Lessons

Lesson Info

Mode Dial

all right. The mode dial on the top of the camera controls how shutter speeds and apertures, as well as a variety of other features, are controlled on the camera. So let's dive in and talk in depth about the mode dial. Let's start with the simplest, most basic setting on this, which is the A plus known as the Scene. Intelligent Auto Mode and the auto indicates that the camera is gonna be taken care of features for you shutter speeds, apertures focusing and a lot of other stuff we're not gonna get particularly into the scene. Intelligent part of it is where the camera will actually try to determine what you are shooting a photograph up, whether it's a scenic or a portrait or a food shot, and will try to make little adjustments for you. Now the problem is, is that the camera is not super intelligent in this mode, and so I think any relatively smart photographer is going to be able to outsmart the camera if they're willing to go in and make the changes themselves. But it's a good general ...

quick automated mode, but I'm hoping that if you're watching this class, photography is a little bit more important to you, and you're gonna want to get in there and make some further changes yourself. So let's get in and start talking about some of the other mounts. All right, This hybrid auto mode is a very unusual mode him my opinion here. What it does is it actually records four second of video before you take the shot. And what happens is at the end of the day you end up with little four second videos and still images of everything you shot, which is this montage of what your photography day was like. And it's kind of fun and interesting for about 15 minutes, and then it just starts using up data, and it's not really interesting. And you're getting video of the inside of your camera bag and you pointing the camera down at the ground cause it's four seconds before you actually took a photo. And so it's something that you might want to play around a little bit, but I'm not expecting anyone to keep it in this mode for the rest of the life of this camera. All right, next up is a creative assist mode, all right, So in the back. In the A plus mode, it was a fully automated mode where you really don't have any control. The camera is in full control. In the creative assist mode, you are allowed a tiny playpen oven area in order to make a few little adjustments here in there. And so, in this weekend, adjust some very, very simplistic settings on our camera, whether how light it is, how dark it is a little bit of contrast in saturation. And in order to do this, you'll hit the quick menu button, which is that Cuba and right in the middle of the centre, dial on the back to turn that on. And then you'll be going up and down to make different sorts of adjustments in here. And so let me go ahead and turn my camera on. And so let's make sure our cameras turned on, and I'm gonna put it into the creative assist mode. The camera with star on it, and if I hit the set button, give a little zoom in on our display here, you can see we can go up and down and choose different features that we want to control So if we want to control, for instance, the color, we can make it a warmer look or we can make it a cooler look more blue to it. And so this is a very, very safe way to not go to any terrible extreme of radically changing your photos. But we can make it a little lighter if we want. We can make it a little darker, takes a little bit of a moment for it to kick in. And what the camera is doing is it's changing shutter speeds, apertures or potentially even I eso to make this happen. And so if you wanted to loan your camera to somebody and said, Hey, if you want a little play around a little bit with photography, I don't need to explain shutter speeds, apertures or anything else. This would be the simplest way to get in there and do that, but it is pretty limiting this to what you're doing, and you're not learning very much by doing this because it doesn't really show you what sort of changes you're making on your camera. But as I say, it's a safe little area to kind of play in for a little bit, and there are further adjustments that you can make with the top dial on the camera as well. All right, let's go to the next mode on this. So So. Here's some examples of using the creative assistance, so brightness is obviously just going to change how bright or dark the subject is. The contrast mode you can see. The blacks are a little bit deeper and darker in the high contrast mode saturation how intense the colors are for landscapes. You could add a little bit of vividness to it. That's usually looks pretty good. There we were warming up our subject and clean it down for different color temperatures that we might be in. And then, if you want to turn it black and white, you can turn it black and white or at a little bit of C P, a kind of a little bit of a brown to it as well for a different type of look. And so this is some examples of what you can do in the creative assist mode, and they're also additional filters that you can use with the black and white mode that will enhance certain colors in their density in the photograph. So that is the creative assist mode, just a slight bit of manual control over the complete auto. Next up is the scene mode, and the scene mode allows us to change the camera if we know that we're shooting something in particular, and we would like the camera to automatically set us up for those type of situations where we don't want to set the particulars of exact shutter speeds and apertures. But we want the camera to do it for us now. This is going to do a better job than the A plus mode because the A plus mode might switch back and forth, you might say, Well, I'm shooting sports. The camera should figure it out. Well, it may not understand. It may think you're shooting a landscape shot, and so if you know that you're shooting sports or landscapes or portrait, this would be just kind of the next level of manual control over the camera. So this is where you get to manually control things. And so, in order to activate this, put it in the scene mode, hit the set button on the back of the camera and then you'll be able to select from the different scenes by turning the control dial or just going side to side with it. And so let's go ahead and do a little live demo here and put it in the scene mode. So I have it in the scene mode. On the back of the camera, I hit the cue button and you'll see right along the bottom. We have the portrait, and we can switch to the landscape in the close up in the action in which one here we have a handheld night scene as well as the ever popular food photography. And so what is the camera doing? Well, it's adjusting the focusing system shutter speeds, apertures, possibly the metering system. But there is nothing that the camera is doing in these modes that you cannot do yourself if you know what you're doing. And so the question is, do you know what you're doing? And so if you dio, you don't have to set it to the sports mode. You can put it in aperture priority or shutter priority or manual, and start making those settings yourself. But if you just want to play around and you want to have it done automatically. This is a pretty simple and easy way to make this work for a particular situation. So that is the scene mode. Let's go to the next one. Alright, creative filters. All right, for any of you instagram fans out there, those of you who like adding filters and tweaking your images so that they have a different look. This is what this mode on the camera is all about. And so we have a number of different creative filters that we can use here. Let's see if we got some example. So once again, to activate it, it's gonna be the Q button and then using the dial on the back of the camera to control which features you're using and how intense they are. For instance, So what does this do so high dynamic range? This is not a great example for high dynamic range. If you had a wider range of brightness and darkness, you might see more of a difference in the shot. Clearly, the fisheye is causing a barrel type distortion, but then we have all sorts of other ones aren't bold effect, which is very saturated, water painting, which is very de saturated and lightened up. The miniature effect is blurring the top and the bottom half of the photograph, which is how miniatures often look more effective in some situations than others. Toy camera adds a heavy vignette, some lessening of the colors, de saturation They're soft. Focus might be interesting to using that on portrait and then the grainy, gritty, black and like version of it. And so if you want to play around, it's a fun place to play around for a little bit. This isn't probably where you're gonna take all your photos, but it's nice to have that built in, and you can see it right on the back of the camera so you can see the results that you were about to get, so it makes it very, very easy to use. Next up we have the movie mode, and so if you want to record movies, it is where you're going to turn your camera and then it turns it into a movie mode. We will talk more about movies as we get into this, but if you do hit the quick menu, you are gonna be getting access to lots of other features that our applicability in the movie mode and we're gonna talk about. I'd say all of these as we get through the camera. We're not going to stop and talk about him right now, but this is where you can get quick access to them, not having to jump into the full menu system where things can get a little lost in there. So these are your most important features for adjusting the movie settings. Now a few notes on the movies on this They are MP four files, which is fairly basic in the video format world, but they should work on pretty much all modern computers. We have a variety of resolutions and frames per second that you can shoot, depending on which resolution you have will depend on which frames per second you can have. Not. All are available with all the maximum file sizes, four gigs in size or 29 minutes and 59 seconds. If you go over four gigs, it just starts a new file automatically. If you get to the end of 30 minutes, you will need to restart the camera because it does have a recording limit of that time. And finally, this is primarily a still camera and not a video camera. So if you do want to shoot photos, you can shoot photos by simply pressing down on the shutter release. The downside to this is that you're not getting the image from the full sensor. You're just getting a 16 by nine crop of it. So it's gonna be a very wide photograph, very narrow photograph mimicking that panoramic look of the HD video. And we will talk more about movies as we get into the menu section on the cameras. Well, all right, so now we're getting into the serious photographic settings on the camera, and so first up is the program mode, and this in some ways is kind of similar to the A plus mode, the scene intelligent mode in that the camera is setting shutter speeds and apertures for you. But in this case, you get to see what those shutter speeds are, and you have access to all the other menu functions in your camera as well. So it does give you a little bit more of creative freedom. If you want to go in and change the autofocus system or change the I S O or a variety of other things in the camera. And so I think, for most semi serious photographers, this would be considered the easy mode on their camera. And so when you do have it in the program mode, as you can see on screen, the camera will show you your shutter speeds, your apertures as well as your eyes over on the right hand side. And so get familiar with those settings and where they are and what they're doing and kind of keep an eye on him to make sure that you know you are within a hand holding limit. You're not at too slow a shutter speed where you would get a blurry photo. Next up is our time value. And so, in this one, you get to choose the shutter speed by turning the dial around the shutter release on the camera and the camera will figure out the aperture for you. And so this is be a good mode if you know specifically a shutter speed that you were trying to get. So if you're trying to shoot action and you know you need a fast shutter speed you could set, say, for instance, 1 5/100 of a second and let the camera figure out the rest of the things. Now, the time value mode is not my favorite mode because the camera has a limited range of apertures, depending on what lens is on the camera. And it's very easy to exceed the pasta, the range of the lens, and you could very easily choose to faster shutter speed where the lens is not letting it enough light and you end up with the dark photo. And so I prefer using the next mode that we're going to talk about, which is the aperture priority mode aperture value is Canon calls it in. This is where the camera allows us to change the aperture and the camera will figure out the shutter speed. And I think this is a very good mode for a lot of photographers. In fact, it's one of the favorite for most people. I know that this is a great travel photography mode where you don't know what your next photograph is going to be. Set the aperture around, say 5.6, and then you can adjust it a little bit up or down, depending on your needs for the photograph. And so this is a really good one. The main suggestion when using the aperture value mode is keep an eye on the shutter speed to make sure that you have a handhold herbal shutter speed. Let's say around 1/60 of a second or faster Next up is full on manual. This is where you get to sex, select shutter speeds and apertures yourself. You will be using the light meter to figure out if you're getting the correct exposure. So let's do a little manual exposure here in this class Little demo here. So I have but my camera into the manual exposure mode on the top of the camera and on the back of the camera I can see my shutter speeds and my apertures. My shutter speeds are just by changing the top dial and the apertures air controlled on the back dial, and I see right now that might eso is at auto, which means I could set anything I want with shutter speeds and apertures, and I'm going to get the right exposure and I actually want to turn that I s so off, So I'm just gonna jump ahead real quickly, and I am going to turn off my I s o. Actually, I'm gonna go into the menu system if I can remember where the I s o is on this camera right now. It's the moment. All right, Here, change it to eso 100. So have I also 100 set. And as you can see, this image is very dark. And down here at the bottom, my exposure indicator is over at minus two. And so, if I change to slower shutter speeds, I can get this exposure meter evened out. If I wanted to make the adjustment with the aperture, I could turn the back dial so that the indicator well, that can't quite make it there. So I'm gonna have to do a little bit with shutter speeds. And so, using a combination of the shutter speeds and apertures now, where should you set your shutter speeds? And where should you set your apertures? Well, that's a big question that we don't have time to answer in this class here. But what you want to do is work with light meter in general. You want to get that indicator to the middle of the range, and that means that your picture is needed neither too light or too dark. Now you may still need to make it a little bit to the lighter side or a little bit to the darker side, depending on the situation. But there is a whole lot to be done in that mode, but that requires a whole other class on photography on where to set your shutter speeds and apertures. But that is how you do it. All right, so that is the manual mode, and I like to use the manual mode any time. I have a little bit of time to set up my scene, kind of figure things out, and I want to get a series of shots that are very, very consistent in their brightness. So if I'm doing a landscape type shot and I have my camera on a tripod or the lights not changing radically, I would probably figure out what aperture I want and then what shutter speed I need. And then I would shoot a bunch of pictures all at the same combination. Next up is a custom mode, and this is a mode that you get to design and create yourself. And so if you said well, you know, I really like using the camera in aperture priority. But I like a certain focusing system and a certain metering system and a few other tweaks in the menu system. But every time I want to do that, I have to make five or six different changes in the camera and for things that you want to get to very quickly. That's gonna take too much time. And so the camera has a C mode where you can set up the camera exactly as you would like it. And so if it is that mode, you wanted an aperture priority at F eight with a continuous focusing system, with one point focusing off to the left hand side, set your camera exactly in that way, and then go to this shortcut that I have up here. Set up menu number four custom shooting mode and register that as your favorite shooting mode. Then, as you're shooting and you wanted, set your camera up in your favorite way, you just spin the dial to the sea mode, and everything is set up automatically for you, and you don't have to go through the whole rigmarole of making all those individual settings on the camera. And so it's a great system for anyone that has something that they like to shoot on a regular basis That gets to be a little bit complicated in getting the camera set up for that mode. So there you go, folks. That is the mode dial on the camera Main controls.