Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

All right, welcome, everybody, to the Canon 5D Mark IV Fast Start. And so what we're going to be doing here is we're going to be doing a full walk-through of the camera. I know that there's, you know, places that'll give you a few tips on how to do this and that, and this class is really for the people who are hardcore, you're kinda like totally into your camera. You wanna squeeze as much out of this camera as possible, and this camera has a ton of stuff, arguably more than any camera that I've seen before because this class is the longest class. It has the most stuff that I've ever had to put into a class up to date, at this point now. So this is going to be, this is going to be for the people who are willing to sit down, go through the videos, practice with their camera, get their settings right. If you're rushing out to go shoot a wedding right now, this is not the class to be watching for 10 minutes of quick tips, 'cause we're gonna be going in-depth onto these features. Now, I hav...

e a particular style with the camera, and a lot of it has to do with how do I get the highest image quality out of the camera, and I don't like to play games. I don't want the camera doing a lot of funny stuff. And so that's how a lot of my recommendations go, but I realize there's a lot of different people doing a lot of different things, so I'm trying to let my own bias about how I personally like to use the camera, on how everyone else should use it. So I'm gonna try to be very open about you could use it this way for this and use it this way for that. And I am a very visual person and I like to see the entire menu laid out on one page so that I can just scan and find all the items on here. And so this has the entire menu that pages and pages of information, here on one simple page. Now, on the PDF that you get with the class I have this on two pages. The first page has my recommendations, and these are recommendations if you didn't know what you were doing and you just wanted a good basic setup. The second page on this has it blank so you can write in your own, or add in your own ideas about what you want to have in there, 'cause I know everyone is gonna customize their camera differently. I don't think you will run across two people who have this camera, that have it customized exactly the same by the end of one of my classes, because there are so many different options on how you can do this, and I wanna encourage you to customize it to your liking. That's one of the things that I've done in my photography is try to customize everything from my tripods, to my bags, to the settings in my camera, and that's why I wanna give you really good information on it. All right, so let's get into this class. We have a lot to go through today. So the way we've broken this class up is into little sections. The first little part I just wanna give you a class overview. We have some people who are moving into the Canon world from other places; I wanna give them a little introduction there. It's probably completely unnecessary, but I have a section called Photo Basics, and it is inconceivable to some people that I would be talking about that in this class because this is arguably now, or soon to be in the future, the most popular camera among professional photographers. But we do have people who are getting into photography, they have the budget, and they know exactly what they wanna get, and I wanna provide them with a little bit of information. For many of you, you can just skip right on past this onto the camera controls. This is where we're gonna spend a good deal of our time, going through all the buttons, styles, ports, features on the camera, talking about what they can do, how to set them for different types of photography. The Menu Sections is arguably the largest part about this class. This is gonna be the second half of the class, and we're gonna be very detailed. We're gonna go through the Menu items, line item by line item. We're not gonna spend a lot of time on each one for the most part. We're gonna go through 'em quickly. I'm gonna explain what they do and where you would set them for various different types of photography. And then to finish it all off, in Camera Operation I'll give you some tips and hints on how I would set the camera up for different types of photography. And so we got a full day ahead of us. Let's go ahead and get started on our overview. Now for anyone who has one of these cameras, they know that the instruction manual is rather large on this camera, and I could easily see spending 28 hours going through that instruction manual. I have been through it, page by page of course, for preparation for this class, and this class is gonna be in the five-plus hour range. How is it possible for me to get everything in 28 hours into five hours? I can't. I am focusing on things that are most important to getting the highest quality images, and there are other things that I'm not gonna spend as much time. For instance, you could hook this camera up to a printer, and you can select what size of print and how many prints you want and different details about that, and we're not gonna go into that. And so there is a number of areas where you may want to drill down and get some more information by diving into that menu system, or by into that manual system, into the manual. And so it's not completely something that you should throw away, but my hope is that by the end of this class, you probably don't need it, except for maybe one or two items that you really wanna find out more about. And there is, and you may not know about this... The printed manual that you get in the box has an abbreviated version of the Wifi manual. If you want the full Wifi manual, you have to go to Canon's website and download a PDF. And so if you do a lot of Wifi and you wanna figure out more about how that works, you need to go to Canon's site to get the full PDF for that. Now as we go through this class, you might be wondering well, John, isn't lighting and composition also important in photography? And it absolutely is but we don't have time to cover it in today's class. We're going to be concentrating solely on the Canon 5D Mark IV. If you are interested in other photography classes, I have short ones, I have long ones, and of course here at Creative Live, we have not just dozens, we have hundreds of classes on photography. All right, so for those of you who are getting into the Canon world, Canon, of course, has been around for a very long time. They got started with little rangefinders, very simple, basic cameras. They got into their SLRs in 1959, and then they started... and these were kind of cheap SLRs, they were real simple, basic ones, but then they kinda went pro in with their very popular F-1 and various versions of that. In 1987 is when they made their big lens mount change and this was revolutionary at the time because they completely changed their lens mount, rendering it obsolete, and everyone had to go get new lenses and new cameras. But this camera will use the same lenses all the way back to 1987. So all of those will work perfectly well, fully compatible on this camera. And their first digital camera came out, the D30, which, you know, interestingly it sold for about the same price as the 5D Mark IV currently sells for, but that had a crop sensor, and it was three megapixels (chuckles). And the menu system, the class on that camera would probably be about an hour and a half compared to this class, just by the number of features in the camera itself. And so, you might see a few of those floatin' around eBay for about a hundred bucks these days. So one of the great things about having a 5D Mark IV is you're part of the Canon family of cameras, and so they have a huge number of cameras available that fits a wide variety of needs. They have a huge number of lenses and a very complete flash system. So pretty much anything you need, there's a good chance that they make it right there or it's available for it, possibly from another manufacturer. Now where the 5D Mark IV fits is near the high end, and we do have the 1DX, which is kinda their sports and photo-journalistic camera; lower in megapixels, but faster frames per second. The 5DS which is based off of the 5D Mark III, but with 50 megapixels. And the 5D Mark IV, as I said before, the 5D Mark III, from what I have seen just, I don't have any official stats on this, has been the most popular camera for professional shooting photographers. You know, just watching classes here at Creative Live, more instructors owned and use the 5D Mark III than I saw anyone else using. And 5D Mark IV is still very new out on the market. Right now I think people are slowly making that change over, but I think over the next few years, this is the camera that you're gonna see more professionals using than anything else. It's a good in-between camera as far as megapixels and frame rate, and all the features that it has on it. So the original 5D, which is the first, quote unquote, affordable full-frame camera, came out in 2005, and I have owned, used, and primarily done my photography with this entire lineup of cameras here, and so I am, I'm kind of an original 5D baby, you might say, in my history. And so I've gone through the entire line of 'em here, and so, it's been interesting watching this camera grow and improve and change along the way. They were all very good cameras in their time, and this is just the latest, greatest in its generation. So if you do get into the instruction manual, there is a number of pages and all the warnings which just get to be a little bit ridiculous on. These are obvious things, don't be stupid with your camera. The question that a number of people have, that I think is a very valid question, is, Canon claims it is a dust- and drip-repellent, resistant camera. But they also say this camera is not waterproof and cannot be used underwater. Okay, so I think we all get the underwater bit. The question is, is, if it's raining outside, what should I do? This does have a lot of weather sealing, and it has essentially the same weather sealing as the Canon 7D Mark II. I think, and they're not real clear about this, it's a little bit less than their professional 1DX series. I could stand here with a bottle of water and just drop water all over the camera. Now one thing to keep in mind is that there is a connection between the lens and the camera, and the lens needs to be weather-sealed too, if you wanna have that properly sealed off, so you need to have a weather-sealed lens, which is another issue. But as far as the camera goes, my general recommendations are, if you are shooting out and it gets a little wet, there's a sprinkler or it starts to rain a little bit, don't sweat it. That's not a big deal. If you're gonna be out shooting in the rain, let's say you're shooting a football match and it starts to rain and you're thinking, okay, it's probably gonna rain for the next two hours, you should probably get the camera under some sort of cover system in that case, so I would not spend prolonged periods of time out in the rain. I don't think that's a good idea. I would try to avoid getting, you know, blasted with a police water cannon. That might be a little too much pressure on it, so I would avoid those situations. If you know you're gonna be out in the rain for a long period of time, look into some of the many different rain covers that are available for cameras. But a light, moderate rain, for a moderate amount of time, 10, 20 minutes, you're probably gonna be fine, not gonna be a big problem. The other question that some people have is, Canon is not liable for damage if used with non-Canon accessories. Canon, of course, doesn't wanna be held accountable if you're gonna hook your camera up to some crazy contraption or something that changes the software or the electronics in the camera. In general, you are totally fine using Sigma, Tamron, Tokina, and many other brands of lenses. There might be a few features, and we'll talk about them when we get into the menu system, where the camera... Right now, this Canon camera can correct for barrel distortion in Canon lenses, which some of them have, and it can fix it. Now if it doesn't know what lens is on the camera, it won't know how to fix it. So there's a few features that it can't go in and fix those issues with the lenses. There may be lenses that don't communicate properly. Sigma lenses, in the past, didn't have the right chip system, and it wasn't reading correctly. So that sort of thing may happen. In general, I would stick with Canon flashes because I think the communication is a lot better. If you're in the studio or if it's just a simple synchronization, use any flash you want. But if you wanna do TTL work, for convenience reasons, not technical liability problems, I'd stick with Canon flashes. I would probably stick with the Canon batteries, for the most part. There are some cheap, aftermarket ones out there. It's possible you can use them, but they can have some potential downsides. So you can use pretty much any of the memory cards in there. I prefer Sandisk and Lexar. Those are the two main brands and the main accessories that you would use. So some common sense when accessories are hooked up to the camera. So let's make sure my camera and your camera is ready for today's class. You're gonna wanna have a charged battery in the camera. It takes about two and a half hours. You're gonna get around 900 shots, maybe 300 if you're in live view. You need to have a lens on, which we do, and I do have it in autofocus. The autofocus magnafocus is on all the lenses, if it has it. I've got two memory cards in mine, so I'm good either way. I've got the camera turned on. It kills me to do this, but I'm gonna throw it into the A plus auto mode, just 'cause I want it to be really, really simple. I will take a picture of our studio audience here. There we go, all in one shot, good, got it.