Lessons

Lesson Info

Bottom & Front

Alright, looking over on the bottom of the camera, we've got our standard tripod socket that'll fit all our standard accessories like tripods. We'll have our serial number record that for insurance purposes. We have a little access lamp which lets us know if the camera is writing or working with information on the memory card. Do not take the battery out of the camera or take the memory card out if this light is turned on. It's because the camera is currently working. Now there's a little door that kinda flops open here and this is for anyone that needs to use an AC Power system to power the camera for instance in a scientific or studio environment where you don't want the battery to run out. You want 100% power all the time. And so there's a little door that can flop open here. Then we have our main battery compartment, and a little battery lever that you'll need to press to get the battery in and out. The NP-FW50 is a pretty powerful battery but the camera having EVF's do go through ...

batteries pretty quickly, and so I do highly recommend having a spare battery, 'cause the one in there will get you around two and half hours, well it's two and a half hours to charge, gonna get you about 300 images off of it. One of the things I found very convenient is the VCVW1 battery charger which does not come with this camera. It is supplied with some other Sony cameras but not this one and if you want a travel charger, a wall charger, and so it is nice to be able to charge the battery in the camera but I also think it's really nice to take the battery out, put in another battery in so that I can continue shooting, take the first dead battery, plug it into the charger and plug that into the wall. And so if you do want to continue to shoot while the battery is charging, this would be a device that's only about 25 bucks, and could be very handy for anyone who shoots a lot and wants to be able to charge and shoot at the same time. Our memory card slot uses SD memory cards. Very common in the photographic world today. It can also double and use as, use the older Sony memory sticks. Now it can't use two cards at once. It only uses one. And we don't see too many people using the memory sticks anymore 'cause that was a SONY proprietary system that they had on cameras for quite some time. But luckily they've switched over to a more universal system in the SD cards. Now as far as the SD cards go, the size of the cards will determine whether it's an HC or an XC version of the card. For anyone who shoots a lot of action photography you may want to get a card that's a little bit faster, 'cause this will control how quickly information is written to the card. It's also important for pulling information off of the card, and how fast you can download it to your computer. And then we have the minimum speed, and this is very important for anyone who shoots video because video is very hard work for a memory card 'cause there's a lot of information that is steadily coming in that has to record. So if you want to record HD videos, kind of our standard video, you want to get a class 10 or higher card. If you're wanting to shoot 4K video, you probably want to get into the SD8XC cards which have a UHS speed class of three which is their fastest cards that currently are on the market right now, which are writing at about 30 megabytes per second. And that 4K just uses up four times as much information, so we need to have faster card that really controls and can handle all of that data. Now as far as downloading, you can use your camera. Plug it in through the USB, but to be honest with you it's a relatively slow process getting those cards downloaded to the computer. And so a faster system that I would recommend is getting a card reader because those are really designed for transferring very quickly or if you can plug the card directly into your computer, that works very quickly as well. One last note on the memory cards, is is advisable to you to format your cards on a regular basis. Don't do it right now if you have pictures on there that you want 'cause it's gonna delete all the photos and Sony has a particularly interesting file system that they put. I'm gonna show you what that looks like in the second half of this class in the menu system. And it's just a little bit awkward and I would highly recommend formatting once you have downloaded and backed up your images. And you would definitely want to download if you were transferring memory cards from one camera from a different brand. Say you were coming from Nikon or Canon, and you're gonna use those memory cards in this camera. You can do so just straight away but I would recommend formatting those memory cards. Of course getting your information off first, but formatting the memory cards before you use them in this camera, because of its unusual format system that it uses. Alright looking onto the front of the camera. We do have stereo microphones to get you a little it better sound quality. I would recommend external mics if you do a lot of video work because the sound quality is difficult when you are having then lens, or when you have the microphone attached to the actual camera itself. The lens mount here is something that we'll look at. So let me just quickly show you on my camera right here what we're looking at. And so the lens release is down off to the side. Usually I reach around but it's a little bit tough when it's mounted here on the tripod. And then what you want to look for on the lenses is the little white dot right there. And so white dot on the lens, white dot on the lens mount, match 'em up and turn it. I know a lot of people who are new to interchangeable lens cameras, they kinda get a little bit scared about taking the lens off. Well you rightfully should be a little bit scared after all I mean take a look at this. Let's look right in there. See there's the sensor in the camera, and we don't want to leave our lens exposed in a dusty environment and so, if it's raining out, if there's a lot of dust particles, if you're in a work shop with a lot of wood chips flying around you don't want to be changing lenses right then. And so generally you want to keep either a body cap or a lens mounted on this at pretty much all times. Alright. What else do we have on the front? So we have our sensor. It's a 24 megapixel sensor. Pretty standard these days. Standard CMOS sensor. It's the same resolution as the 6,000. They did not make any changes in that. It is a new sensor. It is different in that only because it has more face detection points built onto the sensor for focusing so it's better focusing, but it's the same image quality as the Sony A6000. We have our CPU contacts which are connecting up with the lenses, and communicating information about focus, aperture and a variety of other things. Our lens release which we were using to take the lens on and off. We have invisible, it's hidden behind the grip there, we have our little wifi antenna which is something that we're gonna be working with in the second half of the class. We're gonna do a little live demo. Hook the camera up to the phone and see if I can take a remote photo from my phone. Our remote sensor. There is a wireless remote that you can get in order to shoot photos. So if you don't want to be cabled up to the camera in order to shoot photos, there is this little remote. Sells for about $25, available from good retailers all over the place. There is a little AF illuminator and self-timer lamp that lets you know when the camera is gonna fire if you have the self-timer illuminated. It is like a little tiny flashlight that illuminates when you are in very dark situations. Now, this is something that I find a little irritating from a subject point of view. I don't like having this light shown in my face when it's kinda dark. And if it's something that you want to turn off, we'll be doing that in the camera settings, page three, AF illuminator, which is something that I'll recommend turning off 'cause I don't think it's real necessary in most situations. Alright let's talk a little bit about the lenses that you would mount on this camera. So, a little bit of history here. Sony bought the Minolta lens mount if you recall back in the beginning of the class. And those cameras have what's called an A mount on them. They then made digital camera with smaller sized sensors, that still had an A Mount, but thy used DT Lenses that were specially designed for that smaller sized sensor, but they could still use all of the regular lenses which didn't have any special name to 'em but they can use the regular lenses and the DT lenses. Then Sony decided to do a mirror-less camera, and that is where this camera falls in. This is the 6300, and it has a different mount called the E Mount. Alright? And it uses an E lens. Now recently they've introduced a full frame version of these mirror-less cameras in the A7 series, and it has an E Mount as well, but it uses FE lenses and you can kind of think a full frame as far as the E lenses, and so there's a lot of letters to keep track of here and so if you get a little confused, it's understandable. We have two mounts. A Mount and E Mount and that has to do with being an SLR or a mirror-less camera. But then you have to know whether it's a lens design for the full frame or the crop frame sensors. And so as far as the 6300 options, it has the smaller sensor compared to the A7 series. They both have an E Mount. And you're gonna be looking at either E Mount, or FE Mount lenses and you'll be able to use both on this camera. So let's look at the difference between these two lenses. So, the FE is designed for the full frame sensor. As light goes through that, it produces a large image circle which covers the rectangular area of that full frame sensor. The E-Mount lenses are specially designed so that they cover the rectangular area of the APS-C sensor producing a larger image circle, which reduces the size and cost of the lens for instance. Where things get a little interesting is if you mount an E-Mount lens on a full frame sensor. Well it doesn't cover the full area and so you're gonna get vignetting, or darkening of the corners. In the reverse, the FE-Mount however, can be easily used on this camera, an APS-C sensor because the image is gonna be perfectly clean. You're kind of over shooting, and you're using more, there's more information than you're able to take advantage of but you are free to use any of the E- Mount or FE-Mount lenses on the camera. They mount on and you're gonna get clean, good sharp images with all of them. So, the lenses that you are likely to encounter. The basic zoom. The 16 to 55 remember I said awhile ago is a terrible lens. Okay, so let's take look at the back of my camera 'cause I want to show you something that I think is quite interesting. So, the camera is currently turned off. Make sure I get this lined up straight. Let's get it right on frame here. Alright, so I'm gonna turn this camera on and I want you, let's get this straight. Okay. So I'm gonna put it in the program mode to start with and I'm gonna turn it on and be very aware of the picture as it turns on. Right? Now actually I got into the wrong view finder mode. So let me change the display so that it's right here. Make sure this is tilted upright. So I'm gonna turn it off. Now watch when I turn it on. It's gonna have kind of a fish eye look and then it's gonna correct for itself very quickly. Here we go. And it kinda, you see that little fish eye look? We're gonna do that again real quickly. Turn it off. Turn it on. It kinda zooms out. And a little fish eye and then it corrects for it. Alright? And that's because this lens is one of the most uncorrected lenses ever in the world, and Sony has compromised. They wanted to get the smallest lens possible. And I'm sure what they probably did is they probably went to the engineers and they said we want a lens that's this big. And the engineers said, well that's impossible to have a corrected lens. Well who said we need to have it corrected? We'll fix it later. And so the engineers designed a lens that is not very good and clean. And I can show you how bad this lens is. Let me turn off some of the displays so that we just get, where's our? Okay. I'm trying to get as clean an image, I think this is gonna be about as good as we can do. And the way you can see how bad this lens is, is if you turn it into the panorama mode. So keep an eye and watch what happens as we go one, next one here we go. See how it looks very, straight lines are no longer straight in here. Look and see how that screen is very bulbous there? And so let's go back to just a scene mode, and you can see how this is how it's supposed to look, as I'm pointing over at our screen over there. Whoops did I just? I just started recording. Alright. So let's get this straightened up against the side of our TV monitor there. Let me flip it over into the panorama stitching mode, and you can see how uncorrected this lens 'cause what it's doing in the panorama stitching mode, is it's just trying to grab as wide an angle and it's gonna straighten it up and fix it up later. And so, this lens optically is not that good but even for people who shoot raw images, it's fixing them. So it takes the raw information, and then it does a distortion correction to fix the problem. And this is part of the compromise for having a really small lens. Now what does that really mean? Does that mean this is a bad lens? That you should not own this lens? Well, I own this lens and I don't plant on selling it, because for the size there's nothing that beats it. It's really quite good for the size. It's just, a different way of solving the problem because they could've had the engineers design different glass optical elements to fix the problem, but they're doing it electronically. And it's a little bit more obvious here. But there's strong suspicions that there are other companies that are doing the same thing, but they're not telling us about it. Okay, so that's a nice small lens. Probably the next thing that you want to do is get yourself a telephoto lens, because this doesn't have much telephoto. The 55 the 210, is a not too expensive lens. It's a few hundred bucks, and that would provide you with a very different look and capability. Now you're gonna see a lot of letters that describe various aspects of the construction or features of the lens. One of the things you'll see is a T-Star coating which comes from Zeiss which is German manufacturing lens manufacturing company. They are a company that Sony has partnered with 'cause Sony is really good at electronics. Zeiss is really good at optics. So you're gonna see three different types of Zeiss lenses potentially for this camera. Well, first off their are Sony lenses which are designed and built by Sony. There are Zeiss lenses, which work with the Sony cameras and they are designed by Zeiss. They are built by Zeiss usually in Germany but sometimes in Japan in various other places in the east. And then in between the two, you have Sony Zeiss Lenses. And these are lenses that are Sony's idea. The Sony engineers came up with the problem, but they had to go through the Zeiss engineers to get the quality checks to meet the standards. And then it was built by Sony itself. And so anything with Zeiss on it, it's gonna cost you more money. Let's be honest. It's gonna cost you more money, but it is gonna be mechanically and optically a very very good device and so, if you wanted a really high quality basic zoom lens, the Zeiss 16 to 70 f/4 would be a really good lens that I think would be very nice. It's much bigger than the 16 to 50, but it's a really nice lens. If you wanted a wider angle lens, Sony makes a 10 to 18 millimeter lens. And that would get you into the ultra wide category. A few other little nice prime lenses, lenses that do not zoom, the little pancake lenses or I like to call 'em cookie lenses 'cause they're just about the size of a good cookie, are really nice for street photography, or anytime you want to have the smallest package possible. Another Zeiss lens for somebody who wants something that's a little bit wide angle, little bit faster at letting in a bit more light, and for a good normal lens or a good portrait lens you might want to look at the 30 or the 50 1.8 lenses. They're not too much money, but they are very bright, and working with a fixed lens is just a great way of doing a lot of different types of photography and just opens up some new doors and a new way of thinking compared to a zoom lens. Alright. So that takes us all around the camera through all the buttons and all the dials, and through all the lenses. Let's check in on some of the questions and see if there's anything we can tidy up here. So, John we have kind of a hodgepodge of questions that have come up throughout this last portion of the class. So some of them might be going back a little bit. So, one question about lenses. If you could just clarify for SVogle2, do both E and FE lenses have a 1.5 crop factor on the A6300? Oh well that dives into a whole muck of stuff. Technically, how do I want to answer this? They've kind of asked the wrong question is what the problem is. The camera sensor is smaller, so yes. The camera has a crop factor. The lenses are what the lenses are. If it says it's a 50 millimeter lens, it's a 50 millimeter lens and it acts a certain way on this camera. I think the easiest way with having a cropped frame camera or any camera is to know what your standard lens is. And so for this camera, the standard lens is roughly a 30 millimeter lens. Alright? And that's roughly the diagonal of the sensor itself. And so 30 millimeters is your normal lens and we just talked about the 30. You want a normal lens? Get the 30. You want something a little bit telephoto, you get something that's a little bit bigger number so that's the 50. If you want something a little bit wider angle, 24. That's gonna give you a little bit wider angle. And so, in essence they are kind of correct in that assumption. Yes, you are getting a crop, a 1.5 magnification if you are comparing it to a full frame camera whether that number is FE, or E lenses. Right. Thank you. Okay, go ahead. Yeah John, in reference to the kit zoom lenses, the short and the larger one that you had up there, I found I could not get sharp images with those. I got the 50, the 1.8, Okay. and that's sharp but the other, is it mechanical? Is it the guy behind the button or? No, that's hard for me to answer. I'd probably have to see to know for sure, but I would imagine that, you say you have the 50 right? Yes. Yeah. Yes I do. So I would expect that the 50 would be sharper than the other lenses. Now the question is is it just a natural prime versus zoom? Prime being sharper, or is that there is something truly wrong with the lens? And so, when I say this is about the worst lens that Sony makes, that it is one of the things that it is optically weaker and so I would expect any of those primes to be sharper than this. Especially as you get up to the edges. And it's just hard for me to determine why that is. Now it, and I'm not sure how good at you are at picking up those details, because if you're an experienced photographer, they'll know exactly what to look for and they'll be able to see that. And so, not quite sure on how to answer that one. Yeah with another camera brand and lenses, I can get real sharp pictures. And with this one I just couldn't till I went to the 50. Interesting. That sounds, that isn't, that isn't how it should normally sound. My suspicion is that there might've been something else goin' on, because I would think that the average person can use this lens and get decent results. You might just have higher standards than most people or there could've been something particularly wrong with you particular setup. Before I got my mirror-less cameras I had the A system. Okay. I got rid of my bodies and kept my lens. Okay so I have an aray all the way from up through 300 prime. Wow. My question is, I have used the adaptor for the A7R Mark II and it's worked well. Can I use it on the 6300 or the 6, or do you think the lens is sufficiently robust, or the lens mounting system would be sufficiently robust to handle the adaptor plus the heavier lens? I don't have a problem with the strength of the lens mount. I think you can totally can. I think that's not a problem. Now at a certain point, let's be honest when you get a big enough lens in here it's not that a lens is mounted on a camera, it's that a camera is mounted on the back end of a heavy lens. Right. And you're supporting it by the heavy lens and sometimes they have their own tripod mounts. And so, even with other brands. You get these gigantic lenses there's this little tiny camera hangin' on the back end of it. And so, that is nice and strong. That's not gonna be a problem. Now whether you want to do it from a performance standpoint of view, or size and weight standpoint, that's gonna be another personal choice that you're gonna want to make and I will talk about the adaptors that you can use with the other lenses as we get into the menu section of the class. And they are something that you can use, but you would really have to be dedicated to that lens because if it was me, I think I would want to just sell that lens, take that money and spend a little bit more money and get a lens that's designed for this camera because they now have a pretty good collection of lenses for this camera. Okay. Thank you. And there's only a few cases where, maybe if you had a 300 2.8, and they don't make a 300 2.8 for the mirror-less camera. What else you gonna do? You gotta use the adaptor. But for like a standard zoom lens, I'd sell that zoom lens and I would get a zoom lens that was designed for this and a big part of the reason for that is is, you probably got this camera in part because it's a lot smaller of a camera. And that adaptor just makes everything a lot bigger. And so sell the adaptor, or not sell the adaptor, sell the lens. Just get the lens that's right and the whole package will be smaller. Alright John. We have more questions coming in from folks at home. Specifically about lenses as well. So SherryMPhoto had asked, do you have to use a Sony lens to take advantage of AFC? For AFC, no you need any auto focus lens, and there are a number of manufacturers that make manual focus lenses where that's clearly not gonna work. You're probably safest using the Zeiss lenses because Zeiss and Sony are already best friends. They're like BFF's okay? And so they share all the focusing and electronic information. And there are other manufacturers, and I'm not sure how many of them are making Sony lenses but like Sigma, Tokina, Tamron, and other companies like that and they kind of reverse engineer. They buy a camera and they tear it apart and they figure out well oh this is the power and (grunts) okay this is the focusing one and they figure out how it works and occasionally they might have some sort of problems. But the Zeiss ones are gonna be absolutely perfect, and I would think anything else that can auto focus, is gonna do AFC just fine. Great. Okay another question had come in from HDNugen who says, how did the G Master compare to the Zeiss lenses? Okay, so the G Master is a new series of lenses from Sony, and so you have your Sony standard lenses, and then you have your G Master which is their premium quality lenses. And so, the reports that I have been seeing 'cause I haven't had a lot of personal use of those, is that they look like they are on par with the Sony Zeiss partnership lenses. And, they're probably optically on par with the Zeiss lenses on their own 'cause you got Sony, Sony Zeiss, Zeiss, and G Master. And so G Master is all through Sony. Now eventually thinking long term, it seems to me that maybe Sony partnered with Zeiss to learn something. To kind of get their optical game up. And I'm just speculating right now, but at some point that partnership might fade, but Sony's trying to learn and get really good at making glass and this G Master is basically what they've learned over the last 10 years on making lenses and from all the reports I've seen they look pretty impressive. Very impressive lenses so, I don't think I would simply buy a lens because it's Zeiss or G Master. I'm gonna be choosing it over focal length and aperture, and oh it's G Master okay well that's kind of an extra good thing. It meets that standard within the company. Alright great. Couple more questions comin' in. We have from SVogle had asked earlier on, does holding down the shutter button half way also lock focus? Can you do that? Yes. And so in the AFS mode, pressing half way down locks focus, in the AFC mode, it constantly adjusts where the focus is and so there's a number of ways to lock focus. One is pressing halfway down. As the camera is currently configured because we haven't gone in and customized anything yet, that AF MF button on the back of the camera is also a focus hold button too. So you can lock it in with your thumb, or the shutter release but you do need to do the shutter release first, and then press the thumb in. But in short yes to that answer. Alright great. And another question from SherryMPhoto, what does select focus point on off mean when it's written there on the screen, and on the display? And how do you turn off the text display? Okay. So let's do a little demo on the camera here. So let's turn this camera on. We'll come around. I want to make sure that I have focus points that I can select. So I'm gonna go in here to my focus points, and just choose a medium flexible spot here. And so, it says, and I don't know if we can see that, I only just moved this. Select focus point. You can see it written down here. And so this is controlled by the center button of your camera. And so if you can see how this is highlighted up here, let me press the center button it's turned off. Now it's turned on. And so now I'm moving the focusing point. And if I press the center button, then I come over here to the side where it says ISO, I'm controlling the ISO. Press down on the shutter release to back out of that. So the center point takes us back and forth between the two points. As far as turning off the text, well I don't think you can do that. I don't know of any way to turn that off. You can change the display information. And let me try to get more or less information on, and that's about as clean as we're gonna be able to make it here. And that just comes on. But you'll notice, that it comes on and I think it will turn off here in a moment. So it turns off after a few seconds. And so you don't see that. And so you must have patience. And it will disappear on its own. And so it's on there right now and I'm moving the focus points, and so that text comes up but only for a short period of time. This is from JPart5, who wants to know as many people do, what is your tripod that you're using there on the table top? Oh wow. Well this is a, what's the number of this? And so, here let's hold it up folks. Let's get really close to this. So this is a Really Right Stuff tripod and Really Right Stuff makes some pretty good stuff. And this tripod is the TFA- from Really Right Stuff. And it's not a cheap tripod. I want to have something nice up here. I want something that looks good for you guys. But this is a really nice tripod. And it's really strong too. I mean this is just some really strong metal on there, but you can go to Really Right Stuff website. They have some fantastic stuff. I have a number of their ball heads, so this is a new tripod they came out with recently and I said that would look really nice on camera.