t know which bit of the bush you’re looking at, which part of the picture should be light or dark, and how fast they need to work to keep that flying bird from being a blurred streak. No, clever they may be, but intelligent they’re not. And what this means is that for you to get the results you really want - rather than the results the camera gives you - you’re going to have to “Read The B****y Manual” at least once.

The instruction booklets that come with cameras these days are both thick and large. Oh, and detailed. Oh, yes, and some of the diagrams are more complicated-looking than anything Wily E. Coyote ever came up with to catch the Roadrunner. Manuals are not easy things to work through, nevertheless they’re mostly very well-written (the days of finding something like “Turning out your camera will be result of much enjoyment” are long gone), and working through the pages from beginning to end will provide you with the answers to questions you didn’t even know you wanted to ask. It’s a daunting task, but I’m afraid it has to be done - otherwise you’ll spend your days asking yourself why you can’t turn the flash off, not knowing what the mode dials are for, getting wrongly exposed images when you go into birding situations equivalent to “off-roading”, and forever looking at photos on the net and wondering how come your photos don’t quite seem to be as good (which is why I first thought it might be an idea to look at the manual after months of messing around getting nowhere fast).

What carefully reading the manual does is help someone move from being a photographer who is forced to use just the basic point-and-shoot settings to one who has control over the camera’s functions to achieve results that match what they see with their own eyes (it’s easy to forget just how amazingly good the human brain is at image processing). As I mentioned in the first post in this occasional series, photography literally means “writing with light”, and being able to control the camera properly is the equivalent to an author learning grammar: any old fool can write a sentence - but how much better that sentence looks and reads when the author knows how too use punctaution and can spell properly wouldnt you agree.

I know from talking with friends of mine that what often seems to put people off from looking too deeply into the pages of the manual that comes with their brand new camera is that so many of the terms used are new and difficult to understand (ISO, aperture, colour balance etc) and the text is concise and rather technical - which is why I began “HTBAQGBP” with a Glossary. Not that a glossary is much more than a starting-point, and there’s no doubt that you’re embarking on a rather steep learning curve if you actually want to both read AND understand what’s in the manual - but what’s that compared with spending 500 dollars or more and not knowing what changing the ISO will do or how to set the correct white balance? It’s a bit like buying a TV and not knowing how to change the channels.

So, going to take a bit of well-meant advice, dig out that box the camera came in and spend a little time curled up with some rather techy reading matter? No? Well, I guess you could just keep pointing and shooting and deleting most of the photos you take instead…

Next time: What camera should I buy then, you know-it-all?