Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Controls: Auto Modes

Time to get started on the good portion of this class which is the camera controls which is where we're gonna go through the entire camera looking at all the different sides, at the controls, and figuring out what they do and how best to operate them to get the best quality photos. Alright, first off, we have our on and off switch on the camera, you'll clearly want that on for the rest of this class. The shutter release is how you're gonna take your photos but it's also how you wake your camera up and auto-focus as well. The main dial on Canon cameras is right on the top so it's very easy to get with your index finger and we're gonna be using this to adjust shutter speeds and a variety of other settings in the camera. On the back of the camera is a four way controller for going up, down, left, and right. We'll use this for navigating the menu as well as for selecting focusing points. In the middle is a set button which is what we're gonna use to confirm settings that we are selecting a...

nd highlighting in the menu system. So when something's highlighted and you say yes, this is what I want, it's gonna be the set button that you're gonna hit at that point. Alright, our tour around the camera is gonna start on the top deck of the camera. The shutter release for taking photos. When you press halfway down it wakes the camera up, it starts the auto-focusing system, and it starts the metering system all at the same time. You'll press all the way down to shoot the photo but you'll want to be very careful about getting a good feel for that shutter release so that you know what it feels like to press halfway down because photographers are doing that, waking their camera up, getting things set to shoot, and so that they're fully ready and their camera is fully ready to shoot the picture at exactly the moment that they wanna shoot. The big dial on the top of the camera is the mode dial and this is for adjusting the exposures and this will require a little bit more in depth talk so let's talk very detailed about what this dial is doing. So to start with, we have the A plus mode which is known as the scene intelligent auto mode. It's the most simplistic auto mode on the camera. And what's going on here is that the camera is gonna set shutter speeds, apertures, it's gonna pop the flash up for you, and it's gonna do a variety of other things and so it is looking to try to see what type of photo you are taking and it's using information it's getting off the sensor to figure out, are you taking a sports photograph or a portrait or a landscape shot and it's gonna try to adjust shutter speeds and apertures for that type of situation. Now, as sophisticated as this camera is, it's still not as smart as you. And so if you know what you are doing, it's probably better to make that setting individually on the camera. This is a good mode to be in if you just got the camera and this is as far as this class as you've watched, you haven't cracked the instruction manual, you haven't learned anything about photography or perhaps you're handing the camera to a friend or a relative who doesn't know about photography and you just wanna keep it really simple. Put it in the A plus mode, give it to them, and it's gonna be fine for most all basic photography for good, basic shots. But if you wanna have more control, you take the next step. Now the next mode, which is known as the flash off mode, is exactly the same as the scene intelligent auto mode with the one exception that the flash will not pop up for you and so this is good in situations where either the flash is not allowed or it's just not useful. So if you were to go into a museum that did not allow flash photography, this would be a good place to put it. If you're in the upper stands of a stadium photographing an athletic event and you know the flash is not going to reach all the way down to the playing field, that would be a good time to turn it off and put it into the flash off mode. But other than that, it's the same as the scene intelligent mode. Next up is the creative auto mode and in this mode here, the camera allows you to go in and play with just a little bit of restrictions on what you can do. And so I wanna show you what you can do in this mode here so let's go ahead and take my camera and get it into the creative auto mode. And if we look at the back of the camera here, if we hit the Q button, which is right here, we're gonna be able to get in and change a few different settings on the camera. And we can go up and down to select these different modes and then we can press the set button to go in here and change the ambience-based shots. And this is the color, the tone, the saturation of our images. And so this is just a subtle look to our images. Now we can do a black and white, that's pretty different. But all of these other ones are gonna have a very slight difference in the color, the sharpness, the clarity of the images and you can play around in here. It doesn't give you a lot of room to play around. Let's take a look at another one of the options in here and so this one is we can adjust how much blur the background will have. And so we can adjust this to left for more blurry or to the right for sharper. It's a fairly limited range and a fairly limited way to control and you're not really learning photography. So anyone who's like getting into photography, you're gonna take a photography class and you wanna learn shutter speeds and apertures. You probably don't even wanna play with this, you're gonna wanna go straight beyond this. Let's take a look at another one. Alright, so this is the motor drive, we'll talk more about this as far as it's regular controls in the class but single shooting and continuous shooting. And then we have another one over here where we can control some of the way the flash is operated. Whether it's on all the time, off all the time, or in an automatic mode. And so there is a very limited control that you can do in this creative auto mode and so it's like a very small playpen for a child. There's not too much to do, you're not gonna get hurt, but you have a little bit of creative adjustment modes. But I think if you're willing to watch the rest of this class, you're gonna have many, many more valuable resources in order to go in and make many more adjustments yourself and have much more creative control. Now, nothing that the camera is doing in those creative auto modes is anything that you can't do on your own. So it's not like the camera is doing something special that it doesn't allow you to do. Nope, you can do everything yourself as well and probably better if you learn a little bit more about photography. Alright, so let's jump into the next mode. Actually it's the next group of modes I should say. So next up, we have a group of scene modes. And these deal with certain types of photographic scenes and if the camera knows what you are trying to do, it can give you a little better results. And so if you're shooting a portrait shot, it's gonna try to give you a little bit shallower depth of field, it's gonna use the flash if the light levels are low, and it's gonna try to give you a little softer skin tonality so that your portraits have a little better look to it. And now we're gonna go through a number of other scenes that are also just tweaking the situation ever so slightly. So the landscape mode is gonna give you greater depth of field and it's not gonna fire the flash 'cause that mountain way off in the distance is not gonna be illuminated by the built in flash on this camera. Next up is the close up mode. This could also be used for food photography but we do actually have a food mode coming up here in a moment. But anything that you're gonna be focusing up fairly close gives you a moderate depth of field and will fire the flash if necessary. A sports mode, which does make some more notable changes on the camera, will give you faster shutter speeds, will give you continuous focusing, as well as continuous motor drive so that you can shoot a whole series of shots at one time. We do have a food photography and this is kinda related to the close up one. In this case, we've turned the flash off. We do have a nighttime portrait mode so that it knows that you're shooting portraits but it's also very dark on this one. So it's gonna try to give you a little bit shallower depth of field, the flash will fire to help focus in some cases and the flash will fire if necessary. And so these are modes that are a little bit more directed than that scene intelligent mode, the green A plus mode. And so, once again, these modes are not doing anything you can't do on your own if you know how to do it and how to make those settings. And so for somebody who's just getting started in the camera, it's probably the fastest shortcut to taking photos that look a little bit differently than the standard automatic mode. But as I say, I think you're gonna wanna get into the more manual and semi-manual modes on this camera because that's probably why you got a camera that has that capability so that you could get in there and use it. Alright, the last setting on the dial here is something kinda completely different. This is the movie mode and so when you wanna shoot movies with the camera, you do need to dial this all the way back to the movie mode and one of the things you'll notice is that on the back of the camera, rather than getting the full image area, you're gonna get the cropped 16x9 aspect ratio of the HD video that this camera shoots. And so it's gonna be kind of a wide format that you're going to get and we are gonna talk more about the movie modes as we get to the movie settings in the rest of the class but there is a movie record button right there on the back of the camera. So once it's in the movie mode, then you can press that movie record button and start recording. You can use the up, down, left, right arrows to control where the camera focuses. So you can move that focusing point around as well. If you wanna dive into the quick menu, that'll give you additional information and options as you get into the movie recording. And so let's talk about what some of those features are. And so in here you can control the auto-focus, the white balance, picture style, a few other settings that we're gonna talk about as we work our way through the camera here. We're gonna be encountering these modes as we get into the full menu system. The Q menu is just simple a shortcut to get those. As I say, we will discuss those more in the second half of this class as we go through the menu system. If you hit the display button, you will change the display on the back of the camera. In some cases, you just wanna see the straight image that you are recording. In other cases you wanna know a little bit of technical information about the settings on the camera so by cycling through the display modes, you can choose which one you prefer most to see.