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Lesson Info

10:45 am - Lenses and Displays

All right, so we're going to talk about the lens options that you have for this camera not conduct about every lens but it is part of a larger ecosystem of cameras and lenses that is a little convoluted and I want to kind of clarify what's out there how it matches up and how to work with it so to understand where we are with this camera we need to look back in history a little bit with sony's history with minolta because sony inherited the minolta lens lineup and the lens mount system so sony currently has a full frame camera that has an a mount on it that uses a whole series of lenses that we're not getting into in this class in order to have smaller, more affordable cameras. They also produced a smaller slr like the a seventy seven which also has an a mount on it can use their traditional lenses but also uses their dt lenses you cannot use a dt lands up on the traditional full frame sensor cameras so you have to be a little bit careful and those air just the sl ours so this camera is...

a marylise camera that uses a smaller size sensor that has what's called an e mount on it in fact, it says email right on it and it will use what are called e lenses and so you want to be very particular and in most cases I would most highly recommend exclusively getting the e lenses for this camera I would not get the dt because they're not going to work directly nor the other full frame lenses which don't have a specific name to them they're just the general sony auto focus lenses now recently, this has kind of been complicated by the fact that sony has brought out a fourth camera in a fourth different division. It is a muralist camera, but it does also have an e mt to it and it has specifically f a lenses that work on it you know you could take an f he lands in theory because I haven't had a chance to actually try this and mounted on this camera, you probably wouldn't want to because there's a little bit of waste of money and resource is and going on and I'm going to explain that visually here in just a moment you could take in a lens and mounted on this new mirror lists a seven but you're going to get serious vignette ing of the corners as I will show in just a moment. And so sony has been trying a lot of different things and some people fault them for doing this that's their very ambitious and they keep wanting to try new technologies and they keep moving from one thing to the other, so they're throwing everything against the wall and seeing what works here and so you need to be very clear about what lenses work on what camera so let's, take a closer look at some of this difference between the single lens reflex is versus the mirror lis cameras, so on the slr, the single lens reflex camera, the sensor is within the camera housing, and there is a forty four point five millimeter flans distance so that's a distance from the sensor to the lens mt so all of those lenses are designed to have the sensor exactly forty four point five millimeters behind it. The marylise camera, on the other hand, doesn't have the mere and is has a much shorter flans distance of just eighteen millimeters, which makes the cameras much smaller in size. The lenses for these cameras are expecting the censor to be specifically eighteen millimeters behind it. So the problem is, is that when you take one of the slr lenses and you try to put it on a mirror lis camera, it needs a gap of forty four point five millimeters, and that is possible by using one of these adapters. So if you want to take one of the a mountain lenses and put it on the mound body, you can do it, but you need the sony l a e a one, which sells for around one hundred thirty five dollars. And you can use that camera and optically it's very good there's not really a problem with it you just need to have this extra lens adapter so that the lens is mounted in the right place now they do also make something called in l a to which allows you to do the same thing but allows a different type of focuses focusing system called the phase detection auto focusing system this will enable the camera to focus much faster on subjects that are moving rapidly. This device sells for around three hundred dollars and as you can see is a little bit chunkier and bigger in size it's not something that's very common that people with really small cameras are going to want to use this really big adaptor on but it's one of the many different sony adapters that you can use to mount one type of lens on a different type of camera body. So with the new full frame sony mirror less camera the a seven in the a seven r that shares the same lens mount you want to be very careful about choosing a mirror lis lens from the collection of sony mirror lis lenses you want to take a look is in an email lens or is it an f e and I believe the f s standing for full frame so let's take a look at how these lenses are designed and what they're good for so the fda is designed for the full frame censor. It produces a very large image circle in order to cover the large sensor area size so that you get a nice, clean image from corner to corner. The email lenses have a smaller sensor size and thus a smaller image circle, but it is still big enough to fit the sensor size. Where things get a little complicated is if you try to switch lenses with cameras, so if you were to take your e mount lands on on this song on the new sony a seven, you're going to get heavy vignette ing on the corners or a darkening of the corners. You can still shoot pictures, but it's a look that not a lot of photographers like. On the other hand, if you want to use an f e mt lands which are not very common these days, at least at this early stage of the full frame, perilous lenses it's going to create a very large image circle of which the camera is only recording a small area in the middle because that's the size of the sensor. So I would think if you own this camera, you want to stay with the standard e mountain lenses now what is available out there? What are you going to see? Well, a lot of people purchased this camera with the retractable zoom lens the sixteen fifty that's the one that I have here on the camera and it's nice because it is so incredibly small it does match the size of the camera quite well however optically it is not the greatest lin's sony has to offer its not at the top of the list you might say if you want something that's really nice you want to take a look at the zeiss lenses ice is a lens manufacturer in germany and they make lenses kind of on contract for sony they have very high standards for optical quality for construction and their lenses will reflect it in price the standard kit lands is worth around three hundred fifty dollars if you want to buy it on its own this sixteen to seventy which is a comparable zoom range with a constant for aperture on it sells for about one thousand dollars. You know one of the things you'll see on these lenses as well as any other manufacturer is lots of letters and their little codes for special things that the camera or lens does or is in this particular case it's a carl zeiss designs and the o s s indicates that it has optical steady shot as does the retractable zoom so the image stabilization is built into the particular lenses that you might put on this camera it's not in the camera itself as it is on some other brands of cameras if you're looking for just kind of a good basic telephoto zoom lens, the fifty five to ten is kind of the obvious choice to go with really reaches out there to ten is pretty good for a sensor size that this has it's the equivalent of a little over three hundred millimeter lands. If you're looking for white angle, you're real estate or architectural photographer, maybe a landscape photographer the ten to eighteen is a very nice lands all of these lenses listed here have the optical steady shot that ten to eighteen is quite nice because it isn't a four constant, which is nice to have a constant aperture that doesn't change on you for price, the fifty five to two ten's going to sell around three hundred fifty dollars, the ten to eighteen a little bit more of a specialty at eight hundred and fifty dollars next little grouping of lenses is what I call sweet primes. Primes is another term for a lens that does not zoom it's a fixed lens they make a couple of pancake lenses. I think a better terminology would be cookie lens because they're about the size of a cookie, but they're very flat small lenses of sixteen is a good white angle that's going to sell for two hundred fifty bucks, the twenty is going to be about three hundred fifty dollars these do not have stabilization probably the best lens in the lineup for this camera is the twenty four one point eight carl zeiss sonar lands absolutely beautiful quality lands but I will have to say it is quite large on this camera it's a very big lens in front of a very small camera if you want a standard lands for just shooting general items the thirty five one eight is nice and fast with that one point eight aperture and does have the optical steady shot system in it if you're looking to do portrait you want something that's a little bit longer and focal length in the thirty five and the fifty millimeter fits that bill quite nicely so if you do a lot of people portrait's look for that fifty now the thirty five for price is going to be around four hundred fifty dollars. The fifty should be around three hundred dollars now. Besides the sony lenses there's a lot of non sony off brand lenses zeiss I've mentioned their name before and they actually worked with sony and they do lenses for sony on their own as well it's kind of a strange arrangement I believe what is happening is that within the sony factory they make some of those ice lenses with his eye standards but then zeiss makes some of their own lenses on their own and so they do have these new two it lenses a wide angle and a normal that are available, and these are very high quality glass. The twelve millimeter is twelve hundred fifty dollars the thirty two a nice normal lens is going to be nine hundred dollars a little bit on the lower end of the price scale, and maybe a little bit on the quality scale are a bunch of lenses from different manufacturers that gets sold under different names, but they're all the same lens. You'll see names like sam yang bauer and broken on, and they have some unusual lenses that you won't find from sony or the other manufacturers, including a fisheye super telephoto that is a reflex for a mere two lens in a very fast white angle sixteen millimeter lands these lenses are going to range in price from two hundred eighty dollars to five hundred dollars, so there on that a little bit more affordable scale. Some other lenses that are pretty good are the signal lenses. Now they're not real fast, in my opinion, to it is a nice aperture to have but it's not real fast when you get down to this size of sensor, but these air good little lenses, they have wide a normal and a short telephoto, and they're all pretty nice lenses signal's been really making some good stuff lately, so they've been upping their game. And maybe I should check in see if there's any questions before jumping on to the next section because I'm kind of done talking about lenses and so forth and so general would you what do you got it sir I got a couple of questions judith would like to know what are the pros and cons of buying a lens used from a reputable source the cons are that something could be wrong with it but that's pretty easy to check out bringing your camera shoot some test pictures take a look at the land see if it's visibly marked I I would much rather by you cleanse that a used camera because I like a nice clean fresh new sensor with lenses what you want to do is you want to check the surface of the glass to see that it's clean and scratch free front and back hold it up to a light see if there's any dust or fungus which happens if you've started in a wet moist environment for a long period of time turn and move anything that moves on and see if it turns smoothly put it on your camera shoot some test shots check to see how sharp it is in the corners and so forth and if it's good it's good there's hardly there's not a lot of things that go wrong with lenses there's definitely more with auto focus lenses than in the old days of manual focus lenses but I own several use lenses and it's not that hard to check out and I kind of have fairly high standards I don't like two buy anything that's seen a lot of heavy use I just prefer to avoid those issues and there's a lot of people people are not always selling stuff because there's something wrong with it, there's a lot of people that bought too much and they need to pay rent and so there's a lot of good equipment out there that people just don't use anymore, and so I'm all in favor of use lenses great, so rt h and would like to know ah with lenses could john cover using any focus peaking aides that the n e x six has who I got a good slide for you? So focus speaking is a really cool way of manual focusing with a little electronic digital help, and I actually have a video recorded that I'm going to show you how that works and when it looks like great thank you and rodolfo would like to know can you reiterate please the name of the twenty four millimeter you recommended? Well, the twenty four that I like and I can't say that I recommend it because it's it's big it's heavy it's, expensive it's not right for everyone but it's those ice twenty four f one point eight in the sony e mount great we're good to roll ok, so we're going toe start jumping into the ditch slaves on this camera in this camera as I said before doesn't have a lot of buttons on the outside we're going to have a bit more with the displays on the back of the camera and so let's jump to the back of the camera where we're going to look at the e v f, the elektronik viewfinder and the lcd monitor as I said before, there is a different aspect ratio, so as you look at these and the images on him, they will be framed within different size areas to change the display. Of course you're going to hit the display, but as we've talked about before so let's talk about exactly what we're looking at in the viewfinder. So first off the graphic display down at the bottom will show you your shutter speeds and apertures, and as you're changing them, there will be a line in orange to show you where yours current settings air at and over. On the left hand side, you'll see the reading in numbers of exactly where you've said a mat the little triangle in the background will show you the available range of shutter speeds and or apertures so individual example on screen, you can see that the maximum aperture is somewhere between two point eight and five point six and this will, of course, change. When you put on different lenses with different apertures as you look around the screen, there will be additional information. For instance, the s o and right above that will either be in em in, which indicates you are in metered manual mode, or a plus minus, indicating that if you are setting the exposure compensation over or under exposed or right at zero, normally you kind of want this at zero as a default setting. There is the soft key settings which indicate what the soft a, b and c keilar doing and or the dial around softkey see, and they'll be usually another word or symbol. If there's something particular going on with those softkey's, there will be the indicator for what the control dial is doing. And then along the top of the camera is all sorts of other now kind of obvious information would exposure mode urine from the pictures you have left and whether certain things they're turned on or turned off, or what movie mode, what quality mode you are in, and so a lot of very good, important information around there. One of the few other key things to be aware of is down in the lower left hand corner. You get a little green light when your camera is in focus. One of the things that I recommend on this camera is turning off the beeping of the camera that way when you should've picture you're not making any noise and disturbing people but sometimes it's hard to tell if the camera has finished and found focus and so you can just take a look to see if the in focus light has turned on if you are recording a video it will tell you how long your video is as far as your recording time right here in the display next up let's talk about this for a view finder display so if you press the display button repeatedly you'll eventually get this big graph of functions and what we're gonna do is we're gonna be going through this right now down at the bottom is our key exposure information shutter speed aperture and s o and as you jump into this by activating it with the function button you're going to be able to go in and access the different features in here and so just to make sure that all of you are playing along at home right let's do a little live demo so let me make sure my camera is turned on here and you can see if we're on camera good you can see what the camera is pointed out right now and by just hitting the display button we cycle through the different options and the one that we want to be at is this display right here where it has all the information? And then we will hit the function button on the top of the camera and it will activate one particular area, and then we can use the back wheel to dial up and move around, and we can use the wheel if we want let's see if this one works yet top one works so there's many different ways to navigate around, and what we're going to do is we're going to talk about that in the keynote, where I can bring up some more information. So back on the keynote, let's, get this next one up here. All right? So first option in the top left corner is the single shooting mode. Now we already talked about dr shooting because there is a shortcut button on the back of the camera that says the drive mode, but they put it in here because, well, this is kind of the the quick stop for all the main features of the camera, so we can already talked about those who were just going to move on to the next item in here, which is the media remote. This is the pattern that the camera uses to read light coming in through the lands we have the option of a multi meter, which uses a two hundred segment meter. And averages the light and dark to end up with one good average and I can tell you that this system works very, very well, but some people prefer different types of meters, so there is a centre waited meter, which is heavily influenced by what is happening on lee in the center of the photograph and then the spot meter, which uses a very tiny area in the very middle if you were trying to check the light reading that was bouncing off a person's face, for instance, or a very small area in a landscape, so you'd want to be very careful about using the spot meter it's a very, very precise tool that you don't just randomly leave your camera in that mode, you'll get very poor exposures depending on what you point your camera, so I would highly recommend using the multi meter for general and most types of photography. I leave it there pretty much all the time on my camera next function over deals with the focusing system, we have auto focus, which works quite well, and we also have manual focus where you can go in and manually focus and we have a combo feature, which is called direct manual focus, and I think I'm going to try to do a live demo on this since we do have a little bit of prop over here, so I mean switch the camera on, let me go impress the function button and make sure that I am in the d m f mode and you and see you can just cycle through d m f works very good now I'm going to switch display so you can see what I am pointing that over here. So there's a zoom in a little bit let's zoom into teo. Okay, that's as far as we want to go, we're going to focus on our subject and I've turned the beep off and we can see the green light down in the corner has turned on, so we have focused on me, see if I can reach around. I'm going to grab the focusing rain and I'm turning the focusing rings so I have auto focus, but now I'm fine tuning the manual focus. You can see that it has jumped into a magnification mode. Yeah, let me get a good look at it right about there looks like a good focus. I can take the picture and I used auto focus to kind of get me most of the way there, but if I wanted to find tune it, you could just grab that focusing ring and fine tune it now the key to doing that was leaving my finger halfway down on the shutter release wow, I I oughta focused and I left left my finger halfway down and as I left my finger halfway down I then grabbed the focusing ring to turn and so if you want to be really critical about getting perfect focus that's a very good system and so I do like the d m f up option on that direct manual focus ok, moving on to the next option is the auto focus mode we have two options auto focus single and auto focus continuous this determines how the camera focuses the lens does it focus once and stop which is what you would want for a subject that is stationary continuous would be something you would want for sports activity for instance. Now the camera is not fantastic it's pretty good but it's not fantastic at sports photography. So most of the time people are going to leave this in the s mode. But if your subjects are moving around you got some kids playing, you're photographing a soccer match or something, then I would want to put this in the continuous mode. Next up is going to be the choice of where you focus the auto focus area and we have a number of options. We have the multi we have center, we have flexible spot and this requires a little bit more visual aids so let's talk in depth about these particular modes you know what jim I'm gonna see if we have any questions we got great great questions shutterbug wants to know could you please explain a fixed or constant aperture lens what does that mean when the camera seems to be having a range of aperture choices? Ok, so let me show you on my camera right here on the table this lands as you can see straight on the front hopefully we're on the right camera here it's a three five to five point six lin's so it's a variable aperture which means when we're at the white angle setting which on this lenses sixteen millimeters it has a maximum aperture of three point five but when you zoom out to fifty which is the telephoto position its maximum aperture is five point six and this is very common in kitt lenses and basic lenses it enables them to make the lens quite small. The downside is is that if you set an aperture of three point five and you zoom in that number changes so let me do a little live demo on the camera here what I'm going to do is I'm going to put the camera in aperture priority and if you khun see really closely in here I'm going to change the aperture down here to three point five you could see where this little oranges it's well to the left of the five point six and as I zoom in that orange line moves over to five point six. So that's, the maximum aperture in his eye, zoom back. It will adjust. And so one of the things that I don't like about these lenses is that they change on you. And you have to be very aware that if you said an aperture of f four, you can only get to it at certain places. Eso it's. Nice to have a fixed maximum aperture on your lives, but you've got to pay for it. They generally more money.