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2. Photography Basics

But for now, I want to make sure that everyone is up to speed on their basics of photography. So I have a little section here, too can make sure that everyone knows the difference between shutter speed and aperture. And this is actually from, ah, Class that I did hear it creativelive that is available for downloads called the Fundamentals of Digital Photography. It's Ah, 10 week classes got about 20 plus hours of instruction in it, and in it I go through all the basics of photography, of which I will give you the most basics of the basics right here. So the Canon rebel T T. I. Is a digital single lens reflex camera, and the single lens reflex camera has been very popular for the last 60 years or so because it uses now. It's got a couple of great things about it, and one of us is the viewing system on it. We use one very high quality lens that light will come through and there are wide variety of lenses. Lenses that have white angle use and lenses that have narrow angle of you We call t...

elephoto lenses now is the light comes through that lens. The lens, when it focuses, is going to be moving elements back and forth to focus the light on the image sensor as light goes through the lens. It also goes through an aperture, a mechanical opening that opens and gets smaller to restrict the amount of light. And so here we can see our theoretical lens at F 1.4 as it closes down to F 22 to reduce the amount of light coming in and as we open it back up to F 1.4 to let in more light, this is a great way on a camera to control the light. How much light do you wanna have let in something you can control with the aperture now the aperture not only controlling the light, it controls the depth of field or what's in focus. And so here this lens, at 1.4 has a very shallow depth of field. You can see those red hash marks on the right are very close together, and as we stop the lens down, which is the terms we use for closing lands or moving to a smaller aperture, we get more and more depth of field, and it's a little confusing for newcomers because we are getting bigger numbers but smaller apertures, and it's because these air actually fractions and we're just showing you part of the fraction. So as we move to F 22 were getting as much depth of field as we can get out of this camera and lens at this situation. And this is a great way for controlling what our viewer sees in the photograph. Whether we want him to see lots of depth of field or very shallow depth of field now is the light progresses into the camera for viewing purposes. It's going to hit a mere where it bounces light upward into a ground glass. And some of you have maybe used a traditional style camera with a waist level finder, maybe like a hassle glad or maybe a twin lens reflex camera where you would look straight down into a ground glass and looks at what's coming through the lens. But for easy viewing purposes, most people like working with a single lens reflex because it has a prism in the top. It bounces the light around through a viewfinder so that you can see very clearly and easily what's going on under bright light. Under low light conditions, you can see the angle of you that your exact lens sees. You can see any filter effects that are going on. You get to see exactly what the sensor is about to capture. Now, when you press the shutter release that mere needs to get up and out of the way because the light is going to be coming back to the image sensor in the camera. Now the image sensor is a big part about the digital camera. How many megapixels, how big it is. Very important factors will talk a little bit more about in just a moment. Now. In front of the sensor is a shudder unit. It's a two stage shutter. Its got a first curtain and a second curtain. So when you press that shutter release, the first curtain will drop away, which is usually comprised of about four very lightweight metal blades. The sensor is exposed for a predetermined amount of time, and then the second curtain shuts down, and that's your exposure. The mirror will then return so that you can see what's going on and This is why in photography we say you have to anticipate the moment. If you see something very good going on and you press the shutter release, you're gonna get a picture of something that happened moments later. So you have to anticipate in photography now that cheddar controls the shutter speed and the shutter speed has a great effect on the types of pictures you can take and what they're going to look like. A really fast shutter speed, like 2/1000 of a second, is great for stopping very fast. Action like a bird in Flight 1 5/100 of a second is very good for stopping human actions. So sports dance things like that 5/100 of a second will stop. A person jumping up in the air 125th is more of a regular everyday shutter speed. You might say good for stopping action that's not moving too quickly 1/30 of a second starting to get on the little on the slow side. So if you have something moving pretty fast, like some horses racing, you're gonna get some blur because they're moving. During that 30th of a second, an eighth of a second is getting to be quite slow. This is slower than I can handhold a camera, and I've had it on a tripod, and you can see because the bridge is sharp. But the people walking across the bridge are blurry cause they're just walking it in everyday regular pace. As we get down into some pretty slow shutter speeds, we can do some pretty fun things with water crashing over a rock on the ocean shore. And then we can do some very slow shutter speeds like 30 seconds, which was actually done well after dark. And this are not since not fog. These are not clouds. This is just the ocean flowing in and out on Iraq's down in Monterey, California so you can see selecting the right shutter speak and have a great impact on the final image. So when you go to the camera store and you look around at all the different cameras that you can buy, what's not completely obvious is that there are a lot of different sensors, and there's a different sensor in a lot of the different cameras. There's a lot of different common sizes and types of sensors, and in this class. We're going to be concerned a little bit with the size of the sensor. So we're not gonna look at the point shoots today. We're gonna be looking at the more serious SL ours and the sensors used in them. Now, the Canon Rebel t three I use is the smaller of these three. The largest is based directly off of 35 millimeter film 35 millimeter film measured 24 by 36 millimeters in size. And they make sensors exactly that size these air. Fairly large sensors. They call him full frame. They have a crop factor of one point. Oh, because they're the same size is 35 millimeter film. The problem with the sensors is that they're fairly expensive to make, So manufacturers started making smaller sensors. Nikon has one that we call a 1.5 x crop. It's smaller by a factor of 1.5 16 by 24 millimeters. The one in your cannon t three. I is just slightly smaller. It's got a 1. crop, and so it's gonna crop the image by 1.6 times compared to a full frame camera. We still Ah, we still useful frame. It's the standard. Even though it's a relatively small number of cameras out there using it, it's still kind of the standard that we adhere to. So those are some of the basics that you need to know for understanding this camera. And if anything here seemed new or interesting to you, you might want to check out the fundamentals of digital photography. It's as I say, it's a 10 week class that I did here at Creative Live. You can go to Creativelive and download the class and watch it at your leisure. It's kind of nice because you can go back and review sections. You can take it in small chunks, however you like to learn is how you can watch the class. And so that's a good way to brush up on all the fundamentals so that you have all that base so you can go out and start taking great pictures. Have a quick question from PC Consulting. Sure, the question is, if they have the same sensor and processor, why's the T three? I considered an amateur camera, but a 60 d is a professional camera. Ah, the sensor is only part of the game. It's just like in the days of film. You could put the same film in the camera, but why was one camera better than another? And the same is true here, the controls and the access to the controls. And so if you have a 60 d, it's got a few extra buttons and dials on it that you can more quickly access and change features as well as some of the technical characteristics of the camera. How fast it can shoot frame to frame what its top shutter speed is the type of focusing points in there. So there are a lot of feature differences, and I have to be honest with you. There's a many, many times Will you be taking pictures side by sign? T three I vs 60 d and you're gonna get exactly the same picture. But in some situations, the 60 D is just gonna outperform the T three I because of those focus points. The motor drive, the shutter speed, the controls on the camera on. And so the 60 D is a slightly larger cameras, I say in that larger size of the camera allows for more physical buttons on the camera. Great. Thank you. A quick question. Just while we're still on the fundamentals from Claire of our A. How does image stabilization relate to shutter speed or affect it? Um, that's an interesting question. Uh, it's kind of separate issues by you could say that most people can hand hold a typical lens down to about 1/60 of a second, and you don't really need image stabilization above that. But at around 60 45th and around, their image stabilization is of great benefit. Now, this does vary with the lens you use. And so if you're using a 500 millimeter lens, there's gonna be some different numbers that were playing with. But I'm talking about just for the average user in the average lens. And so, ah, the other thing to think about that some people kind of forget about this. They love image, stabilized lenses, and it's great null, but it doesn't do you any good when you're shooting at 5/100 of a second, you know, let's say you're shooting your friend soccer game and you need a fast shutter speed like 5/100 of a second to stop the motion image stabilization isn't going to get you a better picture, because the 5/100 of a second is stopping the action for you. It's not the image stabilization that's steadying the camera, so the two are related, and sometimes they work together, and sometimes they're completely separate. Great, thanks.