Lessons

Lesson Info

9:00 am - Class Overview

Welcome everybody to the sony in e x six fast start in this class we're going to going through all the buttons all the dials, all the menu features and how to get the most out of your camera so let's get this ball rolling and get started with the show here the glass that we have free here we're going to first start off with just a little overview of the sony system some of you might be new to sony system they haven't been in the photography game for that long with interchangeable lenses like this we'll go over a few basics as faras shutter speeds and apertures not much when I spent a lot of time there and then most of the class we're going to going through talking about all the buttons and dials recommendations for where to set them and why you would set them and what exactly the different features of the camera are and will spend a good time going through the menu system, which is a little bit of a great on a lot of people who own this camera is the organization of the menu and so we'...

ll try to understand their layout and explain a lot of those features in there and then at the very end we're going to go through and do some practice setups for different types of photography like sports photography or portrait photography and landscape photography, for instance so that's what we're gonna be doing so let's get started and let's first talk about the instruction manual that comes with the camera most cameras, the big complaint is that the instruction manual is so large you'll never get your way through it. Well, my complaint with the instruction manual is it's so small it doesn't have a lot of information in there, and so this class is going to have about four and a half hours or so of information. We're going to cover a lot of the things that are in the instruction manual, but there are items in the instruction manual that we do not have time to cover in this particular class. One of the things that's not really unusual about this camera, but a lot of cameras have it is that there's a lot of things that the camera khun do that has nothing to do with taking high quality photographs, it's manipulating images and digitally enhancing and kind of goofing around with images that you've already taken. And my main purpose in this class is to teach you how to get the best quality images out of your camera, and sony tends to like like to play a lot of little games with how can they manipulate an image and so we'll talk a little bit about them, but we're not going to go in depth on a lot of those particular issues next up, this is not a photography one o one class. If you are looking to learn how depth of field works in different shutter speeds and so forth, this is not the class, and you will be woefully disappointed in this class because we're staying highly focused on the sony any x in particular. So if you do need to brush up on the photography basics, there's, a lot of other great classes and, of course, is that you can take on that, and we will talk about a couple of those as we go through this class, so let's get started. You know, sony's been around it's, actually the newest of all the companies that produce cameras, they only got established in nineteen fifty eight, but they did get involved in the digital game very early on. They actually had one of the first digital cameras way back in nineteen, eighty one did not have a lot of capabilities, but they were kind of starting to make their mark because they are very much and electronics company ninety six. They kind of started making their first modern day digital camera the cybershot cameras. In two thousand six, they acquired the remains of the dwindling minolta company, and they took the lens mouthy flash mount and basically the whole system of minolta cameras and lenses. And they rebranded it into sony and started coming up with their own sony products slowly re labeling all the old minolta things. But the thing that's to know about that is that you can use older minolta lenses on a lot of these newer sony cameras not this one in particular but on these sony sl ours and we're going to talk about esa lars and marylise in just a moment and then in two thousand ten sony kind of came up with a very revolutionary product. It was a muralist camera that had interchangeable lenses which is the e x siri's this email lens and that's kind of where we are today now recently they have introduced a full frame marylise camera which we will talk more about us we get into the class now the any ex siri's of cameras is a group of cameras that range from entry level two medium high semi professional level muralist cameras that all use the same size one point five crop sensor and they are easily distinguished by the fact that the lower two do not have the finders and the upper to do have you find her so the any x six and seven are both pretty popular cameras with fairly serious photographers because of the fact that they do have those built in viewfinders which make him a lot easier to use under bright sunlight and in a variety of other viewing conditions and we're not going to really talk too much about the n e x seven it's a very nice cameras got twenty four megapixels and the n e x six kind of slipped in a little after the gx seven at a much lower price but had a lot of the same features and was just a really sweet spot for a lot of people. So this has really been the top selling camera for sony as faras kind of the enthusiast, photographer and that's why we're doing a class on it here now as you get into the instruction manual there's all sorts of crazy warnings about what not to do with the camera and a lot of this stuff is just pretty obvious just don't be stupid with it that's one way to put it now one of the things that you do need to be concerned about is the camera is, as they say, neither dust proof nor splash proof nor waterproof so it does not have a lot of water ceiling on it like a higher in professional camera does so do be careful out in the rain if it was raining and you wanted to get out and take a shot I probably would not hesitate it all to go out and shoot with this camera but I want to stay there very long so if you are plenty to shoot under very wet conditions, I would look at some sort of rain or waterproof cover that you can put over the camera. Now to make sure that you have your camera ready for today's class, you are going to want to charge the battery throughout the class. I have a number of little gripes with the camera, and I'll be honest with you because I don't work for sony and I can tell you my grapes and rant all I want s o my first of all great is that this camera does not come with a battery charger, and you have to charge the battery in the camera and it's the longest charge time of any camera that I have owned. It takes five hours to charge the battery because you are going through a very slow charging system. The advantage, though, is that you could charge the camera from a laptop computer or pretty much anything that takes a usb plug on it. So there is a bit of a tradeoff in this case. Make sure you have your lens attached. You're going to want to have a memory card so that you can take some practice pictures. Go ahead and turn your camera on. And it kills me to say this but turned that mode I'll to the green eye camera mode and I'm going to do the same with my camera here and take a picture and I'm going to take a picture of jim and see what we got here there we go and it looks pretty good. So my camera set up, hopefully your camera is set up is well, you can relax for the next five minutes. We're just going to go through a few fundamentals of photography, some basic photography stuff. I just want to make sure that, you know, maybe some of the new users of this camera kind of have an understanding of a few of the basics for those of you who know shutter speeds and apertures hang on it's only going to be a couple minutes, all right? So what we have here in front of us is a mirror lis camera, and we haven't interchangeable lens and the lens is very important part of the camera, of course, an inside of it is an aperture it's our first way of controlling the light that comes in the camera and the apertura has variable openings, and so in this visual example, you can see we are stopping the lens down each time we move one f stop larger and the number we're actually getting smaller in size by half the amount of light as we increase the aperture each setting, we're doubling the amount of light coming in the lands and so that's our first way of controlling light. Now, along with controlling the amount of light, that aperture also controls the depth of field. So if you'll notice in this photograph the first one, we have very shallow depth of field. The red hash marks on the right side indicate the front edge and the back edge of focusing. And as we change our apertures, you see on the left you can see our depth. The field is increasing on the right hand side, and so when we get down to f twenty two, we will reach maximum depth of field, at least on this theoretical lens. All right, so that's what's going on in the lens. Now, as light comes into the camera, we go straight back to the image sensor, and that sends the information elektronik lee to the lcd display on the back of the camera. If you have that turned on, of course now what's unique about this camera. What I think makes this camera very valuable is that it also has an electronic viewfinder, a viewfinder that has very high resolution to point three six million dots, which, by today's standards, is one of the best viewfinders on the market. And so that's what you can look at holding the camera up to your eye, which is a very stable place toe hold it. Now we need to talk a little bit about exactly how this sensor is gathering light and how shutter speeds work on this sensor because it is different than a traditional slr. So as light comes into the camera, it is normally striking the sensor and that's the image you're looking at in the viewfinder or on the back of the camera and in this camera has in pretty much all marylise cameras that I know if there is a shutter unit, a first curtain and a second curtain, and the normal process that this will work is that when you press down on the shutter release, it closes the first curtain. It gets the sensor ready for the image, it now records the image, and then it has the second curtain closing to stop the shutter speed, and then the second curtain needs to open again so that you can see what's going on to be ready for the next shot. And so there's a lot of shutter movement going on in the camera when you take a picture and what sony has done in the standard process for this camera is actually a little bit different. This is an option in this camera, so here's, what is happening most of the time in this camera is that the camera is using an electronic shudder for the first curtain so as light is coming into sensor and you're sensing an image that you want to capture, you press down on the shutter release and the camera just flips a switch and starts recording and then the second curtain will physically block the shutter off to finish the shutter speed and so it's using an electronic first curtain and a mechanical second curtain and then the second curtain will open up. Now in this cameras we dive into the menu system we will be able to choose whether we want a physical first curtain or an elektronik first shudder curtain and there is kind of a trade off of features of going on what happens when you use the physical curtain is that it it takes a little bit longer in time and makes a bit more noise if you use the elektronik curtain, you could occasionally see some ghosting or some strange artifact ing in certain types of images it's not very common so I'm going to recommend using the elektronik shutter but we'll talk more about that when we get into the menu system so the whole shutter unit is another way of controlling the amount of light in the camera so we can choose fast shutter speeds to capture fast action or to reduce the amount of light coming in the camera a shutter speed like one five hundredth of a second would be good for stopping human action and as you can tell, that is one, five hundred that's a fraction of a second so one one twenty fifth of a second a little bit more of a pedestrian shutter speed for stopping the movement of some camels legs in the desert as we get down to thirtieth of a second, we're starting to get into the slow shutter speed, so we're going to have some blurriness with subjects that are moving in this next song shot. You will see that the bridge is sharp because the cameras on a tripod and the bridge is not moving but the people have a bit of blurriness to him because that's how much you blur when you are walking at a pretty casual pace if you want to get the blurry shot of a river or waterfall something around one second should do a pretty good job and if you like to shoot pictures at night for nighttime photography or light painting or star points, you might need a shutter speed as long has thirty seconds. And so that is the way your camera is capturing images on the image sensor and a little bit on how the mirror elice camera is working to capture its images and this camera with its optional electronic first curtain or physical first curtain is a little bit unique in that regard now the sensor itself is very important and there's a lot of different cameras on the market and there's a lot of different sensors sizes on the market and there there are several sizes to choose from even within the sony brand and we're not going to talk too much about the really small ones. We're going talk little bit more about the larger, more serious ones and the one that's easiest to explain is the largest of all of these and that is the one that is based off of thirty five millimeter film and for a number of good reasons thirty five millimeter film became the most popular film for about fifty or sixty years, and it was very convenient for us photographers to buy a full frame camera, use all of our old digital or over old film lenses on our new digital camera and it was great. The problem is, is that those full frame sensors are very expensive and they make the cameras uh, a certain size. And if you make a smaller size sensor like the one that's in the any x six, you could make a smaller size camera for less money and so there's a number of common different sizes out there. The one in this camera is known as an a p s sensor also referred to as a crop factor of one point five because it crops in to the full frame sensor by a factor of one point five if you are using the supplied strap for this camera, one of the little tips I have for you is that when you thread the strap through the strap a jester, you make sure that the tail end is on the underneath side. That way there is pressure on the top pushing down on it, and it is less likely for that strap to kind of slip out of there. If you want to pick the camera up in your hands there's a little test for you how do you hold the camera? Do you put your thumb on the top? Or do you put your thumb on the bottom? Because there is a better technique and a worse technique and you don't want to put your thumb down on the bottom you want to put your thumb up on the top and the problem is I can show you right here is if you put your thumb on the bottom that puts your elbow out in the middle of the air and if you put your thumb on the top it kind of brings your elbow down by your tarso where you could hold the camera in a more steady fashion and so I highly encourage you to use this system here it also gives you nice access to working the zoom switch on this particular lands that we'll talk about a little later now I want to show you a couple words on screen and want you to think about which of these words is better. Which one do you like? What do you think is the way that you want to set your camera? Well as we go through this class, we're going to talk about a lot of different features and on many of them you can let the camera do it automatically for you or you can manually set it up yourself now what's best depends on a lot of factors depends on how much time you want to put in how much effort you want to put in and what your knowledge level is of that particular feature if you don't know about something, you're probably off you're probably better off letting the cameras set it for you, but once you know how to set it and your particular about what you want to accomplish in the particular photograph, you're going to want to start manually setting in and I highly encourage people to get to manually know their camera. And so aa lot of my recommendations is because I like to work things very manually and you can choose its your camera exactly how automatic and how manual you want to set it so think about where you are now and where you would like to be down the road a year or two years down the road setting your camera