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Photo Basics

Lesson 2 from: Canon T7i Fast Start

John Greengo

Photo Basics

Lesson 2 from: Canon T7i Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

2. Photo Basics

Lesson Info

Photo Basics

This first little section here on photo basics is for anyone who is kind of new to photography and is not familiar with SLRs or sensor sizes or the basics of shutter speeds and apertures. We're not gonna spend too much time here, just cover just a few quick basics. If you already know those sorts of things, feel free to jump forward to the next section on camera controls. So the Rebel T7i is a Single Lens Reflex camera, digital variety, and so that's our digital SLR. We have a single lens. There's lots of different lenses that you can get, wide angles, telephotos and many many more. We'll talk a bit about those later on in the first second section of the class. And so in every lens is an aperture unit for controlling the amount of light coming in. And so you can open it up all the way and you can close it down to let in less light. And so you will be working with aperture openings or f stops as they are also known. And you'll open up to let in more light, you'll stop down to let in les...

s light. So it's the first way we have of controlling the light coming into our camera. Now beyond just controlling the amount of light, it also controls the depth of field. If you have a lens that opens up all the way to 1.4, a very wide opening, you're gonna get a very shallow depth of field. Just a little bit is in focus from the foreground to the background. Now as you stop that aperture down to two and two eight and so forth, your depth of field is gonna grow a little bit more with each aperture change that you make until you get down to f22 or further on some lenses where you'll have quite a bit in focus from foreground to backgrounds and so this is one of the features that control how much is gonna be in focus. There are other factors as well but we're not gonna have time to get into those right here and now. So next up, light comes into the camera and it hits the mirror. That's the reflex portion in SLR, bounces the light upward to the focusing screen and through the prism system and out the viewfinder where you get to see what's going on. And single lens reflex cameras have been very popular because you get to see exactly what you're pointed at. You get to see the right angle of view, you get to see whether it's in focus, you get to see whether the lens cap is still on the camera. So it's a very very good system. Now when it's time to take a photo, you press down on the shutter release, the mirror needs to get up and out of the way so that light can make it's way back to the image sensor. Before it gets there, it's gotta get past the shutter unit. And there are two parts to the shutter unit, the first curtain and the second curtain. And the first curtain blocking the sensor is gonna need to open. Light gets in, that's your exposure. And then the second curtain is gonna come in and close it off and that was your exposure. The mirror comes back down so you can see what's going on again and then the shutter unit returns to its starting position again and so a camera will do that up to six frames per second. Now shutter speeds are another good way for controlling the amount of light coming into the camera. They're also a good way for controlling the blur of subjects that are moving. You can freeze action or you can blur action depending on the shutter speeds that you have chosen. One of the most important attributes in any type of camera is a sensor size and the sensor in this camera is what I would consider a medium size sensor. It's not the biggest, it's not the smallest out there. It's much bigger than the ones in your phones and your small point and shoots but it's not as big as 35 millimeter film which has been a big standard in the history of photography. And that is where we have full frame digital cameras which is some of our highest end cameras on the market. There are cameras that are even bigger than that though. So this uses an APS C size sensor, which has a crop factor of 1. which means it's smaller than full frame by a factor of 1.6. And there are a wide variety of cameras out there with different sensor sizes. And as I say, this is one of the more popular sizes out on the market. As you hold the camera, there is a better technique and a worse technique. So when you grip the camera in your right hand, where is your left hand? Just pick your camera up and see what you do right now. And the correct system is to kinda cradle the lens in your left hand with your thumb pointing up. That is the correct technique that gets your elbow a little bit in a more stable position closer to your torso where you can hold the camera a little bit more steady and you'll be a little bit better with holding your camera with slow shutter speeds and low light conditions. As I mentioned before, there's gonna be a lot of different features on this camera that you can manually control or automatically control. So I really wanna talk about how do you manually control a lot of these features. So if you have the time and you're willing to put out the effort and you know how these things work, you can set everything up manually and get exactly the results you want. But from time to time, it's nice to employ a little bit of auto when you want things to go a little bit more quickly. If you don't have time to deal with something, but if you understand how it works manually, it'll make working with it automatically much much more effective. If you wanna know more about the general world of photography, as I mentioned before, the two classes that I have that have been pretty popular here are Creative Live are ones that you might wanna take a look at. The Photography Starter Kit for Beginners covers all the main important topics and we kinda just hit the highlights and go through things real quickly and get you out the door nice and fast with all the basics that you need. If you really like to dig into the details, The Fundamentals of Photography will provide you quite a bit more depth on those same subjects as well as lots of additional subjects and fun in that class. So you might wanna take a look at those after you've taken a look and gone through this class.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

CanonT7i Recommended Settings
CanonT7i Slides

Ratings and Reviews

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Student Work

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