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4a. Menu System part 1

Lesson 4 from: Canon Rebel T2i / 550D Fast Start

John Greengo

4a. Menu System part 1

Lesson 4 from: Canon Rebel T2i / 550D Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

4. 4a. Menu System part 1

Lesson Info

4a. Menu System part 1

All right, so we're ready to move on to the menu system. And this is the the whole display system and where a lot of the features are controlled in the camera. And the first part we're gonna look at here is the display system, how the camera gives you information and first off there is the viewfinder display. And then there is the LCD monitor. First off, we're gonna look at the viewfinder display. So when you hold the camera up to your eye, there's a number of things going on in here. First off the overall frame, what you see, top to bottom left to right is not exactly what you are seeing. The what you're gonna get is not exactly what you're going to see is what I mean. What's going on is that you actually get a little bit more than you bargained for when you shoot with this camera, the frame is 95% accurate, which means you're actually getting a little bit more outside of the frame. And this is a very common thing on this level of camera where you're getting a little bit more around t...

he edge. And so if you're very precisely framing something up. Just be aware that you're going to get a little bit extra when you finally download that image and you look at it. Next up is the focusing points, and we talked a little bit about selecting these before. But the camera has nine focusing points, and they are slightly differently shaped and so if you'll notice some of them are more horizontal, some of them are more vertical, and it has to do with what type of lines their most sensitive to the 12 take note of is the one in the center, which is square, which is most sensitive, is Excuse me is the most sensitive of all the sensors. It is the best, with both vertical lines and cross lines and the most sensitive in different types of lighting conditions. And so if you had to activate one and have it be the most accurate, it would be the center one. Next up is the circle in the middle, and this is the spot metering area. There is different metering modes that we haven't talked about yet, and one of the modes is spot metering, which concentrates a large percentage of the reading in that center circle. And that is why it is there. So you know exactly where that light reading is taking place. And then finally, down at the bottom of the camera is your led info. It won't actually look like this. It'll actually say something meaningful, meaningful to you, Hopefully, but this is what I wanted to go through because it gives you a lot of valuable information. And so we're just going to kind of go left to right on this and talk about the different things that it is trying to tell you. If you recall that on the back of the camera there was the auto exposure lock button. And so when you see that symbol on and the viewfinder you know that you have pressed that button next up is a couple of different flash modes. The lightning bolt indicates that the flashes up and is ready to fire. And then we have the high speed sync mode, and this is not something that you can do that with the camera as it sits here. Uh, it is something that you can do when you have one of the additional speed lights hooked up to it. It's a special mode for using a very fast shutter speed. We have flash exposure lock. We talked a little bit about that when the flashes up using that little ass direct button back by the thumb to activate a pre flash to get an exposure lock in that would indicate that it's locked in. And then we have flash exposure, competent compensation. And this is where you can go in and you can actually power the flash up and you can power it down. And I'm gonna show you how and what sort of adjustment to make on that. When we get to that section, we have our shutter speed information, and then we have our aperture information. So that's going to give you a readout. For instance. 1000 doesn't mean 1000 seconds. It's a fraction it's 1 1/1000 of a second, and the same is true with the apertures, those air fractions as well. Next up, we have our exposure level, which is our meter indicator. Some people remember old cameras that maybe had needles and circles that you lined up in this one we have in electronic viewfinder that in general very general terms. You wanna have kind of centered towards the zero. If you want something lighter, it'll be on the plus side. If you want something darker, it'll be on the minus side when you're making adjustments in manual exposure, or perhaps with your exposure compensation. The next bit of data is a D plus. It stands for highlight tone priority. It's called D plus because there is something in photography called De Max, and it has to do with the brightest point in the darkest point. And there's a feature that we will get to in the menu section called Highlight Tone Priority that you can turn on and off of its turned on. It's gonna affect the performance of your camera in particular. There was a question that we had about somebody not being able to set I s 0 100 on their camera, and my bet is that they have a D plus showing in their viewfinder, and we will talk more about this when we get to that section. After that, we have our eso speed, which is Ah, nice feature of the camera to display the I s o speed right in the viewfinder so that if you are shooting, you can see what that is, and you can change it very easily because of the I. S O button is very easily placed on the top of the camera. Next up, we have a white balance correction that could be done and a monochrome shooting. As I said, you can shoot this camera in the black and white mode, but if you are, she need it in black and white. And if you're shooting J pegs, you will never get any color out of it. So it's really important to know when you are shooting black and white, and that's why they put an indicator in the viewfinder. The maximum burst is the amount of pictures that you can take at one shot, and so when you press down on the shutter release and you have your camera set in a motor drive mode, it will fire off pictures at a rate of about 3.7 frames a second for up to eight shots. The camera will Vince slow down because that's as many shots is. It can fit in its Ram memory buffer. At that point, the images will start to be downloaded to the card, and you'll be able to take pictures at a much slower rate at about noon, perhaps one per second. So if you were shooting in a sports mode, let's say you're taking pictures of baseball and somebody hits a home run. Don't take all your pictures while they are running to first base because you won't have any bullets left when they get around home plate and the team comes out to greet him. And so you want to shoot in short bursts, usually three or four shots at a time. When you're shooting sports, you want to make sure that you always have a few pictures left when you really need to fire them off. And then finally, we have a focus confirmation button. If you use auto focus, this light will come on when the camera has achieved focus. If you want to manually focus, you could manually focus, and when you achieve focus, that light will come on as well, and so you can use that as a manual assist if you if you like to manually focus so the back of the camera also gives us lots of information and this is Ah, that Q button we hit to hit the quick menu. Turn my camera on after our lunch break. Normally what? You will have information in the back of the camera, and you will access information by hitting the Q button for the quick menu. And then you can go into that menu. You can start making changes. So after you hit the cue button, so you also have the menu button, which can pull up different sorts of information. And so there's different changes, and some things are exactly the same. You can change him in the quick menu, or you could go into the regular menu and change him. And there, of course, is your menu button right there on the top left. Now, when you are in either one of these, you're gonna be using the cross keys to navigate from top to bottom toe left to right to make your changes. You could also use the main dial on your camera to make changes as well. So that's an option. Whatever option you prefer. And then when you find the setting that you want to make, you will use the set button in the middle to enter that setting in. So when you're normally shooting, this is kind of your shooting mode. It's going to display the most important information to you, including the exposure mode, the shutter speed, the aperture and the I S O. And these are things that any serious photographer is gonna want to keep very close tabs on. The next line down is gonna have your exposure meter. So it's gonna tell you whether things air overexposed or under exposed, and then it will have your flash exposure compensation that you can get in and adjust. And I've talked a little bit about this and I'm gonna go ahead and change this on the camera right here, and I will navigate down toothy plus minus. And actually, it's Hopefully the camera above me is recording this and I'm going to set this at minus one. I'm going to reduce the flash power output by minus one, which I think is a good place to have it. And here's a picture example. Why remember I recommended when you're shooting people pictures that adding a little bit of fill flash is very helpful. Well, as you can see in this left shot. I've added a standard T TL flash, and I've let the camera figure out how much power to put out from the flash. In my opinion, it just smacks of on camera flash. There's just a little bit too much light going into the girl's face. So by powering the flash down, we have a little less light, and it looks a little bit more natural now. In this case, I can't really tell the difference between minus one and two, so I'm just gonna leave it on minus one. I think it's a good setting. Let's look at another different. Another scenario. And in this case, the T TL setting was clearly over exposing the person's face. And it has to do with the fact that she is wearing a dark sweater and she has a dark background. And so the cameras trying to lighten up the face to compensate for this dark area, and technically, the camera thinks it got it right with the standard T TL setting. And so with minus one and minus two in this case, I prefer minus two on the exposure compensation because of the different lighting in this particular situation and so with the setting, I would leave it at minus one is a standard, but you might go down to minus two. There might be a situation you need to go down to minus three or back up to zero, but it's a good way for you to keep control off the flash, which is normally automatic, and this gives you just a little bit of manual control over that. Next up is the picture styles. And once again I said, That's ah, generally not too important for a lot of shooters, so I'm gonna kind of pass by that one. We have our white balance in here that we will get in Maurin to. We actually have already talked a little about life balance, but you can get into and change it here. Remember, there is a white balance on the back of the camera, or you can access it through the quick menu, so there's a couple different ways to get to that feature. There is a white balance adjustment if you have made that in the menu system, that would show up on the back of the camera, and same is true with white balance bracketing these air kind of higher end votes that not everyone is going to use. And if you have made adjustments in the menu system, it will show up here and the auto lightning optimizer. Wow, that sounds really weird, doesn't it? The auto lighting optimizer. I'll explain that, actually have a slide for that. And if you have made of that adjustment, it'll just show it to you. They're so down at the bottom, it will tell you what sort of recording you are making if it is a raw or JPEG image, or perhaps both the focus mode that you're in. We've already talked quite a bit about the different focus modes. It'll just show it to you there, the metering mode we haven't talked too much about. But it can be changed in here. And let's go ahead and just dive in and change that metering mode. So I'm gonna press the Q button to activate my que menu, and then I'm going to navigate to that metering mode gonna press set so I can go in and I can adjust between four different metering modes. Evaluative metering is a metering system that uses a large area of the frame. It's a very good system because it breaks it down into 63 different zones and analyzes and makes a very good balanced adjustment with everything that it sees. The other modes in there are partial meeting spot metering, and we just looked at the smart metering area in the viewfinder, and it highly concentrates the meter reading right in the center. Partial meeting is basically a fat spot, and center weighted is an even fatter spot, so they're just different size meter in areas in general. I like using evaluative metering, and I think it's a good place for most people to keep their photography as their learning. And as time goes on, you may find that there's another mode that you like to use from time to time. But that's a good general one for people to use. The drive mode has its own button, but we can also access it with the quick menu and get in there and change the exact same setting. So it's a little bit of a redundant setting there. The quick control just lets you know if you have access and you are working in the quick control menu. There is an eye fi card. It's like WiFi rather than a standard memory card. What you could do is you can get a memory card that fits in that slot but transmits information wirelessly to a nearby computer. If that was in your camera and that was activated, there would be a symbol on showing that there's. Of course, your battery indicator indicates how much battery life you have, and then the total number of shots that you have left on the memory card remember in the viewfinder. It showed you the number of shots left in that burst, which is a very small number about eight. This is the total number of shots remaining on the card. So if we press the menu button, we're going to start diving in to the actual menu system, and there are several pages or tabs of information in here, and it is broken down into pretty logical groupings of them. The first is the Red Tabs, and that is for features that you will work with in your shooting mode. So things that affect the actual shooting of pictures. The next up is the playback features and then the yellow or golden ish ones are for general set up of the camera, and then my favorite one, the green one is for my menu. It's where you get to select what you want to have in the menu toe work with. It's your own customized menu now with this camera. As I mentioned at the beginning of this class, if you use the camera in the automatic modes, it's like having child safety locks on the camera. It restricts what you can get access to, and so if you have your camera set on the green automatic zone and you press the menu button, you're only gonna have five tabs available to you. If you move your camera to the manual mode and you press menu, you will notice several more taps, and that is the full menu there. But there is also a video menu to get access to the special video functions, and the only way to do that is to have your camera turned to the video section, and you'll notice that some of those tabs have changed their icons to a video camera. Eso For the first part. Make sure your camera is in one of the manual modes so manual time value program any of those modes up there so that you get the full setting of tabs and we're just basically going to go through this. So if you have your camera, this is a good time to start setting the camera up the way you want it to get to be, because we're just gonna go through it one by one. First off is the image quality, and this is really important. Do you want to shoot raw pictures or J pay? You know, I've been trying to figure out a good analogy. What is raw, what is JP? Because there's some people who have no idea. And the only thing I like better than a good analogy is a good, strange analogy. And the one that I have come up with for this is raw is like owning your home and J pegs like renting. Raw is a za born permanent system, and people are a little bit scared of it at first because they think it involves ah, lot more stuff, and there is a little bit extra involved at the very beginning. But once you have settled into it, it is a really nice thing because you have great control over what happens. Aziz. You heard me say before when we talked about white balance. I don't worry about white balance because I shoot in raw and I can adjust it later. There's a lot of adjustments that you can adjust later if you have shot in raw because you have gathered all the information possible. The quick, short term solution for just simply shooting a picture and getting out of the camera's fastest possible is J. Peg. All the computers right now around the world can handle J pegs if you have a website. If you want to email somebody you want to put it up on Facebook, it needs to be done. It's a J pick, and so if you need immediate quick access to that, I could understand shooting with J Pick. But to really get the maximum out of this camera, I would recommend shooting raw and using a software program like Light room so that you can work with your images. You could make J pegs from there, and it's just a system that you can Ah, it's more forgiving because you don't have to worry about quite a few things out in the field when you're shooting J. Peg, you need to worry about the white balance. You may want to concern yourself with the picture styles. Do I want to add more saturation or less saturation of it? So I highly recommend shooting raw and using a good software program with it next up the beep. And so as we go through these, I'm gonna tell you kind of what the standard setting is. And I'm gonna give you some recommendations if I think you should change it. Normally, the camera, when it achieves focus will give you a little chirp chirp. This drives me nuts. And so I highly recommend disabling this feature. This also will be put you when you set the self timer. And so if you are setting the self timer, it'll just go. B B B b. And if you've ever worked around two or three other photographers who are all using the beep with the self timer, it's quite annoying. And so I prefer to keep my camera in a little bit more stealth mode. And so I like to disable the beep release shutter without card when you don't have a card in your camera. Do you want to be able to fire the shutter release or not? For many people, I would say what they should do on this is to disable this on dso change. I think this is a change from the normal setting on it. And so that way, if you forget to put a memory card in your camera, it won't actually take a picture. So disable that feature. Image review is pretty simple. On that is how long do you want your image to pop up on the back of the screen while you are taking a picture? Ah, the standard setting is four seconds, which I think is fine. If you want to save battery life, you can turn it off or put it at two seconds or you could have it on for a longer period of time. Next up is something called peripheral illumination correction, and so I have a slide to kind of explain what that is. Many lenses, in fact, now pretty much all lenses for that fact have a natural phenomenon of vignette ing or a darkening of the corners, especially when they're shot wide open and So this picture here is suffering from some vignette E. And you can correct for that in camera Elektronik Lee. And so here in this picture, I prefer the picture on the right with the getting the peripheral illumination correction turned on to correct for it. And you might be tempted to turn this on on the camera. But this is once again something that could be fixed in a good software program. Some pictures look better with a little bit of a netting flip side with by that one a little fast, I'm actually gonna go back on that one. So the picture on the left has the been getting turned off. Excuse me. Turned on the control turned on and then on the right, it's turned off. And so, with people, people, pictures of people excuse me, it often looks better to darken the corners. And a lot of people are We're doing that in the dark room years ago and they're doing it in photo shop, just a little bit of darkening of the corners. And sometimes it looks very good for that. So in general I would leave that at its standard setting, turned off and work with that in the computer because you could have more direct control over it. We then have red eye reduction, and we talked a little bit about that before. With the light on the front of the camera. Do you want a two second delay to help reduce red eye? For some people, it's worth it. For some people, it's not flash control. When you enter the flash control you were going to enter in to another fairly large city, you can turn the flash on and off. For instance, if you didn't want your camera to ever fire the flash, you could turn it off. Most of the features of this air gonna be in the built in flash function setting mode, and when you go in there, there are some different modes. The first mode was likely be great out because you don't have any external equipment hooked up to this in the flash mode, The shutter Sync mode. There's a first curtain in a second curtain, and unfortunately, in this class, we don't have time to explore this. But if you get the fundamentals of digital photography, it's in the lighting section. I would recommend going to second curtain. It will likely not have any effect on your pictures, but there's a few pictures were using slow shutter speeds. The flash looks a little bit more natural, synchronized with the second curtain than the first curtain. And so that's one little change I would make in there. You recall we change the flash exposure compensation. We powered it down to one stop. We did that with the quick menu. Will. It can also be done here as well. And then the way that the flash meters, the light has the option of evaluative or average and I would leave it at the standard default evaluative. And so that's the flash control. Next up, we're gonna go to the next tab in the menu system. So you want to make sure that you were on the second tab. Read the middle of the two. The three tabs and the first option is exposure compensation. Now, this has a direct access right on the back that we don't need for exposure compensation. But you could do it in here if you wanted Teoh. But it also controls exposure, bracketing and what exposure bracketing is is when you want to take a picture, but you want a lighter version and a darker version of the same picture. Or perhaps you want to have five or seven copies of the same image just to really make sure that you got the right exposure, or possibly your into a type of photography called HDR high dynamic range photography, you can shoot a lot of pictures very quickly, having the shutter speed and aperture adjusted for you so you can shoot a Siri's like this from light to dark, and you would set that up in this setting. Next up is the auto lightning optimizer. I think I mentioned this couple times, and so here's the problem. In some some pictures, you have a strong contrast between light and dark, and what is in the dark, shadowed areas is kind of lost. If you turn this optimizer on, it is basically going to lighten the shadows. So think of anything that's in the shadows. You're just lightning the information in there, and in this particular image, I think it helps the image out. Now, once again, this is something that you could do in a good software program, so it's not really doing anything you can't do someplace else. It's just doing it in camera. I would not leave it on because there are some areas that you do want stronger contrast, and so of the settings that they have in their turn my camera on and go in there, you can disable it completely. I would probably recommend for most people to leave it on standard, which I believe is where it normally issue can turn it on low. Or you could turn it on strong, and I would strongly recommend not putting it and strong. I don't think that's, ah, good setting to have for most of the time, all right. The next item in the menu is the metering mode, and this is something else that we could change more quickly and easily on the quick menu. But it can be changed here if you want to get into it. The evaluative, the partial, they bring all these up so you could see him here. Partial is a fairly small spot. Spot is the smallest of them, and center weighted is the largest of the spots, so it's not a completely logical order, but it's the way it's in there. And so here, once again, I would recommend evaluative measures a large area of light, large area of the scene and does result in a very accurate reading of a light. Next up, we have custom white balance. We're not going to dive into this too far. But if you wanted to make a custom adjustment on the white balance, you could go in here and you could No, actually, I'm sorry. I was thinking about the white balance shift. I was jumping ahead. One custom white balance. This is where you take a photograph of the white piece of paper and then you register it. And so just for kicks, I will do that right here and now. So I got a white piece of paper here, and I'm gonna throw this into a live. You Maybe you can see this on the camera, and I'm gonna go in here. I'm gonna turn my camera to manual Focus, which it ISS. I'll take a piece of a picture of the white piece of paper press menu going to custom white balance and you'll notice that over on the left, it's has set. I'll press the set button using white balance data from this image for a custom white balance. Okay. And so my camera is now white balance to the light that is landing on this desk. It's a great system for getting white balance adjusted to an unusual lighting system. Next up is white balance shift, and this is one of those areas that we're not going to spend much time. But if you wanted to go in and adjust the white balance by very small increments, you could go in and adjust this once again. If you're shooting raw, you could just change this afterwards and software, and you don't need to worry about setting this precisely. Next up is color space in general, I would recommend changing it to Adobe RGB rather than s RGB. It's a larger color gamut, and it gives your camera the ability to record a wider range of colors. Picture styles. We've talked a little bit about thes. This is where you can go in and you can adjust sharpness, contrast in saturation. You can make some interesting effects with your black and whites. Once again shoot and Ron, you can do it all later with much more control. All right, So we're gonna go to the third menu, which only has a couple of things in there. The first thing is the dust delete data, and this deals with dust on the sensor. Now the camera does have a ultrasonic shake sensor that senses dust or doesn't really sensed us. But it sends an ultrasonic wave over the sensor to knock dust off of it, which does an amazingly good job. Him really impressed with how good it keeps the censor free of dust. But every once in a while, something with a little bit more gum to it. Get stuck on the sensor, and either you have to get in and manually clean it yourself. You have to turn it into a repair shop to have it cleaned, or what you can do if those air open to you. If you're on vacation, you're out in the middle of the desert of the forest or the mountains or something. You could once again shoot a white piece of paper and register the dust. There is a little bit of instructions that you may want to check through on your instruction manual on how to do it. You have to shoot it F 22 you have to shoot it properly. But you shoot a white piece of paper, then the camera can recognize where the dust is. And in future pictures, what is it is it is essentially doing is cloning over those dust areas? It would be better if you could clean it, but in an emergency situation, your camera will be able to shoot around it. And so that is a nice little option. Next up is I s O auto. And here is where you can set the max limits on your I S O. So if you only want your eyes. So when you said it in auto, which I've already told you not to dio. But if you did want to do that, you could set the max limit at 408 116 100 or various levels in there just gives you a little bit more control. And so we're gonna switch over to the movie mode. So what you need to do is you need to turn the camera around and switch over to the movie mode on the mode dial, and that will give us access to some new selections in here. First off is movie recording size, and here we have a number of options, and it's gonna have to do with how big a picture do we want to record and how many frames per second standard Full HD is by 10 80. So if you want toe make a movie and you want it the highest resolution possible, you're probably gonna record it at the top resolution. And there are other reasons to record smaller, uh, aspect re or excuse me, smaller pixel sizes. If you are just gonna put something on the Internet, you just want a quick little video that has a small file. Size 6 40 by 80 is fine for that. It also has a cropped mode where it zooms in on the normally uses the whole sensor. And in the crop mode, you are able to use just this middle portion of the sensor, which basically turns your camera into a super telephoto camera. So if you have a telephoto lens and you want to shoot some video with that, you can use the crop mode and it will crop that in. Then there is the frame rate standard frame rate for video here in the United States is 30 frames per second he had. If you want to shoot movies that look a little bit more Hollywood like, you want to shoot it 24 frames a second now there is also the option for shooting 25 frames per second. Uh, and that's gonna be common in some European countries. I believe you can also shoot it 60 frames per second and then play it back at half speed on many different video programmes. So if you want to show something in slow motion you consume, shoot it at 60 frames per second, and those are some of the options that you're gonna have with the movie size. Next up is the auto focus mode, and we talked a little bit about this when we were talking about the live you kind of. At the very beginning, you have live mode. You have, ah, little symbol that looks like a face with live mode and the quick mode. The live mode is the little square box that we focused with earlier. That's kind of slow. The facial recognition live mode will recognize a face and try to stay focused on that. And then the quick mode returns to the standard camera setting, which is a little bit jarring because there's a lot of mere movement up and down and you lose view of what your cameras pointed at. But it can be pretty quick in focusing. My preference is to leave it on, live you, but too often use manual focus when you're in the movie recording mode. Autofocus during video. What's going on here is you can use the shutter release button to focus, and this is simply a way for you to turn that on and off are actually sees me. The auto focus during video mode allows the focus to either be turned on or off while you're recording. Some people don't want the focus to change while you are recording, and so you can leave that wherever it is that you want. It doesn't affect the way most people shoot video. Next up is the shutter, a lock button. This is where we talked a little bit about the customizing of the camera. You can go in and you can adjust the way the shutter release button and this exposure button on the back works. And so we talked about taking the focus away from the shutter release button in front, And this is where you would do it. You could move it down to the second setting. In that case, what's gonna go happen here is that the shutter release button is gonna control the exposure, and the back button is gonna control the auto focus. It takes a little while to get used to. So be careful when you make that change, because it really changes what you do with your fingers when you are taking a picture. Remote control. This allows use of a remote if you want, or to disable it, moving over to the next tab in the exposure mode. Normally, when you shoot movies, it's gonna be automatic exposure, shutter speeds and apertures air chosen for you. But you could go in here and you can change it to manual. If you want, you will have to set shutter speeds and apertures yourself what's a little bit more work? But for those who are into controlling their movies, very precisely, you might want to do this. You can ah display a grid if you want this will help you keep the horizon level. You can select how long the metering timer is active and then on sound recording. You can turn that on or off if you want. If you want to use external microphone or you just don't need video or don't need audio for the video that you are recording, so maybe we'll just take a quick moment to see if there's any questions before we jump into the playback menu. There's probably a number of questions on the recording modes in the camera. So in class we got the microphone and online. Maybe they have a question. Oh, you question, um, we had some questions around the white piece of paper and creating the custom white balance. This last one was from Deborah, 33. Did you say to use F for creating the white balance? F 22 is not important for creating the dust delete data. We do want to have F 22. Okay, thank you. And, uh, the other question with regard to custom white balance from G blink, can we undo? Do we need to undo the custom white balance for a different lighting situation? Yes, you do need to change it over eso there. It's actually a two step process. And this is one of those reasons is one of those reasons why I told you to keep the instruction manual around Because I'm not telling you everything you need to know. So let me just clarify on that one. We did a custom white balance, if you recall on the white piece of paper we shot a white piece of paper, but I don't believe that we actually locked it in. And so what? You would need to dio and I will see if I could do this on the back of camera here. So I will activate. I'm in the video mouth, which I don't want to pay. I'm still in auto white balance. I've registered a custom white balance, but I haven't activated it. And so now I need to go in here and activate the white balance by going to custom and pressing set. And so I photographed the white piece of paper as Step one. I registered it, and then I turned it on. And so you have to go through that full set up and then once you change to a new lighting system. You would need to photograph a new piece of paper and so forth. Or you can shoot in raw and not worry about it. Auto, white balance, auto white and wrong and round on. And I just wanted to let you know that I did tweet out your renting versus owning comment. Yes, everyone knows. So I'm gonna just kind of go back with questions for the last segment with you. Um, and everyone really wanted to talk about the color space again. But Joe wanted to know if the color space effects raw as well. Yes, it does. Okay, Good answer. Um, there's quite a few more questions here. Go ahead. Can it? No, I was just going to repeat. People were asking again. It's adobe rgb that you recommend. I recommend the baby RGB. It is a slightly controversial issue, so I'm opening myself up to criticism. But I figure I like to play with the largest box of Crans possible. And so that's why I choose Adobe RGB. In fact, you know, if you wanted to submit pictures to Sports Illustrated, I saw one of their camera setting recommendations was to set it to Adobe RGB. And so for magazines, descriptions they wanna have or any professional source, they want the largest color gamut toe work with possible Just to build on that. Do you know if that's the same for video? Somebody is suggesting Well, video. Oh, boy, I'm gonna have think about this one for a moment. Yeah, The video is getting processed in a different way because it's not raw. It's not J. Peg. It's a different dot movie file. And so the color information is getting compressed differently, and so I'm pretty sure that this has no impact on the video mode. You may have to check the instruction manual on that. Okay, a question from Glen regarding movie menu. Shudder. A lock button. Could you go over the four options and what they mean? Let's see if I know what is going on there. Okay, so we have to be in the movie mode. Everyone go to the movie mode, press the menu and the shutter lock button. Okay, so the top one is the standard, so they shutter release will activate auto focus, and the back button will do auto exposure. That standard by going to the second setting. Leave these up here. A lock, a f What we've done is we air taken Auto focus off of the shutter release. So now the shutter release The camera won't worry about taking uh, worried about focus at all. It will go ahead and just do the exposure lock and the back button. We'll control the focus. So once again, we're in the video. Moats were not pressing the shutter release to take a picture. It's just the exposure. Reading and focusing. The next one down will do, focusing in front and then focus. Lock in back and there's no auto exposure. Lock either place and why you would do this? I'm not sure, but it's there if you want it. And then finally, we have auto exposure in the front auto focus in back and no E e lock. And so it's basically a reverse of the previous one, and this is just one of those things to customize the camera for your needs. Now the thing Teoh make note of in the menu system is that there is auto exposure autofocus in these different things that are going on. And then there's the hash. The slash things before the slash is what's happening on the shutter. Release in front things after the slashes, what's happening on the back button. And so just remember that slashes the front of the camera in the back of the camera. We have a question in the last, we're gonna get the microphone. We'll take that question. So I think what what I just heard is there's no way to preserve both to have the focus on the back and still be able to use a lock. Let me take a look in there so you want to use focus on the front or the back. You focus on the back, focus on the back and then still be able to say, OK, here's my, um my exposure, and I want to use it for a bunch of pictures. I think you're correct. The next level up camera. I believe the 60 D has a special autofocus button on there where you could potentially hit both buttons with your finger at the same time. Awkward but possible. And so this camera just doesn't have that extra button on there. And so it's a good example of what's the difference between this and the next level cameras, just just little tiny buttons and little features here that give you that capability Things. Another question from the Internet. Um, Don Dava would like to know. How do you enable the auto lighting optimizer option in the menu? All right, let's go ahead and that. And so let's see the menu turned on. And actually that is, well, there is actually a setting for that for video and a setting for still pictures. And so you could set 11 way and one the other way, depending on how you want those shadows rendered. But you would basically go to where it says auto lighting Optimizer, which is the fourth tab over in the video mode and go back up to the manual mounts. We'll go ahead and put this in manual. It's in the second tower. Or, excuse me. It was the auto lightning optimizer that they were wanting the auto lighting optimizing. So that's the second red tab, the red tab, with two little dots next to it. Second item down and you can go in there and you can look at the different options which are disabled low standard and strong, and I would probably leave it on standard. But you may try some different pictures and adjust to your own taste. They're searching through millions of questions. It's not for lack of questions. It's just for I have a question from Pink. Do you need to turn off the internal microphone to use an external microphone? No, To use an external microphone, you could just simply plug it in. And as soon as one is plugged in, I'm pretty sure it just turns this one off. In fact, I'm quite sure I'm positive. I would bet $5 on it. We had a couple questions about the vignette ing that we talked about. Guardiola says, Does P I C help Control have been getting in white and wide angle lenses is what control it. The P I. C. U had as one year Oh, picture controls. Not sure the question. If you could go back, can you go back a couple? I don't have that option. I thought you and I thought I wouldn't have toe. Okay, just read the question one more time. It was one of the options. And does P I C help control have been yet ing in wide angle lenses to the P I. C. Doesn't everything to do with it. But the vignette ing control the peripheral illumination. That is basically something that could be turned on or off when we see okay, so it's in the red tab. Number one, the 1st 1 it's about they want to 3 4/5 item down. Basically, you could enable it or disable it. Um, but it does need to recognize the lens. And so on this particular camera it is reading out that an FS 18 to 55 lenses attached. And so if it if you put on for instance, I Tamron Sigma Lens that it doesn't recognize or even a canon lens that it doesn't recognize, it won't be able to correct for that. So it does need to recognize the lands and wanna get once again. That's one of those options that you may or may not want to change. I typically leave mine disabled because sometimes I actually like that vignette ing and I am shooting and I want that I kind of like to see it when I get it later on in the computer, and I can adjust it very easily in light room. Okay, what kind of answers? The next question from Nagoya Arts with they say that you make it sound like you could turn the been getting on her off after the fact, like in light room, and they wanted to know if that was true. And why not take a photo without it and then admin yet been getting later in light room. Yeah, well, let's think about what's actually going on. The lens is not letting in enough light in the corners, and so it's getting dark. The question is, where do you want that problem fixed? Do you want the cameras computer to fix the problem, or do you want your computer to fix the problem? In either case, it's a software issue where it's just going to try to lighten the shadow areas so that it's the same brightness is everything else you're gonna end up with pretty much the same result. But if you do it later, you have more control over what it's gonna look like and how strong effect it ISS and I prefer having more control rather than less control. Thank you. Sure. I'm sorry I don't I don't know if he asked us already, but about that I if I hi fi card that would really talked about that, are you going to? Not really. It's something that very few people use, and it's It's probably not worth the time of all of us to go through that. Okay, question from Bobby, you do you? Center weighted Do you center wait for landscapes in street photography? I don't personally, I don't have a problem with people who do. I kind of admire people who do that. I use evaluative most of the time, and I'm typically a person who will shoot a test picture. Look at the back of the camera. Look at the history Graham, make an adjustment and then engage in the serious work. That way. It's kind of cheating because I'm looking at my results and I'm seeing if I'm doing the right thing. But it's really nice to engage in a project where you know you're getting good results, and that's why it's great getting that feedback on the back of the camera, looking at the history, Graham, looking at the exposure and knowing you got it right. Uh, spot meters center weighted meters were more important in the days that we couldn't tell what we got until we got our film back. Nowadays, with e screens in the history grams, we could get a lot more important information and be sure about things right on the point. And so, if you like working with those, that's good. They're they're just different tools for different folks. And are you gonna be talking about the history Rams not? And I think I didn't really We didn't really show. I can I can show in here. Let Z put one up on my, uh, pulling up. Let me play an image back actually has something to look at here There's our class. And so I played an image back in its full screen on my camera. I'm gonna plus the display button once, and I can see how many pictures I've taken. I can see my shutter speed and aperture. I will press display one more time. And now we have a history Graham over here, and this is a monochromatic hissed a gram, which means it's just showing us one color. If I press display one more time, we get the color hissed a gram, which is the one that I really like because you can see the channels. And what this is showing is it's showing dark pixels on left and like pixels on the right. And in this case there's a lot of information towards the middle, which means I got the right exposure. And this is one of those things that requires a little bit more teaching. And so my class on exposure is what you want to see in the fundamentals of digital photography. There's there's a whole class and there's a whole slew of pictures that I have is examples of what's good and what's bad. And so getting used to and working with that hissed a gram is important. In fact, let's see. I don't know if we could do this. Can I hook up live, um, get PhD in my cord and do a live you shocks? I think I might be able to show people a bit more about the history, Graham, and it just seems like a nice, high tech, geeky thing to do here, and I'm sure that's not gonna offend anybody, so we're going to try to switch things over to our live You? Yeah. Let's see if we're gonna get this switched over here. We're working on it, folks. So hang with us here. Quick. Question. Free. Quick question. While you're doing that, Uh, did you talk about how to enable disabled the D plus to get back one slide for that and we're getting to it. Yeah. All right. So here we got just a quick little scene set up and let's see if I pull up the display button if I could get this. Uh, it's not what I wanted. We are experiencing a few technical issues. Hold, please. There's artist a gram. Okay, so we have a history, Graham, and let me move over to manual exposure. You can see the history Ram is way off to the left. That means it's very dark. And as I change, the hissed a gram and lighten it up. You can see it's moving to the right, which means we have more and more lighter pixels. And for a well exposed image, it might look a little like this. Hissed a gram that we see right now on camera. It's kind of a mountain towards the middle. And as we go? Well, I don't think that we're gonna This is gonna allow us to get overexposed. Well, here we go. As we get overexposed, the data gets stacked up against the right hand wall, and that's what we don't want. We generally want a mountain more towards the middle, and you especially want to be aware of where the ends of the history Graham are and that you don't want him stacked up against the walls. And so that's a quick tutorial on the hissed a gram. But mountain in the middle, Mountain in the middle. Very general. And there's professional photographers cringing all around the world. I know what you're thinking, but that's a good general place to start. OK, have a question from Skier An, um, who says that she likes shooting in macro. And when she sets the doll to macro, it seems to lose all custom options and that everything is automatic when in fact, when they do what again, when they're in macro mode, all of the custom custom options Um, everything becomes automatic macron. Well, what I think they're talking about is that on the top of the camera on the mode, I'll there is a little tool up or rose or flower of some sort. That is the macro mode, and it is kind of the Mac remote for exposure. And once again, this is in the area of child safety locks. And so what's happened is that it has put restrictions on all the menus that we can get Teoh. And so I don't recommend using those automatic modes for anyone who has listened this far in this class. You should be over in the manual side and you can have much more control over your macro work. So for macro photography, I would highly recommend manual definitely Manu.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

CanonT2i_Handout.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

lblack
 

This is a great class. I bought a Canon T2i (used but in great condition) for my wife (I have a Canon 60D), and this class has been good for both of us. It served as a great learning class for my wife to move from a small point-and-shoot to her T2i DSLR, and for me -- well, what can I say. I thought I knew all about my camera, but this class proved I do not! I learned a great deal here beyond just the T2i specifics. I like the clear concise delivery of the subject material. Everything is organized in such a way to be able to digest each section before moving to the next.

a Creativelive Student
 

I really enjoyed this class. I've had my T2i for a while now, but I've only used it sporadically because I didn't understand many of the functions. The few times I referenced the manual was like listening Charlie Brown's teacher....LOL. John is really great at explaining things simply. I watched his Fundamentals class live and it was awesome. I'm hoping to add that to my collection one day.

user-eb008e
 

This was the best tool for me, as I am new to the world of semi professional photography. This is a great starting point before moving on to greater concepts. Understanding your camera is a must, and the switch to Manual shooting now is not as intimidating after this viewing this tutorial. I will definitely pursue his other classes.

Student Work

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