Lessons
Class Introduction
15:31 2Photo Basics
06:08 3Camera Controls - Top Deck: Mode Dial Part 1
15:46 4Camera Controls- Top Deck: Mode Dial Part 2
13:00 5Top Deck: Custom Settings and Focus Mode
13:17 6Backside: Electronic Viewfinder
07:52 7Backside: AF/MF
05:24 8Backside: Function Button: Top Row
20:58Backside: Function Button: Bottom Row
08:08 10Backside: Control Wheel
10:12 11Left, Right, Bottom & Front Sides
09:58 12Sony Lenses
10:11 13Menu Overview
03:47 14Camera Settings 1: Pages 1-3
14:00 15Camera Settings 1: Pages 4-6
17:29 16Camera Settings 1: Pages 7-9
07:22 17Camera Settings 1: Pages 10-14
21:50 18Camera Settings 2: Pages 1-4
16:02 19Camera Settings 2: Pages 5-9
14:50 20Wireless Settings
06:24 21Application Menu
18:46 22Playback Menu
03:35 23Setup Menu
22:27 24Camera Operation
10:53Lesson Info
Backside: Control Wheel
Next up we have our control wheel on the back of the camera which spins around, but is also different buttons. So on the top side of this button is the display option. You saw me using this in the demos throughout the day so far. And by pressing that button, you can cycle through the different displays on the monitor, which is the LCD monitor on the back of the camera. And the option for for viewfinder, if you put it on that one, it shows you lots of technical data. And when you press the function button, it'll access something known as the quick navigation. Which is basically your function button on the back of the camera, and that allows you into those 12 modes that we just talked about going through. It's just laid out in a slightly different form. And so if you like lots of technical information on the back, go for that for viewfinder option. But sometimes you wanna view the image and sometimes you want different sorts of information. And all of this can be controlled in the camera...
settings 2, the display auto review. You can go into the display button, controlling which one of these options. Let's just say for instance, the level and histogram are things that you never use, you could uncheck those boxes so that when you press the display button, you won't see those every time you cycle around. Lots of different customization on this camera. To the right, on the dial, on the back of the camera is the ISO. We've controlled this before, we've talked about it before, but if you wanna keep it here, you can reassign this button or you can reassign its space in the function menu. If you press down, you have direct control to exposure compensation which is something a lot of people like having direct control to. Which is why we have a quickly accessible button on it. We did see it before in the function menu. And once again, seeing something again for its second appearance here is the drive mode. Something that people are constantly changing on the camera, so they wanted to have a specific control on this. The C3 button, once again, is a customizable button. It doesn't have any standard customization right out of the box, so that is one that you can definitely go in and add some particular feature to. And you do that in the menu settings there on page eight of nine. The custom key shooting options. Let's talk about the playback options on the camera. So when you hit the playback button, there's a lot of the buttons on the camera that kind of change what they do on the camera. So first off, you can go back and forth on your images by turning the top dial on the camera. You can also change it by the back wheel on the camera. If you press in on the buttons, for instance, the display button, you can cycle through the different displays. Sometimes you just wanna look at the image, sometimes you wanna find out information about the shutter speed aperture or look at the histogram information to see if you got the proper exposure, as well as some of the other data that goes along with it. You can do an image index, where you can look at a large group of images. And then you can zoom in on your images by pressing the button. And so I wanted to give you a little, let's bring up one more item on here, what else do we have? Oh, we can also send it to the smartphone. We'll be doing that in the second half of the class. And then of course, you can delete your images. So let's do a little demo here and run through some of these different operations. On the back of the camera, I am gonna hit the playback button. Let's get ya straightened up here. And so if I wanna change what I see, I'll hit the display button. Ah, a little overexposure there, get back to the full image. If I wanna check focus, this is as good as any, you'll see that little plus sign right up here. That means when you hit this button up here, it's gonna zoom in. I don't see much, but you'll see my thumb nail down here. And I'm gonna direct this around and see if I actually got anything in focus here. Something's in focus. And so, not all of that is in focus, but there we go, we're getting some nice focus. And I can turn this wheel to zoom in and out. If I wanted to compare this with another photo, I believe I can just turn this and you can see down here, in the bottom right, I'm on picture 25 of 26, 26 of 26. And so if you wanna compare zoomed in areas, you can do that pretty easily. And then zooming in and out. And so I'm just gonna hit the bottom button here and that's just gonna direct me. I need to get out of this so I'm gonna hit the center button. And that kicks me back out. Now if I press the bottom half of this, we're gonna go into our thumbnails. Now we can kind of scroll up and down and look at all of the different shots that we were shooting. If I hit this bottom button, that's just directing us through. We can go, actually, out to the left and I can go up and down over here as well. I'm gonna press the center button, because down here it's just got a dot, and that means the center button right here in the middle of this wheel. And so that's gonna get us back to the calendar. Now if I had shot pictures a week ago, I could go back and select a week ago. I can't go to the future and see what I'm gonna shoot in the future, but I can go into the past and if I have images on this card, that I had shot before, we could do that. We can go to different months. Oh, I can go to the future. What am I gonna shoot this summer? Ah, nothing in there right now. In any case, you can go back and forth and you could also select different types of photos you're looking at or for videos. If you wanna look for videos, you can look for still images, or you can look on the calendar. And so if you have images ... And I hope you don't use this folks, I'll be honest with you. I really hope you don't use this feature. Cause I don't want you to have images that you've been taking pictures for the last several months on one card. I would hope that you would download the card on a more regular basis from that. So that's kind of a little poke around little tour of the playback features on the camera. When you shoot video and you play back video, there's a whole different set of options on here. And so what I wanna do, real quickly, is I'm gonna shoot just a short video. So I'm gonna put this in the video mode on the top of the camera. And what I wanna do is, I'm gonna make this very simple. I'm gonna zoom in on our little table here and I am going to start recording over here on the back of the camera. We're gonna shoot 10 seconds and I'm just gonna do a slow zoom back. Okay, maybe it's kinda quick. And then I'm going to stop this after 10 seconds and now I'm gonna hit playback. So you can see a still image and a video image looks very different. And so there's a playback option and I'm gonna hit the center button to do the playback. And so it's gonna kind of kick us into a playback mode and it's automatically playing back. I'm gonna hit the center button here cause I wanna stop this for a moment. I'm gonna go up to display, because I wanna show you more information about what's going on. I can go left, well let's see, let's come to the right, playback. And there is a control panel by going down. And I'm gonna pause that for a moment. Now I can go back and I think I can go frame by frame, or actually I can go back to the beginning. Rewind, fast-forward. And so I'm gonna play here and I wanna pause this when I get into the full, right there, I wanna pause it right there cause there's something kind of cool that you can do here. Okay, not cool, but important, is you can control the volume right here, that's fine. But this right here is a way for me to pull a frame from the video. And so if I said I want this frame and I wanna make a still photograph of it, cause remember, we're looking at a video. And this is just paused right now, so I'm gonna press this button in here and this gets me to where this screen where I can pull frames from it. And if I was a little bit off and I wanna go to a previous frame, I can go forward or backwards a little bit. But you'll see this indicator here. The bottom part of it means that I can pull a frame from this. And there's a little indicator up here on the top left, you see this little video? I am pulling a still frame out of the video. So I'm gonna hit the downward portion of this button right here. It's processing that and it just saved that as a still image. And I'm gonna exit now, by pressing the menu button. And so there is my video and there is my still image. See that's not a live image, that is a still image. Let's look at some information about this particular image. This image is a 16 by 9, so it's in the HD ratio. It is only 2.1 megapixels in size, so it's a relatively small resolution. And so if you are pulling frames, it's not gonna be real high in resolution compared to a still image. If I was to shoot a still image, just for comparison reasons, let me throw this back into a program mode, take a still image, zoom in to about the same area, play this back. This up here is a three by two, 24 megapixel image. That pulled frame is just 2.1 megapixels in size. If I was to go to full frame and I was to zoom in on it, I guess it will let me zoom in fairly far, but it's gonna be limited in its resolution. And so if you needed to pull a frame, the cool thing is that you can do it in camera, you don't need a video program in order to do that. And so if you are playing back videos, there are those extra controls there for controlling what you're doing.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Nichola Johnson
GREAT CLASS. I HAVE JUST ENTERED THE 'MANUAL' CAMERA MODE AND ACQUIRED THE SONY A6500...THIS CLASS TOTALLY HELPED WITH THE CAMERA BASICS. I WILL DEFINITELY TAKE MORE. JOHN GREENGO IS FABULOUS. CLEAR AND EASY TO FOLLOW.
Lee Kneisz
I bought the a6000 course a while back and when I upgraded to the a6500 this was a no-brainer. I love how comprehensive the coverage is and it was a great refresher on previous features. If you're a newbie to the Sony a6500 this is a must!
a Creativelive Student
I've owned the A6000 since it came out and still learned a TON from John's A6500 class. I will definitely be getting his original A6000 class. I'm SO glad he's doing Sony cameras now. Thanks John G. - You are a truly great teacher!
Student Work
Related Classes
Camera Guides