Another Nikon d40 question

I swear I need to find a good forum where I can post these...

How do you get your lens to focus on what you want? It seems that half my pictures focus on the tree behind my subject, or a toy 2 feet behind the babies and whatnot... Sometimes it just can't focus at all... I've tried different settings (first subject, dynamic area and whatnot) and not seeing any difference... Also, all the pictures without flash seem very blurry.

Gosh I have that $500 camera and all my pictures are garbage!

Manual focus.

On auto-focus you have to have a lot of light. If you are in a low light situation, it is very hard for the camera to auto-focus.

Also how close is your subject to the lens? Camera can't focus if the subject is too close to the lens either.

You will get there, and your pictures will start getting better and better. The equipment doesn't make one a photographer. But you will learn. It just takes time to understand the abilities of a DSLR that makes it more capable of taking better pictures. Using it the same as you would a P&S, won't really get you better pictures than a P&S.

Yeah the problem is that it's hard to learn when you have no basics. There are all those options and it doesn't tell you what it does...

Maybe I'll try manual focus next but I wouldn't even know how to adjust the options...

With manual focus, all you have to do is turn the rings on the lens to focus. There will be 2 rings, the one that determines how close you are to your subject (assuming you aren't using a fixed lens), and then another ring that will adjust your focus.

There will be a setting on your camera though that you have to set to manual focus. I have a switch on my lens and on the front of my camera by the lens. I have a D70. I don't have first hand experience with the D40, so I am not sure where it would be located on the D40.

Manual focus is located by/on the lens. I forget... and I'm too lazy to get up and check it.