Lessons

Lesson Info

Button Layout: Top Deck

Well, let's get moving on into the buttons of the camera and so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna go around the camera talking about all the different things, so first up, obviously, if you're following along at home, you should have your camera's turned on and follow the additional steps here, okay? Assumed with everything else you know that there is a front dial that's kind of the main dial that you're going to go to for a lot of things there is also a rear control dial. Sometimes you can use one or the other it's kind of interesting because I work a lot with cannons a lot with night cons and sony's figured out a completely different way to handle some of the buttons and dials on their camera and what's kind of nice about them is, whereas nikon and candid force you to use one dial you can use whatever dial you want on this camera in some cases this I will show you in a moment on the back of the camera it's called the multi selector, but I'm probably just going to call it the jo...

ystick because on the back of the camera there is this little knob and it kind of sticks out further than you might expect right here and it's like the good old joust if anybody remembers joust in the video games little joystick, their pac man yeah it's it's going from side to side and up and down and it actually sticks out a fair bed I don't if we get a shot from the side angle here but it kind of sticks out a notable bit surprising them out you can you can grab onto it hold on to the camera that way all right, so let's let's get on to the top deck of the camera and talk about some of the main features up here so when you turn the camera on and off the camera automatically has a sensor cleaning they call it a sensor shake I think it's like a harlem shake but a little different to keep the dust off of the sensor and so that's happening every time you turn the camera off now be aware if you're new to cameras I don't know if there's anybody here that doesn't know this, but you need to press halfway down tto wake your camera uh, battery life is a bit of an issue to get into that a little later and the camera wants to go to sleep like all cameras do in order to conserve battery power seanie to being he used to pressing halfway down it'll also activate the focusing system and the media ring system and then of course you're going press all the way down to take the picture but get used to leaving your finger on that halfway I don't when I'm not shooting pictures and I'm just kind of thinking about that next picture I'm pressing the button halfway down here and it's uh I know it's like I'm at a stoplight and I'm just revving that engine just a little bit because I want to be ready I wantto have everything one hundred percent ready to go okay, so the modi all the big mo dial on the left this is how we're changing our shutter speeds and her apertures kind of the style in which we're going to change this like a lot of the new cameras out there we do have a lock button on the middle of it so that it locks in where we get it there now first off the camera does have a very simple auto mode chances are you're not watching this to learn how to use the camera in the auto mode this is for when you hand it to your friends, your relatives who don't know about photography and I will let you know that if we meet at some time and I occasionally meet students, I met a student mine in yosemite national park where it's photographing on a bridge it was so funny five might diverge for a moment and I'm shooting a picture there with two photographers and I'm just talking to this guy and he's like, yeah, I'm taking this this online class really who's it with I don't know it's ah, creative cameras, creative something or another I go who's your teacher this jay I don't know if he kind of looks like you and I go hi, I'm john gregg. Oh he's like, oh my god, it's you! And so if I meet you out in the field, I do tend to kind of look down to see where your camera said at uh and my guess is that if you want to take full advantage of this camera, you don't want to have it in the automotive. The problem that I have with it is that it has a lot of child safety locks when you go into the menu system, there's a whole bunch of things that are great out that you can't get to, and so for anyone who really wants to get the full performance out of this camera you're going to want to move will be on the auto night. Now the scene mode is kind of an expanded version of the auto mode you're going to press the function button in the back of the camera and then you're going to use the little joystick and you could navigate to portrait in action and these different types of photography and the camera does do a slightly better job picking shutter speeds, apertures focusing and things like that and so if you were going to go do a triathlon and you're going to give the camera to your brother to go shoot your pictures, probably good, put it in the action and just be done with it, they're going to have a simple time they can't get in mess up your good settings. Eso on once again for anyone who's serious about the camera, they're going to want to move well beyond the scene mode. All right, sweep panorama. All right, now, we've probably all had a point and shoot or a phone where we can just kind of scan across and I'm very used to doing panorama stitches where I would shoot, make sure I'm in the right mode. Here. Here we go. I would shoot one picture, two pictures, three pictures or if I were really want to get coverage of verticals. One, two, three, four, five and it's a little bit of a laborious task because I take him, I download them in delight room. I then, uh, put him together in photo shop. I stitch them together as a panorama. Luckily photoshopped stitches them all together now. It used to take me a couple of hours to stitch a big panorama now will it'll do it automatically, but this camera takes it one step further, and I went up to the to a festival, which is going on right now, just north of seattle, and I decided to go up and do some testing. So what you can do here is you can do one continuous sweep. The camera just fires picture after picture off so that you can get this all done in camera in the field, all done with it on, so you don't need to do any work later on. And it does a really good job because it's shooting multiple pictures. So if you want to shoot whiter than your lens can go, or you just want a really white panorama, this does a really good job now, there's a couple different ways you can shoot with it. You can shoot with it horizontally like this, or you can shoot with it vertically, depending on what's, more important, with your angle of you, and it also has kind of a standard angle of view, which is, I don't know it would be like maybe a fourteen millimeter lands. Which most of us don't own but it also has a super wide and so here is a super white image and what I would do is I would just put it there and the camera would be firing away like a maniac that boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom and it shoots probably twenty pictures and so this is a full one eighty all compressed into one simple file when you're completely done and here's what the entire file looks like so you get you and this is all done in camera this is straight this is handheld I'm not even on a tripod at this point and once again the beauty is is that you can enlarge it and the detail is still there it's not like you just cropped the scene now there is no other slr from other manufacturers that do this this is a completely unique so anything had a lot of fun I shot a lot of panorama is this day so you can see this is ok I got the pixel dimensions up there and anyone who's really into panorama tze isn't going to like this because we're not using all twenty four million pixels in the entire area and so it's more for people who want a simple, faster panorama and you could still I mean these resolutions are big enough that you're still going to do a fair bit with this and so, uh, this is kind of fun to dio, so I'm going to go ahead and do one right here and make sure I got this set up, right? And so I'll just do a quick pan here just so that you can hear what it sounds like, and I can see that I'm going to get all the students and its shows me a shaded off area over here I'm not even pressing the button down all the way around, and so that is going to show up and I said it here so maybe again so in the side we could get it and so it shows us one image completely on the back of the camera there and so it's done I'm done no photo shop time require and so that's kind of a fun thing to be able to dio not quite like my iphone, it is like a little bit higher calling, yeah that's great. Thank all right, so that's the sweet panorama, which I have a lot of fun with that was that was something kind of knew that with nightgowns and cannons hadn't really played with before. Okay, next up is the telly continuous priority, eh? That's, a mouthful life there, isn't it? Ok, so maybe a little preface here on this, um, sony not really the way that I like to do things, but they're very fun of taking their twenty four megapixel sensor and taking a crop of it and doing something with it and there are times when that's nice and other times when it's not so nice, I like to get full frame. I bought a full frame camera I want to get full frame, but there are some advantages and so let me show you talk a little bit about this mode here, so there's your full frame camera, it can shoot at six frames per second in the normal continuous dr mt. What the camera does in this t eight eighteen, ten moz are kind of abbreviated him here is it crops down to a one point five crop sensor and it can shoot it eight frames a second, so if you don't need full frame, you are getting less megapixels. You're not getting twenty four megapixels if you're shooting birds or sports and your lenses it long enough, you can now get eight frames a second. All right, it's an option? You don't have to use it so it's a nice option to have in there. If you want a crop it even mohr on t ten, you can go in and shoot ten frames a second, and because in both the t eight and t ten, you're you're compiling less pixels less data it can process that information faster which is why you can shoot at eight or ten frames a second now in t ten you are limited to j peg only and so that's a limitation you're not getting raw and so it's an option so I don't have great examples of this but I just went down to the park and I just shot a still photograph of what here's what it looks like with a full frame on the left, the t eight in the middle and the t ten on the right and so it's basically giving me a telephone mohr telephoto lens then I would have and then I shot a syriza pictures now one of the advantages of shooting and t eight and t ten is the focusing points which we'll get into a little later are covering that that whole area because the focusing points or towards the middle of the full frame and it did a really good job focusing and so shooting at ten frames a second even at t ten you're still looking at a image quality that's going to get you an eight by ten image and if twenty years ago you said how would you like to shoot ten frames a second and get eight by ten's from it would be all over it we would love it it's just that the camera can also shoot twenty four megapixels and so it's ah it's a mode that might be useful to more amateur sports photographers, but it does give you another option in there. Of course we have a movie mode sony scott a lot of great movie technology that they're bringing in to the camera we'll talk a little bit more about that as we get into the menu system as we get down into the more serious section now the program mode is going to set shutter speeds and apertures for you and what is kind of unique about this camera is that you can use the front dialogue or the back dial for program shift, so if you want to change your selection of shutter speeds and apertures rather than just using one dyle which is the way both canon and nikon work, you can use either dial in this case, which is just a nice little bonus on it with aperture priority kind of the same idea you change you're in charge of your aperture camera figures out your center speed use either dial for figuring out your aperture and of course the same thing is going to work with shutter priority and then when it comes full on manual, you're going to have your shutter speed in front in your aperture in back so it's a pretty conventional design dial's air pretty well located in my opinion there they turned smoothly and right they have enough stiffness that it feels good and so anyone who's used to the other cameras it does a good job at that as well and then of course it's got three different customized moments and so what you can do is you can go through the menu settings you can set up all the other features of the camera and you can save everything you're doing to memory setting one or two or three that way if you have three different completely different types of photography your nature shooter but every once in a while you like to shoot wildlife and then you also do portrait photography you could have all your camera set ups in one two and three and very quickly go back and forth and that's going to save you a lot of time so that you don't have to go back into the menu systems and this is pretty common at this level of cameras while these days so that's the mode dial stereo is becoming more and more common on cameras anyone who's real serious about shooting videos is going to use an external mike we'll talk about those later but it does have a little bit better sound quality than other full frame cameras because it has that stereo mike in tow okay so a little bit of history here minolta remember they were always doing things first. Well, they decided a long time ago too completely changed the very traditional mt for the shoe for the flash on the camera now. Why they did this, they say, was to come up with a better quality shoe that held the flash in there better and didn't fall off and didn't break. They're probably technically right, but I think we all knew why they wanted to do it. They wanted to sell their own flashes because it was a continue completely different mouth and everyone else is, and I'm thinking that had to figure into their minds. At some point, nobody else will be able to have mounts on lee. We will have them out for this one, but it drove everyone nuts because it wasn't just flashes that we put up here nowadays, we put microphones up there, there's cases where we'll put viewfinders, we put accessories of all sorts clipped onto this top piece. We have radio triggers that will put in their gps units that we might put in there, there's all sorts of it's, a great mounting place if you need to have something attached to your camera and they've gone back to the old system. So thankfully, eso unfortunately, if you have older minolta or sony flashes, this is going to be a new flash system, and they've done some smart things they've added the traditional eyes so hot shoe. So standard stuff like a pocket wizard if you're working in a studio or with lighting equipment, you want one a little pocket wizards that plug in up here so it sinks your flashes that's going to work but they've added electronics hidden up in the front end so that they can have special power to microphones, lights and who knows what else in the future? And so they have the smartest design on their hot she right now because they're going toe be able to take that forward with some great technology if you do have one of the older flashes, you're going to need this little adapter that I have on screen here so that you can mount the old flashes into the adapter so you come out that adapter on this and so it's a bit of a transition period for them with their flashes their newest best flash that you would most likely want to get with. This camera has this exact shoe on it so there's no adapters necessary with the main flash, which is actually this flash right here the h v l f sixty and we got one of these in the house here grab one of these over here so this is their top of the line flash if you're pretty serious about flash if you shoot event photography if you're going to shoot weddings and so forth this is a great device I think what I like most about it is being able to swivel it right here there is no other flash that it swivels like this it stays very close to the camera body and it keeps the weight closer because a lot of times the cameras get a little awkward wait when you get the flash way out at the end and other cameras will have other swiveling devices on it, but none of them have this type of swivel device, which I really like this it's a great flash unfortunately, we don't have time to go into flash. This is a fast start camera class, not the complete course so that's a really good flash highly recommended if you're pretty serious about flash photography with camera because it does not have a built in flash, it has an electronic viewfinder and it has a screen on the back and to go back and forth you cannot have it automatically switch or you can manually switch it back and forth. I like the automatic switch because it has a proximity sent censor just like the grocery store does when you step on the math you get near the door and so soon is your eye gets close to it it turns on the view finder in here you move away from it the back one goes on, but if you don't like that that's not working for what you're doing because every once in a while, maybe your hands hitting it, turning it off you can go manual and then just switch back and forth with the button on the top of the camera. All right, on the front corner of the camera where you can reach with your hand in the hand grip, we have a drive mode, so obviously we're going to have pretty common stuff that you're used to a single, continuous low, continuous high, continuous low, I believe is two and a half frames per second. We have a couple different self timer modes, and then we have a couple of other things in here. We have a bracketing, which is nice, being able to do some bracketing. We also have bracketing white balance, which I'm not real find up, but you can do he might need it's right there it has bracketing d r o dynamic range up try to remember with the d I dynamical optimization optimization, I'm going optical, but optimization is right, thank you very much. And so this I'm not real fund of it actually works to my chagrin, but I like shooting just straight clean, raw images and kind of as we go through the camera the way I like to shoot my camera is I want to get the highest quality image I want a fuss with the cameras little is possible and I don't want to alter my images I'll do that later if necessary every once in a while it's nice to get it done in camera if it saves me time and this is one of those areas where it goes in and kind of plays with the lightness, the shadows, the highlights to get something that it thinks is better. I personally found that if you shoot raw images and you get it pretty well exposed right, you can do whatever you would you might need with it but it's in there in case you need it we also have a remote mode so that if you do get the wireless remote which is this little guy here which I was stunned once again I'm not paid by sony and networking for sony I just figured a remote with this many buttons on it has got to be one hundred bucks but apparently it's only around twenty five dollars and so it actually looks more like a video remote for a video camera and so it's got a few extra little features on it for when you're using video as well that's where a lot of sony's heritages is in video next up we have our white balance buttons so we have all of our common white balance settings normally I recommend for most of my students just shoot in raw auto white balance. Fix it later. If it looks bad in the field, then adjusted as necessary to save you just a little bit of time later on pretty common settings in their next up, we have our exposure compensation. And so this is for anyone who wants to shoot in program, shutter priority or aperture priority. You press this button, you turn either the front or the back dial, and it allows you to overexpose or under exposure images by up to five stops that's pretty extreme it's, pretty rare that you go beyond one stop, but it can go up to five stops in either direction and so pretty simple device to use if you're in one of those semi automatic mounts. Next up we have r s o. So we have pretty are pretty normal settings. We go from one hundred to twenty five thousand. We do have a low setting of fifty. And so a lot of sometimes people get confused because a photographer will say, you want to keep your camera said at the lowest associating with native sensitivity of this camera is aya. So one, hon, you can go down to fifty, but best quality would be to leave it at one hundred. If you were shooting, say a waterfall at a half second and you really wanted to get down to one second and you don't have anywhere else to go in the aperture, you could go down the I s o fifty but in general limited I so one hundred and then move up as necessary from there now it also has another mode on it that is a little unusual work. It is kind of bracketing it's a, uh well, it's, what it's doing is it's shooting multiple frames it's called eso auto multi, and what it should shooting is multiple pictures in order to reduce the noise of the isil. I'm not a real big fan of that, but it is one of the options that you can use in there. We have a little button on there for display light turns the light on up in the top so you can see it clearly at night might be a good time to take a quick breaks and we'll see what sort of questions have accumulated up to this point. Yeah are many questions that have come in from the audience? Um, I realized the special composition only works with shudder rupture and a program owed why is it does not work on up and the manual knowed you adjust the brightness by changing the shutter speed and the aperture and exposure compensation doesn't do anything what it's basically doing this it's kind of changing the reading of the light meter and so let's just say you're an aperture priority and you change the exposure compensation if you're an aperture priority it's in control of shutter speeds and we'll just adjust those shutter speeds up and down if your insurer priority, it'll change the apertures if you're in program, they'll kind of work with both and emanuel, let me correct me you think about this for just a second want to try one thing on the camera I'm gonna put it in manual because I think there may be a way that you can do this here. Yes, you care okay, so you can do it in manual, all right, but you have to be an auto sl, and so if you're going to have the camera make the picture lighter or darker, it has to do it has to have some tool in which to make it lighter or darker. Normally it works with shutter speeds and apertures, but if you put it in auto I esso and manual you can then do a plus or a minus exposure compensation good question, thank you another question that came up from the internet the memory settings on the dial on top could those be used also if you're maybe sharing the camera between different people and you want the camera to remember the settings that you like as opposed to your wife for one of your kids maybe well, seeing how I don't work for sony? Yes, that would work, but if I worked for sony no, that doesn't work, you need to go out by another, all right, great idea, though let's see can both the viewfinder and the lcd beyond at the same time? No, you can't be on at same time. Um, you don't really want that on when it's on in the viewfinder, the only place that you can see it in the viewfinder? Well, this does have one of the more, most not more most unique screens that can really flip out, so I suppose I could have it pointed off to the side over here. Well, I'm looking through it, but that's just not real likely I don't think, but uh, no, it doesn't work and then the only other question that's come up for for this segment, the remote that you mentioned the optional remote is that an infrared remote? Does it have to be a line of sight? Think about them. Sorry if I catch you off guard, but I believe it is I'm ninety nine percent sure, but I didn't have one of those in my hand for testing purposes, but I'm pretty sure he is