My camera won't take pictures?

I have a Nikon and when I press the silver button, it only focuses and won't take the picture… I've tried several times.

Unless the camera is broken what are your lighting conditions? If the light is too low so the camera can't focus, it won't fire. If you've also tried in day light the the same is true then I'd suspect, if it's a cheap, small camera and it's over a year old, that it's done.

Which Nikon?

dSLR?

P&S?

If it is a dSLR, if it can't focus (there's not enough light), the memory card is full or the shutter/lens aperture/ISO is not set correctly so your image would be either grossly over or underexposed. There are some other reasons why the shutter will not fire.

Have you tried putting the camera into the manual mode?

It really depends what mood you have it in and also if the autofocus is focusing or not or if it is even working.

most cheaper cameras when using an auto or priority mode will only take a photo once it has focused on something because until then the camera can't work out how to expose/take the photo of what ever your taking a photo of.

a good way to fix this is to try and get more light in the area so the camera can focus on something or turn manual focusing on as this overrides that feature of the camera.

if it is a more technical problem then try and get it fixed under warranty rather than trying to fix it yourself