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Optimizing Your Gear Part 2

Lesson 18 from: Think Like a Photographer

Ben Willmore

Optimizing Your Gear Part 2

Lesson 18 from: Think Like a Photographer

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

18. Optimizing Your Gear Part 2

Lesson Info

Optimizing Your Gear Part 2

all right well one of the things that want to talk about is some of the customers ations I make on the camera itself and with the camera we've talked about things like shutter speed and aperture and what lens you use but in the menu system for your camera there's usually all sorts of options that you can change these air going vary by manufacturer so I'm only going to be able to show you what I change on my particular camera which is that happens to be a cannon five d mark three so if you happen to have that particular model you'd be able to make all the changes that I mentioned if you have a different one instead be inspired by what I show you to say you might want to explore your menu system to see if it offers similar functions to see if you can customize it yourself for instance one of the changes that I make my camera is I find what I'm in the field trying to find the play button to play back my picture if I need to review them when it's dark out or all my cameras above my head or...

something else is not overly easy because it's the second button on the back and my brain doesn't always remember that well there's a way where this little button in the center of this style usually doesn't really have a purpose at the time that you're shooting it's mainly when you're in the menu system of your camera that that is a useful button but there's a custom function in my camera where if I pressed the set button I would rip I would review my image and that is the easiest button to find on the back of my camera my thumb almost automatically goes to it any time on the back of my screen so that's the type of customization but let's just look through the menu system I'll show you the kind of stuff that I like to change and then if it's if you're particular camera has a similar setting you could try the same thing so take me just a moment here to get my menu up now when I first launched this on a cannon there is something called my menu which is a place where you can store functions that would usually be found in the other men use of your camera where you'd have to search for them in all the diff category's let me just show you what I put in there at the very top I put in for matty my card that therefore when I very first hit the menu button this is the screen and always comes to and I've always just one click away to be able to format my card then I can choose which slot in my camera I'm going to format and I could come in here and format it but I find searching for that particular function is not a fun thing to do so I put it here in the my menu section below that I have sensor cleaning my camera has something where it can shake the camera sensor tio try to have have the dust fall off of my camera sensor and that often happens when I'm changing lenses that it'll automatically turn on the sensor cleaning function but on occasion it just doesn't seem to do it and I just want to force it to to censor cleaning so I store that and there as well and without any time you're doing sensor cleaning I hold the camera horizontal you know normal like this I'm not holding it down like that were up or anything else because it's going to shake the camera sensor hoping to get the dust to fall off and there's a little strip of sticky tape at the bottom of the area where the sensor is where if the dust falls and hopefully will stick on to that piece of tape if you're looking at your camera on the sensors pointed this way where's pointed down now if it shakes your sensor and there's dust on it where is it going to fall it's gonna fall this way in what's sitting right below that is the shutter and now you're going to have the dust sitting on the shutters so the next time this shutter opens and closes its goingto fly around in your camera in deposit itself somewhere else so any time I clean the camera sensor I try to hold the camera you know straight uh then and hear the next choice that I have is exposure compensation in a b a b is auto exposure bracketing that's the feature that I used when we shot hdr or where when I choose it I can tell photoshopped how many shots to take and how different they should be in brightness or if I put them all so they line up I'm actually turning off the feature and so I put that in this mine menu area just so it's very easy to get to because it's very common for me to shoot hdr and I might want to change the settings used below that you can also choose the number of bracketed shots if I click that I can tell photoshopped tiuna photoshopped my camera to take two three five or seven shots and so depends on how wide of a brightness range my scene has if you remember when we talked briefly about shooting hdr with you most of time three shots would be fine for most purposes but in some when you're in something like a slot canyon looking straight up at the sky I think that was my example in order to get detail in the sky and also get detailed the darkest portion of the image I did take a lot more than three shots and so here is where I would change it uh also those are the main ones the stuff down here is just there because I had more space it's not something I typically used to put things into this menu that's called my menu there's just a choice down here at the bottom called my menu settings and if I choose in there I can come in here and delete items I can change their order that type of thing but that's where I went into two actually choose what appears in this in this thing that's called my menu is what shows up every time I hit the menu button it's always the very first menu so if I can store things like formatting my card cleaning my camera sensor in doing my bracketing it's something where I rarely need to search through all the other menus that are in available but let's look at those other men used to see what kind of things I would look for to change and I'm not going to necessarily show you every little thing that I would change because some of the settings are completely unimportant or are so personal to you that it's not going to matter I'm just going to show you to make sure you're aware of certain features that you probably do want to change the first thing I change that I can't stand when I first get a camera is the beep setting this would make it so every time I auto focus it makes a noise and if you want to annoy somebody you're photographing and get them to be distracted or you want an animal to suddenly look weird or some you know do something make your camera beep all the time every single time you auto focus and so I'd set that to disable and in my view finder instead there's a little green circle that lights up every time it successfully focuses and I can see that so anyway that was one of the first choice is under uh under the camera menu then other things that we haven't here that I'd always change is below that is release shutter without card that means if I have no storage card in here whatsoever and I pressed the shutter will act like it's taking a picture to me that is the dumbest setting unless you're giving in demo you know in the field or something where you don't want to take pictures but if I'm ever in the field in this thing is turned on then I might not realise there's no card in my camera and I might think I'm taking pictures all day long and only later on when I realized that there's no card in the camera so I end up turning that off so that if there's no card in the camera is never gives me the false impression that I am capturing an image uh other things in here that I use frequently ah also speed settings if I choose that here first at the top is the actual iso setting my camera's set too I don't usually go to the menu system to change that because there's a button on the outside of my camera that says I s so that's where I change it but down here there's a choice called s o speed range and if I choose that it lets me tell it what the highest and lowest value khun b and with default settings the minimum setting is not this setting here it would be one hundred I would default setting now if I like to have slow shutter speeds to get blurred motion in my scene to possibly shoot a waterfall and have the water be blurred and all that oftentimes I want to make the camera very make it so it's not very sensitive to light so it needs to use longer exposures and this is one area where it will help me so I click this and I said it to fifty that's the lowest it would go I wish it could go our uh and that's going to make it less sensitive to light or at least I'll have the ability to bring it down to fifty and it can be rather nice over here on the other side if you find after shooting with your camera for a while that you find certain eso settings just to be unusable that the amount of noise that you get in your image is makes it so the images aren't usable I would change the maximum then to bring this down to whatever you think the highest usable would be in for me most of the time that's either sixteen hundred or thirty two hundred to pay and what it is I'm shooting I going above that is I don't really like the look of the image it's ah a bit on the noisy side uh so anyway those r s o and I find mainly getting the idea so being able to go down to fifty to be overly useful down here at the bottom everybody asked about this setting color space this only applies to j peg files yeah there's a lot of settings in your menu system that will only apply to j peg files because they're processed in the camera so there need a aa lot of setting specified but when you open an image either in light room or in photo shop you can change what's known as the color space that's attached to your image so it's not critical what you choose here if you open your image in camera wrong then at the very bottom of the camera window will just be a small line of text it's actually text that's underlined and if you click on it that's where you can choose your color space when you're opening a raw file if I was working with j peg files it would depend if I print my own images or if I send those images out if I send them out to be printed ah lot of this service bureau's on output houses that do that prefer s r t b that's what they need that's what their gear is set up for and if so I'd use that but if I'm pretty my own images and I want the widest range of colors ah possible I would choose adobe rgb instead what this means is just what are the most vivid colors I can create in my picture gas rgb will limit the vivid colors whereas dobie rgb will will allow you a wider range of more vivid colors all of the settings like picture style in anything do with contrast and all that only apply to jpeg files they're not things that I typically changed because I'm shooting raw format the majority of the time and so I don't really need to do that down here the long exposure noise reduction is something I just and I usually have it set to auto and what that does is if it's going to be a long enough exposure where it's going to get rather noisy the camera will decide if it needs the noise reduction or not if I'm shooting with a cannon cameron what's nice is it does not prevent me from taking another photo right after that on some other brands of cameras like nikon if you have long exposure noise reduction turned on it takes an equal length pause after you make a shot so let's say you do a two minute exposure then your camera would pause for two minutes to do noise reduction after that before you can take another shot and so if that was the case then I might decide if I want that honor off because it could be rather important if it's going to slow me down but with the cannons and still let you take another shot right afterwards so I find having that set to auto works out pretty good go over to another thing right here is something I find to be useful member how I talked about not wanting to tell my camera up with tall buildings were short buildings actually and be able to tell if I tilt my camera or not is not overly easy unless you can see some sort of reference on your viewfinder so if I come in here I can choose if I want to grid to be over laid on top of my picture not every camera will offer this what this one does some people would like to use the three by three grid because if you want to think about the rule of thirds some people talk about where you could place your subject at the intersection of those grid lines that would be one choice you could use but I use thie six by four grid just because it gives me more grid lines and that means there'll be lines closer to the edge of a building that I can see do they just the edge of the building at the same angle is thies vertical lines or is it tilted because my cameras tilt it a little bit so I like the six by four grid I'm going to skip over the auto focus enough because that's really specific to this camera and it has a lot to do with sports shooting in other things and a lot less to do with um with landscapes and other things so I'm going to skip over that also going toe go a little bit further in here just to find some settings that I find to be useful all right here's a critical setting and that is up at the top highlight alert that's what I call the blink ese if you ever find that in your when you're playing back your image if there's an area that solid white and it doesn't blink then that means this setting this turned off so I make sure that that's turned on and that gives me an idea if I might need to change my exposure setting to make the image a little darker because I've blown out the detail in my highlights and let's see right here is where my playback grid khun b this I usually have turned off because I only want to see the grid when I'm looking through the viewfinder actually composing the image this would put a grid on top of the picture when I'm playing it back and I find that that's not something I usually find overly beneficial because I usually compensate for it in the viewfinder then I'm going to go through a few of the other studies because I'll find some stuff that I find useful to change just take me a minute teo through here right here is viewfinder vf means a viewfinder grid display and so here is where I need to turn this on in order to be able to see a grid over laid on my picture right in the viewfinder itself so when I pulled this up to my eye there's a very slight black lines on the scene and it helps me tell if I'm having my lens tilted up or down when I'm shooting architecture see here ah okay then here is some really nice settings there is this area up here called customs shooting mode in custom shooting mode when I click it just has some simple sightings it looks like only three settings but it actually does quite a bit what is talking about with custom shooting modus on a lot of canon cameras on this dial on the top of my camera where I usually switch between aperture priority mode shutter priority and program all that kind of stuff there's also the letters c one c two and see three and that's where I can store settings that I'd like to use so that whenever I switch over to those modes it automatically loads in a whole bunch of camera settings for me so I just want to tell you briefly what I put into those particular areas on my camera I set it up so when I switch this over to c three it automatically starts shooting hdr meaning multiple exposures that vary in brightness so what that means is to set this up so when I spin it over it's ends up automatically being ready to shoot hd are what I do is first choose the mode I'd want my camera to be in when I shoot hdr and I usually am an aperture priority mode when I shoot hdr so I swing the style first toe aperture priority mode in right after I do I go into the menu system plan to take just a second for to show up and I find that's setting there it is custom shooting mode and I say let's register the settings I currently have on my camera so I say register settings and I say c three and that means that when I switched to this big dial in top to see three it's going to think that it's an aperture priority mode then after I'm done doing that so I guess I'll do right now the on ly setting that I looked out of my camera before storing it in to see three was what modi was in aperture priority mode after that I switched this over to c three so now it's not going to mess up the other modes whatever settings I'd change in my camera are only going to be related to this thing called c three now let's see what I can do I'm gonna come in here and just change settings on my camera I'm gonna come in here and set my eyes so setting to what I I usually like to use also one hundred I'm going to come in here and I'm even going to choose my favorite aperture setting whatever that is I'm not telling you everybody has their own no it's what the scene needs but I'm going to change the drive setting on my camera I'm gonna set it to continuous high we talked about that setting when we talked about hdr that's where if I press and hold the shutter it should take multiple shots and if it's set to hide should take miss fast as he can another thing I'm going to do in my camera to get ready for hdr is I'm going to go into the menu and there's a few settings related to hdr that aaron the custom functions here they are I'm going to make sure and some of these have already been changed but there's something called bracketing auto cancel I'm going to set it toe off what bracketing auto cancel would be talking about would be if my camera powers down either by me entering the power off or buy it just timing out you know how after thirty seconds or whatever your cameras set to that the screen turns off that it's not going to turn off any bracketing setting tommy the other thing that I'm going to do is come in here and I'm going to set the bracketing sequence which is what order does it take my photos in when it brackets if you look at this it looks kind of weird with just some symbols in there but all its meaning is the minus means the underexposed image the zero indicates the normal exposure and the pluses the over exposed image because when you bracket usually you get three shots and they vary in brightness in this is simply asking what order should it take those pictures in I personally prefer the setting of minus zero plus the only reason I prefer that is when I review my photographs it will showing me the darkest one first and when I scroll through them they just progressively get brighter and for me it's easiest to think about the images when that starts with the darkest one and gets progressively brighter the default setting is actually the top one and there's a good reason for the default setting I just find it makes it more difficult to reveal your pictures mentally but what it would do is the very first picture it would take would be the metered exposure like the default exposure in that way of some sort of action happened in front of you and you just picked up your camera pointed it at something and hit the shutter the very first shot it would take would be a normal exposure and therefore you know you would have gotten that particular subject matter captured in a normal way then it would take one that's underexposed in one that's over exposed but the very first one you could time to get whatever kind of action is in front of your camera and you know you got it with a normal exposure to begin with the problem with that is when you're revealing your pictures it's really hard to tell which pictures go together because it jumps around in brightness you see a normal image then the next images of dark one on the next images of bright one in mentally it's hard for me to sort through those because they're jumping around in brightness so when I do hdr I like that setting the minus zero plus then most of the time I end up telling it how many bracketed shots I want well most of the time when I'm shooting that three shots is fine for most images so that's what I'm going to leave that at so I've changed all these settings on my camera now and what I'm going to do then is store them into that little custom ikon called c three so in my camera system I'm to go back and find that setting called custom shooting mode click on it and I'll say let's now register the settings we've changed going to see three and we just saved them in there so that now it's got every little setting I put in there uh saved into that spot so any time I click over to c three it is going to recall those settings there is one other setting related to that and it's down here called auto update the default setting I believe has this turned off with the default setting what that means is any time I change a setting on my camera let's say I changed the iso setting the two hundred or even the aperture setting that I'm shooting with if my camera powers down in powers back up it's going to reset to the settings I actually saved into c three so it's going to wipe out any changes I've made since then that means if I change my aperture setting to don't know f ate and I wait long enough for my camera to power down and power back up it's no longer going to be on faa it's going to be a whatever setting I had at the moment I told it to register the settings in what's called c three and so it's going to be kind of annoying any time the camera shuts off in pops back on you're going to be back to the settings that we're in c three instead what I like to do is come over here and set this little thing called auto update and enable it what auto update means is when I'm in c three all it's going to do is remember whatever settings I last had when I was in c three instead of always resetting to the exact settings I had at the moment that I registered them in there it will just remember the last settings I use so if I set this thing to have twenty two turn the camera on and off it's still gonna be at f twenty two if I change the iso setting it's still going to remember that it's simply remembers the last settings I used when I was in that setting called c three if that's not turned on every time the camera powers down your your settings all reset to what you originally registered into that spot so it's kind of weird to think about if you're not used to these custom settings so anyway and see three I do hd are those of the settings that I use when it comes to the other one c two and sith one I put c one where I put in settings on my camera that would be good for fast action because if my cameras set up to shoot something like hdr or a waterfall or something else in suddenly a bird flies by and I want to get it I don't want to have to go in here and change my s o setting I don't want to have to come in here and change my f stop to something that we make it shoot faster change the auto focus change errol the settings and then the birds already gone by so what I end up doing is for c one would I store into it is s o four hundred that way it's going to be a faster shutter speed and f two point eight that's going to let a lot of light in the camera which is going to also contribute to a fast shutter speed and for focusing usually you can have it set to like one of shot or there's something called servo focus servo focused tracks and object so the moment you focus on it instead of just focusing and being done it keeps eye on it so if it's moving it closer to the camera or further away it adjust the focus and so I would also choose that and if I do that and then I say register settings and put it in to see one then what I have my camera gets pretty versatile I can switch it over to c three and I'm ready for hdr any moment pointed at something press the shutter it'll make three shots and I could get it a bird starts flying by I switch it over to see one it just brought the esso set me up really high changed my aperture setting and made it so I have serval auto focus and I think quickly grab that bird the moment the bird finishes going back switch back to c three start shooting hdr again and so I just find using those setting c one c two and see three can be overly useful the middle setting I might set up so this button on the back of my camera that's called a f on that it is what I have to hit to focus because if you're shooting landscapes and things there's no fast movement in your scene and you could move your camera and point it right at what you want to be in focus hit that button to have it do the focus and then recompose your scene but that button on the back that you can have it override your focus where that's the on ly button the focus is is not what you want to do when you're shooting birds or people or anything that's moving and so the problem is if you turn it on normally and then your subject matter changes suddenly you're hampered by that it slows you down and so that's why I can set that in c two so that way we have fast shooting and see one for birds and things we have landscape mode you could say in the middle one because then the button on the back would be used for auto focus and then see three would be hdr and now I can very quickly switch between those and um the versatile when I'm not thinking about those that I switched to the normal modes aperture priority programme mode whatever if there's nothing specific but the main thing is at any moment I could be ready for hdr fast action just by spinning that dial all right let's see here and I'll show you where a few of those settings are found one thing in here is there is a setting called info button display options and that is the button on the back of my camera right next to the viewfinder called info if I choose that you can say what are you going to be able to cycle through they're in one of the choices of his elektronik level I use that all the time so I keep that in there and then if I said it also to a setting called display shooting functions then if I can ever not see the top of my camera that I could instead see this display which would show me what modem in what my s o setting is it would also show me exposure compensation and other things in general it shows me all the things I would usually need to look at display in the top of my camera for and that's a really useful if my cameras ever above my head and I can't see those functions and so being able to get to it by just hitting the info button on the back my cameras real nice so I have it so it concise between those two but that's the info button um choice and where is it take me a moment to find it here there's a function in here to control when all the buttons do on your camera on the back but some of the things that you can change that are overly useful not in the auto focus I know that I'm reminded as you go through this ben of my first camera yeah the olympus on one which is a very highly you know you could modify a quite a bit you know you could change your your shutter speed and your aperture or you could do manual and it was pretty pretty deep yeah well that's the problem I'm having right now is just looking for one particular feature in here and if I look at my notes will be able to find it uh let's see it's called custom controls that's the name of the feature I'm looking for and I think it's in possibly the custom functions over here let's look for custom controls hey all right so if you go on to a setting called custom controls at least on this particular camera you can control what the various buttons doing your camera for instance you have a little diagram with cameron the left and you'll find one particular feature will be in red and that's the function you're controlling so in this particular case it is my shutter button if I click there I can tell it that that shutter button should do meet a ring and should start auto focus or go to the middle it's just going to start meet oring what that means is if I sent it to this middle setting it means that the button that I used the the shutter button will not control auto focus it's not going to focus the camera which mentally feels a little weird because here is so used to pressing the shutter halfway down to focus but if you send it over here instead it would instead not auto focus I'm not going to do that right now I don't want to mess up my camera the next time I pick it up but sometimes I would turn that off and I would instead come here to the button on the back of my camera that's a button called auto focus on avon and I would tell it to just to auto focus uh in here I can have it to things like locking the exposure autofocus stopping um other any way you could also disable it so if you actually put it over here now the media ring and starting your auto focus would be on the butt in the back your camera instead of the front and by doing so you would be able to focus and then recompose which could be nice but some of the things that I find to be overly useful is there is a setting in here called set and that's for the button in the middle of the big wheel in the back of my camera and I always change that because usually it has no function at all the button in the middle of the big dial doesn't do anything but I set mind to this little play icon and what that does is it makes it now so any time ever shooting if I ever need to see my picture all I need to do is put my thumb right on that button in the middle of the wheel and just press and that's the easiest button to find on the entire back of the camera so why they assigned no function to it whatsoever by default I don't know for me that's my playback but you one other thing that's nice about this is you can tell it what the two dials doing your camera when you're in manual mode that means should the dial on the top here camera control your aperture or should it instead control your shutter speed you can switch him back and forth which is nice because if you get used to work in an aperture priority mode the dial on the top of your camera usually chooses the aperture setting and here I can make it so it stays consistent when I go into manual mode so that shows you some of the settings that I use in my camera I know there's a lot of settings there and it's kind of like a you know firehose of information plowing by but if you actually get this video and you play it back uh you could go through with your camera if you happen to have a cannon five mark three and you could try to be changing some of the same settings the most important settings for me though are really what I store into the custom functions of c one c two and see three of my camera because that's when at any moment I can adjust to a situation a bird flies by I'm ready for it I need to do hdr I'm ready for it and I don't have to fumble through all the choices on my camera then when I hit the menu button I get my most commonly used settings there and so I don't have to fumble through all the menus and it makes it so it's uh for me is really streamlined do we have general questions I'm sure people have questions about weird menu choices of course didn't talk about which I'm sure we could talk all day about well I saw the aberration the aberrations one I was like I've never seen that before what's that so ben the stuff that we just talked about these custom functions that's you know particular to the mark three yeah the mark too will have similar settings but there won't be a cz many right and so I'll be certain things you won't be able to set and then if you have a nikon you'll still have custom functions you'll still have everything that they all be have different names though but they'll often have similar features it all depends on your camera though correct but the true idea of this little segment was to let people know enlighten them of the kinds of things that they would probably find in their night cons in there you know all the sonys just kind of go to the instruction manual yeah well pretty much look and see if there's any setting I mentioned that you think would be useful and then either google the name of your camera and the name of that setting or a description of that setting that see if somebody comes up tells you that it's available on your camera and how to get to it otherwise you can look in the index for the manual or flip through it see if your particular camera has it and if so how to access it but I find somebody people just never modify the settings that are in there other than s o and a couple others that I wanted to show you really how you can get your camera to react much faster by using things like the custom functions yeah that's something I've been thinking about and thanks for reminding me that it's something that might speed up my my work flow a little bit when I'm shooting weddings and shooting and bright areas and then I'm running inside so some funk you know custom functions could be good quick question from photo wanderer says can you title of the custom functions c one c two in the camera so that you have some idea of what you said it forward you just have to kind of remember that I know of okay it would be nice if he could where when I clicked it over it said landscape or hpr something like that but no not that I'm aware of and that's why I always think of custom function number three is being most special because even with my eyes closed in the dark if I hit the dial on the top of my camera and just turn it until it stops the last function is number three and I know that that's what I'll be in and that's whatever I used the most and then I would set the the middle of the three functions to whatever you use you know second most in that way you just spin it until you get to the end and you know that's your most common and then click one click over that's your second most used in third click over and you're in the the one you rarely use well that's a good good trick so vegas dad would like to know do you use the custom settings from most of your shots or special settings depends on which setting to referring to adjust your custom functions that you usually just you customized for most of your photography yeah I customized the camera right when I get it I looked through all the menus and see what would be useful for it and I find it could really speed me up especially things like the playback button being in the middle of the big wheel in the back but it's not something where once I've set up the camera I need to go in and modify them all that frequently s oh it's a matter of spending the time you know a night with your manual kind of thing you get a good beer something making more bearable because usually camera manuals are like britain and nine languages or something and who knows what languages originated in but if you can spend one night with it you can get much better at your camera because you can really use all those functions cool bob you have a question it was a different question but in auto bracketing you said it aperture priority and then the camera picks the shutter speed yes can you envision a situation where you might want it to have the same shutter speed and vary the aperture yeah if I'm shooting sports something that's in motion and I want to get a consistent look because otherwise my shutter speed will vary around eso find know that I like the look of a runner when it's at I don't know a fiftieth of a second or something I'll be in in shutter priority so people issues sports motor sports anything that's in motion so birds animals that sometimes you're going to want to be in shutter priority it's what I shoot the least in so it's rare for me to go there most the time on still in absolute priority mode and all I do is open up my aperture to say let a lot of light in which means short exposures eyes what I need consistency where is referring to was auto bracketing oh I'm sorry auto bracketing in the question was win what about it in auto bracketing what the camera does is you picked the aperture and it changes the shutter spee sure but you can also get it to keep the same shutter speed and very that picture on occasion I could use it but the problem is when I'm in shutter priority mode usually has so much to do about the action that if the exposure was off what I say it it's more about the exact moment I'm capturing it so it's wouldn't be very common that I would do that I dude on occasion though for weird uses like I do these things called panel lodges which is a panorama collage thing and I want them to vary in brightness but um otherwise I can't think of what I'd use it and another question from cannon girl one of our regulars can the video settings also be a part of the custom settings and do you ever find a use for live you I know you don't typically do a ton of video but I don't shoot a ton of video but live you in general I like live you just means that instead of looking through a viewfinder I'm looking at the screen on the back and I like live you mode when I'm doing things like well any time I don't have the viewfinder up to my eye so if I'm on a tripod and my cameras up above me remember how high my tripod goes well it might be that I get my tripod up really high but I don't have a ladder to stand on toe look through the viewfinder so I turned on live you so I can kind of see and aiken somewhat compose it's a little better if you have the kind of camera where the screen in the back and tilt out though um or if I'm really close to the ground if I set my camera almost on the ground oftentimes getting my eye to the viewfinder is a little less than ideal so I just click on life you mode and it will allow me to get a much better view and composed when I'm really near the ground also sometimes I am on something where let's say I'm shooting over a fence sometimes I put my camera on the end of a mono pod and I'm extending up over a fence I'm like looking through the viewfinder so live you mode though I could get some sense for what I'm seeing so I really like it and it's just uh overly useful anytime my eyes not up to the viewfinder okay one more questions and internet then I'll let you proceed with your good content but sam cocks in larita they're both asking questions about what if you don't like your custom function settings as they are is there a way to just reset them tio default factory setting yeah one of the choices in the custom function section of your menu is I think it's called reset where reset all functions something like that I think it might be the very last choice in the menu so if you get like let's say you handed your camera to somebody else to let them use it for three days it comes back and it doesn't work the same you know you might want to go in there and reset those what if you're gonna give somebody else your camera use you might want to register your settings remembering to see one two or three go register the settings were used to using into one of those said that if you loan out your camera and they change the settings at least you can click overto you know one of your custom ones where you've saved your settings into and get back to shooting right away before you discover whatever that setting was messed with

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Bens Gear List.pdf
Comp Idea Card Borderless.pdf
Comp Idea Cards with Border.pdf
Practice Files.zip

Ratings and Reviews

David gridiron
 

Ben Willmore's class about Think Like a Photographer is a fantastic class. Ben has the ability that very few people have and that is to keep the students attention and excitement about the topic. I have been a teacher for 38 years and it is a profession that very few people can do well. Ben has nailed this class and I am so excited to take his class. I just hope I will be able to someday meet him and thank him for giving me inspiration to pursue my passion. This is well worth expense and I encourage people to take this class. All the topics are covered from what to look for when taking a photograph, equipment, and processing. Tremendous!!!!!

David gridiron
 

I am almost finished and this is the most comprehensive photography course I have seen. I have taken some local courses, some other on line courses and hundreds of magazine articles, however Ben Willmore is fantastic. I am a retired teacher of 39 years and Ben has the unique ability that most people do not have to relate all his students. I takes a very special person to be a good teacher and Ben nailed it. I highly recommend this class. Mr. Willmore covers all aspects of photography from the very basic to the advanced. Very well done. My next goal is to try to meet Ben Willmore and personally tell him thanks. Kudos to Creativelive as well.

Ashleigh L
 

AMAZING CLASS! I caught bits and pieces of the live stream, but even in those bits and pieces of it, I learned so much! He's a great teacher, easy to understand and great visuals. He "walks around" the subject to give us different POV, tells us the negative/positive/neutral of the photo, and tips. Thank you, Ben!

Student Work

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