Lessons

Lesson Info

10:30 am - Back and Accessories

Over the camera, we kind of covered the top deck of the camera, so now it's time to move to the back side, and we're going to be actually going through the menu section much later. Obviously, in the top left is the menu button, which enables you to do get into all the customized features of camera. This camera has about a hundred different options in the menu city that will be going through that later, not right now. Next to that is the info button and when in doubt, just press the info button that's what I like to say, because in here you're going to be able to pull up different sets of visual information on the back screen of the camera that's going to show you either what shutter speed and aperture you're at or where you're last picture was at. So if you like it, if you want a different display, you can't hurt by just pressing the info button, and so cycle three would take a look at what your camera has in there. It's going to show you a bunch of the way that your camera is set up. ...

One of the cool things that you'll get, teo is, you'll get to this horizon level, which will show you how you have your camera tilted, so if you're on a tripod. You're trying to shoot a landscape or anything else where you really haven't lined up properly, you can just hit the info button a couple of times, and you'll get to this horizon level, which makes getting your camera flat and straight on the horizon much easier than adding I a bubble level to the top of your camera, and it is pretty accurate. One of the basic ones that I would leave it on is this one, the one that you see on screen here, which is just your basic camera settings. Now, if there is some of these menu options or the information options that you don't like, you can go into the setup menu number three, and you can select which ones you would like to turn up so it's just one of the further ways that you can customize your camera, we will get to this section later in the menu that we cover later. Now the camera has a soft rubber I cup, which is often often very good for people with eyeglasses. It, however, can wear out after time. You could buy a spare one of these at a good camera shop around twenty dollars or so, somewhat hidden and up in the right hand corner is a die after as I get my keyboard work, there we go, so the die after controls the focusing of the viewfinder and this may be should be the first thing you should do with your camera is to make sure that the view through the viewfinder is as clear as possible and I know that the dialled does get bumped from time to time and so this is something that you may occasionally have to go back to and adjust so don't just think that you're going nuts in your eye sight is going terribly bad adjust the diop ter and see if you can fix that first next up is the movie and live vue switch and buttons so this is gonna entail a lot of information so let's kind of step aside and talk about this for just a moment so there is a rotating collar where we can either shoot movies or we can go into the live vue mode for right now let's talk about live use you want to switch the mod overto live you the first thing that you could do is you can press the button in the middle to activate live you what it does is it pops the mirror up and you get to see what your cameras pointed at right here and right now now just like we talked about a moment ago you can go in and press the info button if you would like more or less information on the viewfinder sometimes you don't want to see anything but what the cameras looking at and other times you want to see additional information like your shutter speed aperture I sl one of the more interesting things that you can do is hit the cue button, which we haven't talked about yet but the q stands for quick menu and it allows you to jump in and changed a whole bunch of features some of which we've talked about some of which were going to talk about as we go through but this just allows you as a short cut to get in and change these features. What I want to talk about right now is just the first item in there which is the auto focus method of the camera because the autofocus system on this camera is different that any previous canon camera or any other brand of camera as well. So I want to talk about how this camera focuses and this is true of any single lens reflex that does live view as you can see on screen the system that we're using in the single lens reflex. We have that mere system which bounces the vue upwards for composition reasons but a little bit of light is let through a secondary mirror to a secondary mirror and bounced down to what's called a phase two texan autofocus system and this is how your camera focuses it gets a little bit of light down there on the face detection system and knows how to focus your camera and so that's what happens when you look through your camera and press down on the shutter release halfway now let me show you what happens when we put our camera in the live view mode the mere pops up and out of the way the shutter opens up and light come straight back to the image sensor now look down it our phase detection autofocus sensor and how much light and information is that sense are getting right now zero none so this is why traditional slr cameras do not do well in the live you or the movie mode it's because the mere is up and out of the way and they're not able to use the system that they have been working over the last twenty five years on focusing and that's where the cannon seventy d comes in and changes everything on the center of the camera are millions of pixels and in this particular camera what's done is that they've taken these and they have made duel pixels out so there are actually two different pixels they still consider him one as faras image quality but they you are looking at the light and they are able to determine the distance the subject is away in how to focus the lens by the different types of information received by the left side of the pixel and the right side of the pixel and so that is how the camera is focusing by light simply hitting the image sensor now it's using the pixels in the centre eighty percent of the frame so with live you focusing, you can cover a much wider area then you could with the standard focusing points on the camera now it's still it's a great new technology it's still not as fast as the traditional face detection technology so if you want to focus really quickly don't go into a live view and moveem out you want to focus it just with the standard auto focusing system, but this is the best of everything else that is out on the market and so when you put it in the live you, you'll hit the button and it will go into live you. One of the other options that you have is if you hit the button over on the right hand side, which you will notice a blue magnifying glass and a plus sign you can magnify your image and you can zoom in to check sharpness and let's see if we can do a live demo here in the class. I'm gonna see if I could turn my camera around so that your camera can see it I'm going to hit the live view button and uh just for simplicity I'm going to go into the program mouth so that we get a reasonable I mean, we just happen to have a prop over here and for fun, I'm going to throw the camera into manual focus, and if you can see the back of the camera, we can see that I'm adjusting focus and let me get lined up here a little bit and, you know, it looks pretty good about here, but now I'm going to come up here to the plus button, and I'm going to zoom in and I can control exactly where I am by using the touch pad, and now I can come back for focusing, and I can adjust focus so that it is in as sharp that's too far come back a little bit right about there hit the minus to come back, come on back, back here and now I can take a shot where I know that I have manually folk just absolutely perfectly. And so this is a technique that would work very well for landscape photography, or maybe product photography obviously doesn't do well with portrait in sports and things that are happening very, very quickly. But when you're on a tripod manually, focusing using that zoom in is the surest way of achieving the highest level of focus, so some other things to know about this focusing system is that when you do have it in the live you system there are a number of different focusing systems you can have and so we have a face tracking system that will look for faces we have a single and a multi zone area we also have a quick mode which is kind of an awkward modem not a big fan of the quick mode this is where the camera returns to the standard phase detection focusing by dropping the mere down focusing and then returning the mirror into the upward position I'm not a big fan of that it's very jarring and you can't see what the cameras focusing on while it's doing it and so my preference is in the fix flexes own single or multi and in many cases I prefer the single just because it's a small area you can direct it pretty easily by changing the position of it or just by focusing locking and re composing now how do you actually change these you press the cube button you go into the auto focus method in fact let's do a little do live demo so that you can see exactly how this works let me turn on live you again so we can see our subject here I'm gonna put my camera back in auto focus now I'll hit the cue button and you can see how we can navigate around through the different options and the one that we're interested in is auto focus, which is up here on the left and I'm going to hit set because I wantto look, it was not the right thing to hit. If you see on the bottom, we have our options down here, and of course we have our touch screen. We haven't talked too much about our touch screen. Sometimes you want to use the touch screen, sometimes some people prefer the buttons. I'm more of a button person, but I do like having a touch screen and we have different options. And so flex his own single allows me to choose my focusing point and let's take something like our pdf will put it down here, and we'll lower the focusing point down here, and the camera will focus on that we could move it up to the background, and we can focus down there so it's very quick, you can hear we have one of the lenses for those, you know these air, very quiet stepper motor lenses, and so is it focuses, it's very, very quiet and very, very quick. So that's, just a little demo of the focusing system. If you are buying this camera because you want a video camera, you've made a mistake it's, mainly designed as a still camera off cameras that are still photography cameras, this is the best of pretty much all the mainstream cameras when it comes to focusing with cannon icons and a lot of the other major brands and so if you do want combined work it does do a pretty good job it's not in my opinion up to professional standards for auto focusing for most projects and so if you're making your next independent movie project for hollywood great it's got this new autofocus system but it's probably not what you're going to be using there might be a few shots that you could do with it if your mom and pop and you're shooting the kids and they're running around playing in the living room it's probably pretty good for that and so I kind of need to put it in perspective it's much better than everything else but it's not quite up to top of the line professional standards when it comes to the focusing system but for a lot of those people out there that just don't want to go through the trouble and expense of buying a separate video camera I think this is a rugged combination of the two okay moving forward now we're going to talk about the movie mode in particular recording video and so in this mode we're going to flip the collar over to the left hand side so we're under the movie mode and now to record you're going to press the start stop button wants to start and wants to stop recording now it does depend on where your mod eyeless set you have essentially two options manual or program if it is in manual, you are in manual, if you are in anything else besides manual, you're in the program mode, where the camera will figure out shutter speeds and apertures and be in total control of it. And so for those film buffs out there, manual for everyone else doesn't really matter. Just throw it in something other than manual. For those who want some technical information about the movie mode it is recording into, it is often known as dot movie files, these air very common, high quality files that you could do pretty good editing with the resolution's. We have three different resolutions, standard definition, high definition and full high definition that nineteen twenty by ten eighty, the largest size, which is where most people I would think we'll want to have it at we have a number of different framing frames per second twenty four frames is how hollywood films a lot of their movies, and people really like that look in certain types of clips. Twenty five would be more of a pal standard for europe and other places, a lot of places around the world. Thirty frames per second is very common in north america, and then we have kind of an over cranking of fifty and sixty frames a second, albeit at a reduced resolution. So if you plan, have any needs for wanting to slow your video down into slow motion, you can shoot it at those higher frames per second. Now, there is also a compression of the video file, and I'm going to explain all I in I p be here in just a moment, the maximum file size that you can get his four gigs or thirty minutes, and if it if you shoot more than four gigs of information, what happens is it records four gigs of information and then starts a new file so you'll end up with two files there. One frame is right after the other frame, see, put them together and you'll make one continuous long footage, but you can only record up to thirty minutes and that's simply to avoid tax reasons so that it will be classified as a video camera as it's imported and exported at various places around the world. Now, because this is primarily a still camera and not a camcorder, you could take a still picture any time you want by pressing all the way down on the shutter release. The slight downside is that you are forced into shooting a sixteen by nine aspect ratio, which is the type of ratio that you're shooting most videos out, so it does limit the aspect ratio that you are shooting at now, just for a little bit deeper explanation the resolution on your camera for most people, you're going to want to set this on the full hd nineteen twenty by ten eighty that's where our tv's are for the most part, there is the twelve eighty by seven twenty, which is still very good, and if you wanted to reduce the file size a bit it's often more than good enough for anything that you're going to do online. If you want to post a video online, there is also a very low one. So if you wanted to shoot something for a small youtube video, there is the standard definition. But for most people who are trying to get the most high quality video out of this, you're going to want to have it in the full hd mode. Now. I've had to dive into video a lot more recently, and so one of the different options in the camera is the all I or ii pb compression format of video now when you shoot video and this something we'll talk a little about about later in raw and j peg, you cannot shoot raw video in this camera what it does is it takes the video signal and it compresses it and it's got two different options on how it compresses the information. The first one all I stands for intra coded frame I p stands for inter predicted bi directional who isn't that fun? Alright, so intra frame what it does is it records each frame individually and it compresses the information on that frame you're going to end up with very high quality video each frame you can edit to the frame very very easily what happens and this is where things get a little different here in the inter frame is it takes information from one frame and if it doesn't move it'll use that information in a subsequent frame. So what happens is that it really bases information about every fifteen frames it looks if something is moving and if it's not moving it can save a bunch of file space by just kind of copying and pasting that information into the next train and it is going to be a lower quality setting and it's a little bit harder to edit because it's not quite as clean of a video to get into so if you're going to get in and do really tight edits on a professional project, you definitely want all I if you just want to shoot little jimmy playing with the ball for about a minute you probably could do it with I p b and you will save quite a bit of file space on your computer and you won't notice any difference in the final video. And so where do we make all these settings? Well, when we get into the menu setting in the movie shooting menu number two movie recording size is where we're going to be making these adjustments into our hammering, so usually I like to leave my camera the highest setting it depends on if I'm going to edit do a professional project or if I just want to record some simple basic videos where I'll have that compression city okay, back on the camera, we're gonna have a f on button and so we talked earlier, there was a question about back button focusing this button here will allow you to focus as the camera sits right now because I have my camera basically brand new out of the box this button doesn't do anything special, it does focus and so I can focus by pressing that button, but it doesn't really do any good because when I come back to the shutter button in the front, the camera's going to refocus anyway and so what back button really refers to is by turning off the auto focus on this front button, I can focus with my thumb, be done with focusing and then come up front and take pictures at my leisure and that is just a nice way of separating things for people who are a little bit more discriminating about exactly focusing and firing and in order to do this we will need our little shortcut here we go in the custom function group number three item number four which we will get into later you can go into custom controls you can also get there there's another shortcut through the cuba so if you go into the quick menu which we haven't talked about yet you could get into a shortcut and you can turn off the auto focus of the shutter button as well is going in and controlling the specific features of about a dozen of the buttons on the camera so we will talk more about that as we continue our way through the camera next up to that there's this cluster of three buttons the one in the middle with the asterix on it is known as the auto exposure lock button. It also does something called flash exposure lock and it kind of depends on how you have the button programmed in itself but what it does right now is if you have the camera in the programme mode and just for a real life test let me put my camera in the programme mode and as I point my camera around I'm at a fifteenth of a second and have two point eight I'm at a fifth of a second it f two point eight. It varies according to the light values as I move it around the room. If I find a section where I want to lock it in, I would press and hold that button in. I would actually just tap it in and it would turn on the auto exposure lock and it would lock in that exposure that cheddar speed and that aperture and it would stay locked in for about six seconds so that it gave me time to move the camera to a new position. Take a picture with a meter reading that I took from another area. This is only gonna work in program aperture priority in time value. It's not going to work in manual doesn't do anything in manual, and so some people use this quite frequently. Some people never use it at all. Flash enclosure lock refers to when you have a flash on here what it will do is it will send out a test flash exposure and it will check things and it will figure out if it got it right or not. And it will set it up for the next picture, which would be the actual picture taking and you would likely get a slightly better exposure because the camera knows the distance and the reflectivity of your subjects, so when you have a camera our flash added on to the top you could hit that button it fires a little test flash and that locks in a slightly better exposure next button is one that we have talked about before the focusing point, but so if you want to change which focusing point is active or which one of the three different groups you are working with the first thing that you would do is tap this button but then to go in and change the group you would go in and hit the button on the top is we talked about previously all right moving forward the playback button let's talk about a bunch of the things that happen in the playback mode so a lot of the buttons on the back of the camera you'll notice are in blue, which refers to playback so first, an obvious thing is you will turn the back dial on the camera to rotate through forward and back through your collection of photos. You can also use the dial on the top of the camera to jump ten pictures forward or ten pictures backward, so if you're on vacation and you've taken hundreds and hundreds of shots, use that top button to jump very quickly to go see what you shot on the first day of the trip also in blue the buttons on the upper right hand corner allow you to zoom in and zoom out on your subject and of course, when you want to get rid of your images, you could go down there and hit the garbage button. One of the other things that you can use is the q button, and you can go in and you start tweaking with your images that you've already taken. So when you play back images, you could rotate them, change the rating. A lot of this stuff is something. I will discuss more detail when we get through the menu settings, but his thank you. But you can take a look through that let's, go ahead and do a little live demo with the camera here, let me hit play back. I took a few pictures earlier in the class. We'll take a look at these and so just to make sure you see, I am not shooting live video here my hand is in front of the camera, and so if we want to zoom in and check sharpness, we can hit the plus button and we can zoom in. And then we can use the touch pad on the back of the camera to take a look to see if we are sharp and it's looking pretty good. And as I mentioned before, we do have a touch screen so we can move around our image, we can pinch. So common gestures that you would find in a phone we could do swiping, and I think I took a bunch of black pictures, so let me go through a bunch of these. I'll go the other direction I walked around creative live this morning took some pictures of what's going on in some of the back rooms, and so here's a bunch of people that have not signed releases for having their picture telecast, and so we won't stay on too long, and so we can zoom in by pinching and moving out cell very handy. Some people like doing this on screen. Some people just prefer using the dials on the back of the camera, whatever you like. Don't forget to hit the information button where you can pull up more or less information on the camera will be talking about some of these extra displays as we go through the class. So there we were doing were practicing earlier before class with the iphone remote on. We're getting into that later on in class, so that's some of the things that you could do in playback. All righty, what do we get next? Okay, over on the right hand side of the camera, we have a little card light, which indicates when your camera is writing information to the memory card, so think I mean key thing is don't try to take the card out of the camera if this light is on, that means the camera is accessing and writing or reading information from the card and it's just a warning that hey, the camera is working next up we have our cook control dial and our multi controller and are set button which we I have talked lots about and that multi function lock button. If you want to lock that stuff up, you can lock it in there and you can actually control by going into the custom function group number three. Number two in the last multifunction lock. What that does is it controls what things get locked when you lock the button is that the dial is at the dial and the multi controller is that the dialogue on the top of the camera? And so you, khun really customize the camera exactly to your needs, which is quite nice. So that's the back of the camera let's switch over to the left side of the camera. We mentioned briefly before about the flash button. So if you do need the flash you we can just pop that button, hit that button, pop it up, and when you're done, you can just gently push the flashback down, which is totally fine if you are playing back movies. We have a speaker button over here on the side so if you're kind of wondering where the sound is coming from that's where it's coming from and we have two doors with different ports in these first up on the top left is the microphone input jack the camera does have stereo microphones which are pretty good but they are connected to the vice that has blends elements moving in your hand moving on it so it picks up a lot of camera noise is and if you want to get better quality sound, get an external night microphone and plug it into the standard size jack here we have our remote option so we talked about the bulb remote earlier on or not touching the camera during long exposures. The basic remote for this camera is the rs sixty e three sells for around trying to remember the prices around fifty or sixty dollars on this one and good for anyone who's working off of a tripod on a regular basis in the other door we have our hd am I out port so if you want to send video to an external recorder if you want to send a slideshow or movies to your hdtv, you would be using this little hd my many out port and if you do want to transfer images to your computer which you shouldn't be doing but I will talk about that later you can transfer out images straight through this avian to come it's a combo a v out digital port and so you could transfer out your images through here so over under the right hand side of camera is obviously our memory card or we used the d memory cards in this also the sth sea and the s t x c which are simply different sizes of cards they all fit they all look the same most of the cards out right now rst hc and we're seeing more and more of the s t x c cards one of the options that I'm going to recommend when we get into the menu setting is locking your camera up if there is no memory card in the camera so this kind of prevents you from taking pictures if there's no film in the camera on so we can do that in the shooting menu number one do be aware that on these sd cards there is a little switch on the side of the card which will lock the card and prevent it from being deleted on dso if you do have that card locked and you can't take pictures, you may just want to unlock the card it's just a safety prevention but sometimes it does get bumped and people aren't sure what's going on and so normal position is in the upward position but it can be locked by pushing it downward if you do want to shoot video, especially in that higher all I compression format, it requires a lot of data to be read and written to that card very, very quickly. And so you should look for cards that have a u h s class of one if you were going to be shooting video that's, just going to enable your camera to shoot for longer periods of time without having any little hiccups or backup in data that needs to get recorded to it. So for video, if for sports work as well, faster cards are nice, but for day to day picture taking, pretty much any of the regular kurds will general the work, but do keep an eye on the speed of the cards, as I mentioned before, the little port on the side of the camera is not the best way for downloading images. Yes, I know your camera comes with that cable for free and it's. One way to get your images from your camera to your computer, but it can be painfully slow. It's a very slow transfer process. A much better system is to get a good card reader and plug it into the usb port on your computer. And so that's, what a lot of photographers do who are constantly downloading back and forth it's a much faster system. And if your computer happens to have a slot where you can just plug a card straight into it, that is going to be the fastest system yet for transferring large, large bits of data. All right, on the bottom of the camera, we have our standard tripod socket. So it's going to fit all standard mona pods, tripods and accessories. So that's the same, your serial number's gonna be located down their record that for insurance purposes, the battery compartment is where the standard camera battery from cannon the lp six goes. This battery cells for around sixty bucks and it's been a been it's. Been a good battery because they have used it in a lot of different cameras and so it's, a very common battery. And if you get a different candid camera generally on the upward into the scale, it's going to use the same battery is this which is convenient. One of the great things in the menu is going in to check how good the battery is, not just a general low, medium or high go. You can go in and you can see how many shots you have taken on a particular battery charge. You can see exactly to the percentage of how much is left. Fifty eight percent, fifty nine percent, and so, with great little system there. Now, obviously on the bottom of the camera what you could do is you can plug on an additional grip. The b g e fourteen is a vertical grip which allows you to hold the camera more comfortably in a vertical position. This is a very good system to have if you do a lot of sports photography were you shooting people running around vertical shots if you're doing portrait photography very, very handy just puts the hand in a much more comfortable position. Also good for anyone. Who's just got really big hands and so nice little device that's what is going to sell for about two hundred bucks? And the other thing that's nice about this is that you can stick to batteries in there. So for anyone who uses the camera for long periods of time, that does not want to change batteries and there's a variety of reasons why you might want to do this perhaps time lapse photography wanna shoot star trail shots throughout the night you're going to use a lot of battery power. Two batteries are in the camera and we'll go for twice as long now. The camera does come with what's called a travel charger, the l c e six, which is a good basic way of charging the camera. If you do want to charge the battery from a car charger, they do make a car charger which sells for around one hundred forty dollars they also have an a c adapter kid if you're working in a studio or perhaps a scientific environment and you need to have constant power running to the camera that sells for about one hundred twenty dollars not something that most people are going to need