Lessons

Lesson Info

11:00 am - Focus and Flash

So the options for focusing our multi in what multi is is it looks over a large area of the frame and will automatically focus for you and the default program built into this camera as is in all cameras is it will focus on whatever is closest to the frame if it's in the middle that's where it focuses if it's in the upper left corner that's where it's going to focus if it covers more than one of these boxes if it covers three of these boxes you will see is many boxes pop up as that subject can focus on the next option is to simply focus in the center which is what I often like to do for basic photography needs because aiken direct where the camera is pointed out this camera has a very nice system called flexible spot which is going to be one area in the middle that aiken direct with the tab on the back of the camera and I can choose where I want to focus and tell you what I'm going to try to do a live demo and let's say I'm going to grab something to focus on back here this looks good I...

'm leaving my chair warning and I'm grabbing something with a long cable what is that crazy team is a nice dark room clark and I did not do this did not test this out so I have no idea if this is gonna work all right so let's see if I could get my camera to do do you zoom in a little bit so we have the camera in a portion of it as well as something in the background that looks pretty good so you can see right now on our camera let's see press halfway down what did our camera focus on it focused on these green boxes over on the the dark room timer if that's not what I wanted to focus on I'm going to go in press the function button lips I need to get back to my different display which is people do here and I'm gonna go over and I'm gonna go to flexible spot which is right there it's set now I can move this spot to the timer and focus here we got a green dot we got a green box we focused I could move the point over here to the rack in the background and I can focus over there and so I could leave this in the middle if I want there's not a lot to focus on here has a little bit harder time focusing but still does grab it I could reposition the camera focus lock and move that would be one option focus lock and move or if I want to leave it locked down on a tripod I could just use the wheel in the back of the camera to move it over and focus on it, and I really like this system because you can put the focusing system virtually anywhere on the frame you can't get into the extreme corners, but it's pretty rare, that that's where you would want to focus, and so this is a really good system. Hopefully, you guys were able to see that on screen. All right, next up, I'm going to start from taimyr out of here. That was a great prop bill. I like these props around here is that this camera also has something called a phase detection area, and this camera uses two different types of focusing system. He uses the contrast system, which is looking at light hitting the sensor, and whether it's in focus or out of focus, and it changes the lens till it's nice and contrast within the center area, as you can see, is illustrated on this slide. There is kind of that middle portion box of area where the camera is using ninety nine phase detection points for focusing. This is a different type of focusing system that works very good at predictive, focusing it's also just good under different types of scenarios, so your camera will be extra sensitive and better at focusing within these frames. And so when I was moving that focusing bracket way off to the side, it was still able to pick it up in here, but in some types of lighting conditions and subject contrast, it may not be a cz well is doing this now. One of the options you have in the setup menu is to turn on this visual display so that you know where to have your focusing brackets and, well, it's kind of nice to know that you have these focusing brackets and that you can see them it really clutters up the screen, so I can't say that I recommend turning them on, but you can turn them on by going into the setup menu, undershooting settings and turning on the phase detection auto focus area, and you will see this turned on all the time. But as I say, it does clutter up the screen quite a bit. Okay, jumping back into our grid display that was our auto focus area multi is where I would leave the camera for somebody who doesn't know the operation of the camera or you're just you're not being too particular into careful with how you point the camera, so for very general picture taking it's fine, but for the more discerning photographer whose particular about what they want and focus, I like the center, and particularly I do like the flexible spot area next up. Is face detection so this camera has a face detection wrote, a lot of cameras do, and what you can do in this is the camera will recognize a face you can actually register a name with a face, so for instance, if you have a couple of kids, you can take a picture of them and register names with those kidsfaces and the camera will automatically add that information to that particular photograph, which could be very handy for labeling and scrap booking on your pictures. And this is something that you can turn on or turn off the basic face detection will look for face for faces and focus on them. This works pretty well when you have a single subject in the frame, but when you have multiple subjects, it's sometimes will fight over which one it wants to focus if one is closer to the camera than the other. So if you're working with a single individual, I think it works pretty well. If you're working with multiples, you'll have to try it on your own to see how it works for your type of photography next up, one of the most important settings in your camera, and that is the quality setting that you set the camera, too. The two basic options for recording on this camera are raw images and j peg images raw images is the original true information that comes off the sensor and for anyone who wants to get the highest quality images you want to shoot in raw raw images, however, are not easily emailed and transferred and posted on facebook and so forth and so j peg images are very, very handy what a serious photographer would do would be to shoot in raw and then converted into j peg once they've downloaded it into their computer but some people they don't want to spend the time doing it and the j pegs are good enough for their own needs, so you would probably want to set a fine j peg if you just want to get some straight easy to work with images out of the camera, you could use a smaller resolution of standard j peg, but I would think that you bought a sixteen megapixel camera because you want to get the most out of those sixteen megapixels, which is I find j peg now you do also have the option of shooting raw plus j peg, which means that every time you take one picture you will get to files one raw one j peg the best of both worlds, but the problem is is that you do fill up a memory card and you'll fill up your hard drive with duplicate files and so my general recommendations our if you just want to get nice basic pictures said it to the fine j peg city if you want to get the absolute most out of the camera set raw if you are shooting j peg, I would really think about long term plans about shooting raw getting the right software and the right operating system so that you can work with raw images because there's mohr that you can do with raw images, you're going to have less problems with exposure issues and the leading a photograph because it was too bright or too dark because it just has so much more information you can do anything with it later on. Next up is white balance, and so this is the color of light that you are recording and this camera has many different options for adjusting the color let's take a look at the kelvin scale and this is how it measures light on this color scale that goes from red to blue. The camera has a number of different options for daylight cloudy and shea these air natural lighting conditions that you would be in the idea here is that you would adjust your white balance to fit the lighting situation that you are in if you are under artificial lights, tungsten or incandescent lights, the this camera has more settings that I've ever seen for different types of fluorescent light, and so you can really match the exact lights that you are working under there's also one for flash, which is natural, pure, clean, white, light and beyond. These settings are a couple of other more manual settings. One is where you can go in and physically set the color temperature. If you happen to know the color temperature, I know it's not real likely, but if you haven't figured out, you work in a studio or a similar environment and you know what number works well, you could just manually input sixty five hundred for instance, one of the other options were not going to get totally into is the custom setting, and what you would do here is you would photograph a white sheet of paper and you would register that with the camera has bean white s o you could go into any environment in color, correct for that particular environment, and then finally we have auto white balance. It is some of you might gather by now I'm not a big fan of auto, but I do like auto white balance, and the general reason is his number one. It does a pretty good job, and number two I mostly shoot in raw, and if you shoot in raw white balance doesn't matter it's something that you can fix later on if you shoot j peg, you I do need to be on top of the white palace game a little bit more you can adjust it a j peg later on but not to the same degree and with some damaging effects by going in and changing the color, so my recommendation is to leave it in auto white balance until you get into a situation that you know that you can change for the white balance, so if you're gonna be outside and it's a cloudy day and you're going to be out there shooting pictures all day, well then it might be a good idea to switch the white balance over to cloudy and when you're done, switch it backto auto white balance when you don't know what your next situation is going to be. All right, so that is white balance. Next up on the list is what we have here coming up d our auto hdr auto okay, so what this is dynamic range optimizer this is where the camera will go into a particular photograph, it will look at the light values and it will adjust things. It plays a little bit of game so here's a visual example in this particular example we have d are off and you'll notice that the shadows air kind of dark and it would be nice to lighten up those shadows when you put the camera into a d r auto mode it's going to look at those shadow areas and it's probably goingto lighten it up now it depends on the photograph it may hold back the highlights a little bit and in this particular case I like what d our auto is doing it's lightening up those shadows you know, the problem with this is that not all photographs require lightning of the shadows in some cases you want a nice, strong black shadow, so this is a feature that I don't necessarily want to turn on. This is something that I can control later on in the computer with much finer control. If you were on ly shooting pictures of people, this might be a pretty good option to leave turned on, but in general I like to leave it turned off next up is something called creative style, and this is where your camera will adjust the contrast the saturation and color of the j peg images, not the raw images just the j peg images standard is a good place to leave it if you're not sure where you want to put it if you want to work with it later on if you want to adjust your images for specific types, for instance, you're shooting a lot of portrait by putting it in the portrait mode it's going to adjust the color tones so that it makes skin tones look a little bit more natural I tend not to like to play in the camera doing this. I prefer to do it in the computer, where I have a much better view and have much finer control, so I would probably recommend leaving this ad standard and making that change later on. An exception to that rule would be the black and white note, because in the black and white mode, it'll show you on the back of the camera what the image looks like in black and white, and that might give you some very helpful information as to the contrast and how your subject looks in black and white when you're looking at it through your own eyes in color, and so that was kind of a fun one use, and if you do decide to shoot in raw, you can change it to black and white so that you see it in black and white on the viewfinder. But your raw image will contain all the color information on it. Next up, we have the picture affect mode, and this is kind of a extension of the creative style mode, but this one goes off into wacky effects, and so you can do all sorts of goofy, crazy things with the picture effect mode. I would be careful, though, because when you shoot a j peg image with one of these picture effects, you have permanently shot an image with this very unique look to it and so it's something that oh, play around with have some fun with, but I would be very cautious about using this for anything that's very important because you're going to get some very unusual things out of these pictures, but as I say it's a good place to play around and have some fun all right, next up we have what I will consider, and I'm going to go out on a limb here I am going to say this is the worst feature ever, not just in this camera, not just in a camera, but this is the worst feature in any product ever in the history of the world. This is auto portrait framing, so when you point your camera at a person, it will reframe the shot from the way you framed it up. If I'm trying to think of a scenario where this would work and here's my scenario, you're gonna hand your camera to your five year old daughter and tell her to go around and take pictures of people, and you want to make sure that all of them are kind of framed up similar it might do a better job than a five year old kid, but it is absolutely mind boggling to me that they put this on a camera so my grandmother cut off everybody's heads we have a box of photos of my grandmother said she took it literally there were no heads right would that help in may ways if you cut the head off it's not going to reposition the camera okay right and it's just ok I'm going to totally break the rules and creative life I'm gonna come over I mean that takes the pictures of you I know they can't get it on it but I'm just going to do just a couple of quick shots are going to throw this cameron program I just want to show how bad this is and so they might be able to use the camera and you think a wide so totally breaking rules I know come on over here okay so no no I like the background over here and so we're gonna teo I got to turn on the portrait mode so just to say good press a little buttons here and I'm probably off camera and they can't even see me and in value invalid with this focus area so I'm gonna go back I gotta go check it doesn't work with flexible spots so I'm going to go back to multi and changed this ok now we're got auto portrait I don't know register face okay now it's an auto portrait and I shoot a syriza portrait of you and processing and I'm not even looking at the photos and let's see what's going on and I'm gonna come back over here on the set the camera so we'll take a look at these three different photos I don't know what I got yet let's take a look and see how auto portrait worked and let's get it off that display so that's one picture and notice how the faces in the creative lefthand corner I shot it horizontally but it reframed it vertically cut off the entire side the next one it kept us the full image and then it reframed the other one also in the upper left hand corner of the frame and okay so I see what it's doing kept the original image so this is the original this is the reframed portrait the original the reframed auto portrait and so it is reframing everything as a vertical even if you shoot it as a horizontal but it's not keeping the face in the center it's putting it creatively over to one side now I have horribly offended somebody who uses this moat somewhere but I'm sorry I still don't get it okay moving on because that is something we want to turn off I got to turn it off on my camera right now because that is something I am not going to keep on so where is my mouth? I'm not going to worry about right now, okay next up back to the keynote sorry folks flash mode ok, we talked about the different types of flash that we can use in the camera and this is the quickest way to get in and change those different flash moz and of these modes phil flashes great. You want to add a little bit of phil flash during a daylight situation that works well? The slow sink is kind of fun if you like, working with slower shutter speeds and rear sink could be kind of good for special action type shots. Wireless we're not going to get into you do need the extra cannon or canada groups. Sony flash did the cannon class yesterday, folks sorry about that, dan mean, defend u s so you could get in here and turn the flash modes around to the different settings in their next up on the bottom row. We have coming up in just a second. If this displays make it there we go the exposure compensation. And so we saw this before there's a directive button on the back of the camera that's the bottom of the wheel and you can come in here and adjust it left and right. Left minus means dark and plus means bright and normally you'll see it on a slightly different scale, but when you do it on the back of the camera, you can go in and control the flash exposure compensation as well and the mm once again will mean metered manual so let me do a little live demo on our camera here let's get it back into a shooting mode gotta change my display back to our proper display here I'm gonna pop up the flash because I want to show you a little bit about this particular feature down here so down here under exposure compensation you'll see that it's a plus minus in orange on the top and as I tab down there is a very small lightning bolt with a plus minus the top one controls let's come back I'm going to hit the center button and I'm doing exposure compensation for the overall exposure when I come down and I select there it is that there is the flash exposure compensation this is controlling the lightning bolt the flash power and so let's go back to the key note and this is why you would want to control the power of the flash normally the camera fires what is known as a t t l flash it's a through the lands automated flash in general it works pretty good but with a lot of people faces with flash it over flashes a little too much power and so what you want to do for a more natural look is to power the flash down a little bit in this case I like t t l minus one under different lighting scenarios with different background you'll see that the t t l does not do a very good job and you need to power it down as much as two stops to get a more natural skin tone. If you I want to do people photography, I would highly recommend setting the tl exposure compensation of the flash at minus two thirds of a stop or minus one stop. You may need to do some euro some of your own test to determine what you think looks good and so let's switch back to the flash exposure compensation and dial down if we can here like a two thirds a minus point seven so that's going to darken the flash up just a little bit because we don't like our flashes overpowered our subject. If you are in a manual mode on this camera, you will get the manual meter so let's put our cameras in manual and we'll get the m him and will want to get this indicator towards the middle for our first picture. Now that we may end up having to go more to the plus side or to the minus side and let's, go ahead and do a live demo with our camera here on the table in front of us, I will flip the camera into the manual mode and we can see our shutter speeds and our apertures down here I'm going to set an aperture jim give me an aperture throwing out at me a great eight f eight okay, so we're going to set it at f a and let's uh give me an s l I'd say four hundred ok so I'm gonna press the ice so button over here and we're going to go to s o four hundred now I'm not going to ask you for a shutter speed because I'm going to use the light meter to help figure it out now the light meter right now is indicating well that's gotten blinkers which means I am way off and so I'm gonna have to adjust my shutter speed which is back here and if I go faster it doesn't seem to bring any the indicators around and so I'm going to keep going lower and now you can see this little white indicator and I'm going to move it over to one fifteenth of a second at f a t s o four hundred we've just let everyone know exactly the light levels in here so I'll take a picture and we get a decent exposure and so that's how you would use the light meter in the camera okay moving forward who we've had a major section here I'm not sure I think we should maybe take take a look at questions and see where we're at at this point that sounds great um let's see, I think the best question that's the most relevant has to do with when to choose this particular camera over another camera now that's that's a rabbit hole, right? I mean, it really depends on kind of what you're shooting when you're shooting correct right? Do you have? Do you have john's top five questions you should ask yourself before you go out and purchase a camera? Well, it obviously helps if you know what type of photography want to do if you're photographing your kids that's very different than if you're doing sports photography although kids do sports but you know if you want a specific sports camera just a family camera travel camera what sort of lenses what's your budget? You know, it opens a whole wide gamut where this camera fits in because every camera is the best camera for somebody in particular. And so who this camera is really good for somebody who wants a very small camera and I think for the money that this cost it is the highest quality camera on the market out there and say so if you want great image quality under a thousand dollars this little set up is an incredibly powerful package. Now it's got some issues we've talked about the menu system and the layout may not be to everyone's liking but that's a matter of personal choice there's some people that may really like the layout it works well for them that's perfectly legitimate I think now the sixteen to fifty lands is at a super compact lands and one of the gripes that I have about the sony in e x system is that the cameras are incredibly small but what good is a small camera if all your lenses air kind of big and so if you look at some of the other lenses most of them are quite a bit bigger and so look at the lens is that we'll get you to doing what you want to d'oh and then really comparing the package right and so it's got a good mixture of features and it does some things just better than other cameras but there's some other things that are just a little particular about it every camera has its own personality though just got to see if you match up with that cameras personality so we're going to get started on our menu system and the softkey a is your shortcut into the menu so in most all situations you can hit that top of black button just above the back control wheel to get into the menu system and you'll get this very nice little graphic and we have six groups of where things are things dealing with the camera or image size brightness all the things during playback we have a special application section which is quite unusual and on this particular camera I think the group that designed the camera they sat around it big table and they said, well, where should this feature go? Well, that goes in the camera section and this one goes in the image section and every once in a while they were like, what about this one? I don't know, let's throw it in the setup menu. What about this one? Let's? Throw it in the setup menu and so the senate menu has a very long list about half the items let me see. And so if we can get a shot head on of me looking at this page here, this is everything in your menu system, and we have the camera settings we have image, which is very small brightness and color, which is very small of just a little bit with the playback and a very small application and half the menu is the setup menu and set up menu is very lightly broken down into some other sections, and so most of the stuff has been just kind of dumped into the setup menu, so realize that it's not completely logical when we get in here, but we'll try to make setting make sense of it as we go through now. One of the things that absolutely drives me nuts is the help guide display, so if you're a home, you're watching this on tape. And as you're going through the menu setting, this is driving you nuts. Let me just tell you how to fix it right now. What this is is a little helpful window that pops up and says what kind of help you with every time you go to a new menu setting now it might be kind of helpful giving you information, but once you get to know the menu system, you're gonna want to turn this off. And if you want to stop the tape not that it's a tape, but you can stop it, you can go in to help guide display, and you can turn it off if it's driving you nuts. And so I believe in my camera, let's see if I've turned that off. I've reset my camera so that I could work with it in class, and I made two quick changes I turned off the beep and I turned off the help guide display. All right, so what we're going to do is we're going to start in the menu setting over at the camera settings, and we're going to start at the top of the list and what you want to pay attention to and let's just do a live little demo here on the camera with the live camera, so you'll see how it says. Menu back here we'll hit the menu button and you can navigate up down left and right through all of these were going to be at the camera setting and pay close attention over on the right hand side is a scroll bar that will indicate where you are within this long list of features because there are several features and this first one there's probably about fifteen features and you have to scroll down with the dialogue to see all of them and what we're gonna do is we're going to start at the top and just work our way down so onto the keynote first one is dr mode and if this sounds familiar it's because it's the third time we've talked about it today this does the exact same thing is the dr button on the back of the camera? Does the same thing is the drive mode in the function setting whatever you set last is where it will be set most of the time single shooting is where I would leave it set out for basic photography flash mode we were just talking about this two minutes ago it's here in the menu because everything is in the full menu setting next up is a f imf select and we were just talking about this before with that function setting and auto focus works very nice for those who like to do a little manual touch up to find two in the focus, I would highly recommend the d m f which stands for direct manual focus. Now as you can see on screen here I have general recommendations in orange because that's how they appear in camera and for the advanced users I'm putting those in red and underlining them and I have that as the same way when you get the pdf will have my recommendations with the menu sitting in there as to some good starting place is of course it's your camera you get to set it up exactly as you wanted to, but these are some good recommendations on where to start out setting those features auto focus area the multi would be really good for somebody who kind of doesn't know the focusing system on the camera, but I think once you really want to take control of the camera, I like the center and at the last minute on this class I switched over decided that my favorite focusing system was the flexible spot so that you could really move the focusing point anywhere you want quickly, easily and get good focus with it so I like that flexible spot I wish more other cameras had a similar focusing cyst next up for the focusing mode if you are focusing action, you want to be in continuous so things that are moving towards you and away from you most of the time, most photography is probably just going to be in the auto focus single mode as you can see, a lot of these are duplicate notes that we've already dealt with, so we're going to be moving through here pretty quickly. Object tracking. All right, so what is going on here when you go into this mode, the camera will try to pick out a subject let's say a dog running around on the field, and it will try to track that subject it will randomly, not randomly, it will try to predictably move the frame around to keep that object in focus. I have had varying results with this that are somewhat inconsistent, so you can try this on your own it's not the world's greatest camera for sports photography. You can try this, see if it works for the types of sports in action that you're working on zoo mode. All right, this is the one mode on this camera that I have not yet one hundred percent nailed down because I don't have the right lens on the camera to make this work, but I believe this is doing this. If you take a fixed prime lands it allow you to digitally zoom on the back of the camera, which means you are losing image quality when you do this, which is something that you would probably want to turn off and this kind of brings up an issue just to be aware of as we go through the rest of the features in the menu on this camera this is the most digital of digital cameras it the sony engineers have had a whole creative team with the task of coming up what can we do to digitally alter this image? What can we do to manipulate this image using digital technology and zooming in digitally is just one of the many options that we're going to see and as you will see, I'm not a big fan of digitally manipulating your image in the camera unless it really helps out which it does in some cases and so you will see that I fall on different sides of the fence depending on the situation face detection we've talked about this before in general I would leave it turned off if you do a lot of people photography you can give it a try see if it works for your type of photography registration this this could get into a dangerous area for parents of multiple kids because what you can do is you can register faces of different people, so for instance you could register the face of your daughter and your son and then you can select a priority which child do you want to focus on which one is more important and I'll let you deal with repercussions from that one next up we have the smile shutter so if you were to set the self timer and get in the shot it would wait for everybody to smile and then it would automatically trigger the shutter uh cute really cute I'm gonna leave it turned off auto portrait framing off next up soft skin effect what it does here it will slightly smooth out the skin now obviously it's going to manipulate your image in this case it won't do this on raw images it'll doing andrzej pegs give it a try see if you like it in general off shooting tip list all right, so here is ah whole list of basic tips right in your camera. If you have an excessive amount of battery power and a lot of time on your hands poke through here I didn't find anything that's wrong with it it's just some helpful little advice what do we have next lcd display? Ok, so the lcd is the big display on the back of the camera and if you want to change it there is a button on the back of the camera gold called a display. If you would like to do exactly what that button does but spend more time doing it, you can dive into your menu and said it here they both do exactly the same thing if you want to change the display in the finder you can jump in here and do it or you can just press the display button while you have the camera held up to your eye so it's a very, very long cut to do something there is a direct button for on the camera and I pressed the wrong button on the keyboard so we need to cycle through a couple things for just a second. So when you press the display button repeatedly you get all these different screens, right? Well, if there's one in there that you just never use, for instance let's say the level or the history graham it just doesn't work for the type of photography you do. You can uncheck those boxes and you will not see those a cz you cycle through the menu system on the display system and so it's kind of nice to be able to customize what you actually use. So kathy smith has I haven't any x and a cannon forty d I like the forty d but wondered if the n e x is better for street photography and which lends would you suggest for someone wanting to go out and do that street photography, right? Well, it depends on exactly how you like to do your street photography, but I would say this camera is great for street photography for two reasons. Number one the cameras very small and did I say number two? Number number one, number one, it's, very small and number two. Something that we haven't really talked about is it has the flip out screen here, so you can hold this screen at different angles and see where the camera is pointed out, so you could have it at waist level and see where the camera is directed at. And so that would make it very, very good for that. Now, using maybe the let's. Remember the different lenses, that different, different little pancake cleanses. The sixteen millimeter lands, which would be a nice, wide angle. They have a number of very small, normal to slightly wide lenses, which would be very good for street or travel photography, and the camera shoots pretty fast. I would say, I think this is better for street photography, that a forty d.