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3. Button Layout

Lesson 3 from: Canon Rebel T3i / 600D Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

3. 3. Button Layout

Get to know all of the features behind the buttons on your Canon Rebel T3i DSLR camera.
Next Lesson: 4. Display System

Lesson Info

3. Button Layout

Okay, well this is where we start the learning in earnest I would say all right so you get the camera there in front of you let's look at the top deck of the camera and talk about various things that are on the camera okay first and foremost obviously the off and on switch the camera needs to be on if you want to take pictures pretty simple now when you do switch the camera on the camera does go through an automatic sensor cleaning there's a low pass filter in front of the sensor basically a piece of glass and it shakes really quickly to knock off any dust that might get on the sensor and dust on the sensor can be a major issue with these cameras because they will be black spots on your pictures and I'll have to say that the sensory auto sensor cleaning in this camera does a very good job and we'll see some controls for that when we get into the menu system and so once you have the camera on the camera does tend to want to go back asleep which is why earlier in the class I told youto c...

hange that custom setting so that it stays on a little bit longer but in case it uh it ever goes to sleep on you you can just press the shutter release toe wake it up next up right next to that is the big old mode ill arguably the most important dial on the camera and what this is doing is it's controlling the way shutter speeds and apertures as well as some other features are set on your camera so let's, take a closer look at what's going on with this mode ill all right, the simplest most basic mode is the scene intelligent auto mode it's basic auto if you ask me it's the little a plus green and if you knew nothing about photography this is where you would have your camera set but seeing all of you were taking this class, I'm hoping that if we ever meet in real life and you say, hey, john and I took your class it was nice glass and I'm going to look down at your camera I'm gonna look if it's in this auto mode because I don't want it there this is where you put the camera if you're going to hand it to somebody else to take a picture in my opinion there's a lot more creative things that you can do with the camera once you know how, so we're going to want to move out of this as quickly as possible now there is a flash off version it's basically the same mode but with flash off now in both of these modes the camera this intelligent auto what what's going on is the camera is trying to figure out what you're planted at the thing is is that it doesn't really know if it's on a tripod it doesn't know if it's pointed at a portrait or sports figure it's trying to figure these things out and in my opinion it doesn't do a really good job at it and with your knowledge of what's going on in front of you your eyes to be aware of what you're shooting, you're going to be able to outsmart the camera if you were going to be in a museum you could use the flash off mode to make sure the flash wasn't gonna fire but you could also use one of the more manual modes where the flash won't pop up either there is a creative auto mode that canada's put on here to help you learn the camera this is one of the moments that I'm going to pass by a little bit more quickly there's more information in your instruction manual this is kind of in lieu of taking a class and since you're taking a class you probably won't need this creative auto mode but it tries to give you a little bit of training wheels so to speak about helping you learn about photography and then as we go below that we have lots of little pictures a portrait, a mountain, a flower and these are all different types of automatic seen melts so we have portrait landscape close up sports action nighttime and these air all modes where you can flip to to kind of see how the camera might gear it for that type of situation. In my opinion, I'm not a big fan of these modes. They never seem to go quite far enough in any regard. So, for instance, in the portrait mode, I like to shoot portrait's with a really shallow depth of field. And when I put the camera in the portrait mode, it never goes to as shallow depth of field as I would like. And the exact opposite is true in the landscape mode. I want lots of depth of field, and it never seems to give me enough depth, the field. And so I have to take things into my control into my own hands when I want to do that. And so I want it recommend using any of these, moz, you may want to turn it to their just to kind of cheat and see how the camera would do things, and then you can kind of take it. The next level yourself, however hidden way down at the very end is the little video camera. And this one is kind of important because you can shoot video in this cameron if you want to shoot video. You have to be in this mode here, so you do have to turn the dial all the way into shoot video, and we will talk more about video as we come across some of the different controls for recording and controlling the different sizes of frame rates and resolutions. All right, so let's, get on to the serious side of this style. We're going to turn it all the way up to the p setting, which stands for program. This basically means the camera is going to figure out shutter speeds and apertures for you and nothing else it's actually very, very similar to the a plus mode right below it. The difference is, is that in the a plus mode, the camera's going to pop up the flash of necessary it's going to limit the menus that you can get into and it's going to disable certain features that it thinks that you probably shouldn't have control over. This is why I would prefer the p mode as a cem simple automatic mode for somebody who knows a little bit about their camera in this mode, the cameras figuring out shutter speeds and apertures for you so you can just point it and shoot away. You might want to be aware of what shutter speeds you're using so they don't get a blurry shot and two if you want, you can turn the main dial on the top of the camera, which is right next to the shutter release. And you have what's kind of called a flexible per program, the camera's going pick, shutter speeds and apertures for you. But you have a little bit of say over which direction do you want? Slightly faster shutter speeds or do you want slightly more depth of field? You can control that to some degree using that program next up tv the stands for time value. This is where you want to pick the shutter speed and the camera will pick the aperture for you. And so if you know that there's a very specific shutter speed that you need to achieve something, you could turn it to the tv mode turned the main dial to you. Got to that shutter speed and the camera would pick the correct aperture or at least attempt to pick the right aperture. The problem is, is that the right aperture may not exist or you may not have it in your lands. And so this is a mode that some people like, but I found that a lot of intermediate and advanced level photographers air not a big fan of the time value mode they much preferred. The a v or aperture valium? Oh, this is where you get to choose the aperture and the camera will pick the shutter speed. This is slightly more handy because there's a relatively limited number of apertures and there is a lot of different shutter speeds that you can use so anything that you might want to do with your camera you can probably achieve in the aperture priority mounts, so if you want an automatic mode that would be my most highly recommended automatic mode to use and to change the aperture it's once again that main dial right on the top of the camera right next to the shutter release. All right, finally we're at manual this is my favorite mount. This is where most serious photographers will do a lot of their work. This gives them a complete control over the shutter speed and the aperture of the camera with no restrictions on anything else going on on the camera. And so to do this, we have the camera in manual, we're going to turn our main dial to change our shutter speeds and to change our aperture we're going to need a button on the back of the camera called the a v button and you're going to have to be careful with your fingers here so you could have take your thumb pressing on the a v and you have to leave it, preston as you turn the dial on the camera and so it's a kind of a two finger affair pushing with the thumb and turning with the forefinger and that'll change your aperture and you just go back and turn the main dial to change your shutter speed and that way when you walk something in it stays locked in and doesn't change on you finally at the very end of the dial is thie a dept and the stands for auto depth of field mode and what's going on in this mode is the camera has nine focusing points in the viewfinder that will look at in a moment and it looks at everything in those focusing points and it tries to give you enough depth of field so that everything in those points is in focus. This is not a mode that I I have ever used and I don't generally recommend I think you can achieve the same and orb better results using manual or aperture value and just a little bit of knowledge knowledge that actually you'll probably get right here in this class and so that's the mode dial on the camera can I don't know if we had any questions regarding anything specifically on the model but I'll give you a moment toe check through before we move on to the next little section so most of the time just to reiterate I would encourage anyone who wants to learn photography definitely spend a lot of time in manual that way you can really learn these things yourself and if you do want a simplistic automatic mode my preferences with aperture value I need to have a question from clare of are a can you turn that mode ill from a dp to video or do you have to go back the long way you've got to go back the long way around yeah I would have been kind of nice if they had a completely free flowing so no it is kind of this is one of the complaints about the camera no camera is perfect and one of the complaints is that you have to be in the video mode to shoot video and its way at the end of the dial it's not hard to get teo I mean but it does take a little bit of a twisting to get there all right, that is the question related to this for now I have a couple of random questions but we can address those later, okay? We're gonna keep plowing through some of these buttons here all right very close to where we were with the model is the s o button on top of the camera and this is selecting the sensitivity of the sensor that you are recording with now the standard on this you might say I would say is one hundred that is where the sensor is at it best the image sensor in this camera needs a certain amount of light to create a good quality image, and that amount of light is basically rated at one hundred now we can double the sensitivity to two hundred and make the sensor twice as sensitive and let half assed my basically what we're doing is we're letting half assed much light in to that sensor problem is is that when we lived in half assed, much light it's not able to produce quite as good a picture, it still does a pretty good job bill weaken set it to four hundred and eight hundred sixteen, thirty two, sixty, four hundred so we can keep on letting in less and less light, and the cameras computer is still getting something to work with him producing an image. The problem is, is that we start getting in some artifact ing called noise, and so and I also one hundred this is a crop of, ah, close up of an image, and at one hundred we have very smooth tones, and as you move up to eight hundred, it gets a little bit chunk here and granier and noisier, especially here at thirty, two hundred and at twelve thousand eight hundred you can see what happens when we aren't letting in enough light, and we're trying to basically be boost the signal of what we have received and so this is why you want to keep the camera as low as possible, so I keep my camera at one hundred unless I absolutely need to change it, and we'll talk a little bit about that at the end of the day when we get into camera operation, when you want to bump that aya so up, but to start with one hundred is a good place to put it. Now there is also an auto setting. I'm not a big fan of auto of just about anything on this camera. I like taking control of the ice, so and I don't like the camera automatically changing things on me and it's, a photographer who wants to take control of your photographs, you probably don't want the camera changing things on you, either, and so I would recommend starting off one hundred, bumping up this week along. Now, at the top end of the scale you'll notice in h this stands for high or high one and it's one stop higher than the highest number, and when we say one stop, we basically mean double the previous number so high in this case is twelve thousand eight hundred very, very low quality images would come from the camera, this is kind of a last ditch emergency situation, this is not where you want to put this camera to take. Portrait of your best friend all right, this is where you put the camera when someone's breaking into your car at night across the street and you want to get a picture that's not blurry it's okay, if it's grainy, but you don't want it to be blurry because you want to identify the person breaking into your car. So it's a last ditch thing that you want to go up to all right, next up is the main dia. We've already use this to change our center speeds, and we're going to do this to change a lot of things we use it change center space apertures, and then we'll get into the menu system. We're going to use the style to change additional features in there, as well as focusing points and a lot of other features on the camera it's kind of the one soft button on the camera that has a variety of purposes our shutter release out in front of already told you, teo press that halfway down to wake the camera up when you do press the press it halfway down, it activates the meter as well as the auto focus isn't auto focusing system, and so when you want to focus on a subject but not take the picture, you press halfway down and in many cameras like this camera here, you can actually hear it give you a little chirp chirp to let you know that it's in focus now that beeping required ah drives you nuts like it does me. You can turn it off when we get into the menu system. All right, one of the differences between the tea too high and the t three I and this is one little area where the two c two I is better in some respects is it doesn't have this button here. It has an automatic sensor when you hold the camera to your eye, it turns the display on the back of the camera on and off well, because they went to the flip screen on the new t three either didn't have room for this sensor, so they have a little button here, so if you want to turn to the sensor in the back of the camera, on and off, you would press the display button and so it's something you kind of have to get used to because you might be looking at the back of the camera from arm's length. And then as you hold it up to your eye, you don't want that bright light in your face while you're looking through the viewfinder see would press that button before you kind of got engaged in taking pictures. We have a built in flash on the top we'll talk more about that in a minute or two we have a hot shoe where we can add additional flash units onto the camera now you may be asking if there's a built in flash why would we want to add a anything onto the camera? Well the problem with the built in flashes that it's kind of in a bad place it's right next to the lands and you can't really change the position of it so when you shoot verticals you get very awkward flashes off to the side of your image with a hot you on top you can have the flash above the lands and so we get more natural shadows below the chin rather than off the side of the head and then this also allows us when we're using an off camera flash or hot to flash like in this camera we can do a t t l flash where we take this extra flash unit and we mounted from the side so that we can get much softer light so it's not coming directly from where the camera is now if you are interested in additional flash units the collection of cannon flashes air right here the smallest and some most simplistic is the two seventy e x two I would not recommend this for most rubble users because it does barely anything more than the built in flash does the next one up is the three twenty e x and this one's kind of unique because it has a video light as well as a strobe light for taking still pictures so if you plan to shoot a lot of video and you kind of want one combined flash that handles both your needs this would be a good choice I think for most t three I owners the flash toe look at first and foremost is the four thirty e x two this is a good intermediate level flash that's going to be much more powerful than the built in flash it's going to give you the ability to bounce off of ceilings and walls and to tilt for verticals and you can also take it off camera with chords as well as you as well as you can any of these flashes but I think that's going to probably be the main one toe look at it's not their top of the line however there five eighty e x two is the top of the line flash which does offer even more power and mohr special effects features if you were going to be doing event photography weddings on dh things like that where you were going to be using flash a lot you might be looking at the five eighty instead of the four thirty but for most people I think the four thirty is thie the magic point to be out for the flashes and then you might have been wondering, what's, this little ufl marking on the camera. This is actually the focal plane. This is where the sensor is in the camera and I'm sure many of you have seen behind the scenes footage of them filming movies where somebody is measuring the distance from an actor's face to the camera. Well, this is the mark on the camera that they're measuring. They want to measure the distance to the focal plane for certain types of photography, usually macro photography. Some people need to know this information, so they put just a little etching in the top of the camera for that. All right, next, we're going to the back side of the camera. We have a great large three inch lcd back here, which has higher resolution than your iphone four does. So it's great for viewing images. We're going to be getting into the menu system on the whole second half of this class, and so we're going toe bypass this button. Right now, the information button will be used a number of sometimes you compress it right now and pull up information about how your camera set when you play back an image, you can hit the information button several times to cycle through different sets of information. Maybe you want to see the history graham or you want to see what time that picture was shot or what shutter speed in aperture combination you used for that picture and so it's a very useful button when you're looking for a little bit more information about a particular aspect that you see on the back of the screen kind of hidden right up there in the corner by the view finder is the diop ter and this is an important initial adjustment on your camera it has nothing to do with the pictures that you're going to take, but it does control your view through the viewfinder and so if you have twenty twenty vision or you don't you're going to want it change this to adjust for your eyes if you have to share your camera with somebody who has different vision, you might be battling over this diop ter continually adjusting it for one person to the next it's just a few simple little clicks one way or the other you want to know what you want to do is you want to look through the viewfinder and look at the focusing points on the screen or at the numbers down at the bottom and make sure that they're really sharp and clear when you adjust that die achter, right next to that, you'll see a little outline of a camera and a red dot, and this is our live view movie record button, and we need to talk a little bit more about live you and movie records so let's talk about these two. They are closely related, but slightly different live you is when you want to take still pictures, but you want of you through the lcd screen on the back of the camera movie mode is when you have turned that dial on the top of the camera all the way over to the movie mode setting and you want to take videos, so if you do want to shoot videos, the camera can shoot about a limit of eleven minutes at a time. It is somewhat limited in that regard, it's going to fill up about four gigs of information in that time. Now you could have an eight gig card in there, it's just going to stop halfway through and you're gonna have to press the record button to start up again. You can hit the display mode. Ah, for more information as you are looking at the screen and at any time you are shooting videos, you can press down on the shutter release and take a still picture unfortunately, you're not going to have much control over shutter speed aperture how the cameras controlled, but you can get a still shot at any time you were shooting video. The focusing on this is very limiting in the video mode it's gotta focusing system in it that's great for still footing photographs, but when the mere goes up, the standard focuses see focusing system no longer works, and it has to use a contrast system on the sensor and it's not nearly as fast. So you're going to find that focusing is a a bit of an issue when you want to shoot videos and so most people who are shooting videos. In a serious mode, there are people using this camera for documentaries and commercials and all sorts of production there, typically manually focusing the auto focus modes that you do have is you have live quick and face live what this is, is there's going to be a box on screen, and you're going to use the cross keys and back those up, down and left right buttons to control where this boxes and the camera is going to try to focus on whatever is in that box. This is my preferred focusing mode now how do you change these modes? Well, we'll get to that when we get into the menu system, but just to be aware of these different modes and so the live view I think is a simple and easy way to focus its not very fast though is the problem we have a quick mode. What happens here is the camera returns to the standard still shooting mode so the mere pops down it uses its standard focusing system and then brings the mir back up. The problem that I have is that it's very jarring because the mere pops down you can't see anything with the cameras focusing on and then it pops back after having made a whole bunch of noise going through this little, uh, change up and so the this might be good for certain types of photography. I found that it's a little cumbersome for a lot of people and then finally there is a face detection mode where it will detect faces and we'll try to keep those faces in focus and this may work. For some people in some situations, it completely depends on what you're looking at if you're trying to focus on a number of different people and there's people moving back and forth it's going to recognize all those faces and could get very confused as to which one to focus on s o manual focus is probably my preferred mode, with live being my second choice as to how to change these will get into that trust me just not right here, all right, moving our way around the camera next up on the upper right hand side, we have our meter lock button remember when we pressed down halfway on the shutter release, it activates the meter? Well, if we want to lock the meter in on a particular subject, we would press and hold this button while we recompose the camera to take a picture. Now you'll notice it says, zoom out in blue here and if you'll notice on your camera, there's a little from nail looks like a tick tack toe screen of some sort or a magnifying glass with a minus in blue and things in blue on this camera relate to playback, so when you're playing back an image you can zoom out and of course, right next to it, pull this up we have the zoom in, so if you play back an image, you can zoom in by pressing the right hand button and then zoom back out with the left hand side but that right hand button, if you look at the little symbol just above it, it looks like it has five little points in a frame these are your focusing points that you can select if you want to select a specific point or all points what you would do is you would press this button and then you could either turn the dial the main die along the top of the camera or the cross keys on the back of the camera to select a different focusing point so your options are to select all points which works for a lot of different types of photography let's see if I can do this right now right now I just press the button and all nine points lit up so I know I have all nine points elected if I want to select just one point I will press the button turn my main dial I'm selecting all the outside points until it gets to the middle point and so I can select just one point to focus on and so we can select which part of the scene we want to focus on using that button and turning the dial for general photography right now I'm going to leave it in all points and so those of the cross keys on the back that you would use or the main dial to change the focusing points whatever way you want to all right next up is a button that we've already used when we were in the manual mode if you have your camera in the manual mode by pressing this button it'll allow us to change the aperture value if we press our thumb on the back button and we turned the main dial with our four finger now also below that you'll see a plus and minus right there on the button. If you had your camera let's, say, in p for program, this allows you to under expose or overexposed manually. Now, why would you want to do this? Well, sometimes you take a picture and you thinking yourself, maybe this would be better if it was a little darker, or maybe it be better if it was a little lighter and you're not sure, and you want to give it a little try. Well, you khun dialling a minus one or plus one or minus two, or plus two or anything in between to brighten the image up or dark in the image. And so if you like to use program or time value aperture value, this is a great way to what we call bracket pictures to take pictures that are both lighter and darker from what the camera recommends right below that is our quick control button. Now, in this camera, we're going to have a big menu system that we're going to go through, and some of the most important things in the men you are what they put in there, quick menu and access that menu you would. Press the quick control button and we're going to go through this completely in a little bit, but for right now, it's just a short cut to some of the main features in the menu over on the right hand side is a little speaker, so when you play your movies back that's what you're listening to our cross keys as you've seen before are going to be used for a wide variety of things when we've entered another mode like the focusing points, we use those to select what points we want, but each one of those buttons has its own dedicated feature as well. The top one is for white balance and so with white balance, we have a number of different options that we conceal ect everywhere from automatic, the light shade cloudy and and so forth and so what's going on here is that your camera doesn't necessarily know what white is white high there's a lot of different light sources out there from the sun to tungsten bulbs to fluorescent bulbs, and sometimes the camera doesn't know exactly what the correct light sources, and this is where white balance and cut color temperature come into play. A good old regular sunny day is going to be about five thousand degrees on the kelvin scale cloudy is going to be around fifty, five hundred and a shady day is going to be around sixty five hundred so there's a slightly different color cast even during these natural daylight times and as we start adding our own lights tungsten lights compact fluorescent lights for instance are very very orange fluorescent lights have their own unique color to it and flash is very much well balanced right there in the middle of fifty five hundred and so if your cameras automatic system is not doing a good job, you may need to manually go in tow white balance until it what type of lightings system you are working under now some other modes that we have in here that are not on the calvin skills we have a custom mode I'm not going to go too far into this there's more information in the instruction manual but this allows you to calibrate the camera to any sort of lighting that you're working under what it requires is u two photographs something that is truly white like a white piece of paper you would then go into the camera and tell the camera hey, this is a white piece of paper correct for the white balance in all the rest of the shots and it could do this very, very easily so you might want to check your instruction manual for more specific information on how to do this now we do also have auto white balance and as you may have got the feel I'm not a big fan of auto but in this case I usually use auto white balance there's a couple reasons number one it tends to do a pretty good job the whites are quite white second reason and we'll talk a little bit more about this later is rob versus j peck when you shoot raw you can correct for auto white balance later in software on so if you're going to shoot j pegs you're going to need to be a little bit more careful about how you have your white balance set and so if you do plan to shoot raw where you get the most out of all your images this is something that can be adjusted later on very very easily with no damage done to the photographs but if you do need to change something even though I leave my camera an automatic most of the time if for some reason I'm not getting good results and I know exactly the situation I'm in that oh I'm in fluorescent lights have all these fluorescent lights I'm getting these funky colors I'll change my camera to fluorescent lights so that at least on the back of my camera as I'm shooting I get feedback that's very close to the final results that I want to get so that would be a good reason for changing the next button just over to the right hand side is thie auto focus button there is a number of things that we can control on the auto focusing system and how the camera focuses. We have three basic ways that this will work now kind of the factory default is one shot or single. This is my preferred system for most types of photography. What happens here is when when you press halfway down on the shutter release, the camera is going toe look for something to focus on and it's got a lock on. So as long as you leave your finger halfway down on the shutter release that's what's in focus and that's going to work for taking portrait's for doing landscapes for taking general type pictures, I'm going to jump to the third one a ai servo, this is a continuous mode, this is your sports in action. Note. If you're photographing someone running towards you, you don't want the camera to focus and stop, because as surrender comes towards you, they're going to be out of focus. You need the camera to track that movement, and this is a tracking system, the continuous or a I serve amount, so if you are in sports, you want to put it into the continuous mt. Now there is a mode in between those two called a I focus for automatically switching back and forth. I'm not a big fan of this mode because it's a little erratic in what it's choosing to focus on if you're photographing say a basketball player and he stops for just a moment to guard somebody it's going to stay locked in and then when they start moving again it's not going to continue to track their movement and so I found it's pretty easy to make the determination are you shooting sports or are you not shooting sports if you're in the sports mode you want to be in the continuous mode for general photography I would leave it in the single mode next up over on the left hand side is the drive mode and this has to do with what happens when you press halfway or all the way down I should say on the shed a release usually you want to take one picture that's going to be fine for most things we do have a continuous mode where it will fire off as fast as it can about three point seven frames per second so this is great for sports in action we also have some self timer options we have a remote self timer there is an optional remote that you can get for this we have a two second self timer which allows you to press the shutter release get your hands off the camera so that you're not touching the camera when it fires this should be very useful when you're working on a tripod and you don't have a cable releasing you don't want anything moving on the camera and then finally we have a continuous self timer, which he allows you ten seconds to get in the picture, but you can also set how many's pictures is taken at that time so let's say you have a group of friends and you're afraid somebody's going to blink you could set it to take two, three, four, five or as many pictures as necessary and this could be a lot of fun so that you can have slightly different takes on a group shot. Now if you do want to get in the picture yourself, one great way to do it is with the remote switch. This is a little device called the cannon r c six cells for I believe under thirty bucks and this allows you to get in the picture yourself you're not limited by ten seconds. You could take his much time as you want point this at the camera and the camera will then take the picture so this just gives you a little bit more versatility for self timer shots. It can also be used for other types of shots where you just don't want to bump the camera by pressing the shutter release at the bottom is picture styles now I don't use picture styles because I should in raw if you shoot j peg what's happening when you shoot j peg is that the cameras taking all this true information that it collected and it's kind of packaging it into a nice, easy to read format and when it does this little packaging and compressing, it needs to figure out what you want the image to look like if you remember in the days of film we had different films that were maybe portrait films for good skin tones or we had vivid films for shooting landscapes we can choose those sorts of things in camera if you shoot raw, this doesn't matter if you shoot j pegs you khun slightly tweak the camera for those types of situations I'm not a big fan of these because once again I used raw but we have, you know, portrait landscape neutral and you can even create your own little magic a blend of how you want your pictures developed ah, and so you can get in there and play with this. I'm not going to go fully through this there is more instruction in the instruction manual about that and then of course in the middle is a set button when we're going through the menu and you want to select something and you want to enter that this is kind of like the enter key on a computer you're saying set make this the standard parameter, then at the bottom we have our playback button, so if you want to play back an image, you will hit the playback buttons and then you will use the cross keys left and right to go to the previous image or to the next image. And remember, anything in blue has to do with playback. And so over on the upper right is how we zoom in and zoom out, and we can, of course, changed the display information by hitting that information button in the upper left of the camera. And right next to the playback button is the little blue garbage can. If you want to get rid of an image right there in the field, feel free to delete it there. Be careful about deleting too many images in the field because thescore een on the camera still is relatively small on and it's. Hard to tell something's there's a number of things that can be saved later on, so feel free to delete the absolute worst of your images. But I want to delete too many from out in the field. I would want to see them on a larger screen down there at the very bottom, right is a little tiny light. This is a light when your camera is working, you do not want to turn the camera off, and most importantly, you do not want to pull the card the memory card out of the camera. While it is writing images to the card so if you were to shoot, say a ten shot burst of images that light might stay on for maybe five or ten seconds ah, that camera is storing information the memory card and does not I want to be disturbed you could of course take another picture at that time if you want but just don't pull the memory card out of the camera next up we're going to be looking over to the left hand side so first up here is our flash button this will pop are flash up and let's talk a little bit more about flash so why do you want to use flash? Well if you have to slow a shutter speed, you're going to get a blurry picture in some cases so that's a good time to use flash we could use ah higher isil we talked about the I s o button could raise the sensitivity level but in this case we get a very grainy picture look at that grainy skin all right? So let's leave the ice so nice and low will use the flash and we'll have still little freaky how that works out there with the kids face getting larger but you can see it's nice and sharp detail on skin and so using a low I s o n flash can be a very good combination one of the things too no about flash is that flash does not go forever or at least it's not very effective for very far if their subjects directly in front of you five ten, twelve feet three meters it's going to be good for about that far in this picture here you can see the penguins in the front row are pretty well illuminated with some flash but the one standing just a little bit behind him hardly have any flash on him at all and there is really nothing reaching out to those mountains back there and so it has a very limited distance in which it can work. Now if you're taking a picture person's picture outdoors ah, cloudy day is a great time to shoot a portrait because you have nice even light but adding a little bit of phil flash adds just a little bit of light in the eye sockets and you can add just a little bit of a catch light in the ice you see that little bright spot right in the middle of her eyes is the tell tale sign that I use just a little bit of phil flash and so it's a great technique if there's somebody right in front of you and you want to add just a little kicker of a flash, the built in flash does a very good job and I think that's where it's at its best on this camera all right, sunny days are a terrible time to shoot portrait ce ok, so you're out there it's, bright and sunny you have these heavy shit shadows. Yeah, you can try to lighten things up with that exposure compensation we talked about, but then the over exposed areas just go even more overexposed. So sometimes the better solution is adding a little bit of phil flash to fill in the shadows. You can see the features of the person's face a lot more easily in this case. All right, so that's a little flash and a little bit of extra stuff on this is this particular camera has a top shutter speed of one two hundredth of a second. So there are some center speeds that you may not be able to get to and you have that flash popped up range I think is about three and a half meters or twelve feet. There are some exceptions to the rule, depending on what s so your end but generally think about things that are pretty close right in front of you. There is a special feature for those of you who get involved in flash called flash exposure lock. I'm not going to dive into it too far here there's more information in your instruction manual about it but allows you to fire a pre flash so that your camera can get a better lock on the exposure, and so if you do a lot of flash, you're going to want to check into that feature. There is a red eye reduction lamp to help reducing red eye. This drives me nuts. The problem with the red eye reduction lamp is that there's a light that comes on and shines for about two seconds before you take the picture. If you have taken a picture of a kid, a lot of times, kids think you've already taken the picture and they start turning away red eye can also be fixed in appropriate software programs later on, and so I prefer to turn this off, but it depends on your needs, and we'll come across this of the menu system and you could make your own choice whether to leave it on or off. We also have flash exposure compensation, which allows you to power down the flash if you think it's too powerful and we'll show you some reasons as to why you would want to use that in a little bit. Next up, down at the very bottom is an unlabeled button. This is the mystery button. No, this is just the depth of field preview button, and what this is doing is it's stopping the aperture down to the working aperture that you have set you see when you look through the camera the aperture is wide open and when you want to take a picture it then closes down. So what we have here is we have ice and pirates, very shallow depth of field and what we're going to dio if this works there's a video here showing the aperture closing down next up we have some little rubber doors on the side of the camera and this gives us access to certain parts we haven't a v out if you want to hook your camera up to a traditional tv, we have an hd on my port if you want to hook your camera to an hd tv, we have a remote shutter release cannon makes in remote switch called the rs sixty e three and this is going to sell for I think a little less than fifty bucks and this is nice if you want to fire the camera and not touch the camera while you are doing it. This is very good for landscape photography, for instance, for maybe product photography where you had the camera on a tripod you're at a kind of a slow shutter let's say an eighth of a second you don't want to bump the camera you could be very precise about the timing of this camera about the firing of the camera while this camera does have a built in microphone it's just monaural sound it's, not stereo and you could hook up a stereo microphone right here. There's, some really nice mike's that you can get that hook right up in plug right into the hot shoe on the top of the cameras. So there's a good place to mount them over on the right side of the camera is, of course, where we load our memory cards into the camera. Now this camera uses sd memory cards, and the kind of new versions of sd is sth c, which is a higher capacity card, and xy, which is an extreme capacity qasar card. They will often in this camera, and they basically different. They designate different sizes of cards. Something to note on these cards is that there's a little switch on the side of that protects the card from being written over. So if you take a bunch of pictures and you want to make sure that they don't get deleted, you can flip that switch to the downward position. Toe locket. The other thing to be aware of is there is a card speed down here, and this is a ah minimum speed for writing to video. If you do shoot a lot of video, you probably want to get a car that is class six or higher, and there is a new u h s class weird. We now have you a chess class one, which is one step higher than ten. So one is bigger than ten in that particular case. But under these standard symbols here that you can see here on the card and left, we have class six on the right class ten class stan's gonna write video a little bit faster than the classics card. And as faras memory cards go. While the camera does come with cords to download to your computer, I find it is much easier to buy a relatively cheap card reader that I keep attached to my computer. Some computers, many laptops will have card slots already in the side of the computer, and so it's going to be faster to take the card out, plug it directly into the computer, or to plug it into one of these card readers for downloading, you won't be using the batteries. You won't be using your camera. The camera can be off doing something else. And so it's. A slightly preferred system for getting the images into the computer on the front side of the camera. What do we have here? Well, here's, our red eye reduction land, this is a little flashlight that turns on to reduce red eye. It's also our little self timer indicator lamps so that when we do have the camera in self timer mode we know when the picture is going to be taking because it stays lit for about the last two seconds we have our e f lens mount index so if we have a e f lens with a red dot on the lands, this is what we want to match up to on the camera as we saw earlier, I had an f s lands which has a white square slightly offset so we're going to match up those white squares to mount the lands here's our microphone on the cameras so don't put tape over that our lens relates release button for putting the camera on and off our contacts which we want to make sure do not get damaged or dirty or anything obstructing those for communication with the lands we have are mere, which is thie reflex portion of the single lens reflex the remote control sensor needs to be pointed at this little sensor on the side of the camera and so if you're wondering where you exactly you need to point it, that is what you want to point it at so that was the front of the camera now the bottom of the camera of course is our battery compartment and the battery that you want to put in here is the cannon l p e eight if you use an older camera t to hire excuse me t two I uses the same battery a t one I use is a slightly different battery as dough older rebel cameras we'll have our serial number here that you want to keep note of in case something gets stolen and hey, you can see that little sticker there from borrow lenses thanks borrow lenses and then of course it has our standard quarter twenty tripod socket so this is going to fit all standard tripods luckily there's but the only it's about the only thing in photography that seems to be standardized across the board between all manufacturers is thie size of the tripod socket on the camera. So fortunately that is the same and on the bottom of the camera, if you would like a little bit bigger grip or you would like a vertical grip there is the battery grip b g e eight. Now there is an older version for this for the t one eye the bi g five but this is great for people who either have big hands people who shoot a lot of vertical it's going to be more comfortable because it has a special vertical release it's also good for people who go through batteries quite frequently maybe you're shooting a wedding or something. You can have two batteries in the camera when you use this grip now the kit lands that comes supplied with the camera kind of in its standard packages thie eighteen to fifty five zoom lens, which is a reasonably good basic zoom lands, and this is an e f s lands, and that s stands for small. For the smaller sensor. We're going to explain more about that in just a moment here. Now, this particular lens has a stabilizer that can be turned on or off. It uses a little bit more battery power when it's turned on, but for most hand held photography, I would leave it turned on the auto focus switches. Here you can switch to manual focus if you want to or you can leave it in auto focus I I tend to prefer auto focus for most types of photography, but not all types our zoom ring for adjusting our angle of you are focusing ring, which will use if we're going to manually focus. But if we're in auto focus, we don't want to touch this because the camera is going to be turning this on its own. The filter threads for this particular lands is fifty eight millimeters. If you have a different lands, it might be a different size, but if you want to put a uv filter on it would take a fifty eight millimeter diameter threat. You might notice some little bumps on the edge of the outside there, and this is where the hood will mount. Hood is going to provide a shade over the front of the land so that you can get less flair on mork contrast in your images, which would improve the image quality. It's also serves as a nice kind of bumper on the front of the camera, and so the hood for this particular lands is thie e w sixty psi each and every lens has its own particular hood, so if you have a different lens, you're gonna have to look up to see what hood is the correct hood for that lance. Now some of the lens options that you have, I need to explain the e f versus the e f s because there is a difference in the type of lenses that you can get now. E f lenses are noted by the e f and by the red dot on them, and e f s lenses have that f s designation as well as a white square and your canon rebel can use both types of lenses. So if you on this camera you khun by any current cannon lens and it will work on your camera, the difference is is that the e f lenses are designed for full frame sensors. The e f s lenses air designed for the smaller sensors with light comes through the e f lands it creates a very large image circle large enough to fill the entire full frame of that large sensor the e f s lands produces a smaller image circle to fit the's smaller size area of that frame now if you want to take your f s lands and try to mount it on a full frame camera well number one it probably won't even fit on there but if you couldn't put it on there this is what would happen is that it produces a smaller image circle where you do not get to see the corners there's a vignette ing or darkening in the corners and this is generally what most people in photography think is kind of unacceptable so that's not really an option so if you upgrade from a rebel to say a five d mark two you might need to upgrade your f s lenses because they're not going to work on it now if you want to buy an e f let e f lands and put it on your rebel camera well it's going to produce a very large image circle and your cameras going to take advantage of the middle portion of that image and that's not really a problem at all you do lose some white angle capabilities but you do gain telephoto capabilities so it's very good for telephoto lenses now the standard lands is an acceptable lands it's not overwhelmingly great in its sharpness or its construction, but it's an incredible value because you're basically getting the lens for about one hundred bucks, which is a fantastic deal. If you're satisfied with that lands and you would like a little bit longer lands the one that I would first point you at is the fifty five to two fifty it's, a lightweight, economical choice for a telephoto lands. If you want an upgraded telephoto lens, something a little bit better, a little bit more range, a little bit higher quality optics you would want to look at the seventy two, three hundred. This is an image stabilized lands it's a little bit bigger, lands it's a bit more money but it's a bit better build sharper lands. If you would like to shoot portrait ce or you want to shoot very shallow depth of field, this lands is not much money at all. It's the fifty f one point eight two sells for about one hundred twenty five dollars and it's going to let in close to ten times the amount of light that your kit lens let's in. So it lets in aa lot of light and it's a great value overall as far as the lands it's not that great a lands but it's just so darn cheap it makes it a very good value. If you're into close up photography, they make a number of macro lens is they make one that's f s designed for the smaller sensor that's pretty affordable and small in size and can also double it's a pretty nice portrait lens as well and that's the sixty macro. And so that might be something you might be interested him. All right, that kind of takes us through the buttons. And this is where we're going to look for any questions regarding that? Because we'll take some questions, and then we're going to take just a little bit of a break here in the studio. All right, great. Thanks, john. We have a number of questions going over the past section, so I'll start with serious question. Could you please repeat what? What was said for the depth of field preview button? What does it do? The depth of field preview button. Yeah, sorry about that. We're missing a video. Not sure exactly how that happened. When you look through your camera, the lens is wide open to the widest opening setting leading in this much light as possible. Suppose you have your land set to f twenty two, which is a very small opening. Well, you're not going to see how much depth of field you get. Until you take a picture and look at it on the back of the camera or press in on the depth of field button and if you do set f twenty two and on the sea I'm not sure if I can do this here because of my you could actually hear it stopping down that's if I can do this I don't know if you can hear that it's this close to the microphone as we get I can hear it and so what it's doing is it's stopping the aperture down so that you can look through the viewfinder and see the depth of field that you're going to get? The thing is this used to be a big professional feature on cameras but nowadays frankly it's a whole lot easier just to take a picture and look at it on the back of the camera the advantage that I found, he said if you're in bright light conditions and you can't see the back of the viewfinder or the back lcd, you can see what's going on through the view finder so it's one of the big advantages of an slr versus appointed shoot when you want to look at depth of field very good for landscape photography great thank you question from dull say dough can you use lenses from an older non digital cannon slr with a two three maybe thie the answer has to do with it is it in yose mountain lands because in nineteen eighty seven they change the lens mouth so if it's your grandfather's cannon that he used back in the fifties no you can't if it's back safe from the nineties yes if it mounts simply on there it's going to work so if it's an auto focus lands it's going to work yes, thanks I think we're going to be going over this later but rhea shell has asked how do you shoot raw or j peg? Is there a setting for what we're going to get exactly to that? So we have visuals for that great and photo marsh has asked should you always be in a l servo when shooting any moving subject or just fast sports? Aye aye servo is going to work well for anything that's moving so for instance, the other day I was shooting a portrait of somebody and I wanted them walking slowly just cause I wanted some action if I used one shot I would focus on them they would take one step forward and then be out of focus and so because they are moving period doesn't matter how fast I had it in continuous so it could track their movement and it can track everything from motorcycles to just people walking slowly cool so how d'ya from pakistan had asked, would you use continuous for weddings to so well you know, if dance with the bride and groom were walking down the aisle I would put it in continuous so that I could get a syriza shots where every shot is in focus right? Thank you question from mg hewitt what is the best? I think this was back at the white balance section what's the best setting to use when there are mercury vapor late mercury vapor lights will if you're shooting raw, you won't need to worry about it just put in an auto and you can fix it later you could do a preset where you photograph a white sheet of paper or fight anything that's white photograph it and then once again, as I said, I'm kind of kicking you back to the instruction manual on this one is go into the custom white bounce will actually pass by this when we go through the menu setting on calibrate this photograph to white and so that's probably what I would do if that was really important it's to calibrate it right that in there great and a question from pc consulting does custom white balance work with a great card as well as a white card? It can yes and she just needs to be neutral in color aah black card would be bad because there's no color there s so it's not sure where to base it but a great card or a white card would be fine and photo, marsh also asked, when would you use shade rather than cloudy on the white balance? Okay, so the difference is, is that cloudy is the sun is being obscured by clouds, all right, so it's all getting filtered through those nice white clouds. Nice diffuser, shady day shade open shade is maybe what they should call it. So you're saying the open shade of a barn, it's a sunny day and there's a gigantic blue reflector above you casting blue light down on you? This can cause everything to have a bluish cast on a sunny day, but when you're in the shadows, ok, and I think maybe we're going to talk about this later as well, but I ask you now question from she is there any way to make the camera silent when taking pictures? I take pictures in a classroom and don't want to interrupt the class, will there is a beeping that confirms auto focus that we can turn off when we get into the menu system, so we will specifically show you how to do that. The shutters still makes a sound and so there's no way to get around that you can record video pretty quietly, but it still has that shutter sound and a question from kurt what about using fd lenses with an adapter? You know, I have heard that someone could take those old fd lenses from you know, the nineteen seventy one f one and they could mounted on their camera and somewhere in some garage somebody made an adapter and yes, technically it can be done but it's very, very impractical you lose auto focus, you lose all communication with the lands and frankly, many of those lenses really aren't nearly a sharpest the current lenses it's if the analogy is is that I have an engine in my backyard and I would like to put it in my new car can it be done it's from a ford and I have a toyota can can it be done? Well, yes, with the right amount of tools you can do it it's just probably not worth doing okay. Question from hadiya how do you turn off the lcd or make it it's time for showing the pictures a little bit less? We'll go through that in the menu system where we go into the display options to how long things get display. We do get to customize the camera very but particularly like this so you will be able to make these changes and we'll go by that when we go through the menu system there's a slide for that right as we like to say that see question from the papa john again on them deep is, um can it be changed with firm? Where? So changing the beeping behalf press going to be it could be turned off, but it can it be changes something else. A firm where? Well, we will talk about firm where stars what that is and so forth when we get to it, there's a slide for that on dh they were talking about the beep. Is that with his question was referring to because what we'll be able to turn that off? Just everyone will be able to turn that off without really doing anything other than going to that place in the menu system to turn it on and off. And I will show you how to do that. Okay, great. Syria wants to know. Can john talk about taking brok pretty please. I love ok and was wondering how we can do it with the cannon. T three I well, that is more of a question that you might find answered in my fundamentals of digital photography class. The short answer is you want to shoot with a very wide aperture like f one point eight. The lens that I have on here only goes down to three point five on dso. I can still do it with this one just not as well as having a fast lens that lets in a lot of light but that's something that we talk a lot more about in a general photography class and is a bit more than we have time to get into in this class on this camera in particular okay, a and c question from mg hewitt does the five eighty x to the flash that we talked about also have the video light the five eighty x two does not have the video light on lee that one model which the numbers air escaping the at this very moment I only the one model has the video light on it that's a very that's the only flash on the market that I know that has both video and it's still light and I'm not sure if you talked about this but again from black apple is there a way to directly output footage using the h g m I or so uh I know I would need a special card for that and what would the resolution be? Well, there's uh he kind of touched on when he said the special card for that there is an eye fi card that we'll talk about, which is a card that wirelessly sins pictures to a nearby computer, but it's still images, not video and so that might be what they're referring to but we do right now for here creative live we have this camera hooked up with an hd my cable and at a certain point maybe I'll just do this right now for kicks is aiken switch the camera over and I can show you what we're showing in here and in fact I can kick it into live you and I'll put ken on screen what simon manu exposure I'm going to switch over the aperture priority and so yes you can kick out and I believe this is sending out full hd resolution and I don't know if you're getting it on screen but we can see our apertures and our shutter speeds who were stopped down to f twenty two we need to fix that can we get kenna with bill okay not much with it with this lands so yes you can send out life footage here a couple more questions before we get a break from suze sham nous I've been told that fix lenses act differently on a crop censor what is the conversion can you talk about that? Um fix lenses do not act differently than zoom lenses in that regard this camera has a crop factor of one point six so if you have a hundred millimeter lens on a full frame camera it's going to look like one hundred and sixty millimeter lands on this camera and so everything is kind of twisted or geared towards the telephoto side and so it's very difficult in some ways finding white angle lenses for this camera cannon does make a number of lenses that are wide angle as do other manufacturers but not nearly as many as there are for the full frame system and so for white angle lenses you'll death really be looking at e f s lens is specifically designed for digital okay a question from a cannon and b sixty four how much of a disadvantage is one f point versus nine f points I don't know that it's a disadvantage but there's they're different tools for different purposes and so most of the time I will have one point selected so if I'm just walking around the street taking pictures I usually want to be pretty specific about what I want in focus and I'm going to use the one point for that I use all points usually when I'm focusing on sports and I have a subject maybe it's a bicycle racer coming down the street and I'm filling the frame with them having all the points gives the camera more to grab onto if I have just one point well that might shoot through his arm to the background or between his legs and if I have all nine points I have a bigger bullseye toe work with and so for sports I tend to work with a larger number of points for portrait work you generally want to just keep on one point, because you're going to focus on someone's eye, maybe re composer, you could select one of the different diamond points in there because you want them off center to one side. And so for most people, most of the time, I recommend the center point for focusing its it's a fairly precise tool. But if you know what you're doing, it's a great tool, behalf ok, last question before break, the elf master seventy four wants to know why is the amount of video that can be shot with this camera limited? It has to do with technical things in the camera that I don't recall the specifics too, but it's the way it's recording the type of format that is recording to the type of sensor that's in the camera. It's not designed as a video camera. There are other cameras out there that you straight to a similar style. Ah sensor and card that air just continuous it's just the limitations that we have on the dea solares I'm sorry that I can't go into more technical detail on it, but it's nothing that we can really change at this time.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

CanonT3i_Handout.pdf
CanonT3i_Menu.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

TOnya
 

This was such an awesome class. It's nice to finally be able to figure out my camera. John is such an awesome instructor. I love his classes. I like watching the videos but also need to read the transcripts so I can take notes. It can be a little bit challenging but also very funny at some of the words that the transcription (software?) thinks they are saying. I really get a kick out of it. I have taken John's Fundamentals of Photography and have had so many aha moments in both classes. Its just so nice when everything clicks. John's way of teaching is so down to earth and just easy to absorb the information. Now I'm off to see what I want to do next. Thanks so much for such an awesome class!

Scott Jackson
 

It's almost embarrassing to admit. I've had my T3 Canon for over 5 years, and am just now trying to really learn what all it can do. Up to now, The best I could get in photos, unless I got lucky, was pretty much equivalent to the old 110 pocket cameras. While the T3 is an older model comparatively speaking, especially in the current electronics age, it's still a very good intermediate camera in my view. John as much said this in this course, which made me feel better. I didn't know if it was me, or the camera. Obviously it was me on the poor quality photos. John is so in depth, and speaks well to simple minds like myself. I could understand exactly what he was saying. Everything makes sense now. As John said, the manuals that come with these cameras are a bit over whelming, and just so much to try and read. I learn better with visuals and audio much better. John excels at doing just that. If you have a camera that has so much on it, and you're totally confused like I was, I HIGHLY recommend this course. You'll be glad you did. In just a few hours, I knew more about my camera, and the basics of just about any camera of this type. I was amazed.

Paul Spears
 

I'm a beginner , I'm so glad I took this class. I always come back and re watch it trying to get theses things engrained in my little pea brain. LOL I like this system I can rewatch it when I want or need a refresher. I tried other sites but I like this one the best. If you need help with the T3i or any other Camera they have it all here. I'm now taking the fundamentals of photography. It a lot more in depth but they explain it very well.

Student Work

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