Lessons

Lesson Info

4. Display System

All right so we're going to start getting into the display system the lcd panels and the information that the camera gives back to you and so we have two different systems on the camera essentially that in the viewfinder and that on the back of the lcd so we're going to go ahead and start with what you see in the viewfinder first off the frame that you see is accurate to ninety five percent so there's five percent outside of this area that you are also getting so you're getting a little bit more than you bargained for in these pictures so you have to be a bit careful when you're lining things up with the edges of the frame on this camera because you're going to get a little bit more in the final image the focusing points this camera has nine focusing points and they are slightly different styles of focusing points in the center is a cross point you could see that box is square and it is equally sensitive to horizontal and vertical lines the boxes to the left into the right are more ver...

tical boxes and they are more sensitive to horizontal lines and the top in the bottom box with its shape is more sensitive to vertical lines is so the box in the center is the most sensitive and best sensor for using because it is just the most accurate with different types of light and different types of contrast. Then we have the circle in there. This is the's spot merion area one of the things that we'll get in and shoes here in a moment is the meat oring pattern that we choose, and one of the meeting patterns is spot area where we want to use a very small portion of the scene to read the light, and if we want to choose the spot that's the area that it's going to read down at the bottom, you're not going to see information exactly as it appears here. This is in general, the led information that can be read out on the bottom, and what I want to do is just kind of go through what some of this means, so we're going to start over on the left hand side and you see a little ass trick on the back of your camera. You will see that same ass trick with that thumb button over on the right hand side, this is the auto exposure of lock button when you press down halfway on the shutter release that activates the meter, and if you want to lock it in, you press the button and you'll see this indicator in the viewfinder. If you're using flash, the flash indicator will turn on and there is a special high speed sync mode this is kind of a special mode when used with certain flashes you can use a shutter speed faster than that limit that I told you earlier about which was one two hundredth of a second you could do say one one thousandth of a second with the appropriate flash communicating with the camera we can also do our flash exposure lock and that indicates that we have checked and locked our exposures in and we can also do our flashed exposure compensation which means we can power down the flash or power up the flash if we want to the next a few lines here are your shutter speed information eso your shutter speed that you have set which is generally going to be a fraction like one one thousandth of a second will be listed as one thousand and so there's kind of an assumed fraction that is being set here or any other sorts of general information might also be used with those indicators well then have our aperture setting like f four point oh and then we'll have our exposure level this is our light meter and this is not going to show you all the bars on the bottom but it's going to show you whether you are under exposed or over exposed so if you want to manually expose your picture you will want to get that indicator probably towards the middle to start with and you may need to tweak it a little bit to the left or to the right depending on the scene next up we have d plus, which is a highlight tone priority. This is a special thing that we can turn on and off in the menu system all explain more about it when we hit it in the menu system, we have our eyes, so speed indicated next, and then we have a white balance correction we can go in and customize the white balance. If our camera was shooting everything with a little too much yellow, we could fix it here, and it would give you a warning right here in the viewfinder, we can also shoot in black and white, at least with our jpeg images, and that is something that you definitely don't want to accidentally be stuck on when you didn't intend it. S so there is a warning in the viewfinder because it's a pretty important feature to know about the max burst. This is a number of pictures that we can take right away. Using our motor drive, the camera stores images to the memory card, but before they go to the memory card, they go toe a ram memory buffer, and this camera can hold a relatively small number of them, about ten of them before images go into the memory card, and so if you're shooting in raw. And you lay down on the shutter release and try to take pictures as fastest possible. You're going to be able to shoot for about eight to ten pictures before the camera starts slowing up just because that's the limit of how fast it can store images and then there's a big old circle on the right. And this is your focus confirmation light, and this lets you know that you have achieved sharp focus, and this will also work in manual focusing. If you want an electronic aid, you could manually focus the lens until that turns green, and you know that subject is than in focus. Next up, the back of the camera has your lcd monitor and your quick menu. I mentioned this before there's, a large menu that features basically everything in the camera, but the quick menu is the few most important features that you're most likely to need to change on any given basis. Now, to turn this on and off, you can hit the display button up on the top of the camera and that's going to turn the display on and off. Or you can just hit the cue button to go directly into the quick control menu, and you'll know you will know you're in the quick control menu because one of the features is going to be highlighted in blue. You're going to then use thie cross keys to move and navigate up and down two different rows and different sets of information and you can make changes using the main dialogue on the camera and when you found the setting that you want to adjust it to, you will press the set button on the back of the camera so let's go through what the quick menu has in it and how to change it and what it does the exposure mode this is the mode on you set with the dial on the top of the camera and so you will just simply turn the dial on the top of the camera and this is when the exposure mode will change the shutter speed is kind of the default mode when you're in the manual mode and you'll notice that there's too little blue arrows that indicate that's what the manual dialogues doing when we switch over to the aperture setting, I'm going to try something here I'm gonna try to switch to see if we could do a live feed from the camera we're going to see if this works out here okay? So we could see right now I can change the shutter speed by turning the main dial on the camera if I want to change the aperture, I need to press the a v button on the back of the camera and you'll notice how the f stop another name for the apa church has the blue arrows next to it and now I can change that setting there. And so if I release my finger than I am changing the shutter speed dial and so just letting you know what you're working with and how to change it, all right going to switch back to the keynote talk here, all right, next to that is our eyes. So setting we had the eyes so button on the top of the camera so press that in the main dial and we will see that change in the back of the camera right there, our little d plus, I'm going to keep you hanging on. What exactly? That is that's the highlight tone priority. We'll change that in the menu system. All right? We have our exposure meter right here. This is the same one that we just saw in the viewfinder. This one will show you out to three stops generally it's pretty rare that you would ever go beyond two stops as far as where the indicator would be and just for fun. Let's. Ah, switch over in camera, get super get this switch over there we go. All right, so we can see our indicator is at minus one. I can fix this by changing my shutter speeds. I'm at minus three and I can correct for this at one twenty fifth f nine is the correct shutter speed and aperture for this particular situation now suppose I wanted a different aperture let's say oh I would like to shoot it f twenty two well I'm going to press the aperture button I'll change that to have twenty two and now where's my indicator it's way over at minus so I need to make some adjustments in my shutter speed all the way down here to a quarter second so that would be an even exposure and that's how I would manually do the exposure now what's going on with my eyes so it's up a thirty two hundred I told you to be down at one hundred so let's set this at one hundred and find out what happens now now I'm really underexposed and I'm going to need you need to change my shutter speed even more all the way down ten well where is it? Somewhere between six and eight seconds we'll call it eight seconds f twenty two it I saw one hundred is the proper exposure here a creative life studios you could tell our lights are not on very bright. All right, I'm gonna switch back to the keynote here okay? So next up over on the right hand side is our flash exposure compensation you can power down or power up the flash if you want to and here is why you would want to do that and I told you that using flash for people photography it is a great thing to dio you'll notice the tt l shot which stands for through the lens this's the camera figuring everything out for me fired the flash and put a lot of light on this little girl's face. I could power down the flash you can see with the minus one or minus two and in this particular case, I kind of like minus one I think it has a more natural look than the straight automatic t t l look and so I think for a lot of people photography, if that's what you d'oh, you're gonna want to back off that flash power a little bit. Let me show you another example so tt l really blew out the skin tones here and it partly has to do with that there's a fairly dark background. And she has a fairly dark top on and the flashes trying to lighten up the skin to compensate for the other dark areas in the photograph. And in this siri's I like minus two as I think the most balanced natural look to it, even though there is a lot of artificial flash and there it's it's not overblown like the others and it's not too dark like minus three now where you want to adjust this is completely up to you in the situation that you shoot, but I think for many people you're going to want to power down the flash. The camera tends to one overpowered a bit much in my opinion, and so a lot of photographers will leave their flash at minus one or maybe minus one and a third because we could do third stop increments as well as just a standard place where they leave their flash all the time. The next road down we have our picture mount and this is what we kind of talked about her earlier kind of like the different films that we use weaken select do we want a portrait? Do we want more vivid colors in a landscape? If you shoot raw, this doesn't matter, eh? So it's not something that I personally changed at all are white balance mode can be changed here and this is going to be the quickest way actually it's the second quicker because we do actually have a button on the back of the camera where we can change white balance, but we can also do it here white balance adjustment this is that correction that weaken dio this is something I think hardly anyone will go in and do, and I'm surprised that they put it in this menu system, we have white balance bracketing once again, I think this is something that very few people are ever going to use, but if you're not sure about the white balance and you wanted to shoot a siri's of photographs with different white balances, you could do it here. I've never done it though. Auto, lightning, optimizer this is going to lighten the shadows and it's not something that I would always recommend, but let me show you how it is used. So in this particular case, we have some shadowed areas that are a little bit dark, and we've lost some of the information in there. If we turn the optimizer on it's, like we've added a whole bunch of phil flash to the shadowed areas, and I think it helps this photo out take a look at the side by side version of it. And so this is a good case for yeah, it's a good thing to turn on the problem is, is that you don't always want light in the shadows, and so in this particular case, the image with mohr contrast and darker shadows, I think looks better now. This is something that you can do afterwards with more control in a good program like adobe light room, which is my preferred. Program for organizing, developing and working with images, but there's a lot of programs out there that you could do this with as well on this is something that I would tend to want to leave off and manually control later unless there was a really good reason otherwise little indicator over on the side, if the flashes popped up, which I think would be pretty obvious by just looking at the top of the camera and then our auto focus mode, we also have control on the back of the camera. If you recall, there was an a f button where we can change this, but we can dive into the mode here and change things as well. We have our drive mode, which once again we have a button directly on the back, the camera, and this is just a secondary place where we could make this adjustment. This is, however, the only place or not, the only place, but the quickest place in the easiest place to change arm eatery modes, and we'll have some different options in the meter in mode that we'll talk a little bit more about when we get into the menu system. Well, actually, we're going to talk about it now, how about that, uh, the first option is evaluated meeting in this uses a very large area of the scene it breaks it up into small boxes and then compares and contrasts each box with one another and this is my preferred media ring system for most types of photography you also have the option of partial metering which is a fairly small circle towards the middle we have spot majoring we talked about a little bit earlier with which is thie indicated circle on the screen and for those you in the traditional world who like the center waited metering of cameras of yesterday we do have the traditional center waited meters so either we have a variety of small circles in the middle of small medium and large or the evaluated metering once again evaluative is my preferred system it seems to work really good and I use manual a lot so I can adjust quite easily from the recommended settings from the camera. So you have these four different ones to choose from and they're all good for their own reasons. Next up we have our file types we have right here in the quick menu. If you go to that, you can change from raw to j peg to rob plus j peg and you'll see that there are actually a couple different largest couple mediums and several raw j pigs if you do want to shoot j peg, which is a compressed, small, easily transferrable, easy, easily readable format if this was my camera and I was going to shoot j peg for some reason I would probably shoot large quality j pegs the one on the very, very top because that's going to give you the finest quality t j picks that the camera will produce. As I said, this camera is designed for people who don't own computers, and if you wanted a different file size well, you could shoot it straight in the camera. The s one, two, three and four are very small file sizes, and you're not really taking vantage of the eighteen megapixels and the relatively large sensor in this camera when you're shooting for those small j picks, so either you're going to want to be at the largest, finest quality j peg or you're going to want to be in raw roz the preferred system because you get a gather all the image data you can work with images later on. You could always make a small j peg out of iraq, but you can't make a rock out of a j peg. Now you also have the option of shooting raw plus j peg, I don't like doing this, but sometimes it's necessary in a few special circumstances in the situation, maybe you're shooting your friend's wedding where they want high quality, raw images from the shoot, but they also want you to do a slide show at the reception using jpeg images because that's what program you have for making a slide show well rather than downloading your five hundred raw images converting them into j peg and then put him into a slide show which could take oh maybe forty five minutes or an hour and a half shooting j pegs along with roz you take the j pegs make the slide show out of that and then save the ross for the final prince later on for the bride and groom and so that would be a special situation where you could choose both but I don't like doing that on a regular basis because you end up with duplicate files with very similar file names and then down at the very bottom we have just the little notation that you are in the quick menu activated by hitting the q button we have a little battery symbol to indicate your battery life and then we have the total remaining shots on that memory card and so this is slightly different than the burst that you saw in the viewfinder which was how many pictures you could take right away at the next setting. This is the total number of shots on the card and I think that's going to take us through all the viewings there so we're going to take a look for some questions here regarding the quick menu or things in the viewfinder okay, great the last question was from photo marsh what is the difference between using a flash or auto lighting option for lighting the shadows? Okay, well the flash is obviously going to pop up on the camera or it's going to fire from an external flash and it's adding new light into the scene and it's going to cast its own shadows and it's generally only going to be good for areas directly in front of the photographer and that light falls off very quickly and so if the light reaches out to say ten feet at twenty feet it's going to have very, very little effect using that auto lightning is going to affect everything in the shadows no matter where it is whether it's right next to you or a quarter mile away great another question from photo marsh I was would you use all points for landscape? This was back on the focusing all points for landscape you could. The problem is is that when you use all points in each point hits something slightly different ok, so you're not pointed at a billboard you have ah mountain scene and there's some flowers in the foreground and mountains in the background. Each point hits something different at a different distance and what it chooses to focus on is whatever is closest to you and that may not be what you want and focus or how you want the camera to focus so it could be used but I wouldn't recommend it it might be good for the beginner photographer who doesn't even know that there's focusing points but now that you know there's focusing points I would probably choose the center point pick what spot you want in focus and then recompose the shot if it's shallow depth of field you know you what you want and focus is going to be in focus if you're using a large debt the field you're going to be ableto kind of where the middle point is where the focus is going to have some in front of it and you're gonna have some depth of field behind it and so it gets to a little bit more advanced focusing technique beyond the scope of this class but I would say probably single point a question from pc consulting does that auto light optimizer affect raw images? The auto white optimizer does not affect raw it's going to be in jpeg images on lee and if you have raw and a decent software program like adobe light room and I'm totally not getting a kickback from a toby on this I just like it you can do all of that in there with just a little slider switch with much more control when you do it in camera it kind of does it to one degree and that's it once you've done it it's done and there's no adjusting it could you please show ah mom to six how to get to the exposure compensation again? Ok let's switch this over so that we can turn this on so exposure compensation they believe we're going to have to have the flash up okay are we in the queue menu? Ok, so I'm going to go down and over to our flash plus minus that is our exposure compensation you until we have the tool tips turned on right now which when will you go to something that tells us what it does adjust the flash level to fine tune the subject's brightness? I will then press set and I can now go minus or plus and not sure why I would want to go plus but I could so for many people pictures I might set it right here at minus one or maybe minus one in a third because a lot of photographers who shoot portrait ce maybe some photographers want a very subtle flash just a little bit of gleam in the eye the slight hint that you've added a little bit of lights a lot of people don't like doing the big obvious super strobe in the face type thing and so I'm gonna go ahead and set this to minus one and I'm going to press the set button on it and so now you can see is that it is set at minus one hopefully that clearly explains that ok, I'm going to read this one and so it's a little bit long but from the elf master seventy four when shooting with flash at least built in flash the exposure level indicator will have all the bars lit up if you don't press the shutter button right away and take a picture some of the bars will become unlit starting from the outside towards the middle of the display is this the indication of flash power if not, what exactly is the point of this who that sounds kind of interesting okay, so I apologize for the I just want to point it at something very basic here and so uh it's going changed my aperture here to something more practical stop that let's go down here to five point six let's change to a shutter speed of a sixteenth of a second so we don't have enough light in here if I fire the flans I'm trying to figure out exactly what they're who knows what sort of problems that's going to cause with our systems here okay, so we got the picture on and let's read through that question uh when shooting with flash at least a building flashy exposure exposure level indicator we'll have all the bars lit up if you don't press the shutter button right away ok so that's not happening on my camera okay? And so I'm not sure what's going on because you can see and then the question was, um some of the bars will become unlit starting from the outside towards the male displays this an indication of flash power I am gonna have to throw out a very unusual I don't know on that one that is unusual maybe the elf master seventy four can re explain in the chat room exactly what you're trying to ask okay uh question from kalen austin can you explain the low battery warnings does thie icon change color or is there an audible warning? Well the battery will be less full let's see if this will come back here they basically it'll look like a hollow battery down at the bottom actually let me see if I could turn that off and so you can see there's a battery outline and three little bits and pieces that fill it up as it lowers in battery power you will lose the big bit on the left and then the bit in the middle and then it'll be empty and then a leap linking at you when it's down about the last ten percent question from pc consulting on your screen as well as mine I do not see the white balance bracketing how do we get there? That is something that we will be turning on and going into the menu system let's see if I can get there directly yes it's it's turned off it is something that will overall, turn on in the menu system, but I think we can go in and adjust once we've turned it on in here and see if I can find this white balance shift said, ok, come back to the quick man you see now. It's indicated lips I'm kind of fighting with their display systems here. There you go, you know, turned off it was there for a moment, let's see if I could there it is it's interesting, though it's just notifying me that I have turned, I have adjusted it so it's more of a warning, then a place to go in and change it. I need to go into the menu system to make these changes, and this is not something don't freak out, people stay calm, this is something that you will not need to do with most cases came question from evan, what is the sensor exposer exposure range without adding exposure compensation? I think they're kind of referring to kind of jumped the overall exposure range, which, uh, I don't know that I have a technical number on this particular one, but in general we're looking at around five or six stops of brightness from light to dark, our eyes, we'll see a much greater range, I think some people claim that we have a twenty stop a difference that we can see in our eyes from dark to highlights but of course our eyes or pupils are adjusting our retinas are absorbing different amounts of light and so it's not really a fair comparison which is a whole interesting comparison comparing how the human eye works versus the brain and that's actually class one in the fundamentals of digital photography the classes how the brain and the eyes look at things versus the cameron so that's one of the limitations among this camera and all digital cam it is that they don't see quite the way a human eye does especially with highlights and shadows okay question from ali how do I set up my lcd screen on to use it while I composed photos instead of looking through my viewfinder well that would be the a button in the back of the camera that looks like the miniature camera which is the live view button and so if we have my overhead camera turned on when she's just gonna press this button right here and we're going to go into the live view and have the exciting view of the remote control here let's I'm going to throw this in the manual focus see if I can manually focus that close so there we go and so there we have can it completely out of focus little hot so we're gonna adjust our shutter speed everyone anyone ever said you're a little too hot all the time, all the time. So we're adjusting our exposure there. And so that is how we turn that on enough.