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Button Layout: Back and Sides

Lesson 5 from: Canon Rebel T4i / 650D/T5i Addendum Fast Start

John Greengo

Button Layout: Back and Sides

Lesson 5 from: Canon Rebel T4i / 650D/T5i Addendum Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

5. Button Layout: Back and Sides

Next Lesson: Lenses

Lesson Info

Button Layout: Back and Sides

Okay, we're gonna move around to the back side of the camera now, a lot of controls on the back. The menu button on the top left is what we're going to spend the whole second half of this class going into. And so that's where kind of the full list of all the options in the camera are, so we'll be going through that line by line. Later on, I mentioned the info button previously, info button is good to press any time you're in live you movie view, play back. If you want to change what's on the screen, do you just want to see the image? Or do you want to see shutter speed, aperture information, the history graham or other exposure information or technical information about the camera just always pressing the info button will never heard anything so good. Good button to kind of play around with this camera has a sensor in it, unlike the t three I, which does not, but the t two I does so see if you can follow that this camera has a little ice sensor in it, and when you put your eye up to it...

, the screen on the back of the camera will go blank because it assumes that your eyes up to the viewfinder and you don't want this. Bright light right below your eye and so if you put your finger in front of it, that will also block it as well if you have it on a tripod or you haven't handheld in front of you, so just be aware of that, right on the top right hand side of your viewfinder is a di achter if you look through your view finder and you're frustrated by your failing vision, it might not be your eyes. It might just be the diop ter in the camera, so what you want to do is you want to be able to look through the viewfinder you might need to press halfway down on the shutter release so that you can see that information line of lights below the frame that should be really clear to your eyes. If it is not, just look through the camera and adjust this diop ter it's got little steps on it, but be aware that as you take it in and out of your camera bag, it's sometimes gets moved around a little bit and you may need to adjust it. So just remember if it's out of focus, check the die after first, the main lcd on the back, the camera something that we're going to be working with a lot later, but it's a very high resolution screen anyone who has a fancy iphone five this actually has higher resolution than that it's got about four hundred d p I s so it's a very, very high quality screen on here. Now, the screen on this is kind of new because it has touch screen options, and I'm not going to go in to explain every touchscreen gesture and thing that you can do on this camera. But down in the left hand corner of the screen is often depending what mode urine there's going to be a little q, you compress that, and then that kind of returns gets switches over to return so that you can get in and use the touch screen function on the camera, so you basically just touch the screen to kind of get it activated. To see that queue, press the q in the ongoing and start making changes from there, the camera has a sensor that sense, or the screen on the back is sensitive to different types of gestures like swipes, pinches and spreads. If you've used a smartphone before, you'll know what those are. You can also do something called touch shooting where you activate the shutter by touching the screen, which can be kind of nice in certain situations, and this will work in play back so you can scroll through images and you can also use it in the movie mode. And so just once again you can tap the screen to focus as well and so here's a little video of me playing around with the touch screen zooming in and we're playing around john it blows me away your presentations and wow look at that it doesn't it that works pretty well and so play around with that as much as you like some people like touch screen some people don't I'm not a huge fan of it but I found that it is a little bit quicker and easier in some situations because if you're visually orientated person it's like yeah that's what I want to change right there and you can change it the only thing I don't like is you start getting a little bit of fingerprints on the screen although the screen is pretty well protected and doesn't have his batter problem with fingerprints as previous screens so there is a little bit more information in the instruction manual but feel free to have fun with that next up is our live you and movie record button so the movie record section when you have the camera in the movie mode this is the button that starts recording not the shutter release out in front so we would start pressing it and back and like a video camera you press it wants to start in once to stop you don't have to leave your finger on it the entire time the other part of it is live you and this is where it kicks the camera and alive you so it's kind of switch modes ourselves and going toe live you and so by pressing this button it pops the mere up opens the shutter and now in the back of the screen you can see what the lenses planted at and this could be really handy for a few reasons it's nice when you want to get the camera into a unique perspective for different composition I works really well on tripods because it's kind of hard to stand and look through a camera sometimes when they're on tripods and with the flip out screen on this so you know clearly we have a flip out screen that just clicks in and moves around like this and you can get this held down low you could hold it up over your head if you're going to get a concert or a parade or you just need to shoot over people's heads or something on dso just moving this screen around with live you does work pretty well and just gives you some more options on creative angles for shooting once again remember to use that information button sometimes you want to see all that technical information sometimes you just want to concentrate on the image one of the other cool things that you khun dio landscape in advanced landscape technique is to zoom in using the two buttons in the upper right hand corner there's a zoom out on the left and zoom in on the right and you can do this while you're in line view if you're in manual focus, you can then manually focus while the camera is zoomed in ten times magnification to check focus and it's a very good way for getting exact focus right when you have a little bit of time and you want to go through the full settings now once again like the movie mode when in the cameras in the live view mode auto focusing is not the best. This is not it's forte you might say live you is the wrong mode to use when you want to shoot sports action okay? It is absolutely the wrong mode if you're trying to track a subject moving towards you or away from you, we do have very similar focusing systems available to us we have faced tracking which looks for faces we have the flexi zone multi and single, which is ways that the camera is looking on screen at a subject trying to figure out its distance and get the camera there as soon as possible it can get there it's often a little bit slow in clumsy getting there and so in live you I often recommend manual focusing now there is a fourth mode in this called quick mode where the camera drops the mere down so you can't see what's going on it focuses very quickly using its traditional focusing system that we have yet to talk about it's very, very quick but it's very disruptive because you can't see what the camera is focusing on when it's focusing eso it's a it's a challenging mo to use and I'm not a big fan of that one myself in this mode as in video we can choose continuous focus or not continuous focus a cz I've said I don't know how many times and I will say many more times the camera is not good in continuous focusing technically it can do it it's just not great at doing it and so I would switch to a completely different mode if you're going to shoot sports but it's really nice for still life type shots for set up landscape tripod type shots live you can work very well for handheld work I'm not as big a fan for it with it with auto force now if you are going to use the auto focus system, the sensor has kind of two different areas that you should know about so most all of the screen not all of it, but most of it is contrast detection area so it's looking for contrast it if you point it at a blank white wall it's gonna have no idea what to do it needs line's, vertical lines, lights and darks to focus on. Now. It does have what's called a phase detection area that is in the middle, and this is going to be a little bit quicker and faster for focusing. And so if your subjects are towards the middle when you're in live you or in the movie mode, it's going to be a lot quicker to focus so it's just very challenging to focus and focus on things off to the side and you'll see this is kind of true. We get in and talk about the standard focusing system on, uh, the camera as well, but there are different areas that it is looking at, so those are some things to know about. If you want to use live view on the camera, continuing our way around the back of the camera up in the top right hand corner. I often call these the thumb buttons because that's the finger your most often hitting them with is a couple of dual purpose buttons. They do two different things. Meter lock locks the meter. Normally, when you have the camera in your hand and you planted around at different things, the meter is constantly adjusting for whatever you happen to be pointing it out. If you find the right reading that you want and you want to lock it in, you can press that button in, and that exposure will stay locked in for a short period of time. It depends on what mode you use if you use the manual mode, but it really doesn't do anything that if you use aperture, priority time, value or program, then it will lock that exposure in because in manual it's, already locked in now, the second part of this, you'll notice zoom out using blue. This is something that generally refers to things in play back. We did see how we could use this in live you to zoom in and zoom out, but in the playback mode you can zoom out what happens when you zoom out from one image you can see for images, then you can see nine images. The button right next to it is something that we consume in with, and so those two buttons air once that you will use in play back now the right hand button. The focus point activates the focusing points so that we can change them. So in order to change one of the nine focusing points that you have in this camera, you would first press the focusing points button, and then you have two options. You can turn the dialogue the top front of the camera, or you compress anyone of the cross keys or the set button in the back of the camera, and you can select either all of the nine points or any one of the nine points that you want. By pressing the set button, you go back and forth between the center and all the points. Now, one of the things that they have improved on this camera is that they have added cross type sensors on all focusing points, which there is a huge cheer from people who who are doing action photography with this camera. Uh, I have to throw a slight wet towel on this and damper this a little bit. You do need a lens that has an aperture of two point eight or faster to really make that work out right. S o the standard kit lens that comes with the camera, I have a lens on here, that's at f four. Those cross sensors are not working for me right now, and they won't be working for most people with their standard caitlin's. But if you do get that upgraded two point eight lands and there's, not a lot of him, and they sell from typically more than the camera does, it will work faster, but if you purchase a fast prime, that will be something that is helpful in many ways now, the center point is kind of unusual from the other points they're all cross sensitive, but the center point is roughly twice as sensitive as all the other points in its sensitivity to vertical lines, horizontal lines, various contrast. And so if you had to choose one point, the best one is the center point uh, and so that's, the one I use for very precise focusing that's when I use most of the time on my camera. Ok, moving down the back side of the camera, we have our aperture value exposure, compensation, but now this was the aperture value when we had our camera in manual, we needed to press this button and turn the main dial to change your aperture when we're in the aperture priority mode, a v mode, the tv mode or the program mode. By pressing this button and turning the dial, we get something called exposure compensation. This is a fancy way of saying, lighten the picture and make it darker. So when you take a picture of the camera's going to figure out the best shutter speed and aperture, depending on the mode, you haven't said and let's say in the program out it's going to figure out a good combination of shutter speed, an aperture. And if you want to have a darker version and a lighter version, just because you're not too sure which one's going to come out the best, you can simply die elin a plus one or minus one by pressing the button and turning the main dial on the camera. The most important thing to know about exposure compensation because you need to reset it to zero when you are done, because it will stay wherever you left it s so just be aware if you do like to use this mode, get it reset to zero, okay, right below that is the quick control button. Now the menu button on the camera has the full list of options on the camera. The quick control button has a quick listing of the most important functions on the camera, and we were going to talk about this screen in this button in more depth a little bit later on but it's a quick way to change some of the more important features on the camera over on the right hand side, those little tiny holes on the side of your camera that is this speaker system, so when you play movies back, you can hear what you recorded, we have our cross keys that we've been working with before we're going to use these to navigate for menu, focusing for menus. For using for selecting, focusing points and each one of these buttons has a specific function as well, with a little symbol and or letter code that is on it. So first off in these is the white balance button and white balance is the ability of the camera to adjust for different color colored lights that were shooting under the camera doesn't know what color of the light is, and sometimes it needs a little bit of direction as to what type of light source we are working within, and this is all based off of the kelvin scale and so there's a number of settings that are designed for natural lighting, for instance, daylight cloudy and shady conditions, then we have tungsten, fluorescent and flash for some artificial light sources. And then we also have a custom one, and I'm not going to go into the full explanation on how to use the custom, but here's the basic concept, you're in a situation that you have really funky lighting, and you need to get it spot on. Correct. What you do is you find a white sheet of paper, you photograph the white sheet of paper, and then you go into the custom menu setting, and I'll show that to you when we get there and you would say, this picture is supposed to be white. And you would fill the frame up with the white shot, and the camera would then figure out what color the light sources you are working under, and then would then fix that in the next pictures that you take s oh, that might work out for somebody who's working, say, wedding photographer shooting a wedding. They have really unusual mixture of light, and they want to get the color right on. That would be one way of getting it set right in there. No, the camera also has something called auto white balance, and normally I hate anything that says auto, I just don't want the camera doing things for me, but this is kind of my one exception to the rule, and the reason for this is that first off cannons auto white balance does a reasonably good job in my it's not perfect, but it does a pretty good job. Most of the time. We're going to get into raw and j peg later on. If you are user that uses raw, I would just leave it there pretty much all the time. That's the way I shoot because you can fix it later without any implications without damaging the photograph in any way, if you do shoot j pegs, what I would recommend is what a white balance for the most part. And then switching to one of the other settings when you get funky color and so if you're working in your living room and everything's orange I would turn it to the tungsten setting at that point do remember to change it when you get back out. But auto white balance is kind of a good base setting in this camera in my opinion and so when you pressed the white balance button, which is the top of those cross keys, you're going to get all of those little options and you can just dial back and forth which when you want and then press the set key over on the right hand side we have the auto focus button and this is for designating what type of focusing system if you are brand new to canon cameras, there is a completely different auto focus button over here on the side of your lands that says auto focus manual focus now that should be an auto focus otherwise that this feature is not going to work in your camera. You have to have your lens in auto focus so once your lenses in auto focus you have three options one shot a I focus in a I servo most of the time many people's cameras is set at one shot. What happens in this mode is that the camera will focus on the first solid object that it configure out what that is, it focuses on it, and it stops, which is great for a person standing there or a car that you're going to photograph that's parked there or something like that. The other option is to focus on things that are moving sports action, you're going to photograph sports, you need to be able to have that len's tracking the subject back and forth that would be considered a I servo, or continuous, focusing so that the camera is constantly adjusting the focus for the different distances between you and the subject. Now, the camera also does include an intelligent mode and artificial intelligent most called a I focus, and this is where the camera tries to figure out if it's moving, or if it's. Still, the problem with this mode is that it is a little unpredictable how it's going to react to what you are shooting. I don't recommend this mode because I have found that most people are either shooting sports or they are not shooting sports, and so I would either choose servo for sports or one shot for basic photography. You can experiment with a I focus, but I will give you a hint, it's not even included on professional level cameras because they don't use it, it doesn't work all the time, kind of the way you would hope it, what next up? Over on the left hand side, we have the drive mode back in the old days when we used to drive film through the camera. This is what happens when you press down on the shutter release normally would have the camera set to single shooting. Press down on the shutter release takes one picture. We do have the continuous mode, which will shoot at five frames a second on this camera, which is blazingly fast for a little camera like this. We also have a couple of modes for the self timer. We have a self timer and remote mode and where's our remote. Theirs are remote. You get the little cannon r c six. Pretty good deal sells for less than thirty bucks, and you can have all the time in the world to get in the picture yourself. And so, if you and eighty your friends are doing a human pyramid, you don't have to build that human pyramid in ten seconds. You can take all the time you want to get in the picture. There is also a two second self timer, which is a great mode for anybody working on a tripod. You can set the camera into two second self timer. That way, when you press the shutter release, you get your hands off the camera, vibrations settle out and nothing is a chain or moving the camera during the picture? There is also a continuous self timer where you can go in and have the camera take two, three up to nine pictures after ten seconds and that because of that could be kind of fun if you have friends and you're going to do a different pose on each shot, for instance, or you want to catch your friends while they're not blinking several opportunities had it all right. Next up is the picture styles. This is the button on the bottom quick word. If you are shooting raw, this doesn't matter if you shoot j peg, it matters a little bit when you shoot j peg images thie camera, since all your pictures through a little bit of processing, it kind of decides what your picture is going to look like, and this is how you can have some say in a what that picture is going to look like. So if you're going to shoot landscape shots, they typically tend to have a little bit more vivid colors. You could set it to the landscape mode. Personally, I think this is better done in the computer after you have made the shot, because once it is done in camera, it's kind of hard undo it. You might think of it it's like making a pizza once you put the toppings on the pizza and you cook it it's kind of hard to change it at that point you can it just kind of becomes a little bit of a mess at that point on dso mice recommendation here is probably just leaving it in the standard mode once again this is only going to affect people who are shooting j pigs or the j peg versions of shots that you take in the middle is a set button on its own. It doesn't do anything so he just press the button while your cameras kind of ready to shoot it's not going to do anything but you will be using it for focusing points and when we get into the menu system it's the button you press it's kind of like the enter key on a keyboard. All right, what do we got next? Yes, the play button on the back of the camera so you notice this is in blue and features that are related to playback are in blue. Now the cross keys, the left and right will go to previous image and next image and you can always use the information button to kind of scroll through different groups of information on your about your image, shutter speed aperture, time a day, history graham and so forth and, of course, up in the right hand column. Right hand column, right hand side of the current camera. We have our zoom features so you can zoom in and zoom out whenever I take a picture that I really, really want to make. Perfect. I take a picture and I zoom in to make sure it's sharp uh, that way, you can be assured before you leave the scene gives you a chance to go back and take another picture. So it's one of the great things about digital cameras is checking before you move on to the next shot, so feel free to use those to check your pictures. We have our garbage about button, which is going to be the quickest, easiest way to delete images on the fly next to that, we have a card light this turns red any time the camera is writing information to the memory card or pulling or working with the memory card. In some way, the main thing to know about this light is don't take the memory card out of the camera when the light is on and don't take the battery out of the the camera. If you turn the camera off, the camera will just stay on and continue working until it's done so just you can play with the camera a little bit because it's just going to continue to work in the background, but it is working at that time we don't normally take breaks here, but this might be a good time to just take a a brief question and answer break and so if you have any if you've had a pile up of questions, we'll get it maybe just do a few of them here sounds good we've got bill coal miner, twenty two wanted to know if the great heart will affect the the way the white balance shows up on the lcd, so I think they were probably talking about shooting that custom white down so a great card word would work just fine you don't want to use a black card because it needs light a white piece of paper works very well a great car works quite well I would probably prefer a white sheet of paper, but make sure it's not some sort of manila envelope that slightly colored and so a great card would not be bad at all something be fine and then follow under that a c m eighty three wants to know if that will like it the white color balance want to show up on the lcd if you're in live you how let's see if it will show up in live you will, you could shoot it because there's a couple things going on first off you need to shoot the picture and you could shoot it with live you or standard that doesn't matter once you shoot it you go into the menu system you tell him you want to use the last picture for a custom white balance and so you could you're not using live you using your menu system at that time so I I'm gonna have to say that that question is not relevant it doesn't apply it doesn't work out right? You can shoot the picture in live you unless I'm misunderstanding the question I think they're just wanting whether the color switch like joe if you will see it right yes you'll see it in live you okay? Yeah, because if it's if you're getting wacky colors that's how you're going to know is what's in live you or the playback of the image is going to look back now the screen on the camera is somewhat limited so it's not exactly the colors you're going to get but it's pretty darn close I haven't I haven't done any color calibration of my my screen on the camera can I do that yet they need a little tiny little device that equip on there you go school to skin calibration what were you doing last night way doing tonight? So little follow up question to that is it is the lcd screen and glass screen is a glass um I don't know the materials it's it's a new material they've reduced I know some of the air surfaces there I believe it is glass although it feels kind of warm glass typically feels pretty cold when you touch it on this feels more plasticky but it's kind of cool I don't know and I don't know that's not the stuff that I know does it matter in the operation of it it seems to be a pretty durable screen I mean I'm surprised when they first started including these on cameras it's like well that's gonna get broken and ok maybe I haven't been attention but I have yet to see a camera with a broken screen on yeah they might have been asking because if it's a touch screen than what's the likelihood is gonna get scratched up right I'm not sure let me get my keys not going to do that violence is there live it does seem to handle fingerprints quite um we had a clarification I guess I know you talked a lot about the the way the focusing work catching photons asked do some of the focus points acquire focus faster I think you kind of answered that yeah the center point for the nine focusing points the center is the best when it comes to live your movie focusing there's that kind of chevron shape in the middle where it's more sensitive and can pick up different types of things and from my understanding is that there are basically little focusing fairies buried into the sensor in that middle portion that helped focus in there focusing fairies I haven't found that future great it's very deep in the instruction it's on the teacher's edition. All right, well, bill, since this is your question, I believe I'll let you ask that yeah, I heard about nato bias so this is what I've heard more talk about that recently maybe can you talk about a little bit and if you understand share it is well when the when an image sensor is developed it has kind of its basic sensitivity where does it get the best performance? And with this camera its eyes so one hon with a lot of cameras, its eyes so one hundred and so it's where a sensor is getting the just the right amount of light it's kind of like a piece of film it doesn't get too much it doesn't get too little it's receiving just the right amount of light. Tio get the cleanest, sharpest image possible and that's what's happened when you set your camera guy so one hundred when you said it at two hundred what is technically happening is half the amount of light is coming into the camera and the camera sensor receives half the amount of light and it tries to make a good looking image and it's kind of like going up to the monitor and turning up the brightness by double it's kind of not working with as much information to start with, which is why you get lower quality at two hundred fact of the matter is is that this camera's phenomenal at two hundred not as good as it is at one hundred but still really good it's created four hundred very good at eight hundred and you kind of saw how it steps down the ladder of worsen worst quality as we go up because each time we go up we're getting in half assed much light and so it has less to work with and it's trying to amplify that signal and work with it and so the native sensitivity is just kind of where it's best at and they have tweaked the design of the sensors so its eyes so one hundred which is an also convenient number to remember and you can work with cool thank you and let's say that just to clarify again from g man on the question that we talked about when you change the white balance and whether you see that on the lcd screen when you're shooting if you are shooting in broad will you see that as well so maybe I don't know we're going to talk if there's a slide for it but talking about what you actually see right if you're shooting in all ok, so let's say you're shooting in wrong and you have a room filled with tungsten light and you shoot a picture in auto white balance you're likely going to get a picture that's orange because the camera has a hard time figuring out understand it's it's not great in that scenario you switch it to tungsten still shooting raw you're going to shoot pictures they're probably going to look pretty clean and white light when you downloaded to your computer it's going tohave a tungsten setting on it but in a program like light room or photo shop you can go in and adjust that setting wherever you want and the key thing is without damaging the photograph and you could go back and reset it wherever you want without any damage and so it does apply that setting to that picture but you can adjust it later if you shoot raw so what? What what you're seeing on the back is not the raw image you're seeing it j peg version well, you never really see orion mich in camera you're always seen that paper version of it but it's gonna have that white balance applied to it right? We do a couple more questions yeah, absolutely is there a sea so rocks has asked can you do time us photography from the camera you need an extra device the camera does not have anything built in for doing time lapse photography which for those of you who don't know that's where the camera fires a picture for instance every ten seconds it has a self timer for once but that's not quite a time lapse there there isn't any device from canon that you could hook up to it and there is no really well known other devices but it's possible that somebody has jury rigged to something for it so it's it's not the best camera you would want to step up in the next line in camera candid cameras if you wanted to do time lapse photography you could of course just stand there with a stopwatch every ten seconds for like two hours you could do it it is capable up two hundred thousand times right? All right a question from rocky regarding the meter lock button I noticed that even when it's activated I can still change for instance the aperture in ap mode is that correct or is that user air? Well let me just give a real world try so I'm gonna put my camera did they say they were an aperture priority correct so I'm an aperture priority on the set of temperature of f eggs I want to be there and I'm gonna lock in the exposure and locked me in it one eighth of a second but I can still change the aperture and the shutter speed has sink with the aperture, so it is doing what it is said it is locking the exposure in but you can still change your aperture if you want, but it's kind of locked that shutter speed with the aperture so there were moving in sync together. So it's not something I've used but that's a good point. So thank you very much for kind of pointing that out. Thanks, rocky. All right, I think we're good to go. Any questions in the audience? Okay, keep growing. All right, so let's, move on now we're off onto the left side of the camera and first and foremost is our one big button on the side left side, which is for popping up the flash so we will press this button to camera, turn on to pop the flash up and the first thing to know about flash for you beginners if there are some beginners out there some certainly some people is flash doesn't go very far. All right, it's going to eliminate those penguins, you know right there in front of you, but it is not going to illuminate the entire mountain range it's not going to illuminate the entire grand canyon or the rock arena when you are in the top row of seats, it is good for about ten feet in general the most useful thing that you can do with the flash is adding a little bit of phil flash to people shots and so if you want to pop the flash up to add a little bit of phil light as they call just filling in some of the shadows around the eye sockets and in the face that's a good use of doing it this is an example on a cloudy day of using a little bit of phil flash and you might not expect it but a sunny day is a great time to use a little bit of phil flash come on, sunny days you have really deep shadows hey flash will help fill those shadows with light once again be reminded this doesn't work over great distances some general things to think about on the flashes that we do have a top shutter speed of two hundredth of a second so if you're manually trying to set a really fast shutter speed it's automatically going to drop you down to two hundred you can't make a mistake it's just that you're kind of limited in the top shutter speed that you could go to remember the distance there is something called flash exposure lock I'm not going to go into an in depth here, but what when you fire the flash the cameras trying to figure out a lot of things very quickly by using the auto exposure lock button the flash will do a pre flash to kind of test this test the waters, see what the situation is like and do a slightly better exposure on the next picture. So you pressed the button while the flashes up, the flash will fire and then you take another picture. A decision that you will have to make in the near future and you can start thinking about it now is whether you want to turn on red eye reduction or turn it off if you turn it on, the flash will fire numerous times before the picture is taken in order to reduce the pupil size so that you get less red eye that's. Good, because then you get pictures of people without red eye. The problem is, is that a very bright light shines in your subject's eyes and it delays when the actual pictures taken. So if you're trying to capture very specific moments, it's going to delay that moment, my preference is to turn off red eye reduction and fix it later in post, which is very easy to do these days. A lot of programs, like a photo light room, have pretty much a one click button for fixing red eye so it's not the problem that used to be, and then we have something called flash exposure compensation, as I said before. The camera tries to figure out how much flash to throw out on a particular situation, and it's not always accurate. In fact, it often overdue zit over dosing over does it, and so you can power the flash down, and I'm going to show you how to do that in just a couple of minutes. Next up is this unlabeled little mystery button called the depth of field preview, but now this used to be a big time professional feature on a camera because we wanted to see how much depth of field we were getting in a picture, and in the days of film this was huge because we didn't no the depth of field we got until we got our film back. Nowadays, this button is not so necessary because we could simply just take a picture and look at the picture. But here's what's going on is when you look through the lens on your camera, you are looking through it at its maximum aperture, where it is at its shallow a step the field when you press the button what's going to happen is that the aperture is going to close down while your fingers on this button to show you how much depth the field there is going to be when you play this slide again and you were going to hear a little click, click sound for many people they just get confused because they press this button in and they go it got dark and sometimes it gets so dark it's hard to see the depth of field but you have to look very carefully in order to see that and so it's kind of nice if you're in a brilliant really bright situation landscape type shot where you're trying to get everything in focus its away where you can look through the viewfinder and see what's going to be in focus another way is just to take a picture and then look at it on the back screen of the camera all right on the left side we've got a bunch of different little parts where we can plug things in and so we have an audio visual digital out so if you're going to connect your camera to a computer to download the images which I might say is a very poor way of downloading your images but it can technically be done from this port here the next port below it is an hdmi port so if you're going to plug your camera into a tv so you could do a slide show for instance from your tv from your camera to your tv you can plug in using that port there over on the left hand side we have our remote shutter release it's a type e three which means you can use the rs sixty e three quickly memorize that or write that down. That is the cannon remote for this camera, which does not have time lapse capabilities, but it is a good way to trigger the shutter without touching the camera. And so if you're going to do product photography landscape something from a tripod, this would be a handy device tohave and the camera does have stereo microphones on it as we mentioned, but if you do want higher quality sound using a separate microphone that is not attached to the lens that's focusing and you touching the camera eyes highly recommended. So this is the microphone input and there's. A lot of very nice little microphones for dslr is out there that you mount right on the hot sheet of your camera. Ok, over to the right hand side of the camera. Not too much going on over here other than the door for our memory card. So this camera uses what is known as sd memory cards and there is sth cst xy they're all the same size they just have different size and capabilities ous first how much data they khun store on him and how fast they can store the data. Be aware that these little cards have a right protection switch when that switch is flipped in the downward position, you cannot take pictures to the memory card, nor can you delete them s o, if you're having an issue with your card, double check to make sure that that right protection switches in the right place, it was designed so that you could lock the data on the card in it wasn't accidentally deleted. If you are going to shoot video, be aware of the card speed how good it is for video there's a little symbol that's got kind of it's either a number in a c or you and you want class six or higher. Video is very intensive use of cards because it's constantly writing data to the part and so class six or higher for hd quality video. As I said, I'm not a big fan of downloading from the camera to the computer it's very slow and awkward shall we say I would highly recommend if you don't have a computer that has a card slot? Many of the computers nowadays do have an sd card slot in them, but if you don't have a card slot, one of these card readers from lexar or sandis does a wonderful job, especially if you're going to be downloading images from different types of parts. Compact flash cards on dh some of these conf it up, too. Twenty four different types of parts, and so these are much faster than using the camera itself, and they work on pcs. They work on max, and they don't need any special software to rod, so they're very, very easy to use, and they sell between twenty and forty bucks, depending, which when you get under the front side of the camera, we have a little tiny lamp over here self timer lamp, for instance, comes on when you put the camera itself time remote let you know when the picture is going to be taken, we could take the lens off. You're going to see too little markings. One is the red e f lens mount index mark, and this one is for mounting vf lenses, which I will explain in a moment. And then we have a white square for e f s lenses, which are designed for the smaller sensor, which is what this camera probably came with if you bought it with a lens, our lens release, you're going to press down on this, give the lens about a quarter turn, and it will either come on, you don't need to press it down to mount the lens, but you do have to press it in to get the lens off the camera. Cpu contacts in the bottom of the camera for connecting up to the lands I want to make sure they're clean and don't have any obstructions the mere we talked about the reflex in single lens reflex and then the remote control sensor this is what you want to make sure it isn't obstructed by a hand or by tape if you are going to get that little thirty dollars remote so that you can get in the picture yourself on the bottom side of the camera obviously we have our battery compartment the battery on this camera is thie l p e eight which is thankfully the same battery that has been used on the t three I and the teeth to I but if I recall correctly is different than the one on the team one I b be aware of that kind of job down your serial number four your insurance purposes it's got the standard tripod quarter twenty socket which is right in the middle of the center right into the middle of the lens which is where it's supposed to be and if you do have either big hands or you like to shoot vertically a lot with a camera the battery grip b g e eight sells for around a little less one hundred fifty bucks and is very handy because you can smell to batteries in there so if you're going to shoot for long periods of time used to have one. A better grip on the camera I found. If you do a lot of sports shooting or portrait shooting it's. Nice because you can turn the camera vertically and you have another shutter release for holding the camera. It's, just more comfortable for holding vertically for long periods of time.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Canon®T4i

Ratings and Reviews

user-bd4b1d
 

I always loved photography and even did a 12 year stint as a correspondent for a local newspaper, back in the 35 mm/film days. In 2005 I bought my first Canon, a Rebel XT. I had fun with it but never really knew what I was doing. I would get a good photo about 1 ever 100 shots, just from sheer luck. I bought a Canon Rebel T4i in Nov. of 2012 and having never taken a photography class, have been fumbling along with it ever since. When saw John's Photography Starter Kit, I immediately signed on and loved it. I was so thrilled when I saw he had specific classes for specific cameras and dove into this class, head first! It's like a dream come true! I love John's teaching style. He's concise, gets right to the point and doesn't waste time on needless fluff. I just bought this course yesterday and have already finished it and am ready to do it all over again, until I get it all right. I even learned something with the first glimpse of his slides and the photos of the T4i...I didn't know you could open the back screen, turn it around and re-seat it and have your display right there on the back of the camera without it sticking out and in the way! This course is going to be a huge help in getting the very most out of my camera. Thanks, John!

Getting a lot better
 

I am a huge fan of John Greengo. John is pretty much my Elvis. I learned everything, and I mean everything about this camera,though I kind of felt john could have been a little more enthusiastic about the T4i. I shoot mostly video with 4k super 35 cameras in raw. I understand top of the live vs. consumer grade. My point is, I think this camera deserved a little more enthusiasm than I felt it got. Throw a high quality lens on this machine and it is magnificent. The T4i is only entry level in price point. The photos I've taken with L-series lenses are stellar. Video is very acceptable as well, even with the H.264 codec. I would't have gotten that feeling after watching the video. From a leaning stand point this series of videos is worth the price and then some. I would just hate for people to walk away feeling they bought a toy. They most certainly did not.

Frank Siebert
 

Excellent course and superb tutor. I thought the pace of the tutorials was perfect. I was particularly impressed with the coverage of the course, which was extensive and thorough. I liked the tutorial so much that I have now purchased 3 more of John Greengo's courses.

Student Work

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