The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/1000D Companion

Getting Creative with Program Shift

In the previous chapter, you learned about the effects that different shutter speed and aperture choices have on your final image. You saw that by controlling shutter speed, you can choose how much you want to freeze or blur motion, and that by controlling aperture, you can choose how much you want to blur out the background. You also learned that these parameters have a reciprocal relationship. If you change one, you can change the other to compensate.

The Rebel XS has a lot of different ways to change shutter speed and aperture, allowing you to take complete creative control of motion stopping and depth of field.

If you've taken some shots already in Program mode, then you've seen that it works just like Full Auto mode. When you half-press the shutter, the camera autofocuses and meters. Once it has determined a shutter speed and aperture that's appropriate for the scene, it displays those values on the status display inside the viewfinder and on the back of the camera.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the camera's built-in meter aims for a shutter speed that is appropriate for handheld shooting and an aperture that's not too extreme. But as you've learned, many different combinations of shutter speed and aperture yield the same exposure. Some of these combinations will have a faster or slower shutter speed and, conversely, a larger or smaller aperture.

In Program mode, you can automatically change from the current exposure to any equivalent, ...