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Lesson Info

Camera Operation

So we're going to continue along here and we have camera operations, so now that we've kind of been made aware of everything the camera khun do, do we really know how everything works yet? Well, let's, let's, get our camera set up for the rial shoot, so if you were going to go shoot something really important, your friend's wedding, you're going to go should a job with this, you're going to go on vacation and you want to make sure everything is set up properly. So beyond the things we talked about at the very beginning, the class once again formatting the memory card, you won't have a nice, clean fresh memory card when you head out on a new shoot, make sure the date and time are set properly. The camera is not wirelessly enabled and does not know the time zone you are in nor doesn't know about daylight savings time changes that you might have, so you need to get it adjusted for where you are. Make sure the dye achter knob is adjusted properly for your eyes and make sure that you have c...

ome to peace with your choice with j peg or raw images, and then that the rest of the features in the set up in custom function menu that we just went through are set the way that you want him set for that type of event. And finally, it's not a bad idea to go out and shoot some test photos toe look for dust on the sensors so that you could get that cleaned up ahead of time. I hate getting through a long shoot realizing there's a a single piece of dust that I could've cleaned off for the whole thing it's pretty easy to deal with just once you have it but it's better to deal with it ahead of it then afterwards. All right, so this final little section here is kind of your final test in the camera, and what I have put together here is what I think are the ten most important controls and functions on the camera, and we're going to go through some different setting scenarios of where you might want to have your camera set in different places, and so if you have the camera there in front of you it's probably good just to follow along. All these recommendations are in the pdf handout along with a little bit of text as to why it is where it isthe. So the first way we're going to set the camera is in what I call the super simple mode I'm going to go ahead and set my camera up the same way just to show you how fast that it can be done the first thing I would recommend is just moving to the p mode camera's going to figure out shutter speeds and apertures for you so you don't need to worry about those yourself the auto mode it kind of kills me to say this but using auto eso so I'll hit the ice so button and diallo over till it says auto and then I'll just hit the shutter release to kind of kick out of that note a lot of times when you set something the best way to kick out you might say or enter that has just hit the shutter release so you get back to the shooting exposure compensation the way for us to lighten and darken the pictures should be said it zero that's the a v button in the back of the camera with the little plus minus on it army during system evaluative is a good standard system you're going to find this in the quick menu it's not the most obvious thing but the quickest way to find it is to look for the little symbol that looks a little like the cbs symbol it's got a dock with a semi circle around it inside of another square and that's evaluative metering white balance I think the camera does a pretty good job at auto white balance now remember the cross keys in the back of the camera the top one is white mountains so you can just press that one button and up comes all your white balance options focusing well first off let's make sure that your lenses in auto focus to take a look over on the side of the lands the switches in the a f position this will allow you to adjust the focusing button which is on the back of the camera it's the right cross key and now we can get in and select the three different modes one shot is where most people are going to do a lot of basic photography choosing the focusing points can be done with the thumb button up in the upper right hand corner of the back the camera so you will press that button you can either turn the dial or you can use the set button and the cross keys on the back of the camera whatever style you like and then the drive mode what happens when you take a picture single or continuous there's a dr button on the back of the camera gets the left of the cross keys it looks like a group of boxes or frames single shot is where most people are going to be for just basic photography all right so let's go and try to do something different here let's do some old school retro style photography back in the days of film how a lot of people kind of want to set their camera if they want to work very manually first off let's set our cameras to the manual mode and what I kind of like about this is him is all the way at the end of the dial so you can flip it all the way until it just stops turning to get to the em city. Now you're going to set your shutter speeds and apertures according to the right light that you have, but just for practice, just follow along. Let's go with one hundred twenty fifth of a second, so you turned the top main dial on the camera to get your shutter speed one over one twenty five in the viewfinder, it'll just say one twenty five you have to know it's a fraction aperture let's set it to f ate here is where you have to press the a v button on the back of the camera as you turn the dial on the top of the camera, so you got to leave one finger down while you're turning the other one takes a little coordination next up, let's, get off of auto I sl and just for fun, let's put it at ice. So four hundred I liked shooting with tri x film is a lot of people dead. We're not going to use exposure compensation because we're in the manual mode with mita ring. The old style metering system was center waited metering systems, so you do have to go into the quick menu for this, so you compress the quick menu it's the only thing in this ten list of ten items that you have to go in and do in the quick menu there's not a shortcut key on the outside, and it isn't actually the center weighted is not the most obvious option, and so it's the bracket with nothing inside next up white balance I'm just going to leave it at auto for right now simple for focus let's go to manual focus in that is not on the back of the camera that is on the side of the lands he would flip the switch on the side of your lands, and then you can manually turn the focusing ring on the lands if we're manually focusing. We're not worried about focusing points, and we can simply go to the drive where I would like to set this at continuous. So the drive mode is thie left cross key on the back of the camera and we're going to move that to the multi bracketed area continuous shooting so that when we take a picture, it's firing at five frames a second like that. All right let's do another one and this one is especially for the in class students all right, so see if you can follow along with this test this isn't how I would really set the camera for anything that I've ever done in the past but just follow along all right let's go to the time value mode that's shutter priority for people coming from other cameras were going to set a shutter speed of two full seconds so you got to turn those dials all the way down and you'll notice that two seconds has to with the little quotation after it that's how we indicate full seconds we're not going to worry about apertures because the camera does that let's set an ias away up there of sixty four hundred so I s o button turned the main dial exposure compensation let's set it at plus two so here's where we have to press the a v button in the back of the camera and we're going to turn the dial so the little indicator is below the two next up we're going to set spot me torrie so we've got to go into the quick menu and find the media ring which is down along the bottom row and go find spot meter in which is the dot of the different symbols that you have to choose from for white balance let's go to flat cash so we compress the white balance button and go to the symbol that looks like a lightning both because that represents the flash setting for focusing let's go to a I serve on now this was a trick question because when you go into focusing you can go to a I focus a I servo let's get in there myself but you have to have your lens on the auto focus mode and so they gave you a little warning in the display that you need to have your lens in auto focus for that to be done for focusing points let's go to all focusing points actually that's where my camera set from last time so I think we're good there and for the drive mode let's put it in the two second self timer, so the drive mode is the left of the cross case and we'll go to the timer with the to the little two next to it. So now when we take a picture, press the shutter release, get her hands off the camera and it takes a very long exposure there very overexposed okay, so our cameras are totally whacked out now, so don't turn away don't leave the room because we want to get your camera set up for at least normal shooting, but first let's do a couple of other real world examples so let's say you want to do some landscape photography so what's important to a landscape photographer frequently is depth of field having enough in focus so that the foreground is in focus as well as the background is in focus. This is best done from a tripod you can do it hand held, but we're going to assume we're on a tripod for this situation. Focusing is pretty easy because it's not moving around all right, so what we're going to do is we're going to set our cameras to manual all right now, the shutter speed that you said will totally depend on the light but just for fun, let's set a shutter speed of one quarter of a second lot of landscape photographers need fairly slow shutter speeds one quarter because they're going for a lot of depth of field, and in this case, let's set a depth of field of f sixteen. You might need to be greater than this twenty two or thirty two or you might only need f eleven. This is just for practice ah, landscape photographer is almost always going to be a tie so one hundred because they want to get the finest detail possible. The cleanest possible image from the camera we won't use exposure compensation because we're in man home, meet a ring let's, get that switch back to evaluative so we need to go into the quick menu, find metering and change it to evaluative for white balance. You could change this to the specific lighting you're in, for instance, shade or daylight if you're shooting raw, this won't matter too much, so I'm actually going to simply go with auto white balance because I think it does a pretty good job to start with for focusing you're going to want to focus on a solid object in front of you it's not moving around, so we're just going to move auto focus to one shot focus for focusing brackets I think it's best just to choose the middle single bracket because it is the most accurate, most sensitive bracket of the group, so I'll press the focusing button on the back. I can just hit the set button to get it to the center point, and I'm set for the drive mode. You have a couple of options here. If you've purchased the cable release, you can use the single shot mode if you don't have that, we can use the two second self timer that we used in the previous one and is a bonus you really want to get the picture right? You can use the mere lockup feature, which was in the custom functions, which is one of the features that you could add to my menu and so that way it's like this here you get two seconds hands get off the camera, I used the two second self timer all the time just because I'm too lazy to bring out my cable really sometimes all right next up let's do some portrait photography so in this case you're thinking about a few different things number one you're not on a tripod most likely you want to get the focus set right on the person animal or whatever you're getting a portrait of you have to be a little bit concerned about their movements so we need a shutter speed to stop their movement that's kind of one of the key things we also want to shallow depth of field most likely so the background is not as in focus as our subject so I'm going to stay in manual for this type of photography and the shutter speed is going to be a little bit of a key here and I would like to have a faster shutter speed one hundred twenty fifth or faster is where I would prefer to be to do most types of people photography so we're going to set our camera one hundred twenty fifth of a second if you have a fast app richard lands like a one point four two point oh I would set it there now the lens I have on my camera right now doesn't go down there but I'm going to do the best that it can it goes down to f four so that's where I'm going to set my camera it's much preferred to be at the lowest ice so possible you may need to bump up from one hundred, but let's, just set it at one hundred just for practice right now, because that's where we like to have our camera said it the best possible settings if we can exposure compensation is not used in manual, we're going to leave the meter reader and evaluated meter and gonna check, yes, I got my camera there for white balance, we can leave it at auto, which is where it's been, so I think we're good they're focusing kind of key here. We're going to want to focus on our subject, and we may want to recompose and so one shot focusing is probably going to be the right type of focusing in this situation. You focus on somebody and it locks in, and this would be another good case to just use the center center single point, focusing its very, very sensitive, very, very accurate it's easy to work with and then for the drive mode, I would recommend going to the continuous setting because people's expressions change very quickly or there, her posture, a gesture you can fire off a little group of two or three shots when the situation is just right, you want to get that. Just right moment it's also a good way to avoid blanks is by shooting a burst because he can't blink. I don't know what he who could blanket five frames a second. Uh you're going to get him right on one of them. Okay, so that's that's my recommendations for portrait photography so let's go to action photography and so in this case, you're photographing something that is moving and you want to freeze its action kind of one of the more important things here is that it needs to be a sizable enough object that the focus points congrats on to it. If you see a small be flying around your bedroom and you want to take a photograph of it, the camera can't track that it's not big enough in the focusing points. All right, so what's key here it's going to continue in the manual mode is a shutter speed we want have a fast shutter speed in this case five hundredth of a second for most sporting events is kind of the starting point there in faster is where you're going to want to be so let's get our shutter speed up to five hundredth of a second our aperture? Well, that depends on the amount of light we're going tohave, but chances are if we're going to be using five hundredth of a second we're going to need to let in a lot of lens through the light this is we're having a two point eight lens is a big advantage remember are focusing crosshairs cross type focusing points work better with two eight lenses, and so if you can afford a seventy two, two hundred two eight or twenty four to seventy to eighty it's going to work really well in focusing on this camera, if you don't have to wait, you're going to probably want to get as close to it as you can. Ideally, I would be a tie, so one hundred, but the reality of the situation is that you're probably going to need need to be at a higher I so, like s o four hundred, if you're indoors, you're going to probably have to be at eight, sixteen, thirty two or maybe even higher for shooting indoor sports. I'm going to leave the meeting at evaluative and white balance at auto, which is where we've been going to be fine with those for focusing this one is critical here. You need to change this to a I serve. Oh, this is the continuous focusing system so the camera can track subjects as they move towards you and away from you for focusing points, I like the single point. But it's, sometimes hard to keep on target with the subject that you're looking with, and so hopefully your subject is filling the frame noticeably enough that you can use all points. You're just going to be able to track subjects as they're moving around the frame. And, of course, for the drive mode, we're going to want to get a siri's of pictures to help capture the right moment. The continuous drive on it is going to help out working, of course it five frames per second. All right, next up is what I call our maximum sharpness. Mel, this is potentially it's, kind of like landscape photography and might be said for somebody who's shooting artwork, they made a sculpture, and they just want to get the sharpest possible picture. Well, that should, of course, be done with a tripod to keep the camera steady. We're going to stay in manual mode. We're going to use whatever shutter speed possible, just for fun. If you want to set a shutter speed of two seconds, you can do that. The aperture is critical here. You want to have an aperture in the middle of the range that your lens has now, this aperture various according to the lands, because it's the middle of the range for a lot of oh, basic lenses out there that would be around f eleven so you can change to f eleven in the camera. Your eyes so of course, is going to want to be at ice so one hundred and then you just simply adjust your shutter speed to accommodate for the amount of light that you're working with. We don't have exposure compensation because we're emanuel, we're going to leave army during an evaluative white melon, said auto, those air all fine for focus, we're going to go backto one shot essays so that we can focus in a very specific spot on this subject and lock it in and back to the single point probably the one in the center and just like landscape photography, we have the option of using the single with the cable release if we have it, if we don't, I would use the two second self timer, maybe even the ten second self timer, and as a bonus you could use the mirror lockup and so that's what I call the maximum sharpness mode, and so we will end with the final good mode to leave your camera in that setting or in these settings as you leave this class, which is what I call basic photography you don't know what your next picture is going to be, but you want to be ready for it so here's what I'd recommend finally, john, recommend some automatic modes. All right. So a v aperture value. Ok, so, there's, a little bit of camera assistance going along here. The camera's gonna help figure out the shutter speed for you. You can set an aperture. I would set an aperture that's reasonably wide open, like four, five six with a lot of zoom lenses. That way you're getting a reasonably fast shutter speed. I would probably set an eye so of one hundred because you always want that set at the low setting so that you know you're getting the best quality. You should be pretty aware of your shutter speed, and if you're not getting a faster shutter speed, you can always raise the isil and this one's really important. Everyone make sure you go back to your camera right now and make sure that your exposure compensation is not it. Plus two, because that's where last wass when we were doing our tests, will make sure that gets reset by pressing the a v plus button in the back of the camera and turning the main die along the camera so that that indicator is below the zero very important where you're going to end up with a lot of bad pictures and you're going to blame me. And I don't want to have that on me so I am now guilt free on this because I told you to fix it. All right? So meet a ring once again as I've said many times before in value what it does a good job by balance auto good job focusing for most people most of the time. One shot is a good system to go with for focusing points I would recommend using the single point so that you can be a little bit more discerning about what you are focusing on. But you do need to be careful because it's only one point that's activated and it's that single one in the middle that I think it's really good and then the drive mode just being at the single shot note is going to be fine you can really off a lot of shots and that continuous mode with this camera and so if you have hung with us through this entire class, I could say congratulations because now you are a tea for I or six fifty expert all right, that's it that's it that's all there is in the camera. Well, you know, people have questions, john oh, I imagine the d'oh apparently they were paying attention um uh little l t l asked will be a I serve only use the center focus and that's where you have your focus point set to know hey ai artificial intelligence service no that's the one in between that I don't recommend but that's the one that's looking for movement or not movement but that can work with all points or any point in individual in it that you select ok so it'll work either way what about for that I focus on for a focus same thing ok okay and from g man again have you done any motor sport action photography which I know that you recently have uh and have any suggestions for settings appropriate for super fast moving objects super fast shutter speeds? It depends on what you're looking for personally the very small amount of motor sports that I've done I prefer slower shutter speeds handing with the subject so that the background is blurry so that you can really see that the car is moving super fast if it's a car but that's kind of an aesthetic choice that you need to make with cars and things it's it doesn't really matter the sound strange it doesn't matter how fast they're moving it matters how fast they are apparently moving ah car coming straight at you at two hundred miles an hour doesn't appear to change size that quickly until it gets very close to you and so shutter speeds they're totally going to depend on your angle of you your lens you're positioning and so forth if you trying to freeze all the action experiment at a thousandth of a second and faster I know that if you shoot at eight thousands of a second you will freeze a propeller on an airplane or the blades on a helicopter and so you can freeze very fast action but you can I have to ask yourself how fast of action do you want to freeze because it ah helicopter with frozen blades in the air looks kind of awkward and some people like a little bit of blur in there and so especially like in a car race it's kind of nice to see the car really clearly but a little bit of movement in the in the wheels so there's a lot of aesthetic fine tuning with that but I would have it in the focus aye aye sir. Excuse me a servo motor I'd have the motor drive turned on I would try a variety of different shutter speeds and I would probably be using I would like to have a lens long enough that I could use all the brackets and fill the frame with the subject. Ok, thank you for that. Um and then we have some questions coming in from inca and some other folks that are starting to since I just asked you that question what shutter speed to use for panning et cetera and so once again we're going to talk about this but jungle you know has an amazing course that is the fundamentals of digital photography that goes in depth into digital digital photography as a whole so we'll just continue on with a few last questions that are about this workshop specifically yeah, well, I will just bump in and I will just say that event in the class it's nice because I have a slight for and I have visuals and have examples uh and so panning shots can be a variety of shutter speeds it depends on what you're shooting and that's why it's kind of hard to give you a number but you know anywhere I mean you could use five hundredth of a second if it's moving you know blue angel jet speed fast or it could be an eighth of a second if it's a person walking and so it depends on the subject that you're shooting right it's cool thank you dance like you have the question about the highest s o I used the high I s a lot and recently a black image had lots of green blue and purple spots in the middle. Well, the high I s o do anything for this or doing this you need special software it sounds like she was asking if the high I esso noise reduction will do anything for that. Yes, it may potentially solve some of that problem but it may create another problem and so this is why I recommend a test before you use it on anything important and so that those pixels that she was referring to if you've heard the phrase garbage in garbage out when it comes to computer data this is kind of camera version of it it's not getting enough light in and it's trying to figure out what color these pixels are and it's kind of guessing and it's throwing out these colors and so the noise reduction software can fix it but it becomes a bit muted in its look and you lose some of the detail and sharpness and so there's a balance between these two problems that I can only really judge when I have a nice computer screen and I got a little slider switch and I could go back and forth and you can't do that in the camera it's kind of got the pre set standards right right? Another question from dance lady is how many items can you change in the custom settings to make into my menu all of the things that you've indicated are only a few you can put anything you want in my menu but I believe let's see one, two, three, four I think you can add five things to my menu but you can choose I believe any item in the any thing in the men you can go into those five options yeah, thank you once again great question some of them coming in are now are those general digital photography questions which I know that all of these air answered in here cores talking about why is the middle range aperture sharper than a higher aperture? Don't get me started e o started because we have another three days sweet way would need another five days fighting, so this might be a good place to go to my final couple slides here, so I'm for those of you who have been watching who own a different camera, we have a pretty good collection of camera classes available right now, so if you own a canon and nikon, which is about ninety percent of people out there, there's a good chance that I have a class for you, we can add the tea for I today, and I am adding new classes as quickly as I can, and so coming up kind of major major announcement it's a minor announcement, december fourth, we're going to be doing a new whole new style of camera. Olympus, how about that? Not a nikon night, not a cannon. This class has taken me a lot of time to work on because the menu system in the operating system is so different, this is a micro four thirds camera, this is not an slr camera, this is a different type of camera but this just got ranked by d x o optics those you know what that is air going move yes yes yes aziz the the best the best sensor of the micro four thirds cameras as good as many of the one point six crop in one point five crop sensors out there in a smaller size camera and so expect a good class on this camera coming up on december fourth and we're still working on dates but we have classes coming up in another new camera the one d x of course the newly announced d six hundred will be very popular as will be the cannon six d so these are all classes that you're going to see I don't know the exact time frame but probably into december in january as we move into next year you could look for these classes and thanks a lot for tuning in and for everyone who has purchased these classes because now you know at some point in the future we could have a list of like fifty classes every camera you really want to know how to use there's going to be a class for that and then the class that we've been referring to throughout this class is what's known as the fundamentals of digital photography and this is a class that's downloadable through creative live this is what's going to go in and answer all those other camera questions with visuals it's it's a it's a long class I mean it's like twenty hours and so it's not something you're going to do in one sitting I hope but it's something that it's it's like taking a photography course at your own speed because you can use it win and where you want to and you can go back and refer to things in fact, I mean all this stuff that I am presenting here I can't remember all the time everyone somehow some will ask me a question about the camera that I've taught a class in and they assume I'm an expert but I go just a sec I got to open up my my talk because I have it listed on screen, but I don't have it fixed in my memory and so I have to go back to my own classes, which is I think, a little embarrassing, but it shows you that they are resource tools that you can use and so you could go to creative life tio download that class, you can find out more information about that class as well as my other classes that I teach kind of on an in person basis here in the seattle portland northwest area, I teach a number of classes some that aren't available a creative life and also do some tours next year I'll be going up to alaska on a small cruise boat with photo minded people. So we'll be doing shooting whales and seals and landscapes in the whole alaska thing, which is a lot of fun. And so if you want to find out anything more about that, if you go to my website, john gringo dot com. And so that is what I wanted to say. I'm signing up right now to be your assistant.