Lessons

Lesson Info

Button Layout: Back

Next up let's go to the back side of the camera on and talk about what we're seeing back here, so we'll be talking in the second part of the class about the menu system, so we're totally going to dive in. This is where basically all the features are on the camera the most important ones on the outside, but they're also often located in the menu system next to that below that, I should say, is our picture styles button now for people who don't have access to computers, this button might become important for those of you who have access to computers it's not something you're going to use it's not something I use on the camera if you shoot in raw, this does not matter. This is really only gonna matter to people who shoot in j pegs and who I want to adjust the style and look at their photographs before they take them. What I would recommend for most people is to leave this in the standard mode and a do any sort of adjustment later on after the picture has been taken, but for some people th...

ey know they'd like a certain look to their image. They want a little bit more vibrant colors you could change it to one of the more vibrant modes vivid mode perhaps there is also three user defined modes that when we get into the menu system you could go in and you could have your own little special formula for how much contrast and saturation you want in your j peg images if you shoot raw images, you're going to get the straight data from the image sensor and this isn't really gonna matter so there's many people with this camera that never used that button at all all right, next up is an information button and this button is just generally gonna pull up more information and if you hit that button it's going to show you how many pictures you really have on your camera? And so while the top lcd panel tells me nine hundred ninety nine when I press the information button at the bottom left inside that brackets tells me how many total shots I have and right now I have four thousand six hundred twenty shots left on this so I can tell I'm set I'm set in the j peg model and you know, just for fun I'm going to do something and I'm gonna change this to really low quality to see how big a big a number I can get. Oh, this one topped out at nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine pages, so it only goes up to ten thousand uh so that's that's on a really small jape, which is not where I'd recommend keeping the camera, but we'll get into that in a moment and so when you're playing back a picture when you're playing a movie back when you're looking at live you if you want more or less information, you would hit the information button and it's gonna pull up different sets of data and so one of the things that you can do if you if you want to play around in here is you can get the level on the back, which helps you kind of steer the camera to figure out what's the level horizon on it so it's kind of a fun little feature there and so these are the three different screens that you're going to get you're gonna get a general camera settings and you can see in the bottom left hand corner that's your total number of shots we have our exposure level and then we have our kind of quick control street screen with our shooting functions and I'm going to talk more about that in a moment. The electronic level is kind of nice if you're doing landscape photography and you really want to make sure that you have a level horizon because any time that you have an unlevel horizon and you have to fix it later in the computer you're going to be losing pixels when you do that because you have to crop in in order to do that and so that's the level which could be canonized to use for for some reasons now as we move our way down below the information but you'll notice the color of the indicator on the button changes to blue things referring to playback in this camera are blue so if you look at the back of your camera you'll notice there's a number of symbols in blue refers to things during playback so obviously you're going to hit that when you want to take a look at an image now there is the garbage button right down below it so if you want to get rid of the image you're gonna have to go down there hit play and then go to the garbage button and then you're going have a dial over to erase and then hit the set button which will talk a little bit more about us we get up on the top left is the cuban and the quick button gets access to the menu system but just the most important things in the menu system we are actually going to get into this after the break after kind of the middle of the day break next up we have what has been a running joke in the canon family uh is the print button it's like why did they waste all this space on a print button? And so if you are in the playback mode if you are connected upto a printer you could actually print pictures from your camera to a printer I I have yet to meet someone who's actually done this, but I'm sure it can be done so in order to add a little bit more usefulness to it they have added a raw j peg button so if for instance let's say you're shooting raw and for some reason I can't come up with a good reason right now you suddenly would like to shoot a j peg with that raw image you would press that button and the next picture you took would have a raw and a j peg picture now this probably makes more sense for somebody who's shooting j pegs and they are thinking wow, this is gonna be a great shot I would like to get a backup shot in raw rather than going in and changing too raw plus j peg or raw they could just hit that one button and then they could shoot a raw and j pegs simultaneously at the same time it's not a button that I personally use uh but depending on the type of photography that you do, it might be a quick way to make a little adjustment on the camera. All right next up there's some little tiny holes there that's the speaker so when you play back a movie and you're listening to what's going on movie that's where the sound is coming from so not a lot of bass coming out of there the camera has a removable I cop, it's, the e g I cup. And so this is something that you can take on and off, and if you use the camera a lot, it might wear out, and you might need to get a replacement, but they are available for about twenty bucks. Over on the right hand side is a dye achter, which adjust the viewfinder for you to look through. No it's not adjusting focus of the cameras, just adjusting your viewfinder. This should be turned so that you can see the numbers at the bottom of the screen. Nice and clearly. And if it's, uh, if it's not make that adjustment, and hopefully you don't have to share your camera with somebody with wildly different vision, because you'll be resetting this all the time. But occasionally the, uh, the dialed does get bumped coming in and out of camera bags, and you do need to get that adjusted properly. The back of the camera has three big lcd screen on it. Three inch screens got about a million pixels on it. It's got this nice anti reflective coating, but it's a lot of people like putting on a little extra protection. If the screen does get scratched, it does in par, impair your vision of of the pictures, it also lowers the resell value with the camera on just doesn't look good, and so I like putting on a little protective cover there's a number of them that you can get out there they sell anywhere from ten to thirty dollars, depending on exactly what you want to put on their butt. That's it's a personal choice whether you want to protect that screen or not, it's it's fairly scratch resistant but not completely scratch resistant working our way around over to the right hand side. We have a little light sensor. There is a light sensor in the back of the camera that indicates how bright and dark it is in back of the camera and we'll adjust the brightness on the lcd screen, and this is something that I'm going to recommend turning off because I think it's good to have a consistent brightness level on the screen. I'll show you how to do that when we get into the menus next up, live view and movie mode, we have a button and a switch, and when you push the button, you go into live you. When you flipped the switch over, you go into the movie mode, they're very similar modes, but they're very different than standard picture taking so let's talk a little bit specifically about live view and movie mode. So the first thing to know about this is that your camera focuses in a different manner. Normally your camera uses focusing points and a very fast system for focusing. When you go into the movie mode, your camera does not work quite like a video camera, a camcorder where it's continuously focusing and we have three modes that we can choose from. We can choose from the live mode that middle one is thie face, live mode and the quick mode. So with live mode does is there's basically going to be an on screen box, and your camera is going to focus on whatever is in that box in the middle, and you can move that box around with a little joystick on the back of the camera now, using this mode, in my opinion, it's quite slow, but it's the preferred method of the three and mike in my in my opinion, the next mode is thief face mode, which looks for faces and will focus on the face in some situations that may work. It depends on the type of photography that you d'oh. Now, if you have multiple faces, you're gonna have to kind of keep track of which face it's focusing on, uh, third mode is a quick mode, and what happens there is the camera. Jumps back into the standard picture taking mode which means the mere comes down it then focuses on the subject and then comes back it's a very jarring situation because you can't see what your cameras pointed at when it jumps out of this mode and so it's quick yes but it's disruptive now the fourth option that's not listed that is probably the best option is manually focusing the camera and there's a lot of people who have use this for some very serious video work there's people who shot full length feature movies with it commercial documentary work and all sorts of projects and pretty much everyone is manually focusing either ahead of time or they're having a focus puller on the camera which basically means they're turning the camera turning the lens as an actor is moving within the shot the camera just isn't designed for great auto focus when it's in the video mode or the live you mode and so if you do want to get into making movies and really using this as a professional camera it has great image quality but she might end up working with a rig like this that's got a special mount on it special hand grips you can hold the camera properly an external finders so that you can see what's going on possibly um matt box for filters and shades you might have a viewfinder in the back so that you can see the screen yourself extra batteries, places to place lights it can get very cumbersome, and it dives into a whole other world of ofwork than what we're going to be doing here. And so if you do want to view what's going on the back of the screen more closely for any type of photography or video work, one of the more popular viewfinders out there is the zoo. Kudos, z finder it's, a three times magnification finder. It sells for about four hundred bucks, and you can get it to mount right on the back of the camera so that you could hold the camera up and you can have eye level view finder because just holding the camera in front of you is not the most comfortable thing, and you can't check focus as easily as you can with one of these finders if you need to hold the camera properly once again, this isn't the best way to hold the camera there's a number of different rigs out there from from some manufacturers. I listed a few of the top ones here and there's all sorts of different styles, depending on what your needs are, how much equipment you want, amount on the camera, how you want to carry the camera and how you want to move with the camera, cause that's a big issue. In shooting video and so if you are in the video, you're going to definitely want to take a look into these sorts of accessories and goods for so I kind of just kind of summing up on some of the major things about the camera. First off, it shoots to what's called a dot movie file, it has a particular type of video system called h two sixty four. If you're into video editing, you know all about it if you don't it's just and the other things are is that it has a limit of thirty minutes shooting, but it also has a limited four gigabytes, and so once you fill up four gigabytes of data, the camera stopped shooting so you can't shoot a whole soccer game. For instance, you're gonna have to shoot in clips depending on the resolution that you have set that's going to fill up for gigs. You can start recording again real quickly, but there is a limit on it, and just in case anyone's wondering why it has a thirty minute limit on it is cameras with under a thirty minute limit our classified for import under a certain category, and when they go over that they have to go into a different category of product, which I think. Gives him mork import fees that they have to pay and so it's not that it's technically not capable of it it's that cannon doesn't know how to do it they're just trying to fit within a certain category once again we talked about that information, but in a moment ago when you're in the live you or in the movie mode, you can hit the information button to get either more or less information because sometimes you want to see what your shutter speed and aperture is, sometimes you don't want to have anything on screen at all. You can also use the five times in the ten times magnification you can zoom in, so if you're a nature photographer, you can put the camera in live you you can zoom in and I'm actually going to show you how to do that here in just a moment and you can check the manual focus and you can adjust the focus on get it set perfectly. But if you are going to use this camera for video, what I would highly recommend is focus first and then shoot manually focus your shot and just leave it set for that hole shot. Now if you want to get fancy, you can get a focus puller out their toe actually change the focus while you're doing it but shooting video with this camera and having the focus change while you're shooting video does not look good all right uh it's not very fast it jumps around a little bit and the lens is connected to the camera which is where the microphone is and so all that gets picked up in the microphone so not the best thing in the world and then my final thing is is that if you saw the video that I showed earlier where I was running out of the car to go shoot a picture, you can put the camera in the movie mode and you can press the start stop button to start recording so I'm gonna I'm gonna flip my camera over into the video mode and I'm going to press the start button so now I'm shooting video and there's a red light in the back and is this camera video cameras still camera? It is a still camera and so that's where its allegiance lies and so any time I want to take a still picture all I have to dio his press down on the shutter release it stops the movie recording, takes a still picture and then continues the video with the previous video so when I ran out of my car basically I put my camera in the video mode I ran out I shot my three pictures and that was all one video clip but I also got still eighteen megapixel pictures from each one of those and as you watched that video, you noticed there was a small little jump when I took those pictures because it stopped recording for about a half a second, so it's, kind of an interesting way to shoot a picture because you can see what's happening before and after it. So you get video and stills essentially at the same time, all right, moving on back to the back side of the camera, so the big old dial that we've been talking about is officially called the quick control dial, and we're gonna be using it for a bunch of different things for changing in the menu system. Now, some people bump this, okay, and one of the things that you should know about yourself as a photographer is ru, right? Id or left? I'd most photographers are right id, but I am what I call goofy eyed, which is I am left, I'd and my nose sometimes bumps the quick control dial. Now, I don't tend to bump that and move it, but if I did bump it, I could throw the lock, switch on and lock that dial. Now the dial's still turns, but it's not changing anything, and so if you don't want that to change, for some reason, you know, let's, say, you're shooting a basketball game, and you set the your aperture back there and you don't want your aperture to change it all, you could basically lock that in, which is a nice little feature to have in the middle of that is the set button. This is kind of the equivalent of the computer enter on the keyboard when you are in the menu system and you want to set something there, you would press the button right down in the bottom right hand corner of that dial is the card light when you take a picture that's goingto turn on for just a moment, little red light and if you shoot a bunch of pictures, it might stay on for several seconds. What it basically means is the camera is working, it means it's downloading images too. The card at that time, the most important thing that you don't want to do is pull the card out of the camera while that light is red. Uh, turning the camera off is probably not the best thing, but it probably won't damage her do any harm, but anytime that light is on, the camera is working on downloading images. Next up, we have the multi controller this is often called the joystick and so it's a little button that you can put on that you can go up, down, left right as well as up to the corners as well. As we get over to the top of the camera, we haven't auto focus on button, so if you do want to auto focus on this camera, there are two different ways you can do it you can do it by pressing the shutter release in the front of the camera or you can press this button in the back of the camera and there are many people myself included who like using this button to focus rather than the one in the front. Some people like to turn the focusing on the front button off and I'm going to show you the menu system how to do that it's kind of more of an advanced set up I don't know that I would recommend it for everyone but the advanced users sometimes when they're pressing the shutter released they don't want their camera to refocus uh on something that may be the focus point isn't quite in the right area they get it right on the back recompose and then shoot the pictures they want without and so uh it's going to be nice in conjunction with turning that front button off. Next up is thie auto exposure lock as well as the zoom out button s o the auto exposure lock remember when you press halfway down on your shutter release it focuses but it's also doing a light reading and your camera as it moves around is constantly adjusting the light reading, no matter where you move and if you want to lock the light reading in what you would do is you would press that button in and you can just press it in and it stays locked in, and then you could move it over and take a picture, and then once you take a picture and press the shutter release again, it's kind of reset back to its default nothing and so any time you want to lock the exposure in and this might be helpful, let's say, if you're going to take a picture of a person standing next to a very bright window, you could get the reading where they are, where it's not quite so bright and then come back over to the window reading and shoot the exposure. And so if you want to lock the exposure and you would use this now, this is not going to work in manual, because in manual you're doing it yourself, it would work in aperture priority shutter priority and program millet next up is focusing points, and I will kind of mention here. This is also the zoom in feature, you'll see that in blue, so when you play an image back, if you want to take your camera and play back an image right now, we'll talk about the playback functions. You can use those two buttons to zoom in or zoom out, and this is a great way for checking focus and so very valuable tool to make sure that you got it right in the field. Now, the other part of this button is thief, focus points. What that does is it kind of activates the different focusing point so that you can change them. And for those of you following along and have you do something really complicated, we're gonna jump ahead a little bit here, and if you would like to have access and what I would recommend for most newcomers is too turn on all these features so kind of take a look at what we're doing here. We're gonna press the menu button. We're going to dial over to the custom functions. We're going to go down to group number three called auto focus and drive and over and number six, we're going to have that's the set button and go in, and we're going to register all of these and put check marks by all the options. This way you have options to all the different ways it can focus. So you want to have check marks by all of them and then go toe apply and press set, and then you will enable these. You don't leave it on disable I did that one time, one was wondering why I couldn't get to on my focusing areas, and then I will enable that. And so what happens then is that you have the option of going to all five of these different focusing systems that I'm going to talk about in just a moment. Now, once you get to know your camera and you realize, hey, I don't use that one, you can turn it off, so you don't even have to go buy it. But it's kind of nice to have all those options to start with, and we will kind of run by this again when we come into the menu section. All right, so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna look at the different ways that your camera can focus. It has five different major ways that it can focus, spot focus, single point focus, auto focus, point expansion zone and nineteen point the way you make the change is the first thing you do is you would press that button up by your thumb on the back. The second thing you would dio is you would press the m function button on the front of the camera, and that would allow you to switch between each of the five different zones. And then as a third step if you chose one of the areas where there was a single point you could select a single point using that little joystick or potentially the main dial in the back of the camera. And so the spot point is a very very tiny little point in the middle the focusing brackets air kind of broken up into two there's kind of the normal size version and then the extra small version so if he wanted it to be really, really small in the middle you could choose the spot a f point which is right there okay and you can select anyone of the different nineteen focusing points by selecting the spot and then using the joystick to adjust which one of those points you want so if you wanted to focus with somebody off to one side you could select any one of those points off to the side now the single point f is probably what I would recommend for a lot of general photography here you can once again select any one of the nineteen points within that frame but for the most part I would leave it on the centre point for basic photography. I think the spot f is a nice tool tohave but I think it's sometimes a little bit too small that gets caught on an area that doesn't have a lot of contrast it's going to have a harder time focusing and so I think the single point is a good general purpose one to use. Now, as we get into sports photography, we're going to want to have a slightly larger focusing area, and this is going to be the first one that you might want to give a try it's thie f point expansion, and this is going to allow you to use one point, but it's going to reach out to the nearby four points above below into the side, looking for information to help track the focus of a subject that's moving. So if you're going to photograph, oh, I've saved a basketball or football or soccer that might be a good, good choice to use. Next up is zone a f and zone f is a nine point so it's, just a slightly larger grouping, and this is probably my favorite one for sports photography depends a little bit on the type of sports and how much you have people cutting in front of one another one on it, but this allows you nine group nine points in general depends on exactly where it is, but you can move this to the left and to the right, above and down below centre as well, and so you can adjust it quite quite easily as well, and then finally, you could choose all nineteen points. And in the nineteen point one it's looking at all nineteen points and the default system that it's choosing is whatever is closest to you and that isn't always what you want to dio and so it's a very safe, simplistic mode when you have your camera in the green autozone that's where your camera wants to be and so it's not where I would leave my camera in a general basis in general, I would be at a single point for basic photography where I can be pretty specific about where I'm choosing the focus point like in a photographing a person I'm gonna want their eyes in focus, so I'm going to focus on their eye, not their nose, which is where one of those focusing points might go. You get the picture back their noses in focus, I guess if they have a nose ring that might be kind of interesting uh but if you want their eyes and focus you want you're gonna have to be very precise about focusing on their eyes and so using that technique and you have to press the thumb button in the back. First off, I had actually pressed the shutter release on my camera to make sure that it's turned on, hit the thumb button in the back and then hit the front button to cycle through the different options and so it's got one of the more sophisticated focussing systems out there. And so being comfortable with that, especially switching between still life and action. Photography is very important in this camera.