Lessons

Lesson Info

9:30 am - Top Buttons, Left Side

We're finally into the really good stuff here I will mention that this class does come with purchase it comes with the pdf with several pages of I kind of designed this for my in person class is just something for people to take notes on there's lots of white space and I've included a lot of my illustrations in here so that you don't have to copy down what you see on the screen or you can take it with you. What I personally like about my hand out is not the first several pages but there's a page that's very important when we get to the menu setting and this is the entire menu on one page in fact, I just had a question here today about john does this camera have multiple exposures? And I teach a lot of camera classes and I don't necessarily know everything off the top of my head and I basically just pulled this out and I'm going well that would be over here and yep, there it is right there multiple exposures and this is how you'd want to have it set. And so this is kind of a handy devic...

e because scrolling through the menu system can be a real pain in the butt on any of the cameras this one's better than most and so that's that's my favorite painting the pdf but it's also got some other helpful handouts on how to set the camera for sports or landscape photography or something like that and so that's something you may want to have handy or print out while you take the class even kind of have your notes all in one cohesive area you know john I have to admit when I took your your class for my camera I printed that page out and had it laminated and kept it in my camera back really? I should have a little foldout one it was really nice because because and it's in my bag is just indestructible so nice good deal glad that worked out for you all right so you won't have your camera in front of you and let's start going through it we're going to start off really basic stuff on and off make sure you have a camera on for the rest of the class one of the things they will get into that second and so your camera because it relies on battery power constantly wants to take cat naps and go to sleep. And so if it one of most common problems I have somebody in my class I'll tell him turn this dial and it will do this and they're like nothing's working on my camera broken and what happened is your camera's going to sleep? You need to hit halfway down on the shutter release tow wake the camera up and so photographers are constantly unconsciously pressing down on that shutter release halfway and so that's just a habit you'll get used to most likely now the main dial is the top dial on the candid camera and so if there's something to change that is to go to dial on the camera but one of the great things about this level of camera is that we have two dials in back I will sometimes forget the name quick control dial and I'll just call it the back dial or the rear dial and so that's going to be kind of a second go to dial when you want to change something that doesn't do anything in particular it depends on what mood you're in within that is a multi controller, which is a touch pad which can be turned in eight different directions and he asked my opinion it's a little small and a little filly and you've got to be a little bit careful with your thumbs in how you press it because it is very close to the quick control dial but it's something that you use on a regular basis the set button in the middle is for confirming an entry it's kind of like the equivalent on a computer keyboard of pressing enter you've selected something and you want to confirm that setting that's often what you will use hui using that quite a bit when we get into the menu system on the camera now the quick control dial and the multi controller on the back can be locked and turned off by flipping this lock switch up. So for general operations of the camera, you're probably gonna wanna unlock this and put it in the downward position. The reason this lock is there is let's say you are shooting a football game and you have your shutter speed and aperture locked in at a very specific setting, and you don't want it to ever change, but you're running around in your bumping your camera, you could lock that switch and none of your controls would change, even though the dials are pressed and turned on it. So it's something that some people use. Some people never use it at all. Okay, let's, talk specifically about the top of the camera. First off, the often on when you do turn the camera on the camera goes through an automatic censor cleaning they introduced this several years ago. Back on, I believe it was the forty so several generations before this, and it has really saved photographers are a lot of hassle because it will do a good job keeping most of the dust off the sensor later on. In the menu setting, I will give you some recommendations and tips on how to deal with dust that does eventually get on your sensor. Just because it has this sensor cleaning system on it does not mean you will never get dust on it, it just prevents ah large portion of the dust over on the top left hand side of the camera, we have our mode dial with a lock button in the middle, so that lock button has to be pressed in order to turn the dial, and the style controls the shutter speeds and apertures of the camera and is arguably the most important control on the top of the camera. So we're going to talk specifically about this for a little bit, and we're going to start off on the very most simple setting, which is thie a plus mode. A plus mode is the full auto mode, this is where the camera is setting, shutter speeds, apertures and a whole bunch of other stuff on the camera. I do not like this mode at all the reason I don't like it is because when I'm using the camera there's very specific things that I want to turn on and off, and when you have it in the a plus mode, the camera has essentially turned on a lot of child safety locks and they've great out menus and they've limited where you can go and change certain settings on the camera, I think for anyone who owns this camera, anyone who is taking this class you're not going to want to use the smell this is the mode you hand your kid when you want them to take a picture or you hand the camera to a stranger to take a picture eh they're not going to screw anything up too much on taking that photo and be they can't get in and change your settings on the camera for most of the things in this mountain the a plus what that indicates is that the camera is actually trying to look at what you're photographing and determine whether it is a portrait a macro a landscape shot and slightly adjust for that situation so if you knew nothing about photography this would be the best place to put it but I think by the end of this class hopefully you want to have it set in a better position now one of the things that disturbs me about this more than anything is that when I do press this let me try this again up here I didn't do it this time there we go okay we got that flash to papa and I think flash needs to be a very conscious decision on the photographer's parton is this appropriate for adding flash or not you know if you're out in a big stadium and you're sitting in the top row and you want to take a picture at nighttime this flash is not going to reach the floor with any significant power and so that's a decision that you should make, and so we have the next mode on this camera, which is the same full auto it's just that the flash is turned off mode, and so it does everything else the same, itjust simply will not pop up class, so if you're gonna have the camera to a family member to go in a museum and take pictures where there's no flash allowed, that would be a good mode for this particular setting. Next up is the sea, a mode the stands for creative auto. This is cannons, automatic mode that's got a little bit of artistic direction that you can add into it. It's the problem with the mod is that it's still very limited, like the other auto modes, and I'm not going to spend much time on this there's more information in the instruction manual, but the idea here in the creative auto mode is that you can change a little bit of the depth of field without getting into the specifics of apertures. You'll be able to change the ambiance, the ambience of your photo by making it a little bit soft or vivid, and we're going to be able to totally do that with much more manual control as we get more into the camera but that's just kind of a light version of some artists to hell and so that would be for somebody who didn't take a class but they still want to play around with the creative part of their camera we're going to go much beyond it so let's keep moving on next up is the scene mode and once you put it in the scene you know what I'm gonna do that right now in my camera and so I'm gonna put it in the scene mode I'm gonna press the cube button and we have various portrait modes, landscape modes and a bunch of other kind of generic simplified muslim to get this straightened out and if you wanted to have the camera set up a little bit more specifically for a particular situation for instance you are doing the two city triathlon and you're gonna have your friend take your picture during the event you could put it in the sports mode and that's going to be slightly better than the auto plus mode and so it's a beginner it's not even really a learning mode you can I do call it a cheater mode because what you could do and there is you can go set it up in the sports mode and you can get a feel for what the camera would be setting in that particular situation and once you learn more about photography you'll be able to go in and do something much better now one of the things about these modes is that there is nothing going on in the camera that you can't do yourself so there's no special magic mojo that on ly cannon puts into these modes here you can do everything manually if you want to and you know how and so this is a simple way to get near closer to the mark of what you may be interested in doing but I like having more control over the camera so let's get into the more manual modes the first of these is the programme mode and the dirty little secret on the programme mode is that it is basically the same as thie a plus mode it's setting, shutter speeds and apertures but it doesn't have the child safety locks so if you want to get in and make some changes in the menu settings they are all open to you. You could make any change you want in the menu when you have the camera in the programme mode and so for myself when I want to put the camera in just a really simple quick automatic mode, I will put it in program I don't leave my camera there much but it is a nice simple mode for that now one of the things you could do with it in the programme mode is by turning the main dial on the camera that's the dial upon the top of the camera the camera will go into it's called a program shift mode, which allows you to shift shutter speeds and apertures so that you're still getting in the correct amount of light. But you might be getting a faster shutter speed for a shooting action, for instance, or you might be getting more depth of field for a landscape type shot and it's very nice for kind of a quick adjustment to one particular type of photography. Now, the problem with the program shift mode is that once you put it into that mode, let's say, I'm going to shoot a portrait and I want shallow depth of field. As soon as I put it in there, it will stay there for about six seconds or if I take a picture right, then it will work. But if I let the camera sit, it'll reset itself back to its generic average program setting. And so any time you get involved with a situation where you're going to take several pictures, so if you're at a sporting event and you're going to shoot for the next hour sporting pictures, this would be a terrible mode to put it in because you would have to constantly reset your camera. Now the other thing with using the programme mode is the back dial, the quick controlled I'll controls exposure compensation so let me give you a little visual example of what's going on here and what this does is it basically controls the brightness and darkness of your photograph. Normally the camera's meter system is going to do a very good job at averaging out the light that it sees, but if you take a picture and you're thinking that's not quite right I want to make it a little lighter I want to make it a little darker all you have to do is turn that dial a little film left a little to the right you could go one stop over, you can go one stop under, you can do it in third stop increments so just very a little bit more a little bit more and you go several stops, you go up to five stops in either direction, which is very extreme now this is also the reason why there is a lock button on the back your cameras so that you don't accidentally bump this and so if you're taking pictures and they're all over exposed or they're all underexposed, take a look when you turn this dial and see if it's in the center of the area and where you would want to check that is in the viewfinder and this is something well talk in detail more about later but on screen here's what you'll see when you look in the viewfinder down at the bottom you know what you want to look for is the light meter indicator being at the middle of the range there's minus two the left and plus to the right so just make sure that that light meter is in the middle because that's the most important thing about exposure compensation is getting it reset back to zero you don't want to leave it at plus three or minus three you're going to end up with horribly exposed pictures we'll go through what you see in the viewfinder more detail a little bit later on all right the next mode is tv and this does not stand for television it stands for time value where it means that you get to set the shutter speed and the camera will figure out the rest of the scenario now if you want to take your camera and I'm gonna do this with my camera right now just cause to do a little actual shooting in here and I'm going to set the shutter speed of one thirtieth of a second in here and I'm going to take a picture of jim over here and we'll take a look I'll show you the picture and let's turn this where's my playback button there is so we get a reasonable picture of jim now if I go ahead and say you know I'm going to shoot at a thousandth of a second and I hold it up one of the things I'll notice is that on this particular lands it's blinking the aperture at me which says two point eight and let's just say I didn't notice that I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna take a picture and let's take a look at the results of this image and there you go a perfectly black photograph okay, so what happened right there is I'm in control of the camera and I said I want to shoot a thousandth of a second and the camera was going don't do it don't do it and you don't have the right aperture uh and so that's the problem with the shutter priority mode is that if you don't have a fast enough lands or the appropriate aperture you can still shoot the picture but you're just going to end up with a black picture and so for most people I don't recommend the time value mode a lot of people are thinking well, happy perfect for sports will great you set five hundredth of a second to stop the baseball players and suddenly it gets a little bit darker as the game goes on and your pictures just keep getting darker and darker because you don't have a fast enough lens now there are some people who use it very, very successfully and conjunction with the feature, we'll talk a little bit about more later called auto eso, where the camera adjust the esso to kind of compensate for the fact that you don't have the appropriate aperture. And so, for most beginners, I would say I would tend to stay away from this mode, but it could be very helpful under particular situations. But do be careful ofthe noticing that aperture blinking at you. Anything blinking is a warning sign next up very, very much related to the time value mode is the aperture valium. Oh, now I'm a much bigger fan of this mode here. If you put your camera in the aperture value, go ahead, just pick it up, put it in the aperture value mode, shoot a picture of anything at any aperture, and I pretty much guarantee that you're going to end up with a proper exposure. Change the aperture by turning the main dial the top dial on the camera to any other aperture you want, and I pretty much guarantee about a ninety nine percent chance here that you're going to end up with a good exposure, and that is because the camera has so many different shutter speeds it could go from thirty seconds up to four thousandth of a second. In selecting shutter speed so there's a wide variety of shutter speeds to match up with the apertures but there's a limited number of apertures and so the aperture priority mode is really my favorite quick shooting mode because you have very specific control of where the aperture is and with the resulting shutter speed will be and it doesn't change on you as faras the aperture it stays wherever you leave it and it's only going to change when you turn the top dial on the camera now like the shutter priority mode and the programme mode, the back dial is still used for exposure compensation so that has stayed the same throughout these last three months that we've talked about and so I like aperture party mode when I'm in my walk around shooting I don't know what my next photo is and so that's I think very, very handy mode it's where a lot of photographers keep their camera set alright finally let's go to the most serious mode manual manual, of course is where you get to select shutter speed you get to select the apertures, you will be looking at the light meter in your viewfinder to see if you were properly exposed so generally the system here is to come up with one thing that's more important either shutter speeds or apertures and said it wherever you think it needs to be and then you're going to look at the light meter and you're going to adjust the corresponding feature until you get a good light reading good time then, too, take a test photo and take a look at it on the back of the camera to see how the exposure comes out. But any time I am involved in shooting a subject or a project that is under consistent lighting, so if I'm going to go shoot a marathon race and it's a nice sunny day and all my pictures were out in the street under nice son sunny conditions, I'm going to have the same shutter speed an aperture for many, many different shots I'm going to set it to manual if I'm in concert hall that has specific lighting on stage that's not really changing, I'm going to figure out what the correct shutter speed and aperture is at the beginning, and I'm probably going to leave it there for most all the time unless I'm trying to get different types of shots and so any time you're engaged with a subject for many, many shots under the exact same lighting, most serious photographers want to choose manual because they're going to get consistent results where the camera is not very those features on the camera and so highly recommend learning it's a great way to learn how your camera works and learning photography as well next up is the b mode, which stands for bulb, and this is an extension of the manual mode. The longest shutter speed in your camera is thirty seconds. If he wanted to leave your camera open for thirty one seconds, you could use the bulb mode and what happens in the bold mode? First off, I guess I'll explain the history of it. It comes from the good old view care remember the big cameras, people throw the whole tarp over their head and in order to fire the shutter in the lens, they would have a cable hooked up that had an heir, a bulb release and they would squeeze the air bulb and it would push the cable and open the shutter, and as long as they squeeze down on the ball, the shutter would stay open. And so we use that terminology today, and what that means is when I press down on the shutter release, it'll stay open for long as I pressed the button and as you might guess, that is a horrible way to take pictures because I'm touching the camera. I'm probably moving it, and so that's, why you want to use one of the cable releases so that you're not actually touching the camera, so if you want to leave the camera open for thirty one seconds or thirty one minutes or thirty one hours, which I wouldn't recommend. You could leave it open for a very long period of time. In general, I will tell you right now that the digital sensors have a problem with heating up. And the longest that I have left my camera open is about five minutes. I've seen some results from fifteen minutes, but it's not good to leave the sensor open for a long period of time. But for anyone who likes to do nighttime photography, light painting things like that one two minute, three four minute exposures are quite common and you'll want to invest in one of the cable release is I'll give you the specific number for that when we get to that section in the class and you want to use the bulb setting final setting on the mod I'il is see for custom, this is what you get to customize into one, a particular type of setting. So if there is one type of photography that you do on a regular basis or something that you would like to quickly get teo, you can program the camera to have all your favorite settings so let's just say you like to use your camera in aperture value at f for with spot metering with the motor drive on high you would set your camera exactly the way you want it you would dive into the menu settings which is where I will show you in just a moment and you would tell the camera to memorize those settings and so when you go to custom it would instantly change all the features on the camera to your favorite settings and so in this class if you're watching online you will see that I just added this little shortcut and so for those of you who are watching this on tape you can stop it right here okay really life and you can go into your menu if you already know how to do it if you're watching brand if your brand new and you're just watching for the first time don't worry about it we will get to this section later on but if you want to jump ahead you can go dive into your setup menu tab number four under the little tools custom shooting mode and you'll be able to go program it right then and there so throughout this class you're going to see a bunch of these shortcuts because I know some of you are like hey I want to go do that and I want to do it right now that allows you to jump ahead but for everyone else in the class we're just gonna go through these things one at a time so jim, I might check back in here just to see if there's any questions because there's a lot of a lot of important stuff in that there is and mostly there there's stuff that we are going to be covering later but I wanted to let you know that sam cox from colorado one of our regulars owns a cannon seventy and was wondering hey, john, should I considered getting the seventy d instead? Okay, so another issue side issue I want to address the side issue for me is I don't think in japan they realize at how similar of name seven d and seventy d and it's very confusing in the world of cannon because we have a sixty, sixty, seventy seventy d and so I had to listen really get weight, which camera does he have a right? And so if you own a seven d, you're probably not going to want this camera and if you own this camera you're probably not gonna want a seven d the differences are very, very minor if you're shooting video, this one has better automatic focusing in video which depending on how you shoot videos may or may not help out because a lot of the people who are serious about shooting videos are going to manually focus the new auto focus system and video is great in here that's the on ly riel advantage over the seven d the seventy I have a seventy myself, and it does still have a better focusing system for sports photography. It's got a faster motor drive. It's got a little bit bigger controls. I told you about this back dial on the camera. So take over here. It's, a little bit small and fidgety on this camera. It is larger and more comfortable to use on the seventy camera. And so I do prefer the seventy two, this one for a lot of sports type shooting. But if you were brand new to buying a camera well, if the new features of this one the video focusing what's, what else? Thie wifi system that would probably be, you know, if you're going to use those things a lot nice camera it's also a little bit smaller, it was surprised at how small it felt in the hands. And so if you want a little bit smaller camera it's nice, but I don't know that going from a seventy upto a seventy is the right choice, okay, for most people.