Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction & Product Overview

Well, first off I just want to cover some product overview this is for anyone who may be switching from nikon or maybe jumping up from a rebel camera you know what exactly did they get themselves into? Maybe they had a friend who recommended it and so I want to talk a little bit about kanan welcome you to the canon family perhaps we're gonna go through some photography basics this class well it's for anyone who wants to use the camera but we have a wide variety of users I've had I've had people in my classes who didn't even know how to set their center speed an aperture in their camera I have other people who run their own business and they just they want to get that highest level of information out of the camera and this is going to be basically for everyone and so if you know more just kind of wait through the easy stuff we're not going to dwell on it for very long. We'll get to the high tech nerdy stuff in due time uh and most of the time we're going to spent going around the button...

s and going to the menu system on the camera and then its very end we're gonna have a little bit of a hands on test with the camera so that you can practice setting the most important setting so you could get used to really working the camera all right, so when you get your camera you're gonna get this big old instruction manual that's got about four hundred pages in it and you could easily spend about thirteen hours going through that manual now you don't have to I've kind of done it for you and I kind of picked me two chosen the most important things but there is still good information in there with you I don't know that you need to carry her around with you everywhere you go, but every once in a while they'll be a question and you want to get some more information that maybe I don't discuss because I don't discuss everything in every page on the manual in this class thankfully and so it's still a valuable resource of information so how is it possible that I can cram thirteen hours into five hours and I can't it's it's this class's works in combination with the instruction manual if you are new to cannon welcome to the candid family and they are well pretty all there he started in nineteen thirty three making little range finder camera uh things got a little more interesting with the single lens reflex, which is the same style camera the five d mark three is in nineteen fifty nine and then professional started using the camera quite a bit more in the early seventies when they brought out their f one professional quality camera and things took a pretty major change in nineteen eighty seven when they introduced their first auto focus camera and most importantly they change the lens mount on their camera so lenses from pre nineteen eighty seven that our manual focus will not work on this camera now technically you could buy an adapter to make him work but my honest opinion is that it's not worth it um there's very few lenses that would be worth converting to make it worth it and so you want to be careful of going to garage sales and finding old cannon lenses and think they will work on your camera. Then in two thousand things went digital with the d thirty this camera sold for three thousand dollars and had three megapixels compared to our twenty two in this camera and you can always tell the age of a digital camera by the size of the screen on the back of the camera. So ian what's so great about the five d mark too compared to five the mark three compared to the five demark to well it's not a huge improvement but the twenty two megapixel full frame sense or a lot of people are buying the camera because it is a full frame sensor and for some people twenty two megapixels while it is not the most in the class, some people see it as a very good number two have that's not too many good file sizes that are overly large but really good image quality uh, probably the biggest improvement specifically from the five demark, too, is the sixty one point autofocus system, my personal feeling, and I don't have any inside knowledge on this, but I just kind of guessed that the engineers at cannon took a lot of heat, with the five d mark two and the auto focus system being the same as it was in the original five d autofocus system, and so I could see the auto focus group and they're like, we're getting hammered on the internet, so we're going to give him this and this and this, and then he just started throwing all these things on and it's been the biggest improvement I've seen in an auto focus system from one camera to the next, and so that's the biggest area of new information. In fact, they have a whole tab in the menu system filled with auto focus customization features, and we're gonna go through all of those so you can set your camera up really good for action and all the types of reasons that you want auto focus but that's singley the biggest, biggest, changing the camera we have six frames a second on the previous camera had four frames, and then the original five d had three frames a second, and so on it depends on the style that you shoot. But you know what? More frames per second is almost always good when you're trying to capture critical moments that you need that little burst for s so that's. Definitely very helpful for a lot of photographers. Really good image, quality and low light. The five demark too was very good under low light. And this is even better in low light. And then, while it's not a specific feature, I think just generally the professional feature set that's in the camera and the really solid construction is just very, very good. It's up the ante from the five d mark, too, and so it's, not cannons, top of the line camera, but I see it as a full on professional camera. In my opinion, one of the best things about owning a five d mark three is that you are part of the cannon family of cameras, and they are constantly upgrading, improving these. They have a a wide range of cameras. Now this is albeit at the upper end and there's, not a lot of room to go upwards from this. This is their highest megapixel camera. They do make a one d mark x that is more professionally built. It's more durable, more weather sealed and faster frames per second. Great for the photojournalist and sports shooter that might fit some people's needs so you can move up to that, but they're constantly improving the cameras there's other cameras so if you're gonna buy a camera for so you somebody else in your family you can buy one of the entry level rebels or an intermediate level camera you can share this back and forth and that's the other thing that's great about canon is the huge collection of lenses they have more than fifty lenses and they cover everything from super wide angle fisheye super telephoto zooms of every nature and they're constantly coming out with new ones and I don't know if anyone has been paying attention to the rumor sites, but supposedly tomorrow they're going to be introducing a pancake lands a really, really tiny small lands forty millimeter that is probably optically not going to be the best lens on the block, but if you want a really small lightweight lands, they'll have an option for you. Cannon also has a great collection of flashes. We'll talk a little bit about some of my recommendations for flashes for what you might use for different types of photography that you do later on in this class, so we've been talking a lot about the five d lineage of cameras, so the five d the original five d was a hallmark camera because it was the first affordable full frame camera for most people it's sold for about three thousand dollars and I know affordable is a relative term but previous models were around five or six thousand dollars, so three thousand dollars was a big break in the price the five d mark two brought out video as well as a number of other improvements into the camera and now we have the five d mark three, which is just a total refinement of the whole five demark too in my opinion and they've generally been about three to three and a half years apart in their introductions so when you get your camera which we don't have a new one in the box normally we often have a new one that we take out of the box right here we don't have that today fortunately glaser's camera which is just down the street from us our rent their rental department has loaned us, eh? Very new looking five d mark three I know sometimes when you talk about rental equipment it gets beat up pretty hard, but this thing is pristine and that's because the five d mark three's air so new and hot they just don't happen to have a box to one lane around right now, so thanks a lot glaser's for loaning us a great place to rent equipment if you're in the seattle area, you want to go rent five mark three check it out, see if it's good for yourself or other lenses. They have a great collection of stuff there, and so in the in the box, you're gonna get the cameras sometimes it's packaged with the twenty four two one o five sometimes it's not depends on how you purchased it. Uh, main things you're going to get her the battery in the battery charger there's a number of other little accessories that you're going to get on. If there's anything really worth talking too much about it does come with cannons proprietary software. To be honest with you, I don't use it not too many photographers I knew actually go into and using that software. Most people I know are using adobe light room and then there's a number of people that are also using apple's aperture as a post processing program. Programs like photoshopped and so forth are also very popular, and so that's what most people are doing with the camera, but that that is in there for converting raw images and working with other features that the camera has and we're not going to be going into that aspect of the camera. I always find it somewhat entertaining when you look at the camera and they have all these. Care and precautions care in handling things about how to take care of the camera and it has a lot of ridiculous things like don't drop it you know don't leave it outside in the rain and one of my favorite ones on a camera recently was when adjusting the diop ter don't put your finger in your eye they actually had to write that into the manual so that you want to do it and so I think most of us get this you know don't be stupid with it and so one of the things in there that it says in the very specifically word for word from the cannon manual is this camera is not waterproof and cannot be used underwater so no scuba diving people with your five d mark three unless you have a housing for it there are aftermarket housings for but the camera is weather resistant to a degree and some lenses are weather resistant and have weather seals others do not and cannon is not explicit about how much rain or water or humidity it can take so you have to be a little bit careful a an example of how I deal with the rain is I was out shooting pictures as you know your trainee pretty hard but there's a shot I really want to get so I got to go outside and get it really quick okay, here we go okay let's see uh number one all right. Still little closer. Teo uh, little backed off shot here, right about there. Okay, back to the car with. Okay, so you can see that I don't wanna waste my time standing out in the rain for a couple reasons everyone, I just don't like it and went like that. But the camera is not designed to be shot out in the rain for a long period of time. And so if you need to photograph a football match or a soccer game or something like that and you need to be out there for a couple of hours, I would get a rain cover for it if it is raining and you really want to go out and get a shot. Yeah, I have no problems going out getting the shot, but get in out of the rain or have a friend with an umbrella help you out. So you you just don't want to push the limits of the camera and there are some lenses that have weather seals on him, and if we could get a close shot over my shoulder, here would be real nice. I don't know if we can get shot in on this lens, but this lens here has a, uh whether ceiling on the outside, you kind of take the lens off and you can feel around the edge if it has a rubber seal on it. Some of the longer lenses have this rubber seal most of the lenses don't but that's one of the ways to tell if a lens is a weather resistant lands the other thing that is completely off topic but it comes into play with a little video that I shot uh that was actually shot with a five day mark too, but the video and this works in the same way and we'll talk more about video, but one of the things that you can do is you could be shooting a video which I was doing you could take a still picture and then the video continues to record at the other end of that still picture and so you end up with one video clip with individual pictures and so when I shot that siri's ice got three individual pictures plus one video clip and this camera works in the same way so you can do this photo video fusion mixing them together, which is kind of fun and we'll talk more about that a little bit, but the camera going back to the weather ceiling has pretty much every port and opening sealed on the camera in some way so it is pretty good under light misty rain conditions you could probably through a bottle of water on it, you might be able to throw a bucket of water on it. I don't know I'm not going to do it on my camera voluntarily. The other issue, when it comes to the karen handling of it is cannon is not liable for damages used with non cannon accessories and so let's be honest, cannon would prefer to sell you lenses, batteries, flashes and all the other accessories that go on the camera. I don't think I have seen a case where somebody has actually damaged and broken their camera with some other piece of equipment. I know that when you use a cannon lens on your camera, the camera can communicate, and it knows what lens and what deficiencies that lens may have, and we'll talk about chromatic aberration and distortion in vignette ing that the camera can fix because it knows what the lens is doing, and so that might be an advantage with cannon lenses. But there are some other tamara in toki noah sigma lenses that are very good that can work for you that we're not going to damage your camera at all. Cannon makes some very good batteries and there's there's a lot of aftermarket batteries from china, usually, and sometimes they don't have the chip inside, which lets your camera no, how many clicks you've gone through and how good the battery is it still powers your camera pretty fine they're typically not as good as the cannon batteries but there are a lot less money, so you'll have to make a judgment on that your own it's not going to dance it's a camera in my opinion but you may not get his much life, so hopefully everyone has prepared their cameras for today's class both you at home and here in the class. One of the things that you'll need to do is charge the battery, which will take about two and a half hours it's estimated that you're going to get around nine hundred and fifty shots on it if you start using the live you are going to movie mode that's going to cut down that time inefficiently you'll get around two hundred shots off of a charge if you're using live view all the time and so you do those basic things like attaching the land's putting the battery and you have the memory card that's all good we know about that sort of stuff uh what everyone in the class to turn your camera's on make sure mind's turned on as well. We have the on switch in a new position we'll talk more about that at second and it kind of kills me to say this but turn the camera to the little automatic a plus mode and go ahead and just take a picture. I just wanna make sure that your cameras are working. My camera is working, and I'm hearing some good cliques. Click, click, click. Okay, good. Everyone's camera is working.