Lessons

Lesson Info

3:30 pm - Camera Checklist

All right so we're gonna head into the final section of the class which is just a little practice operation I highly encourage you if you have your cameras at home to kind of follow along with the dials and moving of the dials because we're going to recommend different setting so first off just your basic camera checklist what are things that you need to be thinking about when you head out the door to take pictures? Number one are your battery batteries charged? Have you formatted your memory card? Are they clean and fully ready to go on an empty memory card to me it's like a full tank of gas? I have a lot of things I could do with it make sure that your image quality is set the way you want whether it's raw or j peg you've gone through the menu settings and you know that they're set up the way that you want and if you're taking a big trip or an important assignment, you want to make sure that your sensor is clean that you don't have dust on your sensor especially important when travel...

ing because it's sometimes hard to clean the sensor in various locations that you may not know where there's repair shop so they may not have the accessories that you would normally have a home in order to fix up and so just make sure those things are fully operational before you get into shooting now there are hundreds of features on this camera, but the ten that you really use the most generally deal with metarie heard not meeting, but exposure and focusing, and so most of these have to deal with adjusting your shutter speeds, apertures, isos and so forth, there's a number of focusing ones that are quite important, and I think the drive and white balance are pretty important as well. And so let's go through a couple of different options on how I would recommend setting up the camera. Now, this is the super simple mode you just wanted. Leave it, you're not too particular about anything, just have it. In a very, very simple moment. I would go with the program notes so that you can dive into any of the menus that you want, the camera will figure out shutter speeds and apertures, and if you leave it in auto, it's going to do an amazing job picking a reasonable shutter speed and reasonable aperture in any particular situation, remember, you can use the program shift if you would temporarily liketo get to a different combination. Next up, make sure your exposure compensation is set at zero unless you specifically wanted brighter or darker than average, and you'll have to probably take a look at the results from your first test voters to know that the media ring I am totally fine with the value motive it does a very good job and it's probably the safest place it is the safest place to leave your meeting system for white balance auto does a pretty good job. You will adjust that as necessary in different light conditions for general photography. One shot focus is where the camera will focus and stop focusing on a subject so that you can recompose for focus area. I don't like all points a lot, but it's very simple and it's easy to just point the camera in the general direction that you want to take a picture and it generally does a pretty good job remember that when it looks at all the points, it's choosing whatever is closest to the camera and so that may not work in all situations and for the drive mode, I would normally just leave it in the single shot mode. So I mean said that let's jump to some different types of photography lets do some old school retro photography, so you're gonna shoot film like you did back in the manual days full manual on the exposure you're going to set whatever shutter speed you consent to fiftieth just for fun send an aperture like f because there's a great old saying in photography f a a and b there is how you take great shots for I s so maybe you want to mimic the tri x four hundred speeds that you shot in the yesteryear's so you could set that at four hundred and on traditional cameras, they had center waited meters. And so if you want to mimic that, you could put your camera and center waited meter white balance let's. Just leave that an auto and be simple and for manual focus. Now, remember, when you switch manual focus according to my camera here, the switch for that is always on the lands on canon cameras. And so if you switch it in manual that's, where you have to switch it back to get into the automatic mode and then in the dr, modi would probably do just leave it in the continuous moz that you can shoot pictures on a sequential basis. All right? So let's get into a bit more serious photography, landscape photography and in this case, what's important here is that we want great depth of field for subjects that are in the foreground as well. A subject's in the background. Hopefully we're using a tripod and we're not concerned about cheddar speed, so let's, think about where we want to have everything set in this case, to start with, I would be in manual that way you can have very specific control the first important setting here, we would be in a low, eso said, because you want the finest detail possible on off the light coming off your sensor depth of field wise it's going to vary a little bit, but f sixteens going to give you a fairly good depth of field, you may need more. You may need less depends on your exact scenario, but you definitely want more depth of field in most landscape shots like the ones I showed you for shutter speed. Well, it frankly doesn't matter if you have a good tripod, you'll often end up at a slower shutter speed like an eighth of a second because you're not letting in very much light with the aperture you're going to need to let maurin compensate with the shutter speed. You're not going to use exposure compensation because we're in manual evaluative mad metering works fine for me has does auto white balance for focusing your going to wantto be very careful about where you focus and make sure that it doesn't change on you. So using the one shot or manual focus would be very, very good options there for focus air, you're going to want to be very precise about it, so choosing that single point about where you focus would be highly recommended. And then for the drive mode there's a couple of good options single if you're using the remote and if you don't have the remote you could use a two second self timer which will enable you to shoot without vibrating the camera and then finally if you want to get bonus points and I do give out bonus points is you can put your camera into the mere lockup mode that way you're not getting any vibrate shit from that mere moving up and down so hopefully these settings makes sense to you next up let's go to the portrait mode and while I think about it for those of you who get pdf all of these are directly on the pdf with a little bit of information so you don't need to take exact notes and you can come back to that on the final two pages in the pdf so in the portrait mode what I'm thinking about is shallow depth of field and they need a shutter speed fast enough to stop the action of my particular subject in these cases where I have a few minutes to work and I have consistent lighting I'm going to put the camera in manual aperture priority would not be a bad second choice if I have a one point four lands I'm probably going to use it at one point for maybe f to you don't have that on your lands just do the best you can the shutter speed you're going to probably want to keep it around one hundred twenty fifth of a second or faster to stop the casual movement that your subject may have. You want to have the lowest eso possible, but if you can't use it, you're gonna have to bump up as necessary. We're just going to keep this at evaluative metering. We're going to keep auto white balance unless you have a specific situation you're dealing with for focusing very much like one shot, because I can focus on the subject's eyes, it stops focusing and then recompose, and in order to get their eyes and focus, I want to be very carefully pointing that focussing bracket and I'm gonna be using the single point and because people's gestures and facial expressions change on a regular basis, I'm going to want to use the continuous high setting so that I could fire off a burst of pictures at any given time. Next up, let's do action photography. So in this case, what's important is a fast shutter speed to stop the action and focusing for tracking the moving subject because their point of place in the is constantly changing, we need to adjust with them with our focusing system first off, I prefer to be in manual so that my shutter speeds. Snap pictures don't randomly change on me, and one of the first things you're going to want to have is a fast shutter speed, probably five hundredth of a second or faster. Next up, you're probably going to need a faster aperture. Sports photographers love lenses that get down to two point eight or faster, so two point eight is just definitely a great place to be if you have it that's where you're going to want to be if you don't have it, you're gonna end up wanting a lens that goes down to two point eight obviously you want to have his lower eso is possible, but the reality of the world is that you're probably going to need a little edge on light gathering and you're probably gonna have to go upto s o four hundred or higher, depending on how much light you are working in. We're gonna go ahead and just leave the meeting and white balance where they've been, and focusing is the next really big, important one and this is important, it's the servo this is the continuous change in focusing so that are focusing tracks the movement of our subject, and in this case I really like the zone focusing is my favorite second favorite would be all points. But you want to keep a target area about the size of your subject within the frame too small and it's hard to keep on it too big, and it catches to many other things, and then, of course, in the drive mode, continuous high, we want to shoot off at full seven frames per second in most cases to get as many opportunities at those critical moments as possible. Next up, maximum sharpness when we have a subject that doesn't have a lot of depth to it, these air fairly flat objects in many ways, and they're not moving, and we just want to get the sharpest picture possible. You could substitute ah painting that you're photographing on the side of a wall or on object on a table that doesn't have a lot of depth to it. This is very similar to the landscape set up with just a few minor differences in it. In this case, I'm going to go back to manual exposure so that I could be very precise. I definitely want s o one hundred slight difference here from landscape is you want an aperture that's in the middle of the range for many lenses arau f ate or f eleven is where the lenses are going to be at their sharpest setting if you want to know why you can check about, check out it. Check it out in my fundamentals of digital photography class we don't have time for it in here ah, shutter speed doesn't matter if you're working from a tripod, you'll often end up with a slower shutter speed when you are choosing a small aperture opening like f eleven, I'm going to go ahead and just stick with evaluative and auto for meeting and white balance for focusing you could do one shot that way your camera stays locked in uh would also recommend manual focusing with live view option works very well in this case, single focusing allows us to be very precise about the area that we have chosen to focus recommend that for a lot of different types of photography and for the drive mode we could use a remote with single you could use the wireless remote or they're two seconds self timer and then of course using the mere lockup might also be necessary depending on the shutter speeds that you have ended up at at a half second, you would probably want to use the mere lock up mt all right, one final one this is a good way to lead the class. This is basic photography how should you leave your camera just for good old general basic photography? And I'm going to do this with my camera right here so we'll kind of switch back and forth so when you do I don't know what your next picture is going to be and you don't know what your needs are it needs to be kind of set up in a little bit of autumn oats so in a v I'm going to go ahead and switch my camera into the a v mode that way all I have to worry about is what aperture is my camera out and so I generally like to set my aperture fairly wide open and so in this case I will turn the top dial on my camera till I get to f for this lens is a two point eight lands, so I got one stop to open up if I need a little bit more speed but I have plenty of area to close down if I need more depth of field next up I'll put my mo er s o at one hundred and this is kind of, you know, unknown of what conditions you're in if I'm in a lower light level condition which actually in the studio despite the fact that we have lots of light it's not really very bright in a situation like this, I might immediately bump it up to eight hundred because I could see that my shutter speeds were pretty slow now I'm up that around a fiftieth of a second and I can hand hold this forty millimeter lens at a fiftieth of a second so in here, I need to bump the iast show up a little bit. So in this basic photography mode, I'm constantly looking at the shutter speed and adjusting the esso to kind of make sure things are even doubt and I have a fast enough shutter speed. I'm going to make sure that my exposure compensation by turning the back dial of the camera is not to the left or to the right it's right, lined up in the middle, so that's the dial on the back of the camera, the meeting button is on the top of the camera. It's got a funny little dot in a semicircle, and when you see the dot and the semicircle that is evaluated me torino, you can also go into the quick menu where you can see this in a little bit more detail and with more words to help identify what you are looking at the white balance. I do have to go into the quick menu, and I will do that on camera here, so let's go into the quick menu and I'll need to navigate down to the white balance setting, which is right here, and I would press set to see my options and we can see all our options, and I want to leave it at that. Auto and so that's the aid w b that you see in there you could also do it by touching it so the touch screen works very well in this regards and then we can return to the screen so got that one set next up we're going to change are focusing moto one shot there's an a f button on the top of the camera that controls that so you press the button you got six seconds to turn the dial and one shot allows me to focus on the subject and have it lock in so that I can recompose if necessary the focusing area I like to leave it in the single point I'm pretty particular about what I want and focus and I think most of you should be precise about what you want and focus do you want pop can in front to be in focus on the person behind it well the camera's going to focus on the first solid object if you choose all nineteen and so I think just leaving the single area in the middle is a good option for the discerning photographer who knows what they're doing and then finally for the drive mode I generally just leave it in the single mode if something happens quit I'll just pump up and down and get a few quick shots but that way I'm don't have to worry about pressing down and leaving my finger all the way down so if you have made it to this point in the class and you've watched the entire thing, I can say, congratulations. You are now an official cannon, seventy d expert.