Lessons

Lesson Info

9:00 am - Class Overview

Welcome everybody welcome to the in class students and our internet viewing audience from around the world welcome to the cannon seventy fast start in this class we're going to be going through all the functions of the camera I'll be explaining what all the buttons when all the dials dio and we're gonna go through the menu systems to set your camera and then I'm going to teach about some of the basic settings that you would want to use for different types of photographic situations and so it's not my intention to review this camera and compare it with other cameras I've assumed that you've already purchased this camera or at least you're going to be using it or maybe you're planning on buying it and so the idea of this class is learning how to use the camera now kind of the perspective that I take on this is I want to try to get the highest quality cleanest basic images out of the camera there's a lot of different kind of games you can play with the camera kind of funny, goofy things a...

nd I'm going to spend less time on that and more on the core fundamentals of getting the best quality out of this camera so let's get started with the class and let me explain a little bit more about what we're going to be doing in this class here today to start with I want to give everyone a nice little overview of what they bought into maybe this is your first candid camera, maybe you've had the twenty d, and you kind of want to figure out how many different cameras have come out in the federation since then. We're going to go through a few photography basics it's not a photography class, so if you know your stuff and photography, don't worry. We're only going to spend about five minutes going over some shutter speeds and aperture basics, but then most of the class is we're going to be going through all the buttons, and we're going to talk about every single button on the camera what it's used for what, where you might want to have it set. For instance, we're going to go into the displays what you see in the viewfinder, what you see on the live view screen, for instance, and then later in the day, kind of it seems a little tedious. I realized this, but we are going to go through the menu system line item by line item. We're going to go fairly quickly just to make sure that you can walk out the door on your next shoot with your camera perfectly set to the way you want to shoot. And then at the very end we're going to test your knowledge by changing up the camera and moving around a lot of the buttons and dials the way that you would want to work with him in the real world all right so when you got your camera chances are you fumbled through and found this gigantic instruction manual along with an additional instruction manual for the wifi features of this camera and I figured that you could spend easily sixteen hours reading this information now this class I expect last around five hours and so how is it possible for me to cram sixteen hours of information into five hours? I can't I'm not that good there's a lot of stuff that I'm not going to talk about and I know I'm going anger somebody because I didn't go into something as carefully as they would like for instance you could hook this camera toe a printer and you can select certain types of pictures and you can print them in certain quantities and certain sizes and I basically don't even get into that at all my main concern is about getting the highest quality images out of the cameras so there's a number of features that you may want to go back and reference in the instruction manual so it is a valuable tool but I should be able to get you through most everything you need to get out the door shooting good quality images next, this class is not a photography wanna one class there's an assumption that, you know, difference between a shutter speed and an aperture, and if you don't, there are there's a photography classes available somewhere online. I'm not sure, but I think there's a bunch of classes you can you can watch online someplace, and so if you're if you're brand new to photography, if this is your first slr, there is a lot of stuff going on, and we're going to be covering specific items just to this camera, not general photography already. So if you are new to the canon family, welcome, we've been around for quite some time. Cannon got started back in nineteen thirty three, and that is their original logo that is the goddess of mercy. Kawana has originally were known, and they started making range finders back way back when, and they didn't really get into sl ours until after the war, and they started with kind of cheap, basic entry level sl ours. Then they started to get more and more serious is they got their production upto higher standards and they're professional. Cameron the seventies started attracting a lot of professionals, and then about nineteen, eighty seven, they made a couple of cameras that looked somewhat similar but the big difference is is that they changed the lens mount on the cameras and this was something that made a lot of cannon users angry because with the new ceo sme out you could not use the previous lenses and so if you are interested in using older lenses on this camera you can go back to nineteen eighty seven as long as it's an eo slims it'll work on this camera but it's very different than the previous lens mountain and then along comes digital and around two thousand and kind of the original predecessor of this camera the d thirty came out and just for reference it was a three megapixel camera which sold for three thousand dollars and you could always tell the old digital cameras by the fact that they have really tiny lcd screens on the back of him at that point in time I remember we were just happy to see a real image that we just shot and now the screens are much more versatile us we'll talk about on this particular camera so the seventy d was introduced a few months ago at this point and the big news about it kind of the revolutionary feature on this is the duel seamus sensor now I'm going to talk more about this in particular in a later section but it allows camera camera focus when and where other cameras do not do nearly as well shooting live you and in the movie moment it's a twenty mega pixel sensor they've upped it to mega pixels from the previous siri's of cameras it has inherited the focusing system or most of the focusing system from the cannon seventy it's slightly big brother you might say and we have inherited the wifi system from the cannon sixty which was introduced earlier this year and this is where I am putting myself out on a limb but I am going to try and hook this camera to my iphone in today's class and show you how it works it's not the smoothest operating system in the world but it is a neat way to get a remote view of what your cameras pointed at and finally they've upped the frames per second so anyone who is shooting sports between the focusing system and the frames per second on this camera it has turned into a very, very capable sports camera. So by having a camera in the eels system family you have a nice little advantage and that there are so many cameras to choose from and so if you wanna upgrade, there are upgrades to this camera. If you want to buy a smaller, lighter weight version for somebody else in your family so that you can share lenses and so forth cannon has lots of different options and so that's one of the best reasons for having a candid camera the other great reason is they have tons of lenses pretty much anything you want to do. They have a good lens for and finally they have a very good flash system, so if you do need on camera flash, the camera does have a built in flash, which we will talk about, but there is also a great system of flashes, and I'll be giving you some recommendations on those flashes as we get in to the class a little bit more now, as far as the positioning of the seventy d it's what I would consider their upper intermediate level it's, their advanced amateur camera it's been the long line it's, the ninth in the line from that original d thirty that I talked about that was three thousand dollars. And so this camera, I think, more than any other camera in all of digital cameras, has kind of been the same camera, slightly tweaked every oh, roughly eighteen months to twenty four months and turned into a new camera, and so it's a lot of refinements in, in some ways, it's, a boring camera, because it's so little has changed from the previous version sixty d, a lot of the buttons air in exactly the same spot. Most of the features I would say, probably about ninety five percent of the features are exactly the same, but they've taken this product and it's kind of the way that cannon works on this particular system is they just keep making it better and better and better every two to three years. Johnny, what if I throw in a quick question, please? Eso adonia from vancouver, canada, is wondering what percentage of this class would apply to them if they're using the sixty d can they get something out of today's that's a good question. I get a number of people who emailed me and they're like, well, I don't have the camera you taught the class on, and so with the sixty d, I would say that at least nineteen, maybe ninety five percent of the class will be exactly the same great there's a couple of key areas will be several slides, like on the focusing system has changed dramatically, but most of the buttons are in a very similar spot. And so, yeah, I don't know did they say a sixty d sixty d? Okay, because I do actually have a class specifically on the sixty d great, and so if you were going to buy a class and you knew you were going to have the sixty d, I would get the sixty d class for sure if you thought, well, I have a sixty d now, but I want to get this camera I would get this class, and then it would apply to your new camera, and it does most of the stuff that your old camera would do, so I would say in the nineteen, ninety five percent relevant range, great, thank you think ok, next up, when you dig into that instruction manual, if you ever actually do crack it out of its little wrapper hack a gene, you will notice that there's all sorts of these crazy warnings, and they're about things that you're not supposed to do, and they could replace all of them with just simply the phrase don't be stupid with it, and you would probably be fine. One of the questions that people often ask is aboutthe waterproof nous of the camera and the camera does have a number of weather seals on the camera to help protect it from light rain and little mist in a little drip here and there they do strangely enough reference the weather ceiling of it is exactly the same as their twenty year old eels, one in which was their top of the line camera back in the mid nineties or sell. I don't know if that's real relevant to most people nowadays, but it's pretty weather sealed and if it was my camera and it was raining, I would not have an issue going outside and getting a shot how long would I spend out there a minute or two if it was raining pretty hard, I wouldn't want to spend a whole football game in a pouring down rain you don't want to get a rain cover or something for that and so do be careful with extended amounts of rain. The other issue is is that cannon kind of warns you about using cannon on ly accessories and they haven't tested every imaginable product in the world on this and it may damage it and I've not really seen that happen. I would tend to stick with cannon flashes they make things as far as the operation between the camera they make it a lot easier to work with as faras aftermarket lenses sigma tau, kina tamron and there's a number of other good manufacturers that way as well makes him interesting products that just cannon doesn't, and I've never seen a camera damaged because of that I tend to want to stick with the cannon batteries. There are aftermarket cheap versions they don't always have the electronics that readout how good the battery is so you don't get all the functions they don't tend to be a cz good, but they do tend to be a very good value so you can make your own call on that one, so be careful a little bit with something that you've never heard of before on this camera okay, let's make sure that your camera is ready for today's class hopefully you have charged the battery because we're gonna be using the camera in this class it's going to take about two and a half hours to charge a battery you're going to get around thirteen hundred shots ah lot less if you shoot a lot of movies or you're using the live you so your mileage may vary on that and I also read in there don't eat the battery yes, that is don't swallow that all of the battery so that's a very important tip for you kids out there. Okay uh, next up make sure you got a lens on it. We're gonna wanna have a lens on here. Uh go ahead, turn your camera on you're gonna want have a memory cards so that you can shoot some pictures and it truly hurts me to say that. Yes, but put your camera in the a plus mode by turning a little mod I'll on the top of the camera and press the shutter release so I'm going to take a picture of our studio audience you see, the flash pops up and there we go. We got a picture, this camera is working all right, which means that we can go ahead with this class pop that flash down that drives me nuts we're gonna talk about turning that off the next section coming up here. All right. So before we dive into the full basics of the camera, just everybody sit back. Relax. I'm going to go through a few basics. Those of you who know what you're talking about. Maybe you will get your coffee right now and come back. But if you want to, you know, check out there might be something in here you could learn about. And so this is a lot of information that has been stolen from another photography class that I teach. This camera is a digital single lens reflex. The slr indicates that there is a single lens on the camera and we have many different lenses that we can choose from somewhere wide angle, summer telephoto. Some zoom between as well as many others. Within the lens portion of the camera is an aperture it's an opening that you can very in size to control the amount of light coming in the camera. And this is the first and most important part of the cameras. Ways of controlling the light. You can see this aperture closing down using the common aperture settings or f stops and with each change were either doubling or cutting in half the amount of light being allowed through the lands. And so that's going to be one of our first controls that were going to deal with now beyond controlling the amount of light coming into the censor, it also controls the depth of field, so one point four is going to give you very shallow depth of field. As you can see in this image, the red hash lines on the right indicate the front edge and the back edge of focus. As we adjust this aperture, we're stopping it down the terms that we use, you'll notice that those red lines are slowly growing and the depth of field is increasing and as we get down to f twenty two, that is the maximum depth the field that this lens can render given this situation, and so we have a lot of variety that weaken jews from and what our pictures look like by using that aperture. Next up light comes into the camera, and the reflex portion in digital single lens reflex refers to the mere, which bounces the light upward onto a focusing screen, and it projects a small image onto the screen here. And if anyone here has had the pleasure of using and old twin lens rowley camera or a hassle bladder or a box camera, this might have been what they were looking at because they're looking down into a camera at the focusing screen but for easy viewing. On these sl ours they bounced the light up through a prism system so that you can conveniently hold the camera up to your eye so when you look through the camera that is what you are looking at now when it comes time to take the photograph you press down on the shutter release and that mere needs to get up and out of the way so that light can make its way back to the image sensor but before light gets to the image sensor it needs to get past yet another little gate you might say and that is the shutter curtain also known as just the shutter and it has actually two parts it's a first curtain in a second curtain the first curtain is blocking the image sensor and right after the mere goes up that first curtain will drop away it's usually four very lightweight metal blades light will come in to the sensor for the specific short period of time and then the second curtain will come down followed by the mere returning your view to the viewfinder after which the shuttle will return to its starting position. Now the shutter speed is very important because it controls the amount of light and how fast we can capture action so for instance, you would use a two thousandth of a second to stop very fast action of a whale breaching out of the water, for instance five hundred of the second is very good for stopping human action, so sports dance in activities like that one hundred twenty fifth of a second is a bit more of a pedestrian regular everyday shutter speed good for stopping general action like the legs of these camels in the desert as we get down to a thirtieth of a second, we start getting into slower shutter speeds and we'll get blur when subjects move. As these runners at the start of a race in this picture at one eighth of a second, you'll notice that the bridge is sharp and I used a tripod on this one and you'll see how much blur you get with people walking past the camera. And if you want to get one of those blurry type shots of a waterfall or river flowing, that is something that you would want to do around one second or maybe longer and the camera will go down to thirty seconds and so if you want to do like painting or start shots, nighttime shooting in any case like that thirty seconds can come in very handy in a situation like that. Next up, the sensor in the camera is really important, and there is a lot of different cameras on the market and there's a lot of different sizes of sensors on the market, and so here are some of the more common sizes on some of popular cameras out today and we want to talk a little bit about the size of the sensor in this camera. We're not going to worry about the little sensors of the larger sensors it uses one that is not the largest but pretty large. The largest of these is based off of thirty five millimeter film, and it was very convenient for us photographers who made that transition from film to digital to just get new lenses or excuse me, get new cameras and keep all of our old lenses that way. We don't have to replace our entire lens collection and so it's very nice to have a full frame sensor, and this camera does not have a full frame sensor. There are cameras out there that do, but they're much more money, so they've developed smaller size sensors depending on the manufacturer. Yeah, so nikon came up with a one point, five crop factor to build some more affordable cameras and cannon uses a sensor called it a ps see sensor and it's a one point six crops so it's smaller from the full frame cameras by a factor of one point six the a p s simply refers to the advanced photo system, which was a film system back in the late nineties, that was around for a few years before digital came around and it's just the cannon version of the size, it just refers to a sensor that is a one point six crop. Now you get your camera ready to take out the door. One of the things that you want to make sure is that you have connected the strapped to the camera properly. There's a lot of different types of cameras traps, but if you are using the traditional type, one of the key things is that you want to make sure that the tale is tucked underneath and that way there's pressure on the top, which makes sure that the, uh, strap stays nice and snug and doesn't wiggle its way loose. Next up, a little quiz for everybody. If you have the camera in front of you, hold it up as if you're ready to take a picture and a question for you is your thumb on the top of the lens or on the bottom of the lens? Because how you hold your camera makes a little bit of a difference, and what you want is you want your thumb on the top of the lens, and what that does is rather than holding the camera like this, which leaves your elbow out here without any support. It brings it down here. It doesn't feel as comfortable the first time you pick up the camera, but it's something that will be better in the long run, you'd be able to hold the camera steady er and it's something that you'll notice the way most professional photographers holding their camera and finally got a couple of words for you on screen. Here, take a look at these words and tell me what you think about these words. Which one do you like? How do you like to have your camera set up? Well, in this class, we're going to be going through a lot of different features that you could set manually or you could set automatically which way is the best way to set your camera? Well, it really depends on your time, effort and knowledge of what you are doing as to what is in that system. In some cases I like leaving the camera in automatic because it's very fast, I don't have to put out any effort. The problem is, is that never get set exactly the way that I want to get it set. The more you know about photography, the more particular you will be about how your camera is set and that it doesn't change on you. So, as we go through this class, just kind of keep aware of how you like to use the camera. Now, how would you like to use it in the long term? And I will try to give both beginning users as well as advanced users, recommendations on how to get their cameras set up.