Lessons

Lesson Info

Back Side: Viewfinder Display

We are ready to move on to the back side of the camera, so let's dive back in to this. Okay, so on the back side of the camera, we have, obviously, our viewfinder, and there is a little diopter knob just to the right hand corner of that, and that adjusts the focusing of the viewfinder itself. It has nothing to do with the final photograph. It's just so that your eyes can see the viewfinder, and see the information in there properly. When you look through there, don't worry about what's the camera pointed at, look at the line of information down at the bottom. You may need to press half way down on the shutter release to activate that. You want to make sure that those numbers are nice and clear and easy to see. There is a removable eyecup on it, the Ef, which sells for about 10 bucks, in case that wears out. Nice, soft rubber eye piece there, so if you do have glasses, you can put your glasses right up to that, nice and close so you can see through the viewfinder itself. So let's talk a...

little bit about what you see in the viewfinder itself. The frame that you see is 95 percent accurate. You are actually getting a little bit more than you see in the viewfinder itself, and just be aware of that, that your going to get a little bit more, and so if you're lining up the edges with some sort of line or door frame, you're going to get a little bit more than that in the finished photograph. We've talked about the 45 focusing points. They will light up as they're activated, or as they are turned on, we'll see some more custom controls, for when you see those later on in the menu section, later on in the class. The auto focus area, the four different options you'll see along the top, which ones you've chosen, whether it's the one point zone, large zone, or the entire 45 point auto focus area. We'll have different metering modes that we're going to talk about. One of those options is spot metering, where it measures the light, very concentrated, in a small area right in the middle. So there will be a little circle that turns on, let's you know where that is. If you tilt the camera a little bit when you hold it, you'll get a little warning here with the level, if you have it turned on, and so it will tell you whether it's turned just a little bit, or quite a bit, and whether you see this or not can be turned on and off in Set Up menu number four under Viewfinder displays. And so there will be a little check box whether you want to see this or not. And so, there's a lot of options you'll have, and to start with, I say turn them off until you know that you need them, because I don't like to have too much clutter on top of the composition as you're shooting. We have a grid frame in here, which can be really nice for architectural photography, or just plain old composition, and this can be turned on or off once again in the Set Up menu under Viewfinder displays. There is a option for having a Flicker detection, which is going to warn you if you are shooting under, they're usually fluorescent lights, but it could be any sort of light that has a flicker pattern to it, where you might get an uneven exposure. And so, this is another option that can be turned on or off. There is actually a way for the camera to resolve this, and I'll talk about this when we get into the menu section, and so, you can have the camera automatically fix it, or you can have the camera just warn you about it and then you can manually go in and turn that feature on and off. You can also shoot this camera with different aspect ratios. Now the natural aspect ratio of the sensor is a three by two aspect ratio, but if you would like to get something that fits the HD TV format, which is sixteen by nine, you can see that crop right in the frame, and if you know that's what your final product needs to be, it's nice to be able to see it in the viewfinder so that you can compose it a little bit more easy. We also have four by three and a one by one option, and those can be chosen in Shooting menu number five, under Aspect ratio. We have a warning symbol exclamation point down here on the right hand side, and you can choose why this might turn on, and so, the options that you have is if you have your camera put into a black and white mode. Whether you've adjusted the white balance, or if you have the noise reduction turned on, and so this can be adjusted in the Set Up menu, number four under Custom Functions, number eleven in there under Warnings in the viewfinder. And so, as I say some people like to have the viewfinder as clear as possible, some people want to have important pieces of information very easily seen in there. Finally, along the bottom is the LED information, and this is going to provide us with kind of our most critical exposure information on the camera. There is an exclamation mark here that you will get for warnings that we just talked about, but you'll always have that available to you. There is an exposure lock button on the back of the camera, when that has been pressed, you'll get that symbol in the viewfinder to let you know that that's turned on. There's a number of options with flash that it's going to give you information on. Whether you have the flash turned on. Whether it's working with the high-speed sync, which is with an optional external flash, or whether you've engaged the flash exposure lock mode, where it's locking in the exposure. Then we're going to have our critical exposure information, our shutter speed, our aperture information. Whether we have exposure compensation turned on, and our exposure levels, and then over on the right hand side, we're going to have something called the D plus. This is a highlight tone priority, we'll talk about this more towards the very end of the class, and this is where the camera will go in and adjust the look of your images to control the dynamic range of it. It's not something we normally would do, and that's why there's a warning in the viewfinder letting you know that that feature is turned on. And then we have our ISO speed, and then finally we have the maximum burst, that's the number of shots that we can shoot at any one time. That number will slightly differ, depending on whether you are shooting in RAW or JPEG. And then finally, there is a little green dot over on the right hand side, that turns on when you are properly focused, and this will happen whether you're in auto focus or manual focus. And so, if you're manually focusing back and forth, and you're just not really sure if it's in focus, just take a look over in that right hand corner for that green dot, and you'll see whether it's turned on or off, and that's a good indication of whether you're focused or not. And so, important information, as I say, adjust that diopter and the viewfinder so that you can see this information quite clearly. Working our way back to the back of the camera, let's see what else we got, we got the LCD monitor. So this is capacitive touch screen, which means it's sensitive to your finger tip. It's not necessarily pressure, and so it won't work with thick gloves on, for instance. And we'll be able to use this touch screen for a lot of different types of options. Whether we're focusing or whether we're going to the menu system, and so, we'll have a number of different actions that are common on a lot of different smart devices, and so you'll be able to touch, you'll be able to slide things back and forth. You can flick images forward and back in the playback mode. You can stretch and pinch them, to zoom in and zoom out. Now, some people like the touch screen, and some people don't care for the touch screen. It's an option on this camera. There is nothing that you have to do on the touch screen, and so if you don't like it, you can simply use the cross keys and the rest of the dials and the buttons on the camera. A lot of people do like the touch screen. It's very intuitive in many ways. I'm not as big a fan with it, because I don't like leaving fingerprints on the screen, which kind of impair the view of the image. And so, I use the rest of the buttons, but the options are there, and sometimes the touch is a great way of doing it. It's a great way of working in the movie modes when you want to rack focus from one subject to the next. It's very simple, you just touch where you want to focus, and it's a really good system for doing that. When you hit the menu, you're going to dive in to the full menu, and that's what we're going to be doing in the second half of this class. But this camera is a first for Canon, because they've employed a new guided menu system that looks very different than the traditional standard menu that we have seen for years from Canon. Now the guided menu gives you a little bit more graphics and visuals, which I kind of like, as far as what you are doing with the camera. The problem is that it's a little hard to navigate once you're in there. It works more like on a hub and spokes system where when you do one thing, and you want to go do something else, you got to come back to the basic screen, and then you got to go back out to the other screen, and you can't just jump around from one item to the next. And so, throughout the rest of the class, we're going to be switching over to the standard menu, which is the way all the other Canon cameras work. So if you decide to upgrade this camera, those upgrade cameras don't have the guided menu on it. And so, the way we're going to switch this is we need to dive into the menu under Display level settings, and change the menu display. So let's go ahead and do that right now on my camera, and you can follow along with your camera. So I'm going to hit the menu button, and going left and right, we have four different tabs along the top, and you know, speaking of the touch screen, we can just touch it as well, and we're going to dive into the display level settings, and there are the shooting screen, which is when we're shooting, what we see on the back. The menu which is what we want to change from guided to standard, and so we change it to standard. When we go in to the menu, now it looks different than we saw before, but this is what most Canon menus look like here. And so, there's a number of other options, and we'll get in and talk more about this later on. But for now, we're going to leave the menu display in the standard setting. Next up is the info button and so, it never hurts to press the info button. Just press that button repeatedly to cycle through the different operations. And so, we have no display, we have the camera settings which are all kind of the critical exposure, focus, drive modes that your camera is set at, which is probably the most helpful on the camera. We do also have an electronic level, and so for all you pilots out there, this is going to tell you whether you're flying on an even plane here. Whether you've got the camera tilted sideways or not. And so, it's a great technique when you're on a tripod, and you want to make sure that you're getting an exact level horizon in front of you. This is quite accurate, I don't know if it's 100 percent perfect, but it's really, really close to being very, very good, so recommend using that when you need it.