Taking photos with a digital camera is just like using a camera with film - point the camera, press the button and take the photo.

The complicated bits come when you have to get your pictures out of the camera - you can't just take it to the chemists to be developed!

But if you want to e-mail pics of the kids to their gran, or put family photos onto your Christmas cards, then digital cameras are the business.

The Basics

A digital camera is still a camera. If you've ever picked up a disposable camera, taken some holiday snaps and had your photos developed then you can use a digital camera too.

This means that you'll need to keep the camera still while you take your pics, so they aren't all blurred and you'll need to make sure that you point the camera in the right direction!

If you can manage that with an ordinary camera, you should do fine with a digital one.

The parts

The main parts of a digital camera are just like the main parts of a film camera. You point the camera at whatever it is you want to photograph, look through the viewfinder to line up your photo and press the shutter button to take the photo.

If you've got it set up to use the flash then most cameras will check how much light there is around, and flash if they need to.

Apart from the top of the range cameras, you don't need to focus or think about technical stuff like shutter speed or exposure - the camera does all that for you.

The difference is that instead of using film to capture the scene a digital camera uses a special sort of computer chip - the same sort used in video cameras - to turn the picture into millions of dots which can be stored in its memory.

Once you've taken your photo it is stored in the camera until you decide what to do with it.