Jenni,
The screen you showed is good. It's just an information screen that tells you how your camera is set up prior to taking a picture using your Viewfinder. It tells me that you are in Aperture Priority Mode with an aperture set at f/5.6.
Your ISO i set to Auto. The long box with the numbers is your light meter. Most of the time, by adjusting one or more settings, most people try to get that meter reading right in the center at 0 to get a good exposure.
The letter A is your Picture Style, If you hit your Q button, and using your arrow keys, you can move to that box and hitting your Set button, change that to maybe S for Standard.
You are using AWB, or Auto White Balance. You can leave that, or change it to Daylight.or Cloudy for cloudy conditions. The next box is for auto correcting image brightness and contrast. I have mine set to off. Then you have your flash button. If you hit your Q button, and move to that box and hit your Set button, your flash will pop up.
You are in One Shot, which a lot of people use for stationary subjects. This means that you have to hit your focus button each time you want to take a picture. I personally prefer using Servo, which means that the camera will continuously focus as long as you hold that focus button down. It's helpful for moving subjects, where you don't want to constantly press and release and press your focus button again and again.
You are taking one picture at a time instead of bursts of shots, and are in Evaluative metering mode, which meters an average of the entire scene instead of Spot Metering, which only meters for a small part of your scene. Your picture is AL, which is the best resolution for your 18 megapixel sensor.
Your battery is good, and it looks like your have room for 1729 more pictures on your memory card.
I think that the strip of information that came up on the left hand side of your screen is basically the same kind of information that you see on this screen, but for shooting in Live View. It's when you hit your Q button while you are in Live View. That's just a guess on my part.
When you are done making any changes you want, if you hit your Q button again, it will take you out of the setting changes mode and you'll be set to take a picture.
As far as downloading your manual, it has saved me a lot of time in the past. Using the search function, you can jump to a section of the manual that deals with a specific area that I want an answer to without having to flip back and forth in the manual. Those paper manuals are a pain..
Steve Thomas
