Lessons

Lesson Info

Back Side: Viewfinder Display

Alright, next up on the back of the camera we have our viewfinder for composing your images. There is a diopter which is a focusing control for the viewfinder, has nothing to do with the final focus of your image, it's just the focus of your viewfinder, so if you wear glasses or your eyes are not quite perfect you can adjust it for your eyes. What you wanna do is you wanna look through the viewfinder, look at the numbers at the bottom of the screen, that little line of information down there, you wanna turn the diopter so that those are in focus, that's when you know you have it properly focused. There is a sensor on the top of the camera, and when you move the camera up close to your eye, it'll sense that it's close to a solid object and it'll turn off that info screen on the back of the camera so it's not shining in your face. There is a nice, comfortable rubber eye cup, it's potential that it could wear out after a period of time, it is something that is replaceable for a relatively...

inexpensive amount of money. Now, as you look through the viewfinder in the display you're gonna see different things. First off, the frame that you see is 95% accurate, which means you're actually gonna get a bit more than you see in that coverage area, and so if you see it in the viewfinder you will get it in the final image, but you may get a little bit more than you bargain for if you're cropping right to the very very edge of the frame. The auto focus points, we've talked a bit about. You'll see those light up as they become active and acquire focus. Along the top you'll have our focus areas; One Point, Zone, Large Zone, and the 45 Point Area, depending what you've chosen will light up to let you know what you see or what's available or what's been activated. In the middle is a little circle. This is the Spot Metering circle, so if you set spot metering, which we'll talk more about, you'll see exactly where it's doing its' metering. There is a Level built in here for anyone like myself that has a hard time holding the camera perfectly level. This'll let you know if you're tilted one degrees, or two degrees, or more in left or right tilting. This is one of the features you can turn on or off in the Set Up menu under the Viewfinder Display. Some people like to have this extra information in there, some people just want a clean viewfinder. You'll be able to make that choice as we go through the menu system. There's a grid option which is nice for leveling the horizon, for architectural purposes, or sometimes just for compositional purposes. This is something that can also be turned on and off in that Viewfinder Display under Set Up Menu number four. This camera has a Flicker Detection, which is a problem under certain types of fluorescent lighting where the light fluctuates during a second, anywhere from 100 to 120 times, and you could be taking a series, of let's just say, basketball photos inside under artificial lighting, where, even though you have your camera set to Manual Exposure all of your exposures vary slightly in their brightness. And if you want, you can have the camera warn you that it's sensing a flicker problem with these lights. Now, if you do have a flicker problem there is a menu option in the camera for resolving this, and I will talk more about that as we get in to the menu option, but if you just wanna be warned about it you can have that warning turned on in the camera's viewfinder. The camera also has a number of different crops. You can have the camera crop an image differently than the standard three by two aspect ratio of the sensor, and so if you know that you were trying to shoot a square image you could have those aspect crops show up in the viewfinder and you can probably better compose your image knowing that's exactly the way it's going to look in the end. Most people aren't going to need these on a regular basis, but they are a nice option for people who do have special needs in that composition. There's a number of warnings that you might wanna be warned about, and there's a little exclamation point there that would come on, for instance, if you use Monochrome, whether you've done something funny with the White Balance options, or if your Noise Reduction is turned on or off, you could have this warning come on in the viewfinder. If you don't like it there there'll be another place that you'll see it here in just a moment, but if you want it really noticeable you can have it right up there in front of you. Down along the bottom of the camera is the LED information. This is our main line of information that I've talked about before in the class, along the bottom. There is another warning symbol down here, so you'll always get that warning symbol, the question is do you want the other one along with it. We have our Auto Exposure lock symbol. There's a button we're gonna talk about in a moment on the back of the camera. When that button is pressed you'll see that light turned on. There's a number of warnings about the flash; whether the flash is gonna fire, whether you're doing a high-speed flash, which is with their external speed lights, whether you've locked the exposure of the flash, whether you've used exposure compensation with the flash, any of those things will let you know that those things are turned on. And then our main exposure information; our Shutter Speed, our Aperture information, and then our Exposure Compensation and Exposure Level let you work with that information right down there. Highlight Tone Priority is a special feature I'm gonna talk about later in the class where the camera is trying to protect the highlights, but it does so at not allowing you to use ISO 100, so something you wouldn't normally turn on, this is just to let you know that you've left the dynamic range turned on. We'll have our ISO Speed over on the right and in the brackets is the Maximum Burst. This is how many shots you can shoot right away, in the camera, before the buffer fills up. You can only shoot so many and that'll depend a little bit on what size file you are recording to, whether it's a raw or a jpeg image. So that number will vary a little bit. Then finally there is a green dot over on the right hand side, and that let's you know that you have confirmed focus. So if you're not sure whether you're in focus, the camera does have an audible beep that is turned on, but a lot of people like to turn that off, so as to be a little bit more discreet. You can use this Focus Confirmation dot to make sure that, yes, it's in focus. You can also use it in the manual focus, so if you wanna manually focus look for that dot and then you know that the camera is properly focused. Alright, we have our large LCD monitor in the back of the camera, which is a capacitive touch screen, so it's not pressure-sensitive, but it is sensitive to your skin, and it's gonna have a lot of the normal types of touch options that you would expect on a phone or any other smart device these days. You can touch, you can slide things around, when you play back images you can kinda flick things to go quickly forward and backward, and then if you wanna zoom in and zoom out you can use two fingers to kinda stretch or pinch your images. If you don't like using a touch screen everything that is available to you on the touch screen is available with other controls on the camera, so you can use the touch screen or not use the touch screen. If you really don't like it you can turn it off in the menu if you want, or you can feel free to use it. Now, when I first got my hands on this camera and I hit the menu button, I was shocked. I had been using Canon cameras for more than a decade and I saw something that I had never seen before which was a guided menu that Canon has never had on their cameras and I just said, "What the heck is this?". As I went through it it made some sense as far as maybe someone who's never used a Canon camera before. What they have is they have two side-by-side menu systems, and you can go in and choose which type of menu system you want. You may have noticed, when I've been working with my camera here, that I've already changed it over to the Standard menu. The guided menu would be good for somebody who this is their first Canon camera, they haven't taken this class, and they wanna simply be guided through the different features of the camera. It's a little bit easier to get through the menu system, but once you get to know the menu system it gets to be a little aggravating. It works on what I like to call a "hub and spoke system", where if you do one thing, you have to go back to the basic starting point and then you can do something else, and if you wanna quickly go from one item to the next you can't do that, you gotta go back to home base and then come back out. So I'm gonna recommend for most of my users out there go to the Standard menu system because it's the way that Canon cameras have been working for the last 10 years or so, at least the full life of digital, and it's the way all the upper-end cameras go as well. You'll also be able to navigate a little bit more quickly. Now, the way that you get in and change this is you need to go into the menu system and change the Display Level Settings Menu Display, so if you haven't done that, let me guide you through that right now on my camera. It doesn't really matter what mode you're in, just hit the Menu button on the back of your camera. Now, I'm already in the Standard menu and I'm gonna switch it over to the one that it comes with, which is, whoops, wrong button. Come back here, Menu Display, so the Guided Menu is how this comes, so now when you hit the Menu you get this display here. As far as I can tell, it has everything in here, it's just got a white background with black letters so it looks different, but if I wanna go from Playback Settings to Shooting I can't do that. I have to go back to the Menu and then I have to go over to Shooting and now I have to hit OK and now I can come down and play with all these different settings here. Now, if I wanna go to the Set Up Menu, I can't go to the Set Up Menu, I have to go back to the menu, and I can use the touch screen option or I can use the button on the camera. Now I can go over to the Function Settings and now I can come down in here. You gotta keep going back up and down, up and down. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go in here and I'm gonna change the Menu Display from Guided to Standard. So now when I hit the Menu the Menu looks like this and if I wanna quickly go from this to the Set Up, to the Playback, I can quickly go through all of these and I can just hit the quick button and I can go from one tab to the next. We're gonna get more into the menu later on. There are a number of other options here in this Display Level, and this is brand new, we also have a Shooting Screen Standard or Guided, so this way when we're in Aperture Value or Time Value it gives us a little bit more information and we'll hit OK. This gives us a little bit more information and as they say, for somebody new to photography this is gonna seem kinda nice. For somebody who's a little bit more used to photography it's gonna kinda be a little bit too much help when you don't need that help, so I'm gonna flip mine back into the Standard Mode, so that when you're in the Time Value you just have very quick access to the important information that you need. Once you get to know the camera the Standard Menu will be faster and easier to work with. The second half of the class is where we'll go completely through the Menu and explain all the different features. As I mentioned before, it never hurts to press the Info button. So in the Standard Mode when you're ready to shoot you can go to Camera Settings, No Display, or the Electronic Level, which will give you a nice little display whether the camera is on the tripod in a completely level manner or not. I like the Camera Settings just cuz I have quick access to see the way the camera is currently set up.