Lessons

Lesson Info

Top Deck: Mode Dial (Manual Modes)

Alright. It is time to get into the good part on the Mode Dial. In my opinion, this is the manual modes where you have a bit more input as to what's going on in camera, so first up is the Program mode and the honest truth is that this is quite similar to the Scene Intelligent Auto Mode in that it's gonna set shatter speeds and apertures for you. It's not tweaking them in any way. It's just giving you kind of a straight out standard setting for shutter speeds and apertures. Now, your shutter speeds and apertures will be visible in the Viewfinder and as you look in the Viewfinder, there's gonna be a whole line of information down below where the image area is. The first number on the left is gonna be your shutter speed and it's usually gonna be a fraction of a second, but you're only gonna see the second half of the fraction, so when you see 2000, that means it's 1/2000 of a second. If you see 60, it's 1/60 of a second. The second number is your aperture. Your f-stop number, so those are...

the two key numbers that we're concerned about. You'll also see potentially a light meter, your ISO and your images left as you look across that screen and so, if you want, while it's in the Program mode, you can tweak the camera a little bit by doing what's called a Program Shift and so, let me show on my camera real quickly what that's gonna look like, so first off, I (mumbles) to put the camera in the Program mode. That always helps. So, we've got the camera in the Program mode. Now, you can't see in the Viewfinder, but you can see what we have on the back of the camera, which gives us a different version of the display and so, what you can see right now I have my camera ISO 400. I'm getting 1/15 of a second at a five. If I said, you know what? I want more depth of field then F5, I can turn this dial on the top of the camera and get the camera set to F18 or any other number that I want. If I don't like that number, I can just turn that dial back and forth. Now, one other things about Canon cameras is just take a look at this. If I set it to F22 and now, 22 (mumbles) won't go there. 25, good enough. And I don't touch the camera for a moment. It times out after about six seconds to go to sleep, to conserve battery power and then, this screen will go to sleep after another period of time, but if I go back and press the shatter release, I am no longer at F25 anymore. It restored back to F five. Your camera resets back to a factory default setting for the Program mode and so, if you wanna make a quick change, I wanna shoot at F eight or somewhere in there; you can do that very, very quickly, but then, the camera is gonna reset and you're gonna have to make that change again, so any time you wanna consistent settings for a lot of photos, the Program mode is not the best mode. It's great for one shot scenarios. Travel photography; where you're walking down the street, you don't know what the next photo your gonna take is. You can keep it in the Program mode, lift the camera up to your eye, look at the numbers; if you don't like the numbers, you can adjust it with the dial and get the number that you prefer and so, it's a good, fast way of having manual control over the camera and being guaranteed that you're gonna get proper exposures when you shoot a photo. Now, this is where it gets fun. We have the back dial on the camera which enables us to control exposure compensation. So, exposure compensation is what were talking about a little bit earlier about making our picture brighter and darker and so, we can go one, two, three stops darker or one, two, three stops brighter by turning the back dial on the camera, so in the Program mode, also for use in the Time Value mode and the Aperture Value mode. This is a great way of making photos a little bit brighter or a little bit darker by simply turning that back dial on the camera, so let's do a little demo here on my camera. Let's do a bracket series and I've got the camera in the Program mode and I'm just gonna let it do its thing as far as shutter speeds and apertures, but I'm gonna turn the dial on the back of the camera and here's a quick little note for you. You see I'm turning the dial. Do you see anything changing? No. You know why not? Because the camera is partially asleep. I press down on the shatter release half way, I wake the camera up. Now, do you see something moving? Yes, you do. Alright, so we can actually go even further off, so let's do an extreme bracket here. I'm gonna shoot I think five photos. We'll do minus five and not gonna worry about looking at that photo, but I'm gonna change it to minus; let's do minus two or minus (mumbles) there we are, minus two; we'll do the next one at zero. Right there and then we'll do plus two and plus five. I've never shot at plus five for real photography. Most of ever done is maybe two, but the camera goes to five if you ever need it. So, now, let's look back at the photos. So, remember, we'll be looking at them in reverse order, so we'll be looking at the plus five and in case, you forget it, actually says so right down here at the bottom plus five and then, we're gonna have the plus two, the normal exposure which doesn't say anything and then, we have the minus two and the minus five which looks pretty much pure black to me there. So, what is going on when you change exposure compensation? As you can see, right next to it, is the camera; it's changing shatter speeds and apertures. The camera will change whatever it has access to and looks like the aperture kind of maxed out here, so it's changing the shutter speed for us here and then, it did change the aperture down here, but it will use one or both according to what it needs here in the Program mode and so, this is a great way of making your pictures a little bit brighter or a lot brighter or darker. Now, the most important thing to remember on the exposure compensation is to reset it back to zero and remember, this won't work once the camera has timed out. Turn the camera on. Wake it up and get it back set to zero right here. Now, if you were the type of person that bumps this dial very quickly, there is a lock switch down here so that even if the camera is active, the dial is locked and you can't accidentally make that sort of change and you can get this lock to actually control and lock down a number of other different features, as well on the camera, but that will do for right now, so that is exposure compensation. Very useful tool, but remember, to reset that, back to zero on a regular basis, 'cause that's where you would normally want it to be. So, that's the Program mode which is a good, quick, easy mode to use. The next one is TV which stands for time value which means you have control of the time and the camera will figure out the rest of the scenario in this case and so, you'll change your shutter speeds by turning the top dial on the camera and you'll still have control of exposure compensation on the back dial, so you wanna change you shutter speeds to control light or to control motion and so, if you wanna stop an eagle that's coming into a river at 1/ of a second, that would be a good time to choose a very fast shutter speed. If your camera is on a tripod and you wanna show the movement of some scarfs blowing in the wind, you might wanna choose one second for that or a river flowing or a lot of different things that you can use for that and so, time value is an easy way to make that control and so, time value is something that a lot of people will use with motion and the shutter speeds will range from 1/4000 of a second all the way down to 30 seconds. There will also be the third stops in-between that you can choose, but those are the whole numbers that you will use. Next up is Aperture Value. Now, the top dial will control the apertures and so, you'll have apertures that will correspond to what's available on your lens. Your lens may not have a 1.4 aperture, so you may not be able to get there, but it may be able to get down to something smaller than F32, so that'll depend on the lens that you have, so this is controlling the opening in the lens which is controlling the amount of light coming in the camera, but it also controls your depth of field, so if you want lots of depth of field; you want things very close in the foreground in focus as well as in the background, you might choose F/22; if you want a very shallow depth of field, because you wanna focus on one particular subject; if you have a 1.4 lens, you might set it to 1.4; if you don't, you'd set it to widest opening you have which is the lowest number; it might be F4; might be F3.5 and so that is the aperture priority mode and you can also use exposure compensation with that, so let me just show you real quickly on the camera both aperture value and time value, but first, I wanna show you time value, so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have my camera in the time value mode here and this is where; I'll get this lined up for you here. You get to choose the shatter speed on the camera, and so, if I want a shatter speed of let's say, a 1/15 of a second, I can set it right here and the camera will figure out I need F9. That's fine and if I said, well I want a faster shatter speed; let's say I want 1/500 of a second. Well, I can choose 1/500 of a second, but do you see something blinking? Alright, anything that blinks is a warning that something is wrong, so I'm gonna go ahead and shoot a photo here at my where there's my 1/500 of a second and there's gonna be a problem. Let's make sure my camera can focus and the problem is that we don't have enough light and I'm gonna change this down to something even more reasonable; 1/250 of a second and we'll take another photo and we can see that that photo is once again really, really dark and so, what's happening here is the camera is allowing you to do whatever you want with the shutter speed, but it's giving you the warning with that blinking 5.0; what that means is that this aperture is not wide enough for this scenario and so, you should dial this number back until that number stops blinking and in this case, with the light here in the studio, we're gonna need to be back 1/25 of a second and now we will have an even exposure; a little wanky on the composition there, but we are getting a proper exposure with that, so we can go down and we can go down to longer shutter speeds, but we can easily run out of what our aperture has available to us and so, you do need to be careful in the time value mode and so that is my recommendation is use this with great caution being aware of anything that blinks, so now, let's change the camera into the aperture value mode which is one of my favorite modes, so now, we have control over the aperture setting and so, we can turn this dial. We can open it up all the way to 5.0; if we shoot the photo, we get a decent exposure. Let's fix that composition just ever so slightly. Now, if we're gonna stop down to maximum depth of field at F32; it's a two second exposure, so it'll be very steady (mumbles) it's on a tripod and we're gonna get a decent exposure there and so, I'll play these images back. We chose F32. The camera chose two seconds. We chose at five. The camera chose at 1/20 of a second and this is a very safe mode to play in, because the camera has so many different shatter speeds from which to choose. There's a lot more shutter speeds than there are apertures. Apertures are limited by the device and the lens. Shatter speeds are either doubling the time or cutting it in half and so, there's a lot of different options available there and so, I think, aperture value is a great way when you're not sure with the next shot it gonna be, but you wanna have direct control over what those shutter speeds and apertures are, so good mode; I highly recommend that. Next up, Manual mode and this is where you get full control over shutter speeds and apertures. You can set them anywhere you want. Now, the reasons that you would want to this are two main reasons in my mind. Number one is tricky lighting situations that may full the light need and full the camera is to what the proper exposure is gonna be. Being a digital camera and then, you can check your images immediately upon taking them. You can really dial down and get the exact settings that you need for any situation here. It's also really good for consistent results. Any time you are shooting an event or something that has consistent lighting over a period of time and you wanna take multiple different shots from different angles and different viewpoints and the lighting is basically the same, you can have the same shutter speeds and the same apertures give you consistent results from them. Now, in the Manual mode, you will have the option of a very long shutter speed called the Bulb Timer which allows you to keep the shutter open for longer than 30 seconds and so, any time you wanna do a night time or a long exposure, you can put the camera in the Bulb mode and now, when you press down the shutter release, it'll open the shutter and I'll keep it open as long as your finger is on that shutter release. Now, that's not actually a very good idea, because you'll probably be touching and moving the camera, so this is why you wanna use one of those cable releases, but when you release your finger is when it terminates the shutter speed, so you could use that for some really, really long shutter speeds, so let's put the camera in the Manual mode and take a look at how this would work, so press down half way on the camera; let's wake the camera up, so we are in full control now. We have control of our shutter speeds up here on top. We have control of our aperture here on the back of the camera. You will see by the light meter here whether we are overexposed or underexposed and so, let's say we want it fairly shallow depth of field. Let's say 5.6; right there. We are right now currently we're on the plus side of the exposure, so we are one stop overexposed, so I will correct, fine a little bit by changing our shatter speed to a 1/15 of a second. I'll take a photo right here and we should get a nice, even exposure. Let's say I wanted more depth of field and I wanted to stop this down to F16. I'm gonna need to make an adjustment in my shutter speeds. I'll get it up here under zero. I'll take a photo and I should get a nice, good result here. Now, let me recompose just to give you an example. I'm gonna go in a little bit tighter here on our fruit down here and so, now, I'm gonna turn that off and so, now, the camera is recommending a little bit of a change and I'm gonna keep the... Well, let's say, I'm gonna change the aperture back to F5.6; that's fine and now I'm gonna set my shutter speed to where it says zero right here in the middle at the 1/6 of a second and I'm gonna take a photo and we'll take a look at this photo here. And you know what? Those bananas are a little too bright. What's going on is that black background in there has full delight meter and we need to make this a little bit darker, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna retake this photo. I like the aperture at 5.6, so I'm gonna leave it at 5.6, but I'm gonna take my shutter speed and I'm gonna move it off to the minus side by, we're gonna say, two thirds of a stop here. I wanna make it just a little bit darker, which takes us from; we were at 1/6 of a second and now, we're gonna go down to a 1/10 of a second. I'm gonna shoot a photo here and then, let's compare these two photos and you can see the bananas are getting a little blown out in their detail and color and here, we have a little bit better color, so one of the rules in manual exposure is that setting the exposure indicator to zero is not a bad place to start, but that is not where it should be for every photograph. You'll need to adjust it as necessary. Now, as I mentioned, the slower shutter speed. Let's take a quick look at this. We can go all the way down to 30 seconds and now, we have access to Bulb and so that'll stay on as long as our finger is on the shutter release and so, let's give this a try, so I'm gonna press down and then, when I take my finger off is when it ends and so that would be something that you would do mostly for night time photography and would be better with the cable release on the camera, so that is how you use the camera in Manual and any time you wanna get consistent results, I highly recommend taking a little bit of time, putting your camera in manual, figuring out those shatter speeds and apertures and then, dialing in exactly what you want. Now, one of the things you can do on the Bulb timer is that you can go into the menu and you can set a specific setting for the Bulb timer. Now, throughout this class, you're gonna see these little boxes come up and these are shortcuts for people who wanna go in and do something directly and so, let me just show you on the back of my camera real quickly what this is recommending and so, Bulb timer is in shooting number five and so, if you go into your menu and we're gonna get into this in the second half of the class and we go in to this first shooting menu number five; there is a Bulb timer down here and you can go in here and you can program this timer. We're not gonna do this right now. You can have it stay open any number second, minutes or hours that you want and so, you can really dial down exactly how long you want that Bulb setting to stay open and we're gonna get more into that as I say, in the second half of the class. So, there are all of your mode options and so, we have more than enough to choose from for just about everything that we wanna do. Typically, myself and a lot of other serious photographers; we may have 20 options here, but we really only use two most of the time and that is aperture value and Manual. Between those two modes, you should be able to accomplish almost everything you need in photography, but there's a lot of good other options here, especially if you're handing your camera to somebody else who doesn't know a lot about how your camera works.