Lessons

Lesson Info

Camera Settings Q&A

On if we've had a collection of questions, this is gonna be a good time for lots of questions we absolutely do I think we have ah question in the audience uh couple of sections but um the review time set on the camera does that affect the speed at which you're um pictures are written to the memory? No, it is not you can shoot very, very quickly and what's generally gonna happen is those pictures will not be reviewed because you're shooting in the siri's in fact, good question on this camera is if I do shoot a series of pictures actually I'd be better if I knew what happens at this point is it just shows you the last image that was there oh, the cut were quick at the custom function images the second rabbit hole anything it does the like the highlight it's tone priority the auto lighting optimizer do those matter ifyou're in raw no, they don't so there's a lot of processing that the camera does that you don't need to worry about if you're going to shoot rob, but if you are going to shoo...

t j peg you can I gotta worry about setting up all these parameters, which is why I highly encourage shooting raw, perfect segue way to this question from debbie from canada some of the settings that you're saying that don't matter for shooting raw like why balance? How has that affected when you switch to movies when the light you're shooting and matter that is important because movies air not shot in raw the dot movie file that it shoots two is in some ways like a j peg we are processing those images and so if you are working on a film and you have different people shooting with five g's you're going to want to standardize the way your cameras are set mainly it's that picture made with standard the vivid landscape the customized modes on if you're going to be shooting professionally and probably shouldn't speak too much for video world but you want to shoot very things very neutral without much contrast because they can add that in post and so you're just trying to collect as much data when you're out of the field is possible question from alecia post in the netherlands I knows that my pictures can be out of focus when using the continuous mode how is that possible and how can I prevent this out of focus pictures in the continuous mode? Well, there could be a lot of factors going on and so I'm going to guess that she's shooting a subject that's movie and the focusing system on this camera is pretty good but there are many times where you can shoot sports and it can't keep up with the sports they're too erratic the focusing system isn't fast enough but I will also mention that the focusing system is partly in the camera and it's, partly in the lands. When you stick on a high quality, fast focusing bright lens, your camera's going to do better. And so it has everything to do with the focusing motors in the lands. And the lens, like a three hundred to eight, is really fast, and focusing a cheap seventy two, three hundred that sells for two hundred fifty dollars, is going to be very slow to focus, even though they're the same focal, they have different focusing motors in there. If you recall, when we talked about the focus point, some of the focus points were extra sensitive with lenses that were two point eight aperture. And so if you have a lens that's two point eight it's going to track subject movement better than a lens, that's at four and so there's a number of issues that could be involved, it could also be technique. How is she pointing the focus brackets at the subjects in general for sports on this camera? And I have shoot it, shot it with sports, and it does do overall, it doesn't pretty good shop. There are cameras that are better, but overall it does a pretty good job I would use all point focus, and I would try to use a fast two point eight lens and I would try to fill the frame with your subject so the focus points have have a very easy time choosing in that situation it does a pretty good job and we have a question in class were gonna go too I have never used the video function before I'm still not sure how to get there how do I how do I start shooting in movie mode? Ok, well the button right back here in the back of the camera is the live view slash movie mode so any time you enter that you can take a still picture if you want by pressing the shutter release or you compress the record night I guess I failed to tell you to press the record button which is the set button and you'll get a red light up in the upper corner so you don't have to leave your finger on the button and then your recording the movie and you press it wants to stop and then when you go back into the playback mode you can hit the information button and if you press the set button you can play back that movie. Good question. Couple questions one from fatty ists who would like to know if you should turn the camera off when changing lenses and then alex romania I would like to know if you should turn the camera off changing cf cards I think for both of those questions the answer is yes however I don't do that very often and I haven't had any problems and so I think officially you're supposed to because there's a little bit of a less electrical charge stated the sensor less likely to absorb dust but I have no problems and I haven't seen it any resulting problems from that from anyone else. Another question in class do you recommend any particular card memory card? I know we talked about shooting a raw a lot and I need a cz much space as possible with sports so what do you use and recommend? You know there's it's kind of interesting because there is a lot of different philosophies on cards and how to use them and so, you know, one philosophy we had photographer here who didn't like to shoot anything over four gig cards that way there's not very much information on one card and so that's the don't put all your eggs in one basket theory the other theory is put all your eggs in one basket and watch the basket really carefully and so one of the problems that cameras have or people have is they lose things and so if I have one card in my camera and I never take it out, I'm not gonna lose it unless I lose the camera if I have eight or ten of these things floating around that's more chance of something going wrong someplace else. The other thing is, is that in your camera one of the more common problems that cameras like this has is that on the end of your memory card, we get a close shot over here there's all these tiny little parts and there are tiny little pins inside, and if you shove it in incorrectly, you could bend a pin and it's one of the more common reasons why a camera gets fixed because it has a bent pin in the cf card, which means you can't use the camera, and so the less you take a card in and out of a camera is probably a good thing. Now there's a name brand cards like lex are in san desk and then there's kind of a other names that are probably totally fine. I tend to stick with lex are and sand desk because they're very reputable dealer of manufacturers of these cards, they sometimes cell for a little bit more money, and I basically have one thirty two gig card in my camera where I can shoot more than one hundred. Excuse me more than a thousand raw images. I have yet to have a problem it's really informative. If you want to change my cf cards now, uh, question from hannah exposures, are there any additional settings that will affect the burst capacity mine has always displaying five no matter what size of j peg or raw I have selected is she sure that she's shooting a five demark too would be one question but that does bring up one of the other things is if you recall the custom setting for noise reduction if you have that turned on that might slow your camera down so that would be a potential reason but as faras the burst you should pretty much always be able to get thirteen at least unless jealousy if I turn this on and I set my camera two raw plus large j peg now I'm down to eight she was at five right? Correct, I would think it would read eight but if she had a smaller memory card it would have a harder time shooting through the information but I would think it would still be eight so bit of a mystery there don't know. Okay question from dj photo morocco can you talk a little bit more about developing on folders and give us tips of the best ways to organize the memory card space? I would rather not okay uh what what they're asking about is if you are using one card in your camera to store all your pictures you can create a folder you could give it a name you can select that folder to shoot two or to playback from and I just don't do this, but you could go in and create multiple folders and keep images. The problem is, is that you're trying to use your camera's a computer and it's very difficult, if not in fact it's not really possible, like if you want to take a picture from one folder and move it to another folder, you can't do that. This camera does not have the ability to have a raw picture in the folder and make a j peg and put it in another folder. Basically, you can shoot toe a folder and you could look at images in a folder and that's it so little limited on what we're going to be doing there, but I think it's much better if you can get any sort of chief laptop to download your stuff too. A billion w h is wondering if you wouldn't mind talking about how to set up the copyright information in the camera copyright information on camera is and, you know, I was kind of wondering about this because for those of you in the new here, I did class yesterday on the seventy, which has the copyright information, but this camera doesn't have it, and so you looked at me like, you know, it's that does have it, I was like, I didn't know actually because I was thinking that women is this in here? It's, like I've gone through the menu one hundred times in preparation for this class. And I use a lot of different cameras. It's like it's, one of those things they added just after this camera. So it's not in this one. Okay. Question from c here, melissa would like to know. Is there any other button that can be customized change selections on the quick control screen rather than the joystick button? No, no that's the only one. All right, jeremy oh, is wondering. In my view finder, I can see a speck or two and one tiny piece of fuzz is this on the mirror? How can I clean this off? A if a heir can, um, of a can of air. Hasn't worked for me. Read the first part of that in my view. Finder I can see a speck. Kurt okay, that's. Good now. Okay, so it's it's in the viewfinder and it's not on the sensor. So first off, breathe a slight. Okay, it's. Not on your actual picture. Okay, it's, just in the viewfinder. And so what you can do then is we might want to get a close shot over my shoulder here is the viewfinder in here. Pops out, and you could actually take out that focusing screen and you could clean it off, and you could take that rocket blower that we had and take out that little screen. I don't want to take this one out because this is a brand new camera, and I don't want to mess with it in that way, but sometimes you will get dust on the top side of the focusing screen, and you need to take that focusing screen out. And so that is an advantage that this camera has is that it has removable focusing screens and a lot of the newer cameras like the seventy, the five demark three they have elektronik grids that they you put in there so that you can't change the screen, and what will happen is if you have a big zoom, lands like the the trombone lends the one hundred to four hundred you got this big lens that zooms back and forth that air is pushing in, sucking air through out the camera and occasionally causing dust to swirl up into the top of the viewfinder. And so cameras. After many years like if you're gonna buy a camera on craigslist, take a look through the camera with lens off and look at how much dust is in your viewfinder, and by taking the lens off, you're looking just straight at the focusing screen. Without any distraction of you know what your cameras looking at, you know, brand new camera like this is going to be perfect, but as a camera gets older, it's going to collect more and more dust up there, but you probably shouldn't use canned air on it because the mere in your camera is a front surface to mere so the material that causes a reflection is on the front of it, and that could be easily damaged. And so you gotta be very careful about canned air and anything on the inside of the camera rest. Anna photography would like to know when you said some of the focusing points are better vertical or horizontal. Do you mean how you were holding the camera or something about the shape of your subject? It's going to be the shape of the subject? And so the brackets vikan you can actually look in the camera at the brackets, and if the brackets are longer from side to side, that means they're very good at verticals. If they're taller and shape, they're better at horizontal lines, and so as you look through the camera, the ones off to the side are a little bit taller there just off a little bit from square the very top and the bottom one are sensitive to vertical lines the ones on the sides are are sensitive to horizontal lights yes correct get my horizontal and vertical correct but then everything reverses when you do this um I know stuff in the chat room uh has a comment about the copyright information you know, stuff in the chat room I know stuff uh is is uh it does have a copyright information you just have to put it on and while logged into the cannon program okay, I guess I should mention failed to mention the software that kanan has there is a special program that you can use in your computer that will add and khun do some extra things with the camera that you can't do on their own it's thie I think it's the dpp digital professional photographer or something like that and you can add it but you can't add it just on the camera right there so you need to have special software from canada to do that and is that the software dis that comes with the camera? Do you know I think we are getting confirmation in class that it is our wait? No, no that's what I was going to ask was is it like the firmware that you need thio download from cannons website or is it the disc that's what I was gonna ask I'm not sure I'll be honest with you I don't know in this one I'm pretty sure it's extra software that you have to buy from canada in order to do that and there's some other things that you can get in to do a swell okay question um there have been quite a few about audrey would like to know how can you tell your shutter count total for the camera life can you see that anywhere on the menu you cannot see that anywhere in the camera there are aftermarket programs that are available some places on the internet some people have run through and hacked and made their own little program where you would plug your camera into the computer and it would run a check and could find it out but it's not through anything that cannon makes or anything through any major manufacturer I wish adobe would put that in light room that would be a nice little thing what total shutter account is this on my camera but it is available out there through certain repair shops question from yes it's regarding setting lens calibration menu option I just purchased the spider lens cao arrived yesterday have you used this and if you have used this can you explain how to calibrate the lenses and save the settings? I'm not familiar with that particular device but I'm familiar with that type of devices and as I explained before you'll need to have your camera set up on a tripod you're going to have a subject for it to focus on I would generally use the center focusing point most people will use a yard stick or a ruler so that they can measure exactly where their camera is focusing or at least where it's intending to focus and where it's ending up and then you would need to go in and set each lens to either a plus or minus now it's not a specific distance like its front focusing three millimeters it's going to be more like its front focusing one two three or five uh four five or whatever the numbers that they have in there and so you may need to do a little bit of experimentation when you get in there to do that and so it's it's a little beyond the scope of this class when we could we could do a whole special workshop where we spent about an hour testing lenses and doing that we're not going to that here questioning class I did live view again do you have to focus before you turn on live you because you can't re focus while you're in live you yes you can refocus while you're in live you and so if you're in live you may put this camera in live you make sure my camera has an auto focus I have a box in there if I press halfway down let's see what is going on this camera I gotta make a little adjustment see I have that my camera set in quick right now and it's shifting back do you know if you have it in quick or in what focusing mo do you have because mine is in quick and I'm gonna change it toe live mode and so now if I focus on something close to me it focuses and I'm using the a f on button on the back of my camera right now and it can barely pick up a white wall and a black frame it's just it's just very, very slow to focus so I would highly encourage manual focusing ahead of time uh it just seems to work a whole lot better button works the front button just takes a picture. Okay. Uh, question from kay um l m fifty seven when I changed to a joe adobe rgb the camera automatically changed my files from I am gi underscore number number number to underscore mg underscore number number yes. Any way to turn office and knowing feature they want to turn off they want to turn that off. Yeah, unfortunately there's very little customizing that you can do in this camera about the file names that you get in newer cameras you can go in and you can start customizing these things still with any camera that I have seen out there, what you're gonna want to do a good procedure is when you shoot your pictures and you downloaded to your computer is renamed your files when they get into your computer, the problem with this camera and all the other cameras out there is that they have a counter that goes up to ten thousand and many of us are going to shoot more than ten thousand pictures with this particular camera, and so you're going to end up with file names that are exactly the same, and so I talk about this more in my fundamentals of digital photography class naming procedures, but with a program like light room, you can set it up so that it changes the names right on import, you don't have to do anything I have do is import your pictures, and they automatically been changed to something that you've set up ahead of time, and so I have mind set up that puts an initial code on it, puts a date, put on it and puts a sequential code on it, so I'll never have to images with the same file them file name questioning class changing the file names doesn't pertain. If you're shooting and raw, though, does it changing that color code, that question doesn't pertain if you're shooting and we're all right it's not going to change the file names? Um, I'm changing what part of settings that that the rbg changing the file name it's not going to do that if you're shooting, you're wrong because the color doesn't changing the color setting don't know that's not going to change with raw shooting at all I didn't know that about it changing the file names but I know the file names are structured to describe the type of photograph that it is not only the dot j peg or the dot cr to which stands for cannon raw too it's their second version of their raw format but the file structure of the letters and numbers before it because I'm starting to write the class for the five d mark three and I've written the class with seven seventy and there's additional information aboutthe letters that it uses and how many letters that uses describing the type of color spaces and size of the picture so it's just kind of there parameters but you know what? You don't need to adhere to their standards you can create your own but you will need a computer and software there are just so many questions john um let's take a few more we do have a final camera operation section. Okay, we'll do three more questions here and then some more at the end. Okay, sounds good. Um erica mandrell would like to know more about the flash options if you set your flash to negative one does that affect the flash output? If your flashes off camera? Mmm that would depend if they are using the cannon infrared remote which is transmitting that information to an off camera flash if you are using let's say a radio trigger no that's not gonna have any information because it's not communicating with in the cannon language and cannon family of products so you would either need a cannon flash on your camera or the cannon and I for getting the model number they have a little device that'll trigger an external flash but it's not a flash unit itself and so if you're dealing strictly within the cannon family that would pass through but everything else it won't it there are a lot of comments in the chat rooms about kanan not having firmware updates available for the mark to for mac os x lion do you have any knowledge about that? I know that lioness still relatively new in the apple world and I think the manufacturers are still kind of catching up on that and so it will be just a matter of time. I imagine because that is apple's new operating system and that's what their cannon is gonna have to deal with going forward. So talk to canon it's not my fault you mind if I ask the mark three questions? Uh let's hear it? Okay. Alexander says do you think there's a huge difference between the mark too in the mark three and and that it would make it so important upgrade my equipment and then I showed you the tweet I got earlier from el fotografia, who ordered a mark three but after reading about the leaks there, little worried should they be? You know, I found it kind of funny because I don't know if some people are trying to sell mark threes or maybe if I'm biased because I own a mark two and I don't want to go buy a mark three because I don't want to spend close to four thousand dollars by the time it comes with taxes and stuff, but I get a kick out of somebody who says, oh, this camera is just so much better it is way huge improvement over the mark too. They have made giant leaps and I keep thinking back to many, many years ago when somebody came out with a new car, this car does twenty five miles an hour, the old one did twenty two and this is a far superior car because it does twenty five miles an hour and the difference between them is really small. In fact, just to kind of refresh my memory, I did a test just the other day between the mark too in the mark three with noise shooting at four hundred sixteen hundred thirty two hundred and I wanted to try to put a number on how much better it is the mark three for low light is probably one stop better maybe two stops better but it's hard to see much of any difference at all below it. So eight hundred so even at eight hundred it's like they're the same and so personally I'm looking at how often do I shoot it? I s o thirty two sixty for twelve thousand, which is not very often so I don't need it for low light, but it totally depends on how you shoot and what you shoot with your camera if you're constantly shooting at sixty four hundred one two, two stops better is a huge difference and that might be the total reason for the camera if you used the camera for auto focus reasons ah, wedding photographer you know you're shooting bride's coming down the aisle, this can probably handle that quite well. You want to do an even better job? Well, the mark three shoots at six frames a second versus four frames a second and can focus track better than this one, so you're likely to get a couple of more shots than you would with this camera. You could still get very good shots with this one. You just might get one or two more with the next level camera uh when it comes to the light leak issue it's a pretty rare instant that anyone is actually going to have a problem with that situation and now that I think I haven't really thought through it completely but now that I'm thinking about it and part of me just wants to shake somebody and say why are you using aperture priority in the night time mode at thirty seconds? This is a manual time where if you set manual shutter speeds it's not going to fact things and I can't think of a time that I've been using an automatic exposure mode this is just me and I kind of know what I'm doing my camera but I would never have my camera in an auto mode shooting nighttime type photographs that's a manual setting definitely and so I would not be scared of buying a mark three because of that and so what has happened is that cannon realized this and they made a modification in the new cameras and so the new versions of the cameras are starting to hit the shelves now so if you go to into camera store today there's a reasonably good chance that it's the old version of the camera and there as far as I can tell is no way to look at the camera, the box or anything else and know the difference you won't know and so if you wait a month or two it'll all probably be the new versions and so for some people you know if you are on the cutting edge of what this camera khun d'oh and you're trying to compete with other professionals you're probably gonna need to step up to the mark three there are just certain people in certain things that you need that auto focusing you need that extra one or two stops at those high esos that the new one is better at the difference between the two this camera feels in my mind like it's ninety eight percent at least but that's for the way I use the camera and I'm not using it in the auto focus I manually focus my camera a lot and so the focusing is the biggest issue about the new camera it's better focusing, tracking and video better video that I don't know okay? Because the video is still shooting at the standard hd nineteen twenty by ten eighty it's still shooting twenty four still shooting at thirty frames a second it does add in hd not full hd hd sixty frames a second so it adds in one option there I think it does have some more video features as far as you know it's got a headphone jackson you khun monitor that sound and so it is better there's no doubt it's better the question that you need to ask yourself is how much is it better for what you do? And as I say that fifteen hundred dollars buys yourself a nice l lands or take you on a nice trip