Lessons

Lesson Info

Camera Operation

We've gone through and we've figured out how to do everything let's kind of put it to practice now all right so I'm definitely going encourage anyone here in the group to follow along but if you're at home this is a good time to get your camera out and practice how much you have learned so when you get your camera set up some other things that you're gonna want to think about before you go off on your big vacation you're going to shoot that wedding you're going to shoot that really big job charge the battery you going to do the basic things the battery the lens the memory card you want to form at the memory card before you go out and shoot you re initialize you said it you clean it all up you're ready to start new make sure the time and date is set properly for the location that you're in make sure the doctor novice adjusted for focusing properly make sure your image quality a set you've come to peace with what you've chosen with j peg and raw all the features in your shooting menu you...

r playback menu and everything else is set up the way you want it to be set up then you're gonna go out you're going to shoot a test photo and look for dust on the sensor you want to have that stuff cleaned off before you get started on anything really important all right, so at this point, it's time for the class final test okay, so I have basically whittled the camera and all it does down to ten really important things the exposure mode that big dial on the top your shutter speeds the main dial the aperture is the dial on the back of the camera your s o u member the button in dial combination to do that exposure compensations that big old dialing the back when you're in the auto exposure modes like aperture priority cher party program and as you hold the camera, your fingers should almost just inherently be going to these buttons because it's like braille you're just gonna be able to read your camera by hand the meter in button I don't change this one very often, but it's it's right up there very easy to access white balance button dial combination again you're focusing points that one takes a little bit to change on this will actually know that this one's easy it's the next one the focus point sometimes requires a little bit more work, especially if you're changing from one point to some other point point system and then finally your drive mode and so this is what we're gonna look at here for this final little conclusion section and let's go ahead and just kind of walk through setting up the camera for super simple photography all right, so this is the type of way that actually this is if you're going to hand the camera to somebody else to go take pictures or maybe you're walking around with your family at disneyland and you're not really into taking, you know, super pictures, you just want to take some basic snapshots this would be a good time to use program you don't need to worry about cheddars feeds you don't need to worry about apertures it kills me to say it but set your camera auto, esso and it's just going to do its own thing. This is super simple photography do you make sure that your exposure compensation is set to zero? This might be a good time to use that exposure lock button on the back here camera so you don't accidentally bump that to the minus three and have all your pictures three stops too dark the meat ary I think evaluative is a good general meeting system and auto white balance is going to be fine for most things for focus, I prefer leaving my camera in one shot so that when I focus on something, the camera looks for it and locks on and stays there focus points bit of a personal choice here, but if you're going to hand the camera to somebody who doesn't really know what they're doing, they know what they're doing all points is a fine system to use and for the dr modi, think just taking a single shot, he's going to be fine. One of the downsides on this camera and I have had a bit of a problem with this, and I thought that I have pretty quick reactions is that when you leave your camera in the high speed mode, you press the shutter release. Once you'll get two pictures it's that fast, it just it fires him so quickly you can't get your finger off in just one shot, so single shot is going to be fine for most types of photography. All right, let's say, you're an old dog, you're a film shooter, and you like shooting your cameras in a manual way? How much you set your camera? First thing is, I would probably put your camera in full manual mode that way it gives you control over shutter speeds and apertures. You could pick a basic shutter speed like one hundred twenty fifth, and I encourage you to follow along if you want in classes, we do this, see if you can kept keep up with me, making my changes here, you can choose an aperture like f ate choose f ate because there's an old saying that says, how do you take a great picture f ate and be there, all right, and so that's going to be the aperture dial in the back, you'll see the benefits of having a separate dial for the shutter speed and the aperture he might want to use a little faster film speed here or s o four hundred allows you to shoot a little bit faster shutter speeds and these once again, I'm totally just making up these numbers as you how you might use this is not exactly how you set your camera with shutter speeds, apertures and s so it totally depends on your light meter. Metarie old cameras had center waited me, torri and this one's a little hard to find in the camera, because when you go up to the meeting symbol on the top of the camera as you turn the dial, you'll see I can dot a circle, a dot and a circle, and then you'll see nothing when you see nothing. That's the centre waited meter white balance let's just leave that one an auto to be simple focus who remembers how to change their camera to manual focus? Who remembers yes, it's, not a switch on the camera, it's the switch on the lens that does that a lot of people get mixed up by where do I turn that on the camera oh it's on the lands, because that kind of in a different location and for the drive speed, maybe we would shoot continuous loaf so we're ready for some basic action at three frames per second and so that might be an old school retro way. Teo, get this set up now let's just simply do a test just to see if you can follow along on how to set the camera so just for fun, let's put your camera in the time value mode and now we're gonna choose a very specific shutter speed let's go with one half of a second, which is actually kind of a difficult shutter speed to figure out we're then going to go to an esso have sixty four hundred, so we're going to bump that sixty four hundred way up so you gotta press the call button and you're turning which daily returning, returning the dial on top for changing the and then for the exposure compensation let's get wacky and change it to minus three is that plus three plus three? Excuse me and then our meeting system will use the spot metering system and as I said, there's, thie dot the circle, the dot and the circle and this is the dot so it's just the spot area middle area for white balance flash the universal symbol for flash is is the lightning bolt somebody press the flash button on their camera, so white balance is where there'll be another flash simple in your camera so with focusing a serval aye aye servo servo meaning to move is for sports and moving subjects focussing points this one might take a few little button presses so you're gonna have to press the thumb button in the back you're gonna have to press the emh function on the butt in the front which stands for multifunction not good and then change it to the point expansion which has one dot and then for other dots surrounding it and then finally just for practice setting you can set the ten second self timer and take a picture in your camera will take ten seconds before it actually takes a really horrible picture it's a bit of a magic trick that I do I could set your tell you how to set your camera and I know you will get a bad picture so this is just for fun just for practice setting the camera so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to set the camera up for landscape photography so maybe travel photography but if you have a landscape in front of you here's some things that are going on you got objects that are kind of close to yu got objects they're kind of maybe further away from you and you want him all in focus so depth the field is critical on this where you focus is pretty important and I'm kind of assuming that you're on a tripod, which you should be if you're doing landscape photography in most cases and so in this case, I would recommend using manual exposure so you khun specifically choose your own shutter speed and aperture you're probably gonna need a longer shutter speed so let's just choose a quarter of a second just so that we have something to change it towards. So that's just going to be four one over for it's a quarter of a second give you just a moment dialled hat in we're going to change your aperture and this one's going to be fairly critical in it varies a little bit with lens, talons and situation, but let's set f sixteen, which is going to give us quite a bit of depth of field we might go to twenty two or thirty two depending on the winds and how close proximity we are two subjects in front of us, but we definitely want more depth of field in a landscape shots with the so I definitely want to have my eyes so at one hundred that way I'm getting the best image quality on the sensor possible now I'm not going to use exposure compensation because we're in the manual mode if I need to make the picture brighter or darker, I will just simply adjust my shutter speed or my aperture we'll keep things simple with the metering will just return that back to evaluative metarie and evaluate if if you if you're not sure in the canon is not completely intuitive it's the dot and the circle around it at the same time white balance we're just gonna leave this in auto so that's the aid w b for auto white balance and we're gonna leave our focus in one shot we're gonna pick one thing to focus on we're gonna focus on one two up we're gonna focus on one tree very precise about what we focus on and have it locked there and choosing where we focus we're just going to need one focusing point and we're going to direct the camera two focus in that one area so spot auto focus would also work but I would choose single focus I think that's a good general place to leave the camera for this type of work and then for the drive mode a couple of options here you could use just the basic single mode if you're going to use a cable release or you could use the two second self timer which is kind of what I call cheating but is fully acceptable in this camera and so I cheat a lot with the two second self timer so I don't have to get out the big fancy remote and so that's how I set my camera for landscape photography and if you want bonus anyone like bonuses uh as a bonus you could use mere lockup because then that would really ensure that your cameras very, very stable and so that would be something that maybe you have programmed in to my menu so that you could get to it very, very easy or another way to get to it that's even easier live you put your camera in live you the mirrors locked up and so that works as well all right, let's do another type of photograph here let's take a portrait so we're gonna shoot a picture of a person we could do a dog a cat anything else but something that's probably moving and you're probably moving you're probably not on a tripod and kind of the big deal here is that you want to shutter speed fast enough to stop any motion and you're likely to want really shallow depth of field so that what's behind your subject is out of focus once again I would choose manual exposure here that way you can maintain very specific control over the shutter speeds and apertures you're going to need a little bit faster shutter speed probably one hundred twenty fifth of a second or faster this is where it really pays off to have a fast lens that lets in a lot of light if you have a lens that goes down to one point for you might want to shoot it at one point for this is we're having a lens that's fast like to wait or to really, really comes into having good benefits with the s o I'm gonna want to leave that it s a one hundred as well. To maintain that image quality, I really want to keep that s o as low as possible as often as possible. Well, go ahead and leave the meeting and the white balance right there at the, uh, evaluative and auto so that's the same as before focusing one shot. I'm going to focus on the subject's eyes and I'm gonna want it stay locked there unless they're a fashion model and they're moving towards me in a way for me and I need to track their motion, but if they're just standing or sitting there, I'm going to use one shot and I'm also going to use single auto focus and I'm going to focus on their I I don't want to use the nineteen point focusing and have it pick their nose because that's the closest thing to me, I want their eyes in focus because that's what's important in a portrait photograph now for the drive mode, I would probably actually use the continuous high speed because people's expressions change, their gestures changed just a little bit. And they might get into a really good spot and you want my on a real off three or four real quick shots, right when just the right moment is going on and so that's how I would set up a portrait shot using the seventy all right, let's do a couple more next up is action photography so sports dance things were people or things are moving towards you or away from you or moving around a lot. So there's a lot of changes that have to happen in here, but once again I'm going to stick with manual. I like to maintain control over shutter speed and aperture here you're going to need a faster shutter speed probably five hundredth of a second or faster. It depends on a variety of factors how fast the action is moving your angle of view lens there's a number of things, but five hundred is a good number to start with from there, it really pays off to have a faster lands if you have a two point eight lands, you're gonna probably want to set it there. Many sports photographers don't like shooting faster or wider open than two point eight because the shallow depth of field makes it very hard to focus with a subject that's moving that's why sports photographers love lenses that go to two point eight you're likely to need a faster I s o if I could shoot it one hundred I would be a one hundred, but a lot of times I have to bump this up to four hundred in order to get that faster shutter speed, I'll probably have the meat green at evaluative and I'll probably have the white balance at auto as well. Now focusing needs to change here. This is the first one that we kind of changed in the more serious moz we're talking about a servo servo means to move and so we want to track the moving subject and as far as focusing points, it depends on what you're shooting, how you like to shoot your lens in a number of other factors either a f point expansion or his own my preference runs to the zone, which is about the box of nine little boxes that one tends to work really well. In my opinion, I use that for a lot of types I was using it for the auto racing I was shooting the other day I use it for cross country running and most sports in general is the one I'll go to unless the subjects are very, very small in the frame and this of course is in the drive mode where I'm going to take full advantage of eight frames a second and you are going to sound so much cooler than all those other moms and dads near you firing off two frames a second or something you can sound like you have a very impressive machine gun when you start shooting with this camera okay let's do another one here. This is called maximum sharpness this is where you don't have specific needs for shutter speeds you don't have specific specific needs for depth of field you just want to take the sharpest possible picture of a basic subject. And so with here once again a big proponent of manual controlling your shutter speeds and controlling your apertures now if you're on a tripod for maximum sharpness which is what I would recommend bonus points for that uh you can use any shutter speed you want if not, you're gonna have to be aware of your shutter speed for handheld movement your aperture is going to be towards the middle of the range of the lands if I had to give one number that's probably good on most lenses f eleven some lenses are a little bit sharper a deaf aid or five point six but wherever the middle f stop ranges on your camera right in that middle is where your lens is going to be the very sharpest eso at one hundred for the finest quality detail with the sensor so that of course is going to stay there evaluative metering is probably going to be fine white balance at auto or if you need to specific specifically change it for that environment. You could do that for focusing. I would switch this back to one shot, focusing so you can choose what your camera's going to focus on and have it lock in that spot. And then for focusing points, I would probably go back to the single auto focus here so you could choose with a relatively small bracket, which one to focus on? I do like the one in the center because it's got that double cross hair sensor in there for the drive mode. Either you could use the single mode with the cable release, or you could use the two second self timer and then once again for another set of bonus points, you could use the mere lockup. And so before we end this class, I have one more, and I really encourage you to follow this one, because this one is just plain old basic photography. How would I leave this camera just walking out the door and starting to take pictures? Where would I put it? And this is where you kind of don't know what you're going to get yourself into, and this is where I will actually recommend something other than manual I kind of like aperture value for just a simple, automated way of having the camera set up, I don't need to worry about cheddar speeds, but I will probably leave my aperture relatively wide open may be f four it's, pretty rare that you suddenly need to take a photograph that has tremendous step the field it's far more likely that you were going to suddenly need to take a picture of something that's happening quickly, in which case you want a faster shutter speed, in which case you want a smaller number aperture, I would leave my eyes so one hundred so that my camera's always set to the best quality, but I'm always consciously aware of when I need to raise it, so when you go inside of a home or a building, you're probably going to need to raise it up to four hundred or who knows where eight hundred this is really important right now, because when we did our little test a few moments ago, we changed it two plus three make sure your exposure compensation is set back a zero that's the dial on the back the tv said he metering at evaluative is a good general purpose metering system and auto white balance does a darn good job most of the time, focusing I would leave this in one shot so you can specify what you want and focus, and it holds it there. And then I would leave it in single auto focus as well. Even though it's got nineteen, focusing points, I like to have a little bit more exactness in the way I focus. And for the drive mode, I think just the single shot is fine for most situations. You, khun, pump your finger up and down on that shutter release. If something happens, great. But just you could be very careful about getting one shot at a time. So if you have somehow made it through this entire class and you paid attention to everything that was said, congratulations. You are now a cannon seventy. Expert.