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Lesson Info

Camera Controls: Shooting Mode

All right, let's talk about the shooting mode, and this is a little bit different than most of the canon cameras out there cause a lot of the canon cameras, almost all of them to date have had a big old dial on the top that has had letters and pictures. And it's always been a little limiting because the dials can only be so big and the pictures can only be so small. And if they want to expand the options, they could do it. Elektronik Lee, which is what they've done here. And this is the way some of the top and Canon and other brand cameras have worked as well. They have a mode button, and then you make a selection by turning a dial. So by pressing the mode button and turning the quick controlled ill, you'll be be able to get to all of the shooting notes. Let's talk more about the different shooting modes, which is controlling the shutter speeds and the aperture operation of the camera. Now one of the things is that this camera kind of has two distinct halfs. It has still photography an...

d video, and if you want to switch back and forth between still and video. You'll hit the info button, and you can see down there at the bottom of the screen, there's gonna be instructions on a lot of these screens. Down there at the bottom is to what button to press to perform a certain action so the info button switches back and forth between stills and video options. As you can see, we do have a lot of options when combined, and it would be very difficult to have all of those on a big old Modi along the top of the camera. So this is a little bit simpler, more elegant design in my mind. So let's take a look at the Stills department first. So for general photography, we're gonna have all of these different modes and these air different ways of controlling shutter speeds and apertures. So once again, when you press the mode button, you can actually turn the dial in the back or the dial on the top to change your different modes. And let's let's work through these one at a time. Let's start with the simplest of these, which is the scene intelligent auto mode. So in this mode. The camera isn't fully automatic mode with shutter speeds. Apertures. I s so pretty much everything. And this is what you might want to put the camera. And if you were gonna hand it to a friend to take photos and you didn't have time to explain how the entire camera work, it's gonna perform basic photos properly exposed, properly focused, and it actually can recognize certain types of image situations. It's a bit limited, and you can see the list. Here. It can understand basic portrait, sunset, dark night portrait, things like that, and it will automatically kick in and make adjustments as necessary. And from a from a more manual perspective, it tweaks the images just a little bit. For those types of scenarios, it's a good, easy. It's the easiest mode on the camera now. There is a limited menu in here. So for anyone who is a little bit more serious, one of the things you'll notice is that if you do die, dive into the menu, the options that you normally see are not going to be there. And I consider this the child safety locks of the auto mode and so preventing you or somebody else from getting in trouble and making too many changes. The quick menu for basic settings so one other things will talk a lot about in this class is the quick menu. There's the full menu, which is pages and pages of options. And then there's the quick menu, which is one page with the most popular options. And so in this case, there are just a few things you can change the drive mode, the movie recording size and the image quality. So let me show you real quickly on the camera, a little demo on that. So let's go ahead and turn this camera on. So first thing I want to do is I want to put the camera into the A plus mode here. So the scene intelligent mode is right here. I'm gonna hit the set button here. Focus of this doesn't drive s nuts here. And so if we press the Q button right here, we're gonna get these options over here, and we can use our controller to select a different drive mode, high speed single sought. We can choose different movie recording size and different image quality size. And don't forget to look at all the controls down here. So, for instance, if you want to shoot raw, you have to go down to info, and then you can select the raw options so we'll talk more about this now. This is also a touch screen, so you can just simply touch the settings that you want as well. When you're done, you can either press the Q button or you can press the shutter release down and it will kick you out of that mode. And so this will be the way that you can work with a lot of things Azaz on the different exposure modes that we talk about the cumin. You will always be available, but it will generally have more options available than you saw right there, because this is the highly limited mode, all right. Next up is the flexible priority A e mode, and this is a brand new mode that I have not seen on any other camera. And Canon just blew my mind because they suddenly they could have put this on there and taken off manual aperture, priority, shutter priority and program. Because this is essentially all of those modes built into one. And it may be the way that all cameras go in the future for controlling exposure. And the idea here is that when you're operating a camera, you want to have control over shutter speeds, apertures and I Iso's And maybe you want to regulate the camera controlling one of those at any given time. And in this mode you can take manual control or auto control of any of those three in any combination that you want. And so it's one of the most flexible exposure modes I have ever seen it. It is the most flexible exposure mode I've seen on any camera to date, and it's just very different, and it took me a little while to play with it and really get it figured out on how you use it and how it works. But if you wanted to, you could use this for virtually everything that you do, maintaining full control of every step of the process. So you have manual or automatic control off all the important exposure information, and the way this is gonna work is you can select which one of the settings you want by using the command. I'll on the back of the camera and then changing the top dial for changing that particular setting. If you want to go into automatic, there are controls on the four way controller on the back of the camera, where you can have any individual item go automatic for you by going up or to the left. Or you could have all of them go automatic by going to the right or down. And if there is a line under it, that means it's in an automatic setting. And so let's go ahead and do a little demo on this one. Yeah, let's get this turned around for you. This lined up. And so we're gonna go into the flexible, FV flexible priority mode and down here along the bottom, let's make sure that you can see this information nice and clearly on the bottom, the info so that we can see it down here and so we can have our controls down along the bottom. And as I turned the style in the back of the camera, you'll see which one I'm in control up. So if I want to have control over the shutter speeds, I can come up here and I can start changing shutter speeds. Let's say I want 1/30 of a second. Okay, let's go to the next item. Next item is aperture. What aperture? Well, I would like to be at F eight. Okay, let's go to F eight. Exposure compensation will leave that in the middle. And let's say with I s so I would like to be at 400. Well, okay. These air, the settings I want It's clearly a little bit on the too dark side, so I'm gonna need to make some adjustments. Let's let's crank the I s so up a little bit. Let's go up to 1600 and let's go back over to Aperture and take that down to a reasonable setting of f four there. So I have Ah, nice. Even aperture there. That's looking pretty good. So if I said well, you know what? I'm gonna let the camera choose the I s o for me. I can come over it up the I s o If I press up, this one goes automatic. Eso is now automatic. If I want to come over to shutter speed and I go up, that one becomes automatic. If I come over, if I come over to aperture, I can select a different aperture. I can go up to make it automatic. Now, if I start turning the dials on any of these, they go back to their manual setting. If I want to hit the down, everything will go automatic, so shutter speeds, apertures and esos will go automatic. At any point in time, I can come over and change the exposure compensation and make it brighter. Now this will only work if one of these other three is in automatic as well. And so if something's important to you and you have a very specific setting, let's say shutter speeds were very important to me. Right now. I could set a particular shutter speed. Let's go with the 60th of a second. I could keep that in 1/60 of a second, and you'll see the underlying with the aperture, which means it's automatically being controlled and currently setting it at a 4.5. Eso is also underlying, and it is at 9000 and so it's being automatically controlled, so you can just jump from one setting to the next and have the camera control it or you can control it. So this is essentially aperture, priority shutter, priority program and manual all built into one mode without having to go through the mod ill and changing things. Why no other company has come up with this till now, I don't know. And the fact that so many people have reviewed this camera and had have not given him credit for what is really a groundbreaking way of operating the camera and exposure, I think it's a shame. And so I do want to give them credit for this, and I'm not getting paid by Canon at all. I'm not a representative. I bought this camera with my own money. It is just my honest, truthful thinking on it. So I think this is really good mode. And while later on in this class, I'm going to give you recommendations on how to set the camera. I still kind of go back to manual and aperture priority for a lot of my favorite operations. I think you might be really smart to start working with the F B mode and just see if you can do everything there because it seems like it makes everything a little bit faster and easier to work with. All right, so the buttons on the back of the camera can be customized to do particular things. And so if you don't like the way that those controls work, you don't like up being auto. For an individual feature you would like up to be auto for everything you can change those around. It's a very, very customizable camera. When you are in the flexible priority mode, you compress the quick menu, and you can jump in and change a whole bunch of other image parameters and exposure parameters and other camera settings. I'm not gonna go through all of these right now. We will be going through these as the class moves along, but realize the quick menu is a way to dive in and make further adjustments on the camera. All right, next up is the program mo. This has been the traditional mode where the camera select shutter speeds and apertures. You select eso separately. From this, you can set any particular number. You could set it to auto, but the camera is taking care of shutter speeds and apertures, which does make it sound a lot like the scene intelligent mode, that little a plus green mode. The difference is is that there are no child safety locks on the program mode, which means you can get into the menu. You could make all those basic changes, and you will see the shutter speed and aperture. When you look through the viewfinder, you'll generally see your exposure mode on the left. You'll then see your shutter speeds and then your aperture so you can see what shutter speed and aperture your app. Now the nice thing about the program mode is that you could do something called program shift, and what this does is it keeps a proper exposure but allows you to change the parameters, shutter speeds and apertures so that you could have a faster shutter speed or more depth of field, or have a different look to your image but still getting the same exposure. And so that's a great tool for quickly changing the camera to fit inappropriate situation. Now, in the back of the camera, you can use that back dial for changing the exposure compensation, So if you want to brighten your image up or darken it a little bit. You're gonna be able to use this Dia when it comes to the program, the TV and the upcoming Avie mode as well, so real quickly on exposure compensation, working in third stops all the way up to three stops under expose and three stops. Overexposed is gonna be a great way of making your pictures a little bit lighter. Now, this does not work in manual exposure because this is simply adjusting the automated setting on the camera and in manual you have control of all of the parameters. You can use it Inflexible priority, of course, as well. So long there's something is set on automatic. So a program mode is still a pretty easy, quick and easy mode. Hard to mess up, you might say. In many cases. Next up is the time value mode, also known as shutter priority. This is where you get control of the shutter speed and the camera will take control of the aperture. So this is really good for situations where, you know you need a specific shutter speed. So an eagle coming into the river to pull out of fish or something, you're gonna want to be 1/1000 of a second or faster. Perhaps you want to do one of the slow motion shots of a river and waterfall. You might want to get a sudden shutter speed down around one full second for that. And so this works pretty good for this. If you do use this mode, one of the problems is that not all lenses will have an appropriate aperture for the light that you are currently in if you want really fast or really slow shutter speeds. And so using auto eso with this mode is often a good idea because it can kick in and save you when the light levels are a little bit on the low side. And so if you are in a low light situation, you might get your apertures blinking at you. Anything blinking in the viewfinder is a bit of a warning that something is not working right. And so I'm gonna show you an example of that here in just a moment after we get through aperture value. So aperture value is another semi automated mode. It's kind of the twin sibling to time value. In this case, you get to choose the aperture. The camera will choose an appropriate shutter speed for a proper exposure. You want a lot of depth of field, so the foreground and the background are all in focus. F 16 F 22 something with a lot of depth of field like that. If you want to separate your subject from the background, you're gonna be using a wide open aperture 1.4 to 2.8 something like that. And so on. This you'll change your apertures with the main dial on the top of the camera. Pretty simple. There's a limited range of aperture settings, and there is a lot more shutter speed settings, so you're less likely to get yourself into exposure problems with this. So let me show you a little bit on how these works. Let's just do a quick little demonstration on this, so I'm going to go ahead and show you aperture. I will do time value first on this case, so I'm selecting the time value mode. We have our shutter speed down here on the bottom left, and that's what I have control over and the and actually I'm going to switch over for a moment and I'm gonna make a change. I want toe change. My I s so out of auto real quickly, just so that you can see how this works under many normal situations. Okay, so if I have a shutter speed down here, we have an aperture that is being chosen for us. We can take a photo, and if we play this photo back, we're going to get a proper exposure. Now, if I select too fast to shutter speed, my aperture starts blinking. Once again, I'm in the time value mode and I've selected a time that is too fast. And if you can see how dark it is, if I take a photo, it's gonna come out to dark. But the camera did properly warned me. And so pay attention to these blinking lines. Let's go ahead and switch it over to the aperture value mode. In this case, we get to choose the aperture, and you can see that the aperture has a little, uh, square around it. So that means we can select it ourselves by turning the style on the top of the camera. So any aperture we choose from F four, which is matched up with 1/30 of a second. And if we go all the way down to the slowest shutter speed it F 22 it's at 220.8 of a second. So there are so many different shutter speeds, it's unlikely that you're going to get a blinking shutter speed that is out of range on the cameras. So aperture value the aperture priority mode is a little bit safer and easier to use. If you are using the time value mode, you might want to have your camera set to auto I S O. So it depends a little bit on how you have the I S O set up, but I think this is a great general purpose shooting mode. Next up is full manual. You'll control the shutter speeds with the main controlled I'll. You'll use the back dial for controlling the apertures. You'll need to pay attention to the light meter in the camera to make sure that you're getting a proper exposure. And manual exposure is great when you want consistent results. If you're gonna be shooting several pictures of a subject that is in basically the same lighting, then setting your camera to manual exposure will allow you to get the exposure right on the 1st 1 and then concentrate on composition and focusing and all those other things in photography rather than adjusting the exposure. The other reason I like manual exposure is for tricky lighting situations, where you might have unusual areas of lightness and darkness that would throw off a particular meter. And so, in those tricky situations, getting the light exactly right often requires a manual exposure in a little bit of fine tuning the controls on the camera. So in this case, you're going to need to be paying close attention to the light meter in the camera. You'll see this either in the viewfinder or on the back of the camera. In general, it's nice to probably take your first picture with the indicator right at zero mark, but something's air lighter than others, and some things are darker, so you may want to adjust it as necessary. So let me show you on the back of my camera what this looks like if you want to get into manually exposing images yourself. First off, let's go ahead and change the mode into full manual, and now we have control over shutter speeds, apertures and I esos I'm gonna leave esos right where they're at right now. Let's say that I want to change apertures to F 11. All right, so I'm gonna change my aperture to f 11. I'm gonna press down lightly on the shutter release and you'll see that at the exposure indicator right here. It's way off to the left hand side. I am three stops under exposed. So I'm going to need to change my shutter speeds. And this is not helping. I'm going the wrong direction. So I'm gonna go the other direction until this indicator gets below the middle of the exposure indicator right there. So that's probably a good place to take your photo or at least take your 1st 1 check the exposure and see how it looks. So if we take our photo, it seems to look pretty good right there. So that's probably a good manual exposure. If I wasn't happy with those shutter speeds, I could go in and change the apertures and I esos in order to get the shutter speed I want and so very simple to work on this camera. Easy to work it looks very similar as you look through the viewfinder as well. Next up, we have the bulb mode, and this is for long time exposures. When you're in the manual exposure mode, the longest shutter speed that the camera will allow you to select its 30 seconds. If you would like to go 31 seconds or 60 or five minutes or longer, you can put the camera in the bulb mode, and then the shutter is timed to the shutter release, which means that when you press down on the shutter release, it's going to open the shutter, and it's going to stay open as long as your finger is on the shutter. Release. Now actually pressing the shutter release on the cameras not recommended because you might be moving the camera. And this is a good time to be using one of the remote control options. You can either use the wired remote control, or you could even use a WiFi connection as well. When you take your finger off, the shutter closes up, and that is your exposure. So if you want to have a lot of car tail lights in your shot, you may want to leave the shutter open for one or two minutes. This is the way that you do it with that bulb exposure. And so this is where the cannon Rs 60 E three or other similar type promotes will come in handy. It uses a very common I think it's a 2.5 millimeter plug for the camera, and a very simple device doesn't sell for too much. It's about $20 or sell and enables you to shoot long exposures without any vibration to the camera at all. Finally, we have C 12 and three and these air customized controls, and you can set these up to shoot as you want with all the camera settings that you might like. If you were to do, say, landscape photography, you might want to have a lot of depth of field, a particular type of focusing system, a certain setting for the Iast. So what you do is you set your camera up exactly as you want it, and then you're going to dive into the menu and program those into the custom settings, and we will do that later on in the class, and you can do that for all the different. Three different options that you have in there so you can have your camera set up for three completely different styles of photography that you can change very easily as we get to that and the menu will go ahead and customize, and I'll show you more about how that works later in the menu section. All right, remember, the Mode section has two different sides. There's stills, and then there's the video, so we're going to switch over to video now by pressing the info button. So when you want to switch the camera to video, you press the mode button on the top, and then you press the info button on the back of the camera. And when you do that, it changes the options available. But they're very similar in scope on Lee were now shooting video, and so we're not gonna go through each one of these because it works very much in the same way when it comes to which is said automatically and what is set manually. But let's talk a little bit about video and what's going on. So there is a video quick menu, and there is also a video menu, and you need to be in the video mode of the camera to access and see these different menus. And so, as we go through the menu later on in the class, we're gonna kind of be jumping back from stills to video. As we work our way through the menu system, the camera can shoot HD full HD and four K, And so we have the three major resolutions. We have a number of different frame rates, so let's look at what some of the options are here. So, first off, the full frame is used for stills. We're going to use a cropped 16 by nine aspect ratio for HD full HD, as well as some of the time lapse options. And so four K video is coming from a cropped portion in the middle. So when you shoot four K, you don't get as much from side to side. This tends to be very good for people who are shooting telephoto, so if you're doing wildlife or sports video with, this camera could be quite handy and works out well because you do get a nice four K video out of this. But if you are shooting wide angle. You're gonna have to get extra wide angle lenses to compensate for that because it is a relatively heavy crop at 1. So those are our options with resolution and frame rates. There's a number of other notes about shooting video. We do have canon log, which is a way of capturing a very flat. Seen that you can color grade later for more control over the tonal range and color. We do have some time lapses built in. We have high frame rates, so if you want to slow motion down, you could do that. There is a option for doing four K frame grabs. I'll do a demo of that a little bit later on. Take any video that you're shooting in four K, and you can just pull an individual frame out of it and save it right in camera, which is nice. A Z many of these products do. It does have a time limit of minutes. There is a difference between the internal recording, which is eight bit versus external 10 bit. If you want to hook up an external recorder a little bit larger in size condition pate heat a little bit more easily. They can record a little bit higher bit right there for a little bit better color rendition. Eso You have that choice depending on how you set the camera up and we will talk more about the video as we go through the remainder of the class.