Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction

Welcome everybody to detest sahar fast start my name is john gringo, and in this class we're going to talking about the cannon sixty d this is a new camera from cannon just been out for a very short period of time. It is aimed, I would say, primarily for the intermediate level photographer, but it is certainly capable of professional quality results because it has a lot of manual controls and a lot of great features on it. It's got a lot of automatic and simple modes for the beginner photography, but like any instrument, if you don't know how to use it, you're not going to get the best results out of it. And so this class is all about learning what the camera can do and how to do it and how best to set it up. So let's, go ahead and get started, so give me an overview of what's going to be going on in this class. First off, we're going to be looking at the product, looking at cannes in some of the lenses and just kind of what you've got yourself into by getting a cannon sixty d after th...

at it's something that kind of necessary we need to do, and that is we need to talk a little bit about some photography basics there's ah lot of photography. In the camera, obviously on dh some people who get this camera don't know a lot about photography and would probably be well served to taking a photography class. This class is particularly on working this cameron not on photography in general, but we'll talk about that as we go along, we're going to go through the camera, basically starting on the outside, exploring all the buttons, what they do, and then we're going to go to the menu system, the inside of the camera and all the software that's in it and see howto set up the camera and all of its various functions. We're then going to go through some camera operations, and this is where we set the camera practice setting the camera for a variety of situations portrait, landscape and things like that and then finally will end the day by looking at some lenses and accessories that you can get for this camera that I think are probably more notable than the rest. So when you get this camera, you're gonna get yourself an instruction manual. It's got over three hundred pages, and if you spend a couple minutes per page, which is quite easily to dio you're going to spend about eleven hours reading this instruction manual now the class that we have today is going to last about four hours, which means that we're going to try to do this in one third the time it takes to read the instruction manual obviously we're not going to be able to go include everything that is in the instruction manual I've had teo kind of edit and make things a little bit more consolidated and concentrate mostly on what most people want to dio and so from time to time I will refer to the instruction manual form or information for things that we just don't have time to cover in this class here as I mentioned before, this is not a photography wanna one class if you are not familiar with shutter speed, step the field things like that there may be some terminology that we use that you're not familiar with and if you have not taken a photography class and you've just gotten this camera it's great that you're here because now you can learn all about your camera but you will need to learn more about photography to really master the camera and so that is a separate class and we will talk about some of those basics in the second part of this class so let's talk about kind of the product overview generally what you've gotten yourself into by purchasing a cannon sixty d first off, it's, a candid camera candidates, a japanese company that specializes in optical products. They make cameras, professional quality videos, they make amateur lenses are lenses and cameras point and shoot cameras. For instance, we have a lot of difference office products and that's where a big part of their company is. And they also make their own circuitry within the camera. So the circuit boards, the ccd sensors see moss sensors that aaron the cameras themselves, they actually make those themselves. So they are ah, very large company. Just a real brief history on them. They started in nineteen thirty three. Their first camera was a range finder camera. Things didn't really get going until the late fifties when they introduced their first slr cannon flax. And we'll talk about more about what an slr is coming up in a moment. Their first professional camera was thie f one from nineteen seventy one and then in nineteen eighty seven rather big change happen, and that is that they changed the lens mount on their camera. And this is really important to anyone who wants to buy older lenses. You want to make sure it's not part of the old f d system they have a new e f system will talk. More about lenses at the end of the day but they made a big change and they change their bodies and lenses to a whole new system to accommodate auto focus and that's what a lot of our systems on the camera are now based on that change from eighty seven in two thousand they had their first digital camera it was the d thirty and I remember that pretty clearly because it was three thousand dollars and three megapixels and you compare what you're getting in this camera at eighteen megapixels for around two thousand dollars this would be an amazing camera to take back in time to that to that point to show what cameras were going to be like now the cannon cameras that are offered uh our full range of cameras from very, very much amateur level two top of the line professional cameras and this camera the sixty d fits pretty much in the middle of it something that definitely any amateur would probably like to have and even some professionals might like to have is a backup camera has some nice features that are not on other cameras. One of the great things about getting a canon camera is of course all the lenses that you get to choose from there's over fifty different lenses that air just about going to do anything that you can imagine super wide angle telephoto fast lenses, big zooms, all sorts of lenses and then, finally rounding out the system. They have a very good flash system. They have a number of flashes, macro flashes on camera flashes, teo, shoot weddings and so forth with they have a very good flash system that you can add onto it. So it's a camera that you can customized to the way you want to work now the sixty d's kind of position and heritage. First off, it's got a couple of cameras below it. The rebel siri's and it's got several models above it. Seventy five d mark two and then the one d professional siri's the sixty d came out in two thousand ten. Very late really didn't become readily available until mostly until two, two thousand eleven. And it is based pretty closely off of preceding cameras the fifty d forty and so forth all the way back to the d thirty. So as you can see it's about the eighth in a generation in a long line of lens, excuse me, it's, about eighth in a long line of cameras that have been coming from kanan. And this is where they started. The d thirty was their first digital slr, and this is a direct descendant of it, if you will. So next up we're gonna go through a box opening we're going to go ahead and open this box right here in front of me, but there's a list of items that you're going to get in there and let's, go ahead and open up this box and see what we got inside. So when you buy the box knew this is a kid package it's got thesixty d and it's got the eighteen to one thirty five lens starting with your going to get some warranty cards, which lets you know that you have got an official product from canon and it's, not a knockoff of some sort. There'll be a package of information that includes software, and this is for downloading the raw images and some image browsers it's not completely necessary, depending on the other software you have. Personally, I like to use light room, and a lot of other photographers like to use that program too, and if you do, you're not going to need this software, so it depends on whether you have that or any other software that you like to use. The instruction manual is in here and, as I say for anyone who's new to cannon or new to this camera it's good advice to keep that around because there's all sorts of bits of information in there that you may want to know at some point as we dig in here let's uh let's pull out the camera first nicely wrapped in bubble wrap and then of course another little clean cloth here and so here's our camera nice new camera set this down right here in front of the moment ah inside you're also going to get some things like a camera strap which is a nice camera strap it's got the big old cannon logo on it which some people love and some people I detest way have some cables to hook it up to a tv if you want to do a slide show on your tv you could hook your camera directly up to an hd tv for instance this is actually cables for a traditional tv but we have cables for love do we not? We don't know this is the u s b cable for downloading the images if you want it downloads directly from the camera personally I prefer a card reader I'll mention that later in the accessory section wei have a battery charger and a battery we will need the battery to church to power the camera for today so go ahead and open this and hopefully we have enough charge on this battery to make it work so I think this is a new battery set that aside and then in here the all important lens so this is the kit lands as this package is supplied you can also buy this body alone this is thie eighteen to one thirty five it's a good basic zoom lens to get started with set that right there and then we'll go ahead and put this aside and start putting together our toys so we got our camera our lands let's go ahead and mouth lens up and on this camera will talk more about this but there is a mounting index a little white square right there and on the lens you can see there is also a white square so we're just gonna match those up like that turn to we hear a click and it is properly in their next up we're gonna go ahead and put the battery in on the bottom of the camera there's a little latch drops and locks in place like that the camera is not sold with a memory card and it uses an sd memory card which we're going to go ahead and mount right in the side like that and our cameras turned on and we're going to be ready to go here so that's what you get in the box and uh if you buy the body only you're going to get everything just like that with the exception of the lands so karen handling of the camera let's talk about this for just a moment when you get the camera there comes with an instruction manual and it's got all sorts of warnings in there about things you should or should not do and it's going to say things like don't get it too hot don't get to call don't drop it don't get it wet don't take it apart don't leave it by a giant magnet don't start with corrosive chemicals don't start with highly radioactive material I may have made that one up I'm not sure don't fire the flash it's someone driving a car don't use around flammable gas don't swallow the battery and in essence don't be stupid with it andi kind of all get that I mean we we know that it seems ridiculous that they even include that in the warnings but the ones that people do ask about is the camera is not waterproof do not get it wet what does that really mean? Because everybody wants to be able to take the camera out into a light rain or they want to know what kind of dissolve if I get a couple drops of my starbucks coffee on it well, the camera is not whether sealed and that's one of the things that I cz true of some of the professional and cameras they have whether sealing around all the openings there's a ah lot of openings on the camera if you think about every button on the camera is a potential place where water could seep in, get into an electronics board and ruin the camera so conceivably one drop of water in the wrong place could ruin the camera however that rarely ever happens thie types of cameras that get ruined by water are people that dropped him in a swimming pool or river or lake and people who stay out in the rain far too long with their camera how long is too long? Well, it depends a little bit on the rain but if it was a light misty rain I don't see a problem going out there for ten minutes and shooting pictures or if you're out there taking pictures you know keeping the camera under cover whether it's ah roof or an umbrella or you're raincoat and then taking the camera out to take some pictures when you really wanted to get that shot that would be appropriate use of it a zai say it's it's not a waterproof camera but if it was raining I wouldn't be shy about going out there and very carefully using it on then trying to dry it office quick as possible if you are out shooting and it gets wet and it stops working it might come back to life and the way you can help it come back to life is by opening up the camera and letting things air out so for instance you could take the lens off you can take the battery out you can open up the memory card door and you could basically let the camera sit there and breathe like this you don't wantto take a hot air blower here hair dryer or something to blow it on it just let it sit in a warm dry environment like this and there is a pretty good chance that it will come back to life once it has dried out if it hasn't it'll need to go to cannon repair services and need to be fixed and that could end up costing you several hundred dollars if they can fix it which they most likely can it's just a matter of money the other little warning that you get with this camera is that cannon is not liable for damage if used with non canonical accessories there's a lot of different things that you could hook up to this camera we have different lenses flashes memory cards, batteries and then when we get into the side door here there's a whole bunch of different plugin cables even get for remote usb cords and so forth cannon does not want to be held liable for damage to your camera if you hook up something crazy to it in general I haven't seen any cameras get damaged in that way but there are some features that you may not be able to take advantage of if you have an aftermarket accessory put on one of the areas I would strongly recommend cannon accessories is in the flash department the communication between the body and the lenses fairly sophisticated in cannon does a really good job at that so I'd probably stick with the cannon flash for lenses cannon makes a lot of great lenses but there are some other manufacturers that make good lenses as well and there may be some features and I'll mention these as we go along that may not be able to be communicated back and forth between the body and the lance uh and there are some other accessories that you could hook up generally you're not going to damage the camera you may not get all the features and benefits of what the camera khun dio was there any questions that you kind of had popping up on some of those warning things there? Susan I had a question sure um I want to know about this giant magnet yeah well, you know a memory card where would you find a giant magnet speaker just stereo speaker has large magnets in it depending on where they're located s o you know you go to the local bart shoot their concert you may not want to store your memory cards on top of the speaker but that's it's not so much the camera it's more the memory card so don't put your camera on top of a speaker either I probably wanted to know if there is a memory current in there yeah okay we know where else where else would we find a giant magnet that's probably the biggest one that most people are going to be around you know I wanted to see if going through the airport security because you go through the metal detector there and so I took a memory card through the metal detector to see if it would have any problems and that's not a big enough magnet so that's not a problem so and the going to the airport is not a problem with going through the x rays is no longer a problem okay luckily digital cameras came around just to the right time that was a big problem with film getting x rayed but you can have your camera x rayed and that's not a problem the same thing with the memory cards you know it's good little tip there that is a good time because I'm always paranoid yeah no x rays air not a problem when your camera okay awesome thank tweet that between it that's a good one that's a good tip x rays are not a problem all right next up talk about preparing the camera for shooting first thing you want to do is you want to charge the battery and that's going to take about two and a half hours in general you're going to get somewhere around a thousand two, sixteen hundred shots on it it depends greatly on how much you use live you how much you're reviewing images how much you use stabilization how much you use the built in flash so your mileage may vary, but around a thousand two, sixteen hundred shots we've already attached the lands showed you how to do that. We've installed the battery, which is good. We've put the memory card in let's. Go ahead and turn the camera on. We turned the camera on right back here. Flipped it on. We're good there, and this may be the last time I say this, but, uh, for those of you following along, go ahead and put your camera in the green auto mode on them with the mod button on the top left that's that green box. And what we're going to do here is we're going to press the shutter release and take a picture just to make sure our cameras working camera focuses. Flash pops up and we've got a picture let's. See, make sure we got our picture here. Yep. Got a picture of our students, all right? To get to know howto work this camera better. You also have to have some knowledge about photography, and so we're going to talk about some photography basics here. Now. Unfortunately, this is not a class in photography. It's, not photography wanna one? We don't have time to go into all the elements of photography. But if you would like to get into it here, it creative live. We do have a class called fundamentals of digital photography, with somebody by the name of john gringo andi it's, a ten week class. And if you want to learn about photography, it's a good way to do it, there's more than twenty hours of instruction from everything from exposure to focal length composition. And if you want to learn more about how to use this camera, that is going to be a great follow up course to this sixty d class. But just to give everyone a little preview of what's in the class, or just a few basics, if you never taken a photography class before let's, talk about what a digital single lens reflex camera is, because that is what a sixty dia's. So on this camera, it has one main lens, which allows in a lot of light. Now there are many different lenses. There are wide angle lenses, and they're our telephoto lenses and so there's a variety of lenses that you can get with it. The supplied lens has a little bit of wide angle and a little bit of telephoto. When the camera focuses, lens elements will move back and forth, refocusing the subject's onto the image sensor, and within that lens is an aperture. Which is a doorway that kind of opens and closes it's more like a hallway it's never completely closed it's just a matter of how wide open it isthe and this opening and closing allows you to control the amount of light coming in the lands and so on this example here we have a lens that starts at one point four and closes down to f twenty two and with each step of the aperture we let in half assed much light us before and as we go back opening, we're getting two smaller numbers we're letting in twice a much light with every step of the way now this is a little bit confusing because a small number is a big opening and a big number is a small opening so some people are often confused by that but it is something that you need to learn about and so let's look at a picture example of a lens shot at one point four and so here we've photographed just a simple yardstick the number seven in the two little red hash marks on the right indicate what is in focus the front of the focus and the back focus and you can see with each change the aperture we get a little bit more depth of field it's not a huge change it's a subtle and small change but they add up over the course of changing this aperture into being a quite significantly different photograph by having more and more depth of field and so this lens can close down to f twenty two some lenses can close down even further and here we go toe f twenty two which is as much depth of field as we can get out of this example. Then you can see that there's a big difference between the f one point four in f twenty two now going back to the camera and that light that enters through the lens. The next thing that's going to happen is it's going to hit a mere and this is the reflex part about single lens reflex. It bounces the light upwards into a ground glass and some of you may remember using a twin lens reflex or a waist level finder where you would view directly the ground glass with both eyes and that was away. A lot of cameras were but it's uh been a little bit easier for photographers to view a camera vue scenes through a prism system and a traditional ery knew a viewfinder allows you to see exactly what the land sees, whether you have a telephoto or wide angle lands or whether you using any sort of filter you get to see exactly what the lens sees now when you press the shutter release, the mere needs to get up and out of the way so that the light can travel back to the image sensor uh, if you had a film camera, this is where the film would be. Now, this image sensor is really important it's the heart and soul of the camera, and we're going to talk more about image sensors and their size in just a moment cause the size of the sensor is very important as well. Now in front of the sensor, before the light gets there, there is a shutter unit. It is a curtain that opens and closes for a particular amount of time, and it is a two part unit. It has the first curtain that opens and allows light into the sensor for its particular length of time, and then a second curtain will come down and close it, and these curtains are typically three, four, five blades of titanium or very light aluminum, so they could move very quickly. And then the mere returns down, allowing you to see back through the viewfinder. And so, while you are taking pictures, you cannot actually see what you're shooting it's for that very quick moment, you don't get to see exactly what you're shooting now. These shutter speeds are really important because they could be used for a variety of situations, so a very fast shutter speed, like two thousandth of a second will stop a bird in flight. Ah, five hundredth of a second is a good one for shooting human action, so if you're shooting sporting events, five hundredth is probably the lowest shutter speed you would want to use. Getting to a more moderate shutter speed one hundred twenty fifth of a second for something that's not moving too fast in this case, some camels walking in the desert it's a suitable shutter speed, but for animals moving very quickly, horse race a thirtieth of a second he's going to give you a blurry shot. Not that blur is bad. Blair can be bad, but this is often what is considered to be a good blur, so now we're getting down into much slower shutter speeds. Here, at an eighth of a second, you can see some people walking casually and how much they are blurred. At one eighth of a second, you can see that the bridge that they're on is actually sharp, because I used a tripod in this shot, allowing the people to be blurred as they're moving. If you like to shoot waterfalls or water moving, you're going to want to slow shutter speed, this's at a half second, and that water there's a wave that crashed over this rock, and then the water was flowing over it, which is causing that look to it a half second exposure, this camera can shoot down to a thirty second exposure, and so these might look like clouds around mountaintops, but they're actually waves crashing in on a rocky shoreline. And so a thirty second exposure mostly nighttime out there at this point, a little bit of moonlight illuminating the water, so these long shutter speeds could be a lot of fun to you, because you're not exactly sure what you're going to get when you set it up. Now, we said, we're going to talk a bit more about the image sensor, and this is where we're going to do it when you walk into the camera store and you look at all those cameras behind the shelves. What may not be apparent is that the image sensor that is in these cameras is of a different size and let's talk about the different sizes that are available, because whether it's a single lens reflex or one of the smaller point shoots there's a large variety of sizes available, and that size of the sensor is really important to the way lenses look and to the types of pictures that you can get and expect out of these cameras. Ah, the cameras for single lens reflex cameras there, three common sizes up there and if you recall thirty five millimeter film, which was a big standard in photography for a long period of time well it had a height than with of twenty four millimeters by thirty six millimeters and this was what we used for quite some time there are some digital sensors that have exactly that size sensor and we call those full frame sensors and we call him full frame because they're the same size as the thirty five millimeter sensor and it has what we call a crop factor of one point oh, which basically means it's the same size is thirty five millimetre these air great sensors they're very high resolution they're very good in low light I kind of wish all cameras had him the problem with them is that they're pretty expensive to make and so the camera manufacturers started making smaller sensors because they could make cameras more affordable so nikon has a sensor out there that they call their d x sensor and it has a crop factor of one point five now the camera that we're talking about today the sixty d has an a p s c sensor it has a one point six crop factor to it and it's just a smidgen smaller than the nikon d x sensor and so this will be important when we choose lenses and we'll talk a little bit more about this when we get to the lens and accessory section so this was all basically a little bit of a cut from my class called fundamentals of digital photography if this did not fully explain everything about photography to you you may want to take a look at the class you downloadable class you could get it right here at creative life dot com take just a moment here and see if there's any questions before we get started on the next section I just want to give you a couple of comments there definitely are people in the chat room on twitter who have watched your course before okay and uh there's a are saying how great it is and dr blind want to give him a shout out said that that side particular it's the best slr en f stop description animation I've seen good job john tell him what thank you very much appreciate that yeah so another just amazing animation that you'll get and you're one of things when I teach photography I'm a very visual person I think photographers are visual and so I create my own graphics and animations to help explain how things work hours and hours and hours far too many hours but to your benefit right also just to say about the fundamentals class um advanced students are kind of wondering if there's anything in there for them and we were just saying you know it spans from beginners to advanced students and you're going to learn something new from that class no matter I have professional photographers take sit in on my beginning class and walk out saying, I learned some stuff I did not know about. And so, you know, unless you're a full time professional, has been doing this for a long time. There's probably a bunch of things in there that we that we get into, I mean way. Talk about mere lockup. We talk about hyper focal distances, lot of composition. We spent two weeks on composition and so there's a there's, a little bit for everybody. So it's, a good learning course, and you can learn at your own pace. I agree.