Lessons
Class Introduction
06:50 2Product Overview
13:14 3Photography Basics
09:15 4Button Layout: Top Deck
44:43 5Button Layout: Back Side
20:37 6Button Layout: Other Sides
10:47 7Lenses
07:42 8General Q&A
09:31Lesson Info
Photography Basics
Uh, you can kind of rest for a moment. We're not going to get straight in the camera. We're gonna kind of take a step back and go through some basics of photography and I just want to make sure that everyone knows some of the very most basics and I taught a class here creative live just a couple of weeks ago called fundamentals of digital photography and this is a great class for anyone who wants to learn the basics of photography. And so if you want to know about shutter speed and aperture and so forth this is kind of a little clip from what that classes so the five d mark too is a single lens reflex camera, which means we got one lens on it very high quality lens lets in light and there are a lot of different lenses. We have lenses that have white angles, ofyou lenses with narrow angles of you. We have lenses that change, which are zoom lenses. And as you focus lens elements are going to move back and forth and then within the lens is an aperture. And this is a little mechanical devi...
ce which can open and close to help let in more light or let in less light so it helps control the light and it's just going to open and close like this, and if we take a look at it from kind of another perspective looking down in the lens you can see has were changing f stops or aperture numbers we're letting in less light and every time we go to a new number in this siri's we're letting in half assed much light and as we come back the other direction we are letting in twice is much light and so this is a great way for controlling the amount of light coming in our camera but besides controlling the light it also controls the depth of field and so as we take a lands and we start it's safe say fifty millimeter f one point for you can see over on the right hand side where the red hash marks are that's the year depth of field the front edge of the focus and the back edge of the focus and as we close this aperture down stop by stop we're getting more depth of field we are changing the amount of light that's coming in as well and so this is something that anyone who uses this camera should be very very familiar with this seems to be new information to you you will want to be taking a class in basics of photography all right so that's what the aperture is doing in the lens now as the light comes into the camera it's going to hit a near system and this mirror is going to bounce the light upward into the focusing screen and there's gonna be a small image on that focusing screen in order to see that image, you're going to need to have this light bounce up through the prison system to the viewfinder, where you will put your eye up to the camera so you can see what's going on, and you're actually looking at that focusing screen now, as light comes, when you take the picture, the mere needs to get up and out of the way, so the light can come in to the image sensor on the camera, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about thes image sensors throughout this class. Now, before the light gets to the image sensor, it actually has to go past the shutter unit, which is a two part unit. We call him a shutter curtain, but generally they're metal blades at this point in the shower curtain consists of two parts of first curtain and a second curtain, so the first curtain will open up, and then the second curtain will follow it, depending on how long that shutter speed is set for, and then the mirror will return so that you can see what's going on. So one of the things to take note of is, is that you can't see through the camera when it's actually taking a picture. This is why photographers need to anticipate the moment now, like with apertures, we can use shutter speeds to control the amount of light, but we can also use it to control how it stops action so we're going to use really fast shutter speeds like two thousandth of a second to stop something very fast like a bird in flight we might use five hundredth of a second to stop human action like dancer sports one hundred twenty fifth of a second is a kind of medium shutter speed stopping something moving moderately fast like camels in the desert. Now if you have something moving around pretty quick and a thirtieth of a second, you're going to get some blurriness and with people walking, you're going to get definite blurriness at an eighth of a second, we can use some really slow shutter speeds to blur water crashing over rocks at the sea on the seashore or we can shoot at night time and leave our shutter open for thirty seconds and have our sensor absorb light that we can't even see with their own eyes. And so shutter speeds are a great way of capturing different types of events so kind of getting back to that sensor in the camera the sensor is a really big deal and a lot of people don't realize this when they walk into the camera store that there's all these different cameras out there and there's a lot of different size sensors in all these different cameras now the five d mark to use is a very large sensor in comparison with all the other cameras out there. You can see it here in comparison, this is these are all relatively correct in size, and so the five the mark two uses what is known as a full frame sensor, and this is a full frame in the sense that it is based directly off of thirty five millimeter film, thirty five millimetre film for variety reasons that we're not going to go into, uh, became the most popular film after about seventy years in photography, and it was really convenient when digital cameras came out that it was the exact same size as thirty five millimetre, because all of our lenses will work on the same type of cameras. And so this camera has a full frame sensor and that's, one of the things that makes it very popular among serious photographers. The problem is, is that the full frame sensor costs a lot of money, and so manufacturers make smaller sensors like nikon makes a dx sensor. That's got a crop factor of one point five it's smaller by a factor of one point five and cannon on their other cameras like the fifty d or forty or thirty d. Some of the cameras we've heard about in here using a slightly smaller sensor that's, a one point six crop sensor and we'll talk a little bit more about these sensors in here, but it does open up the door to more lenses that you can use as faras white angle choices. It allows you to shoot with shallow depth of field and also a bigger sensor means you're pixels can be bigger and they can work better under lower light conditions. So if anything that I have said in the last five minutes seemed like it was new information to you, you might want to check out my fundamentals of digital photography class because there's a lot more information in there. It's a class it's downloadable right here it creative live I think they have it on sale. I think we're gonna have it. I think we do have to have it on sale right now so you can pick it up while this class is being aired. Uh, but it's a good class for anyone who wants to go through and really kind of flesh out those basics of photography. I don't know if we should break for questions for just a moment. Do you want to go over what the camera was? The guests let's amend it. We might have let's go back a little ways so way were asking question what's the most popular camera among professionals during the last twenty five years let's see what sort of answer's we have so red dawg said the cannon eighty one uh infinity photo said the cannon f two let's see what else um ask photo said nikon f three maybe the nikon f to agra india said nikon fm ten a nice little camera and then celean said five d mark one of the marked one was a very popular camera and gets more um chris uh frost in said the nikon d d three hundred three hundred okay, I think that one might be lower down on the list that's just my opinion I think that's pretty much that was pretty much all the guests do you see any other one's larry we already say the cannon f one think so okay, yeah nikon f too see that too was a really popular camera but that was maybe, like, thirty five years ago, so that was that was a bit older crystal said the cannon twenty so that's pretty much all the guesses I think okay, well, there was there was the right answer in there. Okay, yes. So wait have a prize for that person let's find out who it is from what I've seen from what I'd from my perspective personal pain it was a nikon f three and if you think about it after he came out in nineteen eighty one and at that time you had professional cameras coming out every ten years we're used to it every two or three years now. And so when I got started in photography about nineteen eighty seven, that had been the professional camera for six years. And so anyone who had bought a camera in the last six years who was shooting professionally probably had an f three. It was gs before the nikon f four came out and things started going auto focus. And at that time there was a lot more people shooting night cons than cannons, and cannon made a lot more headway in popularity in the nineties because they had a very good auto focus system. Their auto focus system, uh, proved to be a little bit better than icons during the early years of auto focus. But the camps were kind of split up more fifty fifty between nikon and cannon. And then when we got back to the five d mark to suddenly just a lot of people switch to that one and you grab gathered a group of photographers and just like everyone had five demark twos and back then, everyone had night kind of threes.
Class Materials
bonus material with purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Mia Linguia
Amazing class, I walk away feeling like I've made this machine my own. Like getting a new car and adjusting all the seating and mirrors and radio stations to your comfort, then giving it a name because its officially yours. My camera now feels more comfortable to use and I can't wait to use it again with these new found tweaks. Thanks John, always a great class!
Mike Swartz
Having used an XTi I was familiar with the basic Canon layout, but when I bought my 5D MKii used from my wedding photographer who updated to the MKiii, I knew there would be a ton of features I'd never really understood. This video series is fantastic. I've learned so much about my camera, many tips on best practices when planning shots and I've seen an increase in the quality of all my photos as a whole vs. just taking a ton of pics to try and capture one or two that turn out nice. I'm excited to try out so many new things I learned from watching these videos. I'd recommend these videos be the required guide to anyone who owns a 5D MKii.
Nelson
Excellent instruction. The instructor is very knowledgeable and a very effective communicator. Great photo examples and "SLIDES for that". Creative Live and John should both be commended for providing in depth and pertinent information. The Canon 5D MkII is a great camera however without a body of knowledge to fully utilize it you might as well have a low end point and shoot. I would recommend this class to anyone who has a 5D MkII, no matter your skill level. Great job!
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