Lessons

Lesson Info

1. Product Overview

So welcome everyone to dslr fast start my name is john gringo and today's class is on the canon rebel t three I or as it's also known in other parts of the world as thesixty hundred d and so this is kind of a replacement in some ways for the instruction manual we're going to go through the camera pretty much each and every button on the camera and pretty much everything in the camera that you need to know about to operate the camera. So if you've recently purchased this camera you're thinking about buying it think of this is your in law your live instruction manual to help you through it so let's get started in show you what we're gonna be doing today I broke in this class down into several segments we're going to start off with a little bit of product overview so that you know what you've gotten yourself into there's a lot of people who have purchased this cameron it's their first digital slr might be their first cannon camera, so we will let you know a little bit about the history an...

d kind of where it sits we're going go through some photography basics just to make sure everyone's up to speed on some of those fundamentals of photography and then kind of the core of the classes where we're going to go through the button layout we're going to go through the camera top back side bottom of the camera and investigate all the buttons, styles and controls on the camera to figure out exactly what their four and how their best use we will take some little breaks as the day goes along and then we'll get into the display system where we look at how the camera feeds you information and then finally we're going to go through the menu system where we're going to look at everything that the menu has to offer and then at the very end of the day we're going toe put this all to use in practical terms in our camera operation section, which is kind of fun where we get tow, set the camera for different types of photography and so I hope it looks good to you. I tried to cover everything in this class, and so this is going to be a pretty complete class. We're not going to try to do it in ten minutes. We're going to carefully walk through everything bit by bit all right to start with when you get this camera, you get this gigantic instruction manual that I figure if you spend a couple minutes per page on you're going to spend more than ten hours reading that very boring piece of material, this class here is going to be about four hours in length how is it possible for me to fit four hours in what is ten hours of information? Well, I can't I've had to kind of edit through and figure out some things that we need to spend more time on and other things that we need to spend less time on. One of things I found out by going through these cameras is that they are partially designed for people who do not have access to or don't own a computer if you need to do all your photoshopped processing in the camera this camera has a lot of those abilities and that's not how a lot of people use the camera so I am going to breeze past some sections fairly quickly I will mentioned pretty much everything but I might say from time to time check your instruction manual for more information so there is still valuable information in that manual beyond what this class offers next off this class is not a photography one o one class if you have never taken a photography class, I highly recommend that you do it it's going to fill in a lot a lot of gaps in your knowledge of photography this is a class on how to work this particular camera it's I kind of assumed that you know a little bit about photography or that you're going to learn about it and if you need to take a class well there'll be a class or two that I can recommend us we get get into the class. So, uh, that's where we are to get started with so let's talk about the cannon t three I and what sort of product you have gotten yourself into if you have purchased this well, you've got yourself a canon camera and cannon is a, uh, great japanese company that specializes in obviously making cameras, video cameras, lenses, a lot of different office products and a lot of their own electronics that go in the cameras themselves. Now can it's been making cameras for a very long time? They were founded back in nineteen thirty three him look at this cute little range finder camera that was their first camera, the kalon thirty five millimeter range finder cam, because that was kind of the the trend at the time is range finder cameras, nice, small, lightweight cameras that use thirty five millimeter film, and then in nineteen fifty nine, they came out with their first slr that candle flex her cannon flags on this incorporated a single lens reflex style camera, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that more when we get to the photography basics. Then they started getting pretty serious about things in nineteen seventy one when they brought out their f one a professional level slr camera and thanks for going along just fine until nineteen eighty seven there's a bit of a a bump in the road, you might say with cannon because they introduce the new auto focus system, and they introduced a completely new lens mount. And for all the serious photographers who had a large collection of lenses, it was caused a bit of controversy because you had to buy a whole new set of lenses to work on these new cameras. And so they made this big leap of faith to the new system, and I'd have to say it. It paid off because they designed a system for auto focus, and that would eventually be incorporated into the digital world. And here we have their first digital slr in the year two thousand, the d thirty, which, as I recall, sold for about three thousand dollars and had three megapixels to it. And we thought that was a wondrous invention at the time. And as I look at this picture of it, I think, wow, what a quaint little screen on the back of that camera. We were just so happy at the time just to be able to see our pictures instantly. And now the screen's air so much larger and easier to see. But that was the state of the art at the turn of the millennium and so that's a little bit about cannons history. Now, as far as their slr system goes, one of the great things about cannon that I really like a lot is they make a full range of cameras from beginner two top of the line professional as well. A several steps in between as you grow and your needs. Yeah, increase as a photographer. There's probably going to be a canon camera for youto upgrade to the rebel is a great place to start and there's lots of room to grow. Cannon also also has many, many different lens is a lens defict, virtually anything that you might need to d'oh so there's lots of great lenses, and we'll talk a little bit more about some specific lenses later in the talk. And then, of course, they have a very good flash system. If you need additional lighting for on camera flash macro flash canada has a very good selection of flashes as well. Now, as far as the t three I goes, it is what many people consider to be an upper entry level camera. The rebel is their entry line of cameras, and they do have a number of rebels. For instance, the t three eyed this one on. Came out in two thousand eleven, the t two I came out about a year ago, but most camera stores will keep the two t t two I in stock for quite a while, sells for usually about one hundred bucks less and has a few less features. And here you can kind of see the timeline, and basically they came up with a really nice design back in two thousand three, and they've been tweaking it and modifying it about every twelve to eighteen months since then, and the difference between one model to the next usually isn't very much a zay say just some small tweaking to each and every model. Now the t one eye to eye and t three ire the most current rebel cameras, and there might be some people who are watching this that are owners of these older cameras, and you might wonder, how does this compare or what's been the latest changes, as you can see here between the t one and the t two I they've gone from fifteen to eighteen megapixels, but that stayed the same up to the t three I and with the t one and the t two they've increased the frames per second, and they've increased the video capabilities, the frame rates in the resolution and finally the t two I had an improvement in the media ring system. When it comes to the t three I've probably the biggest difference is thie articulating lcd screen on the back of the camera next up would be the wireless flash control so if you have a cannon flash you can have the built in flash control this other flash without any cords at all which is kind of nice there's some additional help menus and they've added some creative filters and so I would say that the t three I is a minor improvement to the t to I but I do think it is a an improvement so when you buy the camera typically it is sold in a kit and there's a couple different lenses that you can get with it the eighteen to fifty five is probably the most common because it's the least expensive package on our camera here today which we have on a very generous loan from borrow lenses thank you borrow lenses we have a slightly upgraded eighteen to one, thirty five lands and so this is giving us a little bit more telephoto range it's a very good all around lens and so this might be a little bit larger than the lens you got with the camera if you got the eighteen to fifty five you're going to get some other little accessories in the package mostly dealing with the battery, the battery chargers, some cables, some instruction manual and things like that and so we're going to assume that you've already taken the camera out of the box, and you've charged the battery and got the camera pretty much ready to go in the instruction manual they page after page after warnings about dire things that you shouldn't do with this camera, you know, don't get too hot don't get too cold, don't drop it, don't get it wet, don't take it apart. Don't leave it by a giant magnet. Don't start with lots of corrosive chemicals and one of my favorite don't fire the flash it's someone driving a car don't use around flammable gas, and, of course, don't swallow the battery. In essence, don't be stupid with the camera, and I think everyone understands those basics, but the question a lot of people do have is about the this camera is not waterproof do not get it wet. What do they really mean by that statement? Well, the camera is not waterproof camera, it doesn't have over ring seals around all the openings and there's lots of buttons and dials on this camera, so you want to be careful about getting water in them? We here at creative live in seattle, we have a bit of rain from time to time, and when it's raining, I'm not too shy about going out and shooting, I don't leave the camera on a tripod out in the rain for an hour or two I'm very careful I try to keep it under raincoat. Maybe I have a friend who has an umbrella is try to stay under cover if I need to go out in the actual rain and shoot I do so very quickly and get the camera put away I'll often have a cloth tio mop up any wetness on the camera if the camera does get wet, the camera may either die where it needs to be sent back to cannon to be fixed, which could be expensive or it may temporarily die, in which case the water just needs to dry out. If that's the case what you want to do is you want to take and open every door that you can find on the camera so you would take the battery out, open the battery door, you might take the memory card and the memory card door. You take the lens off and then you just let the cameras sit there in a nice, warm, dry environment and let it naturally dry many times. In that case, the camera will come back to life and you'll be ready to go right again and so be careful about getting it wet but don't be too afraid about getting out there and taking a picture to in a little bit of rain the other thing that they say they warn you about his cannon is not liable for damage if used with non cannon accessories. Part of this is yes, true, because kanan wants to sell you their accessories, their lenses, their flashes, their batteries on anything else that you might be able to hook up to the camera. In general, you're not going to damage the camera, putting on a good quality aftermarket lands like a tomorrow on takina or sigma lands and there's a number of other brands as well that you can put on here and it's not going to cause any problem with the camera. Now the camera may communicate back and forth with the lens to do some special feature, and if it has a lands it doesn't recognize on there it won't be able to do do that. Special communication the batteries that go on here are cannon batteries you can use aftermarket batteries. I've found they're not so good, they're not quite as reliable. They don't have as much power generally. Sometimes they don't feed us much information back to the cameras to how much power is left in the battery, and so I I kind of tend to want to stick with the cannon batteries myself. And then as faras on the excess reports on the side that will go through there's a number of devices that you could hook up faras promotes and so forth and there's a lot of different brands that you can hook up that well not caused any problem at all be careful though about hooking up extra power units to the hot shoe on the camera there's electronics that do hook up with the electronics that camera there I I would tend to want to stay with the cannon flashes myself okay, so preparing the camera for today's talk let's hope that you have charged the battery I know that we've charged are battering here that's going to take about two hours and you're going to get anywhere from, say, five hundred to a thousand shots off the camera it kind of depends on how you use your camera do you review and every image do you use image stabilization? How much do you play around in the menus? How much do you turn the camera on and off? They'll be a lot of things that affect your gas mileage. Attaching the lands is pretty easy I'll do this right here just in case anyone is not completely sure on this we have a little white index mark on the camera as well as a red one, depending on what type of lens that we're going to mount on this this is an e f s lands that has a white mark, so we're going to match up that white square with the white square on the lens mt and just do a little turn until we hear a click. And that means the lenses properly attached at that point. Uh, the battery took this out before, but we'll just show it again. There's really? Only one way to install the battery. Yeah, these are, as they say, very powerful last year for up to a thousand shots or so. So we got the battery installed in the memory. The memory card or this uses sd memory will talk a little bit more about this specifically in a little bit. I got a four gig card in here right now, there's. Only one way to put that in it. Spring loaded and the door closes pretty simply on that end, take the lens cap off. We don't have a lens cap on here right now, but if you have yours, take your lands. Cap off. Turn the camera on there's a switch right on the top of the camera to turn on. And this may be the last time I tell you this, but go ahead and turn that. Big old dial on the top, your camera to the a plus little green autozone that's the simplistic auto mode and at this point, go ahead and take a picture, so I'm going to go ahead and take a picture of can't because she's handle in our web here and just want to make sure that the cameras are working that your camera is working. If not, this is good time to go through your battery on the charger because we're going to hit and to some photography basics here in a moment now, one of things to make this class a little easier to fall along with is pressing down on the shutter release will wake the camera up when it goes to sleep in your camera likes to take a lot of naps, it tends to want to go to sleep after about thirty seconds to conserve the battery power, and what we're going to d'oh is we're going to go in and we're going to change this, so we're going to do something fairly sophisticated right now, and I'm going to switch over actually, I can't switch over at the same time we're dealing with the new computer system here, so which want to do is you want to turn the modi lto em for manual on the top of the camera, you're going to hit men you in the back of the camera and you're going to need to navigate to the right to go to tool tab number one and what I want you to look for going down. And there is thie auto power off, and I want you to set that toe one minute. That way, when you're playing with the camera, it doesn't suddenly die on you every ten seconds, and this will enable you to follow along this. We're going through the menu systems ah, little bit more easily. So take a moment to go ahead and do this right now, okay, hopefully all of you have been able to switch that over, and we will be able. We will be coming by this again towards the end of the class if you would like to switch this back to its original state.