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Lesson Info

Back Side: Navigation

Deck of the camera. It is now time to jump onto the back side of the camera and go through the various features and functions back here. So we have our large lcd, of course, on the back of the camera. We also have our high rez e v f, one of the best on the market, with two point four million dots on it. Now there is a slight difference in the magnification the size of the image that you're going to see it's a little bit larger on the r and the s model, but on the a seven model, the eye point, which is the distance between where your eyes and the viewfinder. So the yeah, the standard model is going to be a little bit easier to work with for people who have eyeglasses, because the camera could be just a little bit further away from the eyes in that regard. Now there is a number of different controls that you can go in and control the look and effect of what you are seeing either on the back screen or on the lcd. One of those controls is in the customs set up on page three, where you can ...

go in and you can turn on. Lcd preview to show you the exposure brightness I like having the camera set up so that the exposure that I see ahead of time very much mimics what I'm actually getting and that works for me because I work in a lot of natural lighting situations so if you're going to be using this in the studio, that is something that you could turn off we will talk more about that as we go through the menu system but that is something to look forward to the camera will automatically switch back and forth between the lcd and the back of the camera. One of the complaints in the reviews about the camera and I'm going to have to agree with this is that it is a slightly oversensitive I censor and so sometimes I feel like there is nothing behind the camera but it's still switching over to the eyepiece on it and so you do have to kind of keep things very far away now you can go in and you can turn off that auto sensor and physically choose either the back screen or the viewfinder in order to work and there are times when that might be a any way of working with the camera so that is something that we can d'oh the diop ter is a for gotten little adjustment knob that a lot of people aren't sure about but that controls the focusing of the viewfinder that in insures that you can see the screen in a sharp manner and so one of the things you should do is turn your camera on, look through the viewfinder, look at the numbers in the display of information and then turn that dial so that it's nice and sharp I know every once in a while just handling the camera, I bumped this and and I pick up the camera and it doesn't look very sharp in there it's hard on the eyes and it's just simply going over to the diameter knob and getting that adjusted all right over on the left hand side is our menu button, which is going to dive into the many different pages and menus and the second half of the class we're going to be going through the menu system in detail and so we're going to move on for right now custom button number three and so this is one of the buttons that you can customize with any one of those well, they're roughly about fifty different modes that you can program into this button, and for right now it controls the focusing mode of the camera how the camera focuses not so much where it focuses, but how it focuses the options are single shot and this is where I leave the camera and I think most people leave their camera most of the time it focuses on a subject and then stops allows you to recompose the camera automatic a f is where the camera will switch back and forth between single shot and continuous continuous shot is kind of the main other mode that people are switching to and that is going to be for action photography where subject is moving towards you or away from you and you want to track that movement we have a manual focus option and then we have a d m f which enables us to focus automatically but then do a manual touch up if we want to so I want to do a little live demo here on our camera and so I'm gonna go ahead and turn my camera on I'm going to throw it in the programme mode just for simplicity's sake right now and so I'm going to hit the sea three button and I'm going to go down to d e m f and so now it is a manual focus like an auto focus like this let me zoom in a little bit here I'm gonna zoom in a little bit maybe I'm concerned that the camera chose the front of the table to focus on and not the camera so I'm going to go around to the lens and I'm going to jump in here and now I can manually focus and the key thing is is that my right hand? The shutter release is on the button if I release the camera's going to want to refocus and so I focus automatically and then I could do a manual touch up and you can see the cameras automatically jumping in and magnifying the image, and I can dial it in where I think it's best and I'm going to say right about there and then I could take a photo and that way I know it's truly sharpened focus. And so for somebody who likes auto focus but wants to have that opportunity for a little manual touch up or fine tune adjustment, the m the d m f is a good option for that. So let's talk about some of these other modes in here, so pressing halfway down activates the focusing system. And, as I say, for most situations, a f s is a reasonable system tau havin they're good for focusing on subjects that are not moving around somebody that's just sitting there in front of you, the main other one is going to be a f c, and this is for tracking subjects that are moving towards you or moving away from you. So we've got another video to show you of working this camera out in the field in action, so let's, go ahead and run that video, and before I do that, I will also mention there's, an faa which switches back and forth the problem with faa and my opinion, is that you don't know what it's going to do and when it's going to do it and so it's a little bit inconsistent and that is why I and many other photographers don't like using that notice it's hard to predict how the camera's going to react and then pressing all the way down will fire the shutter. And so now we can go ahead and run that video, right? Let's talk about continuous auto focusing, I'm going to first change my camera from a f s single focus into continuous focus, and for this, his first experiment, I'm going to move it into a wide bracket so it's using pretty much the whole frame and we're gonna have caitlin go ahead, let's start running, and so she come towards us look at those green boxes, so they've got under her here, but they kind of jump around a little bit and they're not totally consistent. Let's, how do you turn around and go back? And it jumps over to the side and it picked her up, but it's a little inconsistent on wear, it goes and there is a better way of doing this, so what we're gonna do is we're going to change are focusing point. To our lock on option and so what we're gonna do is not just wide because I know kind of the zone where she's going to be and I'm gonna move it up just a little bit right in here, okay. Let's, have you come in and run? And so now it's going to be looking for her and it's picking up and it's putting a box around here although it didn't do a very goodjob let's see if it catches her on the way out there we go. And so now that's a very good job tracking let's have you turn around there and come back and so it's it now understands a little bit more where we are and let's see if it can grab on to her and we have chosen a little bit of a white area, but there we got the tracking and so it's not one hundred percent perfect, but it can track a subject he just needs to be big enough in frames so that it's somewhat significant. All right, so it's a pretty good system as you saw it's not perfect and so you have to see how it works with the type of subjects that you are photographing, but it is something that has the potential of really being able to lock onto a subject and stay with it for quite some time so, uh, very nice featured have once again custom three can be adjusted in any of the custom key settings if you wantto assign that two different button right now, I have it kept there because I think that says mode that I want to change in my camera on a fairly regular basis. Now, one of the options we can do is we can also press the d m f magnify button. I did not do this earlier on my demo, so let me try this again, so we'll go ahead and turn our camera on. Make sure my camera is in the d m f mowed down here, and if I turn the focusing, I can zoom in back and forth so it's even closer by pressing that center button on the back of the camera. And so, once again I focus automatically, I focus manually, and then I press the center button to increase the magnification. And so one of the other little tricks for getting in there. And this is one of the digital advantages of a muralist cameras being ableto magnify the image so that you could get a good, clean look at what you're focusing on. All right, next up we got our rear dial, we've kind of talked about this, we could move on. Next up is a double switch, you might say it's, thie, f imf button and the a l switch and so there's a little collar that you can flip up or flip down and then a button in the middle so this button does two things they could have just put two buttons on there, but they decided to put one button with a switch so you could have it do one thing and the advantage to having the caller rather than just the two buttons, is that it basically locks in one of those features, so it's a little bit harder to get to. So if there's a feature that you wouldn't normally wantto accidentally press that button on the camera, you want to go through a little bit of a safety check to make sure that you're turning something on or off that's one of the advantages of having this toggle type switch, but I guess, let me let me just back up a moment here, and so where is our button here? So let's, go ahead and talk about the a m imf so on the camera will use my camera in front of us in the if an imf it's going to switch back and forth between auto focus and manual focus and let's, go ahead and just put this in a f s here, and did I reprogrammed this? I might have reprogrammed my camera, I thought I reset this okay, so in a l, what it will do is it will do an auto exposure lock. So I put the camera in aperture priority. We're going to set an aperture of f ate just for whatever reason. And you'll notice that the shutter speeds are moving around as we pan back and forth with the camera. If I press in the auto exposure lock, it locks in the shutter speed. And so for anyone who is using aperture priority shutter priority program, you'll be able to lock in the exposure in that way.