Nikon D40 Continuous shooting mode

To enable the continuous shooting mode on the Nikon D40, go into the Custom Setting Menu (pencil icon). Scroll to item 4: Shooting mode. Choose Continuous in this menu to enable continuous shooting. With this setting, the D40 will take 1 shot if you just press the shutter once, and keep on shooting if you press and hold down the shutter. In fact, there is not much reason to use the Single shooting mode, so you can just leave this as the standard.

Nikon D40 - Modes

This is the "point and shoot" automatic mode. The camera will take care of all settings in this mode. While this is fine for most settings, flash is not one of them. Thus, shooting in auto mode, you may become tired quite quickly with the flash popping up automatically at the worst moment possible to ruin many shots.

This is the same as automatic mode but with flash off. So it offers basically the same convenience of auto mode but without the occasional nasty surprise of the flash popping up when it feels like it. If you think you are an absolute beginner, you can use this mode pretty much all the time.

I assume that anybody who has ever picked up a camera can decide for themselves if they need flash in a shot or not. So, if you need to use the flash, press the flash button to let it pop open, set auto mode and flash away. If you don't want to use the flash, stick to flash-off mode.

Portrait mode will set the auto-focus on the closest subject and soften or blur the background using a large aperture. It will also play with optimizing the image to produce soft skin tones. White balance and metering are also set automatically.

Landscape mode tries to give you as much of the scene in focus as possible using a small aperture. Flash and the auto-focus assist are disabled.

Child mode... no idea...

Sports mode will set a high shutter speed to allow you to freeze the action. The autofocus will work continuously as long as the shutter is held half pressed.

Macro mode allows you to take close up shots of objects. The flash will pop up as needed, and the camera will focus on the center auto focus point.

Night potrait mode tries to strike a balance between the subject and the background in low light. The flash will pop up automatically if needed. Shutter speed can be quite slow so take care about camera shake.

Nikon D40 - Setting Auto ISO

To adjust the Auto ISO on the Nikon D40, you need to go into the third menu, with the pencil icon. This is the Custom Setting menu.

Scroll down to item 10 and you find the ISO Auto. Press OK to go in and set ISO Auto to On.

You can also set the Max sensitivity, which means the maximum ISO that will be used in low light conditions. Keep in mind that the image quality will degrade as you increase the ISO values. At high ISO values, you will get slightly more grainy pictures Use lower values to keep image quality high and higher values to use in very low light. For the D40, I find ISO 800 to be a good compromise.

The other option is to set the Minimum shutter speed. This is the threshold that will cause the camera to start pushing ISO up. The D40 will try to strike a compromise between noise caused by high ISO settings and blur caused by camera shake caused by low shutter speeds. Obviously this will depend on the focal length, but somewhere around 1/30 should be a good start. You can set a slower shutter speed if you have a steady hand (for example 1/15) or a higher speed if you have a shaky hand (for example 1/60).