Sony A6600 Full Tutorial Training Overview Set-up & Tips

hi my name is Michael Andrew and I'm about to give you a free tutorial on the amazing sony a 6600 a few resources I want you to be aware of and I'll put these links in the description below is my facebook group check it out it's the sony a6000 series cameras by michael the Maven if you're coming from another camera system we've gone through a lot of trouble to create a table of contents including the timecode so if you hit control F or command F depending on the type of computer that you're using type in a keyword that you're interested in and it should jump you to that table of contents and then you can click the timecode and it will take you to that lesson this video is really designed to be a video manual to be used as a reference that you can come back time and again and look up the topics that you're struggling with now if you are a pure beginner I have to give you a word of warning this video will go over the controls of the camera it is not enough to go out and take great images the reason I say this because I too was a beginner just like you but I didn't have YouTube had to learn through trial and error and it took me two years so if you're brand new to your camera and you're feeling frustrated absolutely highly recommend you check out my Sony a 66 hundred crash course I will show you the basics of photography show you how to use your camera in real world shooting situations show you my philosophy of use what I'm thinking we cover flash we cover video sports wildlife portraits pretty much everything you're going to want to know and it does it in a very fast efficient manner I will put that link in the description as well in any event we have a tremendous amount of information to cover let's get started so real quick let's talk about putting lenses onto our sony a 66 hundred you're going to notice we have this little notch here on the cap and as we rotate that off that should align to the white dot the white dot is important because you will also find coordinated white dot on the lens so when we put a lens onto the camera body we want to line those white dots up we're going to rotate it until we hear it click anytime we take the lens off the camera body we're going to push the lens release all the way in and rotate off and you're going to be doing this as often as you change lenses obviously something I want to point out real quick there's a few things is that underneath the cap of every lens you should see the thread size in the case of the 50 millimeter 1.8 49 millimeters why is that important because it tells you the diameter tells you how big the threads are which is going to be required if you're going to put any kind of filter on here ND filter polarizer things of that nature that's how you figure out how big your lens threads are another thing I want to point out is that weight when you change your lenses it is very helpful to point the camera body down try not to change your lenses in very windy conditions because what will happen is dust will get blown in but we live in a microbe world we're surrounded by small particles we don't see and I guarantee you if you change your lens often or you leave it uncovered you are going to see sensor dust more often than if you did it quickly with the lens body or the opening pointed down sensor dust will appear as these little kind of grace dots on every picture you'll see it when you stop your aperture down to like f-22 and take a picture of the sky you'll see these little gray dots everywhere sometimes they'll just fall off sometimes you'd have to go in there and actually clean it and I'll demonstrate this on the crash course in terms of how I clean my sensors but those are a couple tips when you are changing lenses we were talking about the battery in the memory card we have this little door on the underneath the grip we're gonna open it up keep in mind that we have these pins here for the battery so there's a diagram here on the door in case you ever forget the pins you can see the shape of the battery here they actually go up so the pins are up here second thing I want to point out real quick is that there are two kinds of memory cards they look exactly the same on the front almost exactly the same but when we turn them around you can see that this one has a second set of pins this is a UHS 2 class memory card it is not supported by the a 6,600 which means we have to use a regular uhs-1 card the UHS class 2 cards are going to be noted it's very difficult to see it's this little teeny Roman numeral right there but it's all important that you don't try to use just a plain old memory car that you find laying around your house because we have 4k video and it needs a sustained riding speed which is designated with this little you with a three in its class you three and you'll notice that this UHS class one memory card has it it's right there this is u3 this is a pretty good memory card you pretty much want to get one of the fastest memory cards you can there are some great resources this is the one that I prefer to use in a 6600 you'll see this 170 megabyte per second that is the read speed the write speeds slower but suffice it to say the faster the memory card the faster your buffer is going to clear we'll talk about that in some other reviews coming you look at the diagram we're gonna line this up so this little notch is going into the bottom right here in most memory cards also have a protect feature it's a little slider that you can prevent the card from being written to but we're gonna take this and we're gonna slide it in until it clicks to take the battery out obviously we're going to push the blue lever over that's how you remove it to close the door we're gonna push the switch up and we're good to go if you don't have your camera go ahead and pause the video go grab it and I want you to follow along as I point out how some of these features operate I want to take you on an overview of the external buttons and controls at the camera obviously the power switched very important so we turn the camera on or off the shutter button is the button you're going to be using more than anything else the shutter button itself has two positions there's a halfway depression and there's a full depression I want you to push that down and feel the difference between the first it's like a spongy resistance that is going to engage the cameras focusing systems and then when we push it down all the way it takes the picture so it's pretty important to know where those two positions are by feel I think after a few dozen shots is going to become second nature on the top of the camera we also have this black rotating wheel this is the main dial it's going to be used for changing so many of your different camera settings very important when changing exposure I'll demonstrate this later then we have the mode dial this determines how the camera behaves when we're shooting we'll be covering that a little bit later in this lesson we have a hotshoe cover it's a little plastic cover that when we want to use a flash we need to take it off you're going to see the central pin there that is going to fire the flash we have a flash tutorial on the crash course where we talk about using a godox flash in the basics of flash Oh 45 50 minutes long obviously we have the EVF the viewfinder something that I love about Sony cameras is that while we hold the camera we can use our right ring finger to release the lens and as we mentioned earlier this is the lens release button push it every time we want to take the lens off obviously depends on the lens but often you will see autofocus manual focus switches stabilization switches it really just depends on the lens that you're using in the case of the 51 point 8 there's no switches so you're going to notice on the side of the camera that we have this little plastic cover that it wants us to push towards the back of the camera there's a little notch here that is gonna make you want to put your fingernail in there and take it off it's the how it works underneath and there are some icons out here that will show you which ones are which we have the headphone jack the microphone port which we're going to want an external microphone we also have the HDMI in our USB port on the back of the camera obviously we have the EVF and something that's very important to note is that right here there's a little optical switch when we raise the camera to our face and we get close you'll notice that it'll turn the back monitor off that's a battery saving feature it basically turns the back monitor off and the EVF on next to the right of that a little hard to see it's kind of hiding underneath the eye cup is the diopter adjustment and this is useful if you wear corrective eyewear contacts glasses it's going to allow us to just the focus as we're looking through the viewfinder on the back of the camera this guy right here this rotating wheel I like to refer to it as the secondary selector for an important reason that I'll point out a little bit later but you'll notice that this has multiple ways we can interact with it there's a rotating dial that rotates around there's a directional pad which we can push up down left or right and there's also a central set button that we can push into the camera very important is the deep menu button I call it the deep menu because there's over 100 items in there that we can change and adjust we have the play button which obviously is going to allow us to play back our images review them we have the garbage button which is going to allow us to delete images you're going to notice right here at the FN or the function button this is going to allow us to access different menus and you'll also notice the c3 and we have a c1 and a c2 up on the top those stands for custom buttons and we can customize them in different ways when we're talking about the c1 button on top push that by default it is our white balance when we push the c2 button these are by default our focusing modes c3 button are our focusing clusters we'll be talking about those in the focusing lesson we also have this little switch here that's not on some of the lower edge Sony cameras you'll notice that we can push it up and down the way this works this is also customizable and depending on what we point it to you there's a secondary button here we can push in this case it's exposure lock in the case of af/mf it should allow us to jump back and forth between autofocus and manual focus but there is a way to customize this as well I'll be pointing that out right here where our thumb would rest just on the outside of that is the video record button anytime we want to start and stop video recording we would press it and obviously hopefully you know by now that we have a great rotating monitor that allows us to face the monitor forward as we're doing vlogs and things of that nature so we could see ourselves on the monitor the a 6600 I do recommend getting an offset cold shoe mount over towards the right it feels more balanced and what this will do is will allow us to put a microphone on the camera without blocking the monitor small rig has a number of them they're pretty affordable fifteen twenty bucks made out of metal I believe in just putting it on there a dedicated holder unless you're going to be doing a lot of strobe or flash work if you're doing video work it makes more sense but it's very difficult to see the monitor when we have a microphone on there so offset it to the right if you decide to go that route so we'll get into the camera controls itself but I want to point out that we have all these white icons out here just things like this magnifying glass smartphone with an arrow but these guys in here are going to be very critical you're going to notice next to the directional pad to the right we have the ISO to the top it says display to the left we have the drive modes and pointing down we have exposure compensation and also this little grid icon what these icons mean is that when we push the directional pad in the direction of the icon we get access to that menu item when I push in the direction of I so wants me to changes settings if I hit it twice I can select my ISO by scrolling up or down by pushing on the directional pad I can also rotate the wheel you're gonna be using that one quite a bit auto ISO we'll talk about that when we get into the exposure lesson if we push it again it is going to allow us to set the minimum and maximum for auto ISO so if you want to put a hard stop on how far the camera can change the ISO when we're in auto ISO that's what that does anytime you tap the shutter button should jump you out of these sub menus to the left we have our drive modes and this is what the camera is going to do when we push the shutter button down all the way obviously it's going to tell you and you'll notice it's hard to see with these little triangles in there those triangles mean there's menu options to the left and right this first one single shooting means we push the shutter button down all the way it takes one picture continuous shooting means that if we hold the shutter button down it will continue to shoot and we get different frames per second as we continue to go down and continuous shooting high plus is the absolute maximum 11 frames per second and as we go down and we get fewer and fewer frames per second and some of my testing I found that high tends to get better accuracy with the bursts in terms of the number of frames that are in focus so very often I'm shooting in high we have our high shooting mid in low bursts off the top of my head I think it's nine six or four three or four something like that then we have our self timer single 10 seconds if we push to the right we can get a single four five and a single four - we continue to scroll down we have our self timer continuous and we can see we have multiple images so 10 second timer were three images five images five second timer with three images five images then a two second timer with three images and five images continuous bracket basically means is that the camera is going to change the exposure settings between different shots first number here is the number of exposure values that's how stops it'll change and for how many images so three exposure stops for three different images and as I scroll to the right you can see that it breaks it down into different amounts different images not images at one stop values pretty handy if you do landscape shooting high dynamic range shooting then we have single bracket which means that we have to push a shutter button down every time we want the camera to take the shot same basic concept is that it tells us the number of exposure values and then the number of images it'll take then we can also bracket our white balance it just has a high and low setting terms of how aggressive the white balance change will be and then we have our dynamic range optimizer also just a high and low setting so those are our drive modes it's what the camera does after we push your shutter button down all the way something that's intimidating in the beginning is the huge amount of information that we see and I'm going to point out what these icons mean something I want you to do to feel comfortable with your camera is to get used to toggling your display so if we look at this the wheel on the back when you push up towards the display you're going to notice that this information changes in terms of what is showing on the monitor about four or five different screens used to doing that this way if something happens you want to see it this is how you change it the three most important settings you should always be aware of are going to be found on the bottom of your monitor typically most of the time it's your shutter speed your aperture and your ISO your shutter speed determines how long the camera is exposing light to the sensor these are designated infractions and if we rotate this command wheel on the back you can see we can get faster shutter speeds or slower shutter speeds the f-number is the stop number it refers to how wide the opening is whether it's a very wide opening or a very very very small opening your shutter speed and your aperture determine how much light are coming into the camera on the far right we have our ISO control which is really an artificial boost it's like gain we're adding to the signal or we talking more about these three in the exposure lesson so we're in the manual I'm gonna flip over to aperture priority mode and you're going to see this little plus/minus box with a plus minus 0 0 that is our exposure compensation we'll be talking about that in the exposure lesson as well so as we continue to push up on our display mode you can see we get a histogram which is essentially telling us how well exposed the image is going to be we get a preview on our back monitor we can see get an idea before we take that picture if we continue to push up we have our digital level you'll notice that it's green in the center which means it's correct maybe not perfectly centered there it is so now we know that it's level from side to side and if we were to tilt the camera up or down we can see the orange tick marks coming off of there designating our tilt if we continue to press up so now we come into the black screen menu we're gonna come back to this in just a second if we continue to press up this is where I like to shoot most of the time so let's talk about each of these icons real quick in the top left hand corner we have our mode indicator it's gonna be pas or M most of the time this is telling us what the camera is going to do how it's going to help us this little box here indicates our drive mode which is what the camera does after we push your shutter button down all the way a F stands for auto focus in this case auto focus automatic the focus mode indicator is going to tell us how the auto focus works this little box is our cluster it's the focusing boxes that we have selected to help us when we are shooting this little guy here with the brackets around the head is face detection so AF on is face detection auto focus on P P stands for picture profiles this is going to be very useful for video shooters who want to tweak the look of their video up here we have a little card 3328 is the number of shots remaining that I have with the quality of images that I have selected 3 : 2 is the aspect ratio which is three measures wide by two measures tall 24 M is the number of megapixels the cameras taking you're going to notice that we have is flashing hand sometimes that will happen and some people will be like what's going on there if we make it go away you'll notice that that is a warning indicator when we get into lower shutter speeds saying this may not be steady enough and then it stops flashing so when it's flashing you see that little exclamation point and saying your shutter speed is probably too slow fine refers to the amount of compression that we have for our JPEG images n is the NFC Near Field Communication because we can connect with different wireless devices eighty-three percent is our battery indicator this square box here is our metering modes this has to do with how the camera is measuring light as it enters the lens we have our white balance setting in this case it says 5500 K which is Kelvin we'll talk about white balance a little bit later DRO stands for dynamic range optimizer assess through is some of the contrast details that you're going to see in JPEGs it'll make it a little bit more contrasting this icon here refers to our creative styles which is basically instructions for the camera in terms of how it is creating JPEGs JPEGs retain only a fraction of the original information a lot of information is thrown away the creative styles are instructions in terms of what to keep what to throw away has a lot to do with color science and how the image looks for now leave it on standard this little guy here on the bottom her picture effects they're kind of gimmicky they're in-camera processing that changes the tone and the look I never use it lot of information here on this screen if we were to continue to push up we're gonna go back to that black menu screen so you're going to recognize a lot of these same icons on the back it just gives us a little bit wider range in terms of our exposure compensation they were level we have four histogram of our mode shutter speed aperture a lot of these are the same now there is one important difference is that in this screen when we push the FN button we get an orange highlight which allows us to change many of these icons from this quick menu in the back if you wanted to change for example your silent shooting mode there it is and some of these are only accessible here until we customize it so if you don't want to do a lot of customizations you can come in here and change things like our creative styles or picture effects if you really wanted to the truth of the matter is that most of the important settings that you're going to change will be changed through either the C 1 through C 3 buttons or this back control wheel here the back but this is just an overview if you want it if you continue to push up on a directional pad we come back to this screen now there is another way to get to those shortcuts and that's by pressing the FN button we don't get that black screen but we get the ability to change many of those settings from a quick menu on the bottom so we have our drive modes focusing modes focus area which are the clusters exposure compensation over I so we were metering mode our flash mode you'll notice that we don't have a pop-up flash on the a 6,600 flash exposure compensation white balance our creative styles the format and we also have the mode that we're shooting in when we get into the menu section I'll show you how we can customize which of these menu options appear something else that's important for me to note is that when we flip over to video in our video mode some of this information has changed and I think I'm going to cover up the monitor so cover up the lens so we can see these things a little bit easier you'll notice instead of having the number of shots remaining we have hours in minutes we have the format of our video the number of frames per second we have our bitrate which is the amount of data being written to our memory card per second you're going to notice these green audio levels very useful when you're recording video to make sure that you don't clip out pretty much everything beyond that is similar to what we see in a stills mode which I want to flip back to in any event that is a quick overview of the information screens and how we can access some of the basic settings from those screens let's talk about exposure exposure is a fancy word for really meaning brightness so when we're talking about exposure we're talking about how bright the image is going to be something that's going to be critical as you're shooting is to become aware of which mode you are in the shooting mode and I tell all my students to try to start off too aperture-priority first we'll be talking about that in just a second let's go through the mode dial and let me tell you what some of the differences are between these different settings so we're going to be talking about P a s and M we're gonna be talking about these in depth in just a second we also have these numbers on our dial one and two those are customizable modes where we can set up the camera exactly the way we like it and tell the camera to remember those settings we'll do that in the deep menu then we come to our video shooting mode this little icon up there s in Q stands for slow and quick this is a video shooting mode that allows us to change how fast our video will playback with it's slow motion or fast motion we'll be talking about that as well we have our scene modes the scene modes are kind of useful in certain situations most of this can be done if you understand your camera settings you can dial these in but for beginners the scene modes is let's say you want to take a portrait you can duck turn into the face icon if you wanted to change it so we can come to it we have our scene selection down here in the bottom right and the idea of this is that the camera is going to be set up just to make it easier to get started so let's just go through these real quick we have our portrait which is for people sports which is for fast-moving action we have our macro shooting which is for close-ups we have landscape which is for scenes from far away we have sunsets which may have really bright backgrounds we have our night scene shooting handheld twilight for slow shutter speeds we're doing longer exposures without using a tripod we have our night portraits which is going to incorporate some flash and then we have anti motion blur so the truth of the matter is with these modes I never use them and I don't recommend beginners use them because they can do all of these things if they understand their camera they can dial the settings in but it's nice when you're first getting started then we have the green mode which I also lovingly refer to as the dummy mode the dummy mode basically turns our camera into a point-and-shoot it's going to do most of the camera settings for us we don't have a whole lot of control and we're just gonna take pictures and I definitely recommend not shooting on the dummy mode as quickly as possible so we can learn how to take full advantage it's an incredible piece of machinery it's a great camera and so what I recommend is for the most part even when you're first getting started if you're intimidated shooting the program mode because you're going to get some control over the camera but if you were a pure beginner who really really wants to learn their camera what I recommend is starting off in aperture priority a now it's time to talk about exposure control if you do not have your camera this is where you definitely need to have it in hand because it's going to make a huge difference in your shooting experience and you're going to enjoy photography a lot more exposure means brightness so let's talk about how we change our image brightness there is a short answer to this and there's a longer answer to this and I'm going to give you both versions so an aperture priority mode we change the main dial to adjust the aperture and the camera makes adjustments to the shutter speed so what I recommend you do is aperture priority mode just take a picture of something anything it doesn't matter what it is press play inspect the image and we're going to pretend that we want the image to be brighter this is where exposure compensation comes in this little box here on the bottom of our rotating wheel we're going to push this down and you're going to get this all this funky information and numbers see this little orange triangle when we push this to the right you're going to notice that the image is starting to get brighter on the back of the monitor let's turn it up to two now we're going to take the picture again so if we were to compare the first picture with the second picture you can see that it got brighter this is the short answer so if you want to change your image brightness in the P a or s modes we're going to come in to exposure compensation and move this triangle to the right let's say it was too bright want to make it darker in this case we would move this Orange triangle to the left we're gonna go to two here take another picture so when we inspect those three images we went from an even exposure to a brighter exposure to a darker exposure and in most cases you're really not going to change it that much it's going to be some more something like one little tick mark it's going to be something like maybe that not a lot but that is how we change our image brightness if this is the only thing you take away from this lesson you are well on your way to becoming a fantastic photographer because that is the skill set you're going to be using all the time now I'm going to give you a longer answer and I refer to this as philosophy of use I am teaching you how to think in terms of the camera itself and this is what really what the crash course the Advanced Course is is I go through these real world shooting situations and I show you the philosophies of use and how to change it this is why the crash courses are fantastic investments because they're just a few hours long and you'll know your camera very quickly what I want you to do when you are shooting is to keep an eye on your shutter speed we want our shutter speed to be at least one sixtieth of a second if we are hand holding the camera preferably maybe even a little faster 1/100 of a second maybe even a little faster than that and the reason is you move and your subject matter might be moving as well if we are shooting sports we might want it to be a lot faster like one five hundredth of a second or one one thousandth of a second what I'm saying is that when you're shooting in aperture priority mode it really pays just to sneak a peek at your shutter speed often just to make sure everything is fast enough otherwise you might have blurry images it's the number one problem that beginners struggle with why are my picture is blurry it's because they're using slow shutter speeds they're relying on the camera to do most of the camera changes for them an aperture priority mode you are responsible to keep an eye on that now the next thing I want you to do is to take your hand and move it in front of the camera just like this and I want you to look at what's happening with your shutter speed let's cover it up it's how much it's changing what in the world is going on here what's happening is that as we block light from entering the camera the camera is adjusting the shutter speed to compensate for this it's trying to use a longer shutter speed longer shutter speeds mean more light is coming into the camera so what this means is is that when we're an aperture priority mode we determine the aperture which is designated here and the camera is going to determine the shutter speed it's going to do this for us automatically and the reason why this is important is because as we change our shooting conditions if we go let's say inside of a church we're shooting a wedding now we step out into the lobby and now we step out into the Sun those are three different lighting conditions and the camera would change the shutter speed for us automatically and when I shot weddings that's exactly how I did it why because I'm walking backwards and I didn't want to trip I'm trying to shoot the couple and I don't want to change change my shutter speed as I'm shooting so aperture priority is something that a lot of pros use all the time I have no problem with aperture priority and once you learn this you're gonna have that arrow in your quiver so aperture priority mode we determine the aperture the camera determines the shutter speed based on the amount of light coming into the camera when we talked about exposure compensation we came into this menu and we told the camera - hey make it brighter or hey make it not so bright come down this way what is going on here something you'll notice is that we have two little tick marks between each number and as we move one tick mark it says 0.3 0.7 and now it's at 1 so what that means is that every tick mark is worth about one third of a value what is this value this number +1 I'm going to prove it to you here real quick here we're shooting at one one hundred and sixtieth of a second and when we change it to +1 we tap our shutter button to come back out we're now one 80th of a second twice the amount light twice as long as a shutter speed as it was before so one sixtieth and up here was one 80th so what these numbers mean what they represent is refer to as a stop one stop of light one stop of light means twice the amount of light as it was before if that's true and we were to continue to come up to plus two what do you think the shutter speed would be tap a shutter button if you said 140th of a second you are absolutely correct and this should be mostly true as we continue to come up plus three plus three should be twice as long as plus two one stop so what would the shutter speed be what is twice as long as 140th of a second well we're gonna do the math one fortieth plus one fortieth is two fortieths if we simplify that it should be one twentieth and there it is now the same is true in the opposite direction if it was too bright we wanted to go this way let's just take a look at the shutter speed there it is one one hundred and sixtieth of a second let's go twice as fast so this is twice as fast this once 160th of a second just do the math if you said one three hundred and twentieth of a second you are absolutely correct when we're an aperture priority and we change our exposure compensation we're telling the camera to cheat the brightness in one direction or the other would designate that by the number of stops in that value if you understand this concept you who are going to be crushing it because you understand how exposure compensation works this is only for aperture priority mode we can also use it in shutter priority mode s shutter priority mode is the opposite of aperture priority mode in shutter priority mode when we adjust the main dial it changes the shutter speed and the camera is going to try to make adjustments to the aperture you see it changing here now so what's going on when this aperture starts flashing they're basically the orange highlight means is that we have a shutter speed selected that so fast that the aperture cannot open wide enough to make this happen if you see this the question you should be asking yourself is how do we get that flashing to stop cameras not happy and you might be shooting an indoor sporting event where you need something like one one thousandth of a second the camera is really unhappy see how dark it's going to be this isn't gonna work how can we change a setting to make this happen if you said ISO you're absolutely correct our ISO is a gain or boost in the signal the light coming in to make it brighter when we select ISO 5,000 the flashing stops cameras happy this is resolved and it's saying yeah this is gonna work question a lot of beginners have is this what well if that's the truth why don't we just turn our ISO up all the time I just have it really really high well there's a problem with ISO and the problem is is that the higher this number is the more grain we are going to see let me demonstrate it for you real quick I'm gonna turn up my ISO to twelve thousand eight hundred and I'm gonna take a picture and we're gonna look at it you're going to see this little magnifying glass we can zoom in and my blinds are pure white you can kind of see it this grain it's just dirty grain here that's high ISO noise let's do it again I'm gonna turn my ISO way down and we're just gonna use a longer exposure I'll turn it down to like 400 and now I'm going to adjust my shutter speed so there's a nice even exposure here take it again tick two we're to come in and take a look you can see that the grain is no longer there so lower ISOs are going to have less grain higher ISOs are gonna have a lot more grain it's that's the short answer there's a longer answer to that if you are a subscriber to my youtube channel check out the video called shot noise that is what our ISO is doing for us and the truth of the matter is I almost never use shutter priority why because I can accomplish almost everything that I want in either manual or aperture priority so beginners will ask well what about sports shooting even for sport shooting typically shooting on aperture priority and the reason is I can dial in my aperture and I turn the shutter speed over to the camera you know all I do is I'm just sneaking peeks over to make sure the shutter speed is fast enough and this is important because outside on a sunny day all of a sudden here comes a cloud and you don't want to have to fumble with your shutter speed let the camera take care of it so I personally shoot in aperture priority a lot for sport shooting we've talked about aperture priority I've talked about shutter priority let's visit program mode real quick program mode is a little weird and you can see here that it's telling us we can change our program mode setting with both our main dial and the wheel on the back program mode is a little bit different because when we change those settings both the shutter speed and the aperture change as well it's going to give us these different combinations and we could sneak a peek and look at the shutter speed and try to tweak it this way again I'm not a huge believer in program mode the only time I use program mode is when I am shooting event photography with a strobe and I'm walking around through a crowd and the reason is it keeps my shutter speed in my aperture in a range that works well with the flash that's the short answer but if you change your main or your secondary wheel what you're going to see is the camera is changing these different settings you can still come in and do exposure compensation if you want but the camera is going to be making those decisions for us let's talk about manual mode manual mode is awesome and the reason is we tell the camera the shutter speed the aperture and the ISO doesn't change these things at anytime the reason manual is great is because it allows you to dial in set exposure values and you know what you're going to get this is important especially when you're shooting in studios with strobes if I have enough time I am shooting on manual if it's an event and I'm moving around quickly I tend to shoot more on aperture priority in manual mode the main dial you can see is changing the aperture in the secondary wheel on the back is changing the shutter speed aperture and shutter speed we of course also change our ISO if we wanted to but something you will notice is on the bottom here is that our exposure compensation is now mm what this means is if we were to come in and try to select exposure compensation the camera says nope cannot do this unless you're an auto ISO mm stands for manual metering and what's happening here is the camera is saying this is just in a prediction of how underexposed your image is going to be you can see it's a little bit darker if the image was brighter it's a plus value it's just basically telling us how under or over exposed the image will be manual mode there is usually no exposure compensation so why am i saying usually because we have an incredible feature called auto ISO which means if we come into our ISO can we scroll up you're going to see it here up up at the top when we select auto ISO we will see it designated in the ISO column and what this means is that as we adjust our shutter speed and our aperture the camera will make adjustments to our ISO the most useful point for this I believe is indoor sports photography when we know we want let's say a particular aperture and we know we want a particular I don't know shutter speed see auto ISO is not happy will have to come in there and adjust it the idea of this is that we could dial in a specific shutter speed we could dial in a specific aperture and the camera would make any changes required to the ISO so some images would have more grains some images would have less but indoor sports MMA boxing basketball the lighting conditions can change pretty quickly you're not going to be able to adjust that you know on the Flies it's happening this gives the camera the ability to help us when we're shooting those kinds of events we can even determine the range of the auto ISO by coming into our iso if we continue to push right this is the low value the minimum and we can also set the high value so if 6400 wasn't doing it we could come up to twelve thousand eight hundred can come all the way up to the max wanted to just know it's gonna be really really grainy I think Sony cameras do pretty well up to twelve thousand eight hundred depending on how much lights you have so I'm just gonna turn mine there and another thing you're going to notice is we have this multi frame noise reduction this is how much noise reduction we want applied to each image the reason why this is important is because if it's applied it can slow it down so if you have a very high degree of noise reduction you know you might want to come in here and adjust that for now we'll just leave it on standard I know that is a lot of information that I've thrown at you we've talked about how to change the image brightness we've talked about each of the modes we've chant talked about changing the shutter speed aperture ISO we talked about auto ISO we've talked about specific shutter speeds I think the only one I didn't really mention is really fast running athletes gonna want a faster shutter speed maybe one one-thousandth let's talk about our cameras white balance which is how it interprets different light coming into the camera press c1 button to come into our white balance if you are just getting started leave it on auto white balance a WB auto white balance is going to be close enough about seventy to eighty percent of the time it's going for beginners it's great because you have a lot of other things you're worried about like exposure and focusing what will happen though is that as you're shooting eventually you're going to get into a situation where the color looks a little bit off it's gonna be like blue or yellow orange and you're gonna be going like what the heck is going on that is typically a white balance problem in the reason why this happens is because the camera sees light differently depending on what temperature it is whether it's the Sun or a fluorescent light or a light bulb we'll get into a little bit of that philosophy in just a second but the idea on white balance is that we have these little icons below auto white balance and the idea is that we set it to the icon of the type of light we are shooting in so the Sun is they light little house with shade is the shade if you're shooting in shade it's a different type of light and we have a cloud incandescent light you can see how blue it made the screen then we have different types of florescent light then we have flash something I love about Sony cameras it has an underwater white balance then we have temperature which I'll demonstrate in just a second we have custom white balances so there's tons of different options and this happens that I've seen this in the Facebook group or somebody will come back and they'll say why are all my pictures blue it's a white balance problem you probably change it to your light bulb icon and you didn't change it back something else I want to point out is that you'll notice we have this little arrow to the right so if we push to the right on our rotating wheel we come in to the white balance adjustment we get this little color swatch here and as we continue to push in each direction we're moving this little orange dot around on that color swatch when all the values are zero it means it's even what this is allowing us to do is to customize you can see the color changing a little bit is to customize our white balance and tweak it most of the time I do not use this however when I'm shooting video I will come in and tweak this just a little bit usually like a half value in different directions in the beginning don't worry about it so we're gonna hit the menu button to cancel pure beginners auto white balance intermediate shooters practice changing your white balance depending on the type of light you're shooting in another note I need to make is that if you're shooting in RAW this isn't going to matter as much because raw retains most of the color information and you would be able to process that and post a lot more important for JPEGs to get it right especially if you're recording video a couple things I want to demonstrate real quick is that if we come to the very very bottom we have something called custom white balance so custom white balance allows us to take a picture of something and tell the camera hey this is white so the way we want to do that is highlight this little icon here that says set R and press the set button it's going to say press the set button again to capture data the central area of the screen so I'm shooting in white blinds and when I push the set button it's going to sample that area and set it up you can see it changed the color it's telling us we have a Calvin temperature of 5000 with a slight shift in magenta is this what you want we're gonna hit yeah and you can see the color of the monitor has changed and we're custom white balance to these blinds when I am shooting video I tend to use custom white balance a little more because when you're in mixed lighting conditions it's not the easiest thing to kind of manually dial it in the way I'm about to show you in it you can use things like the wall a bride's dress the ceiling piece of paper you can just throw it in front of the camera sample the light that you're shooting in and it should be pretty accurate should be pretty close coming back to the c1 button so that's your custom white balance and we have three different slots that it will remember we also have this guy in here which says custom temperature it says C temp slash filter without getting into too much of the explanation K stands for Kelvin and what this means is is that every light source has its own different temperature rating there's a long story behind this and in terms of the theory of it and how it works but suffice to say that a bright sunny day sunlight is 5,600 K if you were to shoot with a light bulb light bulbs are typically 3200 to 3400 K and you'll notice that as I turned the camera down to that setting the screen became blue now the reason why this happens is because lower Kelvin temperatures tend to be more yellow there's an easy way to remember this think of a candle light as low Kelvin temperature it's orange it's yellow think of a high Kelvin temperature like a blue blowtorch very very hot what's happening is the camera is counteracting the type of light we're shooting in so if we're shooting in candlelight 2600 K you can see this blue and that blue is to counteract the yellowness of that lower Kelvin temperature light if we were to go up to blue blowtorch temperature really really hot Kelvin now it's orange to also counteract that blue light so the heart of the matter with color Kelvin is blue to yellow and typically the camera is going to try to counteract the light that it's shooting it so that's a very deep philosophy of use typically I don't tell that to beginners I just say auto white balance 5600 Kay is outdoors tungsten light is 3400 to 3200 those are going to cover most of the shooting situations you're in and there are some deeper discussions we could definitely have on it but for now pure beginner auto white balance if you are shooting video and you know the temperature of light you're shooting in you can come in here and sit your Kelvin you can also come in and do a custom white balance if you're shooting in mixed lighting conditions and that's a quick overview of white balance let's tackle our cameras focusing modes this can be very confusing and very intimidating for beginners that said the focusing systems in the sony alpha 6000 series cameras especially recently they're incredible among the very best in the world that i've seen and they continue to improve with firmware updates so it's gonna be worth investing a little bit of time into learning all of our options in terms of how we can use them the way I teach this is the how the when and the where if you can break it down to the how when and where you're gonna be off to a great start so how does the camera focus we already talked about this when we push your shutter button halfway down camera engages its focusing systems you can see this indicated with little green boxes on our target we also get this little green circle in the bottom left hand corner push your shutter button down all the way to take the picture so that's how we focus and there are some other ways I will demonstrate near the end of this lesson the next part of this equation is the wind whether it's a one time focus or whether it's over and over and over again we can access the cameras auto focusing modes by default by pressing the c2 button this will open our focusing mode menu AFS stands for autofocus single means the camera will get a focusing lock you can see it's designated over here AFS when this happens the camera gets focused one time I put your sugar button halfway down we can see those indicators again and as I move the camera left to right the focus will not change as long as I am holding that shutter button halfway down this can be very useful for example if we get focused lock on something and we want to recompose the image to make it more aesthetically pleasing it's gonna be better when we're not shooting it very very wide apertures but AFS means a single focus that stays locked and will not change until we push your shutter button down all the way AFC stands for autofocus continuous this is not a one-time focus this means the camera will be focusing over and over and over again when we engaged a halfway shutter button depression you will notice that now we get these parentheses in the bottom left hand corner we do not hear a beep and you can see that those green boxes are kind of flickering means they're updating a-f-c is perfect for moving subjects people running kids maybe animals flying things of that nature great for sports shooting so that is the main difference between a single focus which is better for still subjects versus continuous focus which is better for moving subjects when we come back in to our c2 button you'll also notice that we have automatic AF and this is a hybrid of the first two we give the camera permission to determine whether or not the subject is moving so in this case it's not moving AFS if it was a moving subject and it was working perfectly it would jump over to AF see when I shot weddings I used to use the equivalent of AF a a lot I don't do it anymore I usually just pick one or the other one shot or PF continuous we also have manual focus in manual focus is exactly what it sounds like we use the focusing ring have a focus assist tool turn on which punches in the zoom and I'm rotating the ring until I get precise focus lock there it is great so literally the camera will not focus when we push that halfway shutter button pushing down I think is happening all of the focus is done with the manual focus ring on the lens typically when I'm shooting video high-end video I will be using manual focus if I'm operating the camera if I'm in front of the camera and I'm doing a YouTube video I will have face detection and I'll demonstrate that in just a second coming back in we also have direct manual-focus which is a hybrid between autofocus in manual focus the way this works is that we press a halfway shutter button depression and while holding this down we can rotate our autofocus ring and jump into manual kind of see it there so it's a little bit of a hybrid of both but it requires us to push and hold the shutter button halfway down and then rotate the focus ring so we've talked about the how we've now talked about the wind which is how often the camera is engaging autofocus and now we're going to talk about the wear which deals with our cameras focusing clusters we can access the focusing clusters by pressing C 3 and in the beginning by default the camera is going to be set up to wide the way this works is the cameras looking for an area of contrast and in the case of this target it's there it's pretty straightforward it's using the whole view finder coming back in we also have the ability to choose zone and you'll notice that when we choose zone those boxes are highlighted to be white and we're using the directional pad to move them around I could also touch and drag tap on our touchscreen monitor very useful now there's a problem with this is that what if we wanted to change our display or our ISO well now it's changing these focusing squares and so the way we jump out of this is that we push the set button in and now we can come back in to the different options and features we have we can still touch on the screen to move around if we wanted to so the reason why this zone is particularly useful is because it isolates a specific area for the camera to look in now it's only going to look within the corners of this box there is the target when I use this in conjunction with my YouTube videos I notice on my YouTube videos I'm usually standing on the left and I turn face detection on it I'm just telling the camera hey look in this area for my face and it does a fantastic job of doing it coming back down we have Center focusing point kind of hard to see but you'll notice that we have these four little corners the center focusing square is isolated to the direct center of the camera and there's been a new update on this in that in the past this was pretty much locked but now what happens is on any of the focusing modes we can touch on the monitor and change that focusing Square to a different position if we don't want that we can hit our set button and it jumps back to the original focusing mode maybe that's a lot of information the ones that I use the most are the flexible spot modes and these are great because we get three different sizes there's large you can see that I can move this around again I can touch and drag move it around but we can also change the size of this single focusing square by coming in and selecting small you can see this teeny example or medium it's a medium-sized box again you can touch and drag on the monitor this is typically what I have it's setup for almost 90 percent of the time I'm on a large focusing box and when we're not in that mode we can still come in here and touch to move that's around I think when I'm shooting off the back monitor this is what what I prefer to do it in the past the Sony cameras didn't have this and the first versions of this so this is really nice that we can touch on the monitor and determine where the cameras focusing when I am looking through the viewfinder I almost always jump back to the directional pad which you'll notice this brings a problem as they're looking through the viewfinder so when this is turned off and you're not getting those white arrows you can push the set button and this will allow me to use the directional pad as a joystick very useful when looking through the viewfinder I am left eyed shooter so I prefer to change my focusing square over here there are some ways we can do it with a touchpad but my nose bumps the monitor and it's always changing it so what I'm looking through the viewfinder I have this turned off we also have our expandable flexible spot this is a little bit different in that it gives the camera a precise square and then an outer box that we're giving the camera permission to look in so there's a slight expand now there are some other really powerful focusing clusters down here and you'll notice it's turned off it's not highlighted it says tracking expand flex we'll spot when it's turned off like that it wants us to be in a continuous focusing mode and you'll notice that once we jump to that come back here it is now we can highlight it anytime you see something grade or unselectable it's because we have another setting somewhere that's turned on and camera doesn't like but I want to demonstrate how this works it is super powerful and the ID on it is that when we get a subject and focus halfway shutter button depression there are algorithms that are going to track that moving subject as long as we're holding that shutter button halfway down I have gone out to the park and tested this it is very good it works better on a single subject when you have multiple subjects running in front of each other like soccer game or a football game it's not really the preferred method but it will track a moving subject very well if there is high contrast on a clean background it's amazing so it's something you should be aware of in something you should have in your arsenal go out and practice it so we have talked about the how which is halfway shutter button depression we have talked about the wind which deals with single versus continuous versus manual and we've talked about the where which is the cameras focusing clusters so a very common question I get is how do we set the camera up for back button focus for sports shooting so let me show you how to set it up and I'll tell you about why you want to do this part of the problem with Sony's menu systems is they can be extremely confusing even for somebody like me who's who's owned Sony cameras for this will be my sixth year what we need to do is to remove the autofocus from the halfway shutter button depression we're going to find it on page six the read tab we're going to come down to autofocus with shutter button and we're going to turn that off this is why it gets confusing is we have to designate this back button to work for autofocus we need to come in to our custom keys talk a little bit more about this when we cover it in the deep menu section but you'll notice that each custom key has a different icon in front of it we have an image film playback so this means when we're shooting stills we can customize our keys come into here so we have this auto focus manual focus control hold and I like that let me demonstrate what this does real quick when we push and hold this button down it allows me to jump into manual focus by rotating the lens so this allows me to get right into manual focus it's nice when I release it now I'm back in auto focus i'ma turn that off so what I want to do with back button focus is I'm going to designate it under the AE L designation of the switch which is really auto exposure lock so when we push this it's supposed to lock the exposure which is designated here but I'm gonna change that now on the menu I'm coming to custom key this is really nice because it gives us an overview of over which buttons we're changing tells us what we have designated I'm going to come into a e L hold this is the one I want to customize and I'm looking for AF on wants us to go side to side look at all the options definitely a lot of information here let's giving us the pages AF on so these pages run parallel to the different tabs so if we want to find something specific so it should be on page six right of the read tab there it is so now this is AF on and if I wanted to engage the cameras focusing with AEL I flipped down and I could push it into the camera body and we're good to go back button focusing is really great when sport shooting because we determine when the camera is focusing or not that's the gist of it pretend that target is a moving athlete and I'm shooting up up up up up up right so if I am using a regular shutter button depression focus focus focus and I recompose now it's gonna focus on the background so this gives us more control over determining when the camera is focusing or not by simply lifting up our thumb we can recompose fire away and we would basically be close enough in that same focal plane and that's a huge advantage for fast moving action like sports shooting if you change this and you forget it's gonna drive you crazy so I'm gonna change this back real quick and that is how we set up our camera for back button focus let's talk about face and eye detection you'll notice that when we were coming in to the different menus when we had our black menu here it is there's our face detection and when he had our shooting menu we have this face detection turned there is a way we can turn this on and off if we press the FN button you'll notice we don't have it in this quick drop-down menu and I kind of like to have it there so what I want to do is I'm gonna put my face detection in this bottom right hand corner so I'm gonna show you how to customize your function menu real quick we're gonna to come into purple tab function menu set the mode dial it doesn't make sense to have our shooting mode in that bottom right hand corner because we can see at the top so I'm gonna change this so this is a little confusing because it's called something else but we're basically going to select face and eye priority in autofocus we select that tap the shutter button press the FN button and there we have changed our function menu to give us access to face in high detection here we press this and we can come in and turn it off if we wanted to you something you will notice is that when a face detection is turned on we get this box around our models face the model came help us out and when I push your shutter button halfway down you're going to notice something interesting is happening here I'll go back to single is that when the face detection falls outside of the cluster that we're using the cluster gets the attention I'm using my set button to move this when the cluster in the face box match up you can see it jumped into the eye detection Sony really revolutionized eye detection back in the day when I was a wedding photographer we would have to move a little square over our models eyes it was very tricky you would miss a lot you couldn't really recompose if you were shooting very very wide apertures because of a shallow depth of field here comes Sony hey let's just make it you know lock onto the eye lo and behold higher percentage of keepers higher degree of accuracy they continue to improve it it's really it's the best I've seen it's the best in the world sony has the best eye detection in the world in de 6600 is the flagship of the aps-c cameras I was reading on Facebook the other day can you start a professional wedding and portrait business with the aps-c Sony cameras answer is absolutely yes completely now in the past when you we would zoom out there's there's gonna come a point when the face becomes so small that the camera can't detect the algorithm but it's improved so much recently that a box is really small it's pretty much going to be able to find that face moe to the time if they're looking at you but keep this in mind if we are dealing with a focusing square that does not match up where your shooters faces what I do when I am shooting for say YouTube is I'll come in to a zone and I'll have this zone pattern over where my face is going to be it's not on there it's gonna default to those squares very important to keep in mind as a side note on previous Sony cameras in the past the default was pushing into the set button and it was jump into I focus it's not the case anymore because we need it to determine where these focusing squares are going to be able to move so you would have to move iaf if you wanted a quick hot button to a specific key I kind of like the AEL where we had back button focus depending on whether you're not you're a portrait photographer or sports photographer I think that's the best place for it and we would customize it in the same way coming up to custom key will go to this guy and we're looking for IAF there it is and what this means when it is set up this way IAF said on the AEL is that when we engage that anywhere in the frame it's gonna get that I lock really powerful if you're a portrait photographer if you shoot kids a lot you know things of that nature where you just want to get that eye focus you don't have to fumble with any of the buttons just boom right there so that is I detection while we're on the topic of focusing there's a couple menu items and tools I want to demonstrate bread tab page six face an eye autofocus set when you come in here we have the ability to turn on face an eye detection turn it off we can determine whether this is a human or an animal subject pretty cool we have the ability to determine whether we want the right eye or the left eye when it's in Auto the camera will decide this gray frame that we see we can also turn off if we don't want to see it same thing with the animal I display we can turn that off as well so yeah it should work on dogs and cats certain animals you will notice in these other tools I want to point out page 13 red tab the focus magnifier if you select it from here you're going to get this box we can change the magnification by pressing in to set button almost six and most 12 wants to come back in and reactivate the box each time we use it how long do you want it to be magnified for 2 seconds 5 seconds or no limit the initial magnification when we're using so when we're using something like manual focus assists one time or six times almost six times the manual focus assists is the punch in it's that zoom and we get when we are using manual focus so if we turn this off and we jump into our manual focus when it's turned off we don't get the punch in when it is turned on come back out then we get the punch in there it is this guy here auto focus and focus magnification you have to have your camera on to an auto focus mode let's just make sure that we do come in here okay we're on auto focus single when we use the focus magnifier it means that we can engage the auto focus with a halfway shutter button depression and continue to zoom in for manual focusing however probably one of the coolest tools that I think when we're talking about manual focus a tool you should absolutely be aware of is peaking peaking is a color overlay that is going to appear in the areas of sharpest contrast it's not always precise depending on how wide your aperture is but it will definitely tell you ballpark more or less where the camera is focusing first thing we need to do is to turn it on I'm going to turn it on to a high level display there's also medium and low and I like to select red because it shows really well tap the shutter button you can immediately see it the focus peaking is going to highlight in red in the areas that are in focus if we use the focus magnifier and punch in if we use our focusing ring in manual focus it'll automatically punch in and we can see it this is very useful when we are shooting with a video and we want to know exactly how deep our depth of field is very important to note that this should only be working in manual so if you're frustrated that you don't see it in an autofocus mode that's why it is pretty much a manual focusing tool and that is referred to as peaking come in here and turn that off while we're on the topic of focusing I should mention that in the yellow tab page 3 we have our touch panel touch pad settings the touch panel is this back monitor when you do not have the camera up to your face when you put the camera up to your eye and you're looking this becomes the touch pad so what it's saying here touch panel touch pad it means that the touch sensitivity is active in these different states for both of them for the back monitor only or when we're looking through the viewfinder when I shoot I am left eye dominant which means my nose is bumping into the screen I typically tend to go with touch panel only because I don't I don't like using the monitor when I'm looking for the viewfinder if this is turned on we can adjust touch pad settings where it'll work in the horizontal and vertical orientation we could turn it off we didn't want vertical orientation touch position I like absolute that's just me if you just wanted to limit it to a certain area you could select relative its this is going to be preference whatever you prefer I would say try both of them absolute means it's the entire screen relative means you're going to use a smaller portion and then when we go to the operation area this is going to allow us to determine what part of this touch monitor is sensitive as we're looking through the viewfinder so if you are left aya dominant and you're looking through the viewfinder you're probably going to want to pick an area we're not bumping into your nose some people use it on the left side I don't recommend that when you use heavy lenses there's nothing to put under the lens but depending on where your nose is it may be up here upper right half the far quarter whatever it is and then when you get that position designated with the black part of the square so then when you're looking through the viewfinder you should be able to touch on the screen and move it around so that is the touch pad and touch panel settings probably a pretty good idea to also talk about focusing options when we are shooting video so I flip this over to video you notice it gets a little bit of a punch in there is a crop factor on our sensor it's one point five if we notice how it jumps in and out what's happening is it's punching in just a little bit when we are shooting thirty frames per second or sixty frames per second we wouldn't see that at 24 frames per second it should be the same but the idea on this is that there's a couple different tools I want to point out and make you aware of when you're shooting video we have eye detection for video which is an awesome feature it means it's going to be more precise that as we track and get closer to our subjects you'll notice that a certain point the real-estate kicks in to eye detection lower end sony a6000 series cameras do not have this feature it's an awesome wonderful feature if you do a lot of face recording you'll notice we've still got the face box something else you should notice is that when you come in to your focusing modes we cannot select single shot so it's either continuous or you're going to go with manual focus continuous means the camera is going to be tracking continuously and something that's really cool about this remember we have this touch square we can touch on the camera and tell where to focus with touch operation back in the day I'd say probably within the last five years if you wanted to change the focus of your camera for video you had to do it manually you actually had to go out and buy gears and wheels and this is still how it's done in Hollywood is that we have a very plex rig that we put on the camera and we'll have somebody actually change the focus manually well with a touch-sensitive monitor like this we can touch on the screen and tell the camera where we want it to focus so you'll notice it's not letting me change what I'm going to do is put a different lens on so you can see the difference a little bit easier so I put a 24 to 72 point 8g master on I'm gonna come into the menu and I need to change the video settings which is something that I recommend you do it's on program mode right now I almost always shoot on manual mode will turn off these little previews as well in a second so now I'm on manual mode now I have the control to change my aperture in my shutter speed to something faster I'm gonna turn this down you guys can see it here so now when I'm at 2.8 touch on here versus touching on here in the camera is changing the focus it's a very powerful tool so we have face detection and continuous we have touch focus where we can touch and change if we were to track a moving subject and you put it on the square it should be focusing continuously where the square is see that kind of hard to see but it is changing the focus very smooth it's very fast it's very accurate we could also come in to manual focus and we have the same tools that we had there before we could also come in to our menu turn on peaking for video kind of hard to see but there it is tons of great focusing tools if you want to punch in and look at something something I want to demonstrate is that when we are in the video mode our customizations can be different so if this is the case instead of having a toggle button that we push and hold for autofocus manual focus we can push it to actually switch over and then we can actually get a magnification in AE else let me show you how to set that up real quick I think it's super useful so when we come in here for the video it says follow the custom for stills and we know this is control hold which means we want to push and hold it down to jump from autofocus to manual we want something that says af/mf toggle so we can push it once and it'll change control toggle here it is so now when we push this button back and forth between these two and then what we want to do is change this guy so we're gonna select focused magnifier we could also come in and customize our c3 button which we may not want to do but we also have the garbage can icon which is c4 down here so with this in mind let me show you how these two guys now work so if we're in the video mode and I push this button now I'm in manual focus we can see that with our peaking so you're peaking x' there if we want to go back to auto focus there are M so that's a really fast easy way to jump in and out of auto focus and manual focus so let's say I'm in manual focus and I want to jump over to the magnify button so wherever that focusing square is where we remove it if we want to jump in to magnify there's our box and so it gives us a quick easy way to jump in to manual focus without needing to go into the menu I can flip this back up come into auto focus that's just me personally it's the way I like to shoot when I'm using video I don't want to have to flip the switch to manual on the side of the lens or things of that nature very very fast control so I demonstrate this on the crash course there's a bunch of different focusing methods if you were to shoot a documentary if you're shooting a vlog if you're shooting a running athlete those are three different sets right there sometimes how do you focus in empty space manual focus so the subject matter that you shoot is going to determine the focusing method that you use and again that's all covered on the crash course let's talk about our cameras metering modes and by default your metering modes you can access in the function menu FN menu metering mode it's this little icon right here and by default we have our evaluative metering mode we can change them by selecting and then coming into each of these metering modes give instructions to the camera that help it to determine the exposure based on where light is coming into the camera that's the short answer the default is the evaluative metering mode that breaks the screen up into different zones there's different quadrants in the camera makes some measurements now the easiest way for me to explain this is in the spot metering mode mode so we're going to come into this meteringmode right here and you'll notice that when we do this we get this little circle in the middle look at the exposure settings one 125th and 2.8 right so wherever I'm pointing this those exposure settings are pretty much the same but the moment we move that over this bright headlamp the exposure settings change so what's happening in spot metering mode is we're giving instructions to the camera to only look within that little circle and that's how it's deciding which shutter speed to use if we come into the metering mode again there's actually a standard and a large circle so we have a bigger circle now outside the circle doesn't change quite as much as it did before it's kind of measuring that whole circle but that's how you would change your spot metering we also have the ability to link our spot metering mode to our focusing square and we can do this in the menu read tab page 8 we have our metering mode face priority multi we'll talk about that and it's that second spot metering point so we can link our spot metering to our focusing point so watch what happens now is that as I move the focusing Square we can see that little circle popping up boom there it goes I think that's more useful when we have a focusing square and then spot metering linked together so that's just me personally that I leave it there another cool feature about this is if we come into the menu face priority in multi metering basically what this means is that when we have our multi meter a mode on with face detection is it is going to set the exposure based on the face very very useful if you're shooting portraits things of that nature because sometimes you'll have highlights coming into the corners and we don't want the camera to be tricked or fooled so if you're shooting portraits with IR face detection it should change the exposure settings based on what it's metering off the person's face so there are some other metering modes there's center-weighted which expands the area it's a greater area in the center we have the entire screen average where it just takes an average of everything from corner to corner and then the metering based on highlights you can see that the camera shifted there as I went to it where we're giving instructions to the camera to meter based on the brightest highlight that it finds across the frame it's not going to be quite as much as when were using spot metering but as we change the amount of light coming into the camera it changes the exposure settings and the PS and a modes and that is why the metering mode is important in the beginning my recommendation would be just stick with multi metering until you get to a situation where you're shooting heavy back light and you want to start playing around the spot metering or linking it to a focusing square let's take a look at the deep menu system and I've been shooting Sony cameras now for five years and they are still confusing to me so if you are confused don't feel bad they are broken up into different tabs on the top and then we get different pages within those tabs so red is mostly for stills shooting come down you can navigate by pushing on the directional pad there's this you want to naturally push on the screen but for whatever reason Sony has an activated touchscreen navigation for the menu so we have to use the directional pad red is for still shooting purple is for mostly movies there's some other settings in there we'll be talking about we have our network settings which deals with the Wi-Fi and I'll show you how to connect to your smart phone we have our playback which is blue orange are the camera settings and then we have a gray tab which is customizable the my menu setting allows us to access those features that we use most of the time so we can add them in here and I'll demonstrate that as well also important to note that you're going to be seeing these little icons in here the little mountain in a square refers to a still image and the filmstrip refers to video we'll be seeing some other things here and there that'll be pointing out the thing that's the most confusing to me is sometimes you want things to be close to each other but they're not they're actually in different menus and there's no easy way to remember where all these things are let me make some recommendations for beginners on the crash course I'll go into far greater detail philosophies abuse things of that nature file format deals with whether we're shooting JPEG or raw or JPEG in raw if you're a pure beginner I typically say start off with JPEG if you are shooting raw you're probably going to want to get something like Lightroom or Photoshop to process those RAW files but in the beginning JPEGs fine JPEG quality deals with the compression this is essentially when the processor looks at adjacent pixels and decides if two colors are close enough they're gonna throw away it's gonna throw away some information and make a smaller file size if you're just starting and you're worried about this you can go to extra fine I know a lot of pro wedding photographers who shoot fine which is half the file size and they can't even see the difference JPEG image size I recommend large which is 24 megapixels typically it's a lot easier to go from a large megapixel image to a small megapixel image a lot harder to go from a small megapixel image and try to uh present never looks good aspect ratio deals with the proportions of the frame that we're shooting with three by two is the complete sensor my dad loves shooting sixteen by nine long exposure noise reduction essentially means it wants us to change the drive settings so this doesn't work in a burst mode and you're gonna see this a lot is when things are grayed out you're gonna try to select it it doesn't let you long exposure noise reduction is when we take an image over one second the camera will clean up some of that noise grain if this applies to JPEGs only same with high ISO noise reduction I recommend leaving this on applies to JPEGs if you have a really grainy images it'll clean it up and so when I'm going to go to the next page over here we have fourteen pages in the red tab I'm just going to push right on the directional pad and we can kind of keep track of it there too two out of fourteen color space should be srgb unless you're shooting for a magazine and you're aware of what Adobe RGB is lens compensation means that the lenses Sony lenses that we attach to our camera body are recognized in the camera body has the ability to clean up problems with the shading in the corners also referred to as vignette nkrumah cabaret ssin is a blue or yellow fringing that you'll see in high contrast areas distortion is when we're shooting with wide-angle lenses so this can all be cleaned up in camera in terms of the JPEGs and it definitely looks better so if you're shooting lots of JPEGs and you have a great Sony lens on there yeah I recommend it so we're already into page three scene selection we've covered it's this top scene mode on top of the wheel wants us to change to the same mode over here not really a huge fan of it but these are the modes that the camera kind of sets up for us does most the settings basically turns your camera into a point-and-shoot for specific situations drive modes we've covered there right here we can access them by pushing left on the directional pad and you're gonna see a lot of this redundancy in the menus where we can come in and change it in the menu as well so we talked about bracketing here when we come into the drive modes and you can see we talked about these continuous bracketing whether the camera would take all the images or we have to push your shutter button down all the way and the differences in the menu is these bracketing settings allow us to add a timer so we could add to 5 or 10 second timer for the bracket if we didn't want to touch the camera didn't want to shake it you'll also notice we can control the order the 0 is an even exposure the negative is an under exposure and the positive is an over exposure so this changes the order of one of how the bracketing shots are taken the interval shoot function is a built-in intervalometer where we can tell the camera to take images at specific intervals like anywhere from 1 to however many seconds you want so we choose when we want it to start we choose how many seconds we want it also gives us the total amount of time we will be shooting for with those intervals the number of shots even auto exposure tracking so if we want the exposure to change over time and I demonstrate how to use these features on the crash course how to do an interval timing shot we go down to the beach and I demonstrate you know using this interval timing to capture a sunset and then you play it back and it looks like it's happening really fast we can go a silent shooting this would put it into an electronic mode we have a ton of other features we cover in the crash course memory-recall allows us to set the camera up the way we like it and we can designate it to one of the memory slots on top of the camera either one or two and there's some additional slots that I'll show you how to set up let's pretend you're a sports shooter and you have a camera the way you like it we're going to go for a high burst aperture priority and we've we've designated everything we like in the camera but we don't like to have to dial in these settings every time we can come into the menu come into memory recall when we come into this screen we get all the information in terms of how the camera is set up and on the top we see this one - m1 m2 m3 the one in the to refer to these numbers on the mode dial so when we press the set button it's going to memorize all of our camera settings on position 1 when I rotate to position 1 all of those settings are recalled you'll notice it only has the one here and when I rotate to 2 it only has the two there this allows us to memorize specific camera settings so if you have settings for portrait versus maybe landscape you could designate those into those two positions so what are these M 1 M 2 and M 3 s these are additional slots so you would come in set the camera up the way you want it and save those settings to m1 m2 or m3 and then when you're ready to recall them you would come in here and select the setting that you want so we really get far more than two it's like six settings depending on how we're setting the camera up recall custom hold this is a great example of why the menus are confusing means that we can assign one of these to a specific button that when we press hold it it will remember certain camera settings that we set up when we come in here so we could come in here and and select and choose certain settings we want then we need to come back out to the menu and we need to come to page 8 because that makes perfect sense right as a pure beginner and then we're gonna go to custom key and in this case it would be MF control this button right here and we would come in here and try to find the the custom hold guy where is he recall custom hold one it essentially allows us to set up some settings that we can push and hold a button to bring those settings up while we're shooting I don't ever use it that's just me though page five many of these we've talked about when we get into the focusing stuff automatic so these are our focusing modes that we can select in the menu the priority set for auto focus single and auto focus continuous is asking what do you want the camera to prioritize first do you want it to focus or do you want it to release most of the time I leave it on balanced and here's the reason when we set it to release the camera will shoot at its maximum frames per second for that burst mode some of them will not be in focus when we set it on auto focus the frame rate tends to hesitate a little bit so in my experience I've had the best success with balanced both for auto focus single and auto focus continuous the focus area has to do again with the clusters it's a menu option to select them focus area limit allows us to determine which clusters will appear and win so we can come in here and we're dealing with a tracking option as we can see there's tons of focusing cluster options and if you want to just limit it to a certain number that you use and there's some that you don't you would come in here and deselect the ones you don't and then when you're shooting those options would not appear in your cluster selection switch a vertical horizontal auto focus area if we turn this on what's going to happen is the camera is going to remember the autofocus cluster and which point we were using when we rotate back and forth from horizontal to vertical so in the horizontal position it would be one square and when you flip up it would be in another you can memorize the point only or you can memorize the point and the cluster that we are using actually kind of like this set to this setting but for beginners it might be confusing as you're bouncing back and forth I just think it's easier to shoot with this autofocus illuminator is a light that will turn on in dark conditions the face and I autofocus set we've covered this already it allows us to determine many of the face and eye detection settings including whether we're dealing with humans or animals which I do we want to display the frame things of that nature auto focus with shutter you're going to need this off if you want to set a back button focus when you turn this off of you if you forget and you're not used to it it'll drive you crazy pre auto focus is something I do recommend turning off when it's on the camera will begin to focus whatever it's pointed at I think it where's the battery down faster it's just me personally I think it's something I just leave off I start auto focus deals with adapting a mount lenses over to our amount body so we're not gonna worry about that auto focus area registration allows us to memorize a specific focusing Square by pressing and holding other buttons down for beginners we're gonna skip this and we have the ability to delete those registered auto focus points auto focus area clear I definitely recommend leaving off if we turn this on it will allow our focusing square to disappear after a certain amount of time and that can be confusing for beginners and in the wide end zone settings we also have the ability to display the squares during continuous shooting this is something I also recommend turning on but if you don't want to see it turn it off as well so the circulation of the focusing point I think the wordings confusing I think this is a good idea to turn on let me demonstrate what it does real quick was is we have our focus square and as we move it to the edge if you want it to jump around to the other side we would continue to press in that direction same from top to bottom I think that's easier than trying to go across the frame again to me personally maybe autofocus micro adjustment is only going to work with certain lenses I have a 24 to 72 point 8g master on here and it won't even let me do it so it just depends on your lens and it allows you to adjust front or back focus our camera is using auto focus points built into the sensor so it's measuring the focus in real time and this is why it's not going to apply to many lenses but I guess some older lenses or different lenses we could come in and change the front and back focusing exposure compensation we've talked about this is increasing or decreasing the image brightness we can change your ISO setting or metering mode face priority and multi metering we talked about so in the metering lesson we talked about how this will change the exposure when it recognizes a face I think it's a cool feature we can link spot metering with our focusing Square talked about that also in the metering lesson I like 1/3 intervals for our steps in terms of exposure changing some people like half steps auto exposure lock with a halfway shutter button depression if we didn't want that we could turn it off exposure standard adjustment we're gonna skip this allows us to adjust basically what the camera interprets is an even exposure so for pure beginners definitely don't mess with this because if you do the camera is gonna behave very differently the a 6600 does not have a built-in flash we see it on some of the lower end a 6400 a 60 100 a 6600 the ergonomics I feel are far better it's a bigger camera it's a little bit heavier but it feels great in the hand and I think they tried to save some space for the Ibis by removing the flash in the crash course I talked about using an external speed light so godox TT 685 I think it's the best value for the Sony cameras it's like ten dollars there's also a commanding module which will allow you to use the flash off the camera great value and we have about a forty to fifty minute lesson on there that will get you started when we're talking about flash I always recommend making Flash changes on the flash unit itself this allows us to do it from the camera when we're dealing with exposure compensation do we want it to apply to the flash as well as the light that we're shooting in so where we set that sub we have some wireless flash settings I do it through the command module that I buy just because it's more affordable and Sony does have some flash units out there but you will spend a little bit more to get the same equivalent power that you're getting out of that tt6 85 s redeye reduction will help fire a pre flash that will dilate the pupils we can choose our white balance when we're using auto white balance if we come in here we can actually see there's different flavors more white and a little bit more ambient leave it on standard for now let the camera choose most of the time the auto white balance is pretty good dynamic range optimizer auto HDR if we come in here we have the ability to choose an auto HDR setting which stands for high dynamic range typically the camera takes a few shots and blends them together it's improved over the years if you're shooting a sunset you don't have a tripod or a lot of time it can save you creative styles again this is how the recipe cooks the JPEGs and for example for shooting see here there should be a portrait you may expect to see the flesh tones a little bit more accurate in the portrait creative style for example in the landscape you might see better blues and greens and so these are different recipes that Sony's put into the camera to help the JPEG processing in the beginning I almost exclusively tell beginners just to leave it on standard and if you get into more JPEG shooting and you want some help from the camera for colors then you would experiment with that after you've learned exposure and the focusing and all those things picture effect is something I don't really use you can scroll through them and see some of these effects some of them are kind of gimmicky I don't consider them professional tools so I never use it the picture profiles on the other hand if you're a videographer you're gonna want to take a look at these pads picture profiles like s log different gamuts and this is going to allow us to record video essentially tweaked the way we want it's not something I put a lot of emphasis on for beginners but if you're looking to capture a higher degree of dynamic range for video this is this is where you would do it if we want to lock our auto white balance with a halfway shutter button depression we would turn this on it's interesting how we get these we have loaded menus and then we come to one that just has one there focus magnifier we've talked about it's a little square we can zoom in on how long do you want that magnification to last the initial magnification do you want mice to start off with a box or do you want it to jump in almost 6 times do you want to be able to autofocus when you are magnified I have mine turn on on manual focus assist is the jump in when we're in manual focus it'll zoom in talked about our peaking setting which is the color overlay in the focusing lesson face registration if you are at a birthday party and you want the camera to focus only on your child's face this is where you would come in you would register your child's face and essentially the camera would be looking for that face when and if we have this priority turned on the self timer if we take the screen and we flip it forward we have this turned on it will give us a little countdown so we can see it and that is the red shooting menus a lot of information in there coming in to the purple tab which is the movie setting you'll notice that some of these are grayed out so I'm gonna flip the mode dial over to the video recording icon the filmstrip and when I come back in now we have the ability to choose the exposure mode for the video shooting and I exclusively use manual exposure because it allows me to dial in the shutter speed and aperture and the cameras not making any changes and I recommend this even for beginners is to start off with a manual exposure mode for video the s and Q which is the slow and quick setting it wants us to rotate the dial over to that same thing I want manual for both of them they come back to the regular video file format I prefer shooting on the top setting the 4k the highest resolution if you have the right memory card you should be good to go there's no record limit so you can record video as long as you can fit that on the memory card memory cards are cheap and there are going to be differences between the data rates that I'll demonstrate if you choose something like this this is also standard HD it's not 4k this is a lower data rate so for me personally I'm always on the top setting when we come in to the record setting we have different options in here and let me teach you what these numbers mean they let the number with a P after your first the number of frames per second so when we're talking about 30 frames per second that's typically what I shoot for YouTube if you are into filmmaking 24 frames per second is the standard and you'll notice that it'll also say super 35 millimeter which is about the size of an aps-c sensor when you see that essentially what the menu is telling us is that there's going to be no crop when we're shooting at 30 frames per second we get a little bit crop on top of our 1.5 it's like a one point two additional you'll see it punch in just a little bit but this is 4k and the numbers after the frames per second deal with the data rate it's the amount of data being written to the memory card per second so a hundred M is a hundred megabits per second when I am recording for YouTube I'm typically at thirty P 102 M in fact that's typically where the camera is most of the time there is an exception and that is what I'm doing slow motion video in order to get access to slow motion from these menus we do have to come in and select HD when I come back down to record setting here it is 120 frames per second its standard HD not 4k at a hundred megabits per second and when we play that back in our editing workflow we would see this as four times slower than 30 frames per second that's one way we can do it but most of the time the vast majority of the time I am here and I demonstrate some slow motion recording on the crash course asking Q settings are a little bit different in that we come in and we determine the frame rate in terms of the recording we can choose 120 frames per second here or one frame per second with everything in between and then the s in Q mode it plays it back according to what we have selected here so if we're gonna export it at 30 frames per second it'll play the slow motion in slow motion so that's why it's kind of handy you know if you're shooting out one frame per second and you play it back at 30 frames per second then it's gonna be really really fast proxy recording is something that high-end editors love it basically means the camera is recording a second set of files much smaller in resolution much smaller and file size so it records the 4k and records these things called proxy files the reason why they're amazing is because they're very small in terms of file space and they're very easy on the processor to edit as the editors are editing the proxy files they're giving instructions to the computer how to export the full resolution files the result of this is that they are able to deal with these proxy files far more efficiently far faster without losing any of the resolution when they finally export for beginners you don't really need to be worried about this you know for basic editing just use the basic files to start until you get the hang of it for video shooting autofocus Drive speed when we were doing the touchscreen to pull focus we can change how fast that happens whether it's very fast or slow we can change the sensitivity we wanted we wanted to be more responsive a lot of this is to tweak to taste Auto slow shutter is something I typically turn off because when I am shooting video I like to be able to have the manual controls I don't want it on anyway the initial focus magnification when you're shooting in video if you wanted to magnify one or four times audio recording obviously we do want to record sound we have a headphone and a microphone jack but this audio record level setting is pretty important because it allows us to control the gain of the audio signal coming into the camera so when you see very loud noises and it clips out you'll see these red markers on the far right that's bad it means you're losing audio quality and if you see that what you would want to do is come in and turn these levels down and see with this orange line here and you can see that it's not quite as loud when you were recording video keep an eye on your audio levels we have two channels there's a left in a right channel and there's part of the crash course where I show you how to feed two microphones into the camera so you can have a microphone on and a host in somebody they're interviewing and it keeps track of those audio files separately this is a whole different discussion audio level display definitely recommend leaving it on audio out timing should be set to live for now wind noise reduction I've never successfully heard of a good difference it makes whether it's turned on or off we have our marker displays if you want some overlays appearing so if we turn this on and we come into our marker settings we could have a guide frame for example up here this won't be on the video this just helps us line things up if we don't want to see that we can turn that off it's just an easy way to turn the marker settings on and off and then we determine which ones here do you want to start and stop movie recording with the shutter button I kind of like it sometimes this buttons a little hard to push you got to get your your thumb at a certain angle in order to see silent shooting it wants to back to a shooting mode completely silent shooting is going to use an electronic shutter let's test it out see if you can hear it completely silent I've used this on movie sets I was a photographer on a movie set and while they're recording they don't want any sound they don't want the click click of the camera go to electronic shooting and it almost sounds like you're not doing anything you're they're looking at you like what are you doing the problem with this is when we use very fast shutter speeds and this is something that you will definitely see let's bump this up when you're shooting in LEDs LED lights which I am right now which is alternating current is you'll start to see this banding artifact and this is actually published a video on this on YouTube explaining why it happens but LED lights are flickering in in alternating current and as they flicker it's captured differently by an electronic shutter so this is the limit of using electronic shutter or silent shutter turn that off come back in take the picture play it back obviously a huge difference it's just something to be aware of electronic front shutter curtain if we turn this on and it I believe it's on by default the first curtain is electronic which means there's not a second shutter if we turn this off you should hear two clicks when we take a picture very hard to hear on fast shutter speeds but it's there there's two clicks so it is something to be aware of that your camera is set up for electronic shutter curtain first you're not gonna get the banding that you see with a full electronic shutter release without lens or card and it enables us to take in actuation without having a lens or garden if you are adapting a certain lens over you know and there's there's no communication sometimes this is something you have to do pinhole photography for example the camera won't take a shot without something connected so turn this on no loss take the picture steady shot usually recommend leaving it on there are some times you want to turn it off the SteadyShot settings allow us to set this up if we go to manual for lenses that are not recognized by the camera body so let's say you're adapting over a wide-angle lens and you want the steady shot to balance it out you can come in here and select the focal length of that lens in the camera will engage its Ibis to help steady it pretty powerful the Ibis is pretty good in the sony cameras it's improved over time and very impressive but if it's on auto it'll do this automatically as you connect sewing lenses to your camera body things of that nature I just changed the lenses and I have a sixteen to fifty kit lens it's very common with the a6000 series cameras to demonstrate the zoom setting when it's set to optical zoom only we're limited to what the physical zoom of lenses there's a feature in here called Clear Image Zoom that I want to demonstrate this is a sixteen to fifty lens and as i zoom in you can see the zoom setting changing and when I get to fifty millimeters we get this little dotted box and it's going to allow me to zoom in even further up to two times as much so one hundred millimeters on this lens so what in the world is going on Clear Image Zoom is proprietary technology that Sony owns that they say up raises the resolution when we zoom past the physical limits of our lens I don't even know exactly how it works but if you have a kit lens that is recognized and allows you to do this it is going to allow you to get in a little bit closer it's a pretty fun cool feature if you want to check it out otherwise optical zoom only these other two settings depend on the lens that we have it's only going to recognize the zoom ring root rotate or compatible digital zoom lenses only so the display button which is located here on top of our directional pad we can customize the types of screens that are played back when we are using the monitor for example for the viewfinder if you don't want to see some of these screens as you're toggling through you can uncheck them same for the viewfinder so we're looking through here I like the auto feature this is this little switch here that will trigger when something's closed when I'm using the gimbal and the gimbal head is a little bit you know where we connect it as close to the viewfinder it'll turn it off and so sometimes you have to come in and select monitor and that turns this off you go viewfinder only sometimes that can be really confusing because you can't see like right now I can't see it there we go and come back to auto framerate I like standard but if you want a high frame rate through the viewfinder you can turn it to high the zebra setting deals with overexposure it's a warning indicator and we can when it's turned on we can control the level so it's 70% or 80% when we're overexposed I like to have mine like right at 100 so that means that as I turn up the exposure we get these zebras marching some people I get at 95 a little bit we can turn different grids on terms of overlays you want to see what those look like there they are the exposure set guide is when you're changing your exposure settings when you turn this on it gives you an overlay that lets you see the exposures a little bit more clearly this makes it easier to see I would recommend turning that on it's kind of nice by default live view display is on and this is going to give us an exposure prediction when we are shooting so we have an idea about how over or underexposed that's going to be there are times we're going to want to turn this off specifically when we are shooting strobes in a studio because the strobes are adding all this light the camera doesn't really know about that and it may be dark as well so when you turn this off what happens is you lose your preview in terms of exposure this is going to help the camera focus things of that nature so that's the one time I would definitely recommend turning it off is if you're in a studio shooting strobes otherwise most of the time it's on auto review means that when you take a picture do you want it to automatically playback you can choose to five or ten seconds now we start getting into the custom setting we talked about these first two but we can also customize some keys when we are playing images back for example send a smartphone FN button by default is set up for that the function menu we talked about this is this bottom menu when we press the FN button as we're shooting and we can determine different features to appear in that menu by changing the function menu set the Bayeux dial setting is a little confusing it essentially allows us to customize how our wheels works whether it's this control dial on the back or the main dial up here and we essentially come in and we choose a function whatever it is white balance for example and then we would come back into the custom keys and we would designate a button that would allow us to access those controls for beginners I don't recommend this because we have the default settings that are pretty crystal clear we have our ISO exposure compensation drives display we give these indicators here so I don't recommend changing those when you're first getting started my recommendation for the sake of simplicity is to keep it set up as the default and we also have dial and wheel setup where for example when we're changing our exposure settings in the manual mode do you want the directional pad to change the aperture the shutter speed or vice versa for the main dial preference it's a preference thing which direction do you want them to rotate in terms in terms of changing the settings up or down you can reverse those I like having the exposure compensation set up the way it is if we turn this on just rotating one or the other will change it and that's kind of confusing for beginners I think it's a good way that it's set up pushed down and then change it how does the touch operation work on the back of the camera I think for focusing it's amazing which is why I recommend leaving it there the movie button do you want it to always record video so if you're in a stills mode and you want to record video real quick you could do that or you can make it work only in movie mode we can lock the dial in wheels so if you're shooting and you got your settings dialed in and you're bumping them and you don't want them to change you could lock them the beep do you want it on or off pretty straightforward and then we get into the green tab we're gonna be talking about shooting with the app which is probably the most useful thing in this menu there's some other things we can do we have airplane mode you know controlled smart flow and things of that nature I'll be demonstrating that just a minute just want to kind of get through the rest of these and then we have our playback which is the blue tab a lot of these are pretty straightforward protecting images you can do multiple images all with this state so if we come in here and we select an image the idea is this will protect it from being accidentally deleted we hit OK this will not protect it from being formatted just come back out to the menu cancel we can rotate our images we can delete individual images not something I recommend I usually like to see it on a big monitor unless I know for sure I really screwed it up the rating this will give us a star rating you can see it on the top here and we can change the rating pushing to the left and right from 1 to 5 stars or no rating and when you import those into Lightroom or Photoshop they should have the star ratings on there okay it's jumping way back here that's that's a glitch should be jumping back into this menu we have the ability to determine which of these 1 through 5 stars are available when we're rating images we can use the camera to specify the print order I typically don't use in fact I don't think I've ever used the camera to print images I usually either download them to the computer first or use the memory card page to this photo capture allows us to export individual frames from video we have to have a video file to do it we have the ability to to zoom in on playback images in terms of how much the initial magnification do you want it as last time or do you want the standard start do you want it on the focused position or in the center when i zoom in I'm usually playing back and I'm pressing the Zoom button myself and then I'm navigating this way we have some playback for the interval timer so we can have continual playback if we wanted it's going to want us to choose an interval timer file but we don't have that right now and then we can also choose the speed in terms of how fast that playback is happening page 3 in the blue tab a lot of this is straightforward you can have a slideshow playback your images if you want to do that you can have it loop at what intervals do you want each image shown which View mode we can view by date folder format this is kind of cool because when you when you get a calendar view you can see you know which days you shot and it'll show you all the images on that particular day on the let me show you this over here we keep scrolling over we can jump by month keep scrolling over we have access to the different kinds of file so date stills the video formats pretty cool image index is just asking how many thumbnails we want to see when we're using that image playback so if you come into the View mode and come into the date so how many images do you want to be able to see here display as a group essentially means is that when you shoot a burst of let's say 15 images do you want them to be displayed as a stack of images or would you just prefer to view one at a time so when this is turned on you can you can view and scroll through burst modes it's kind of cool auto rotation is something that I recommend leaving on to turn it off then it will not always display right depending on how you're holding the camera image jump setting allows us to determine whether or not we want to jump through multiple images using the dial the main dial or the control wheel a wheel is a complete circle and then it's asking do you want to jump one by one by the ones that are protected your star rating there's lots of different ways to jump through those images and that is the blue tab coming into this orange tab we have our basic camera settings there's seven pages of it some of these are pretty straightforward monitor brightness how bright or dark the monitor is going to be so if it's sunny can see can turn it way I otherwise you have the ability to come in here and push up or down same for viewfinder brightness wants to adjust in there we can change the color temperature of our EVF Gama display assist is a fancy word for saying how is this going to look after we have graded it probably a more advanced feature for videographers we have the ability to come in here and look at some of these different gamma displays volume setting is obviously how loud the camera is going to be delete confirmation means that when we press the garbage can icon do you want the default setting to be highlighted on the cancel or the delete option cancel first is a good idea because it means we have to move the setting if we actually want to delete it display quality standard is good there is a higher quality it's going to drain your battery a little bit faster when you want to camera to turn off 30 minutes is far too long I do this because I'm teaching but typically two to five minutes is going to be plenty and then we have an auto power shut off temperature in the beginning sony alpha cameras we're overheating when they first started shooting 4k we don't see it as much anymore but if you want to maximize that output turn it to high and you'll you won't get interrupted for video recording as much if you're in Europe and you know what Pal is you would come in here and change this otherwise NTSC the cleaning mode I demonstrate how to clean your sensor on the crash course this is something that every camera owner should know how to do simply because there's going to come a time your sense is going to get dirty if you don't know how to do it it can be pretty intimidating because you're you know touching the sensor and there are certain tools that make it easier so if you're interested in that definitely check it out the touch operation terms of the monitor and turn it off completely I don't recommend that we talked a little bit about the touch panel and the touch pad this is the touch panel when it's on when we're looking through the viewfinder it becomes the TAT touch pad and this determines which one's active in all honesty I prefer touch panel only touch pad settings we also talked about in terms of how to change where we're touching as we're looking through the viewfinder demo mode is if you're trying to sell the camera as a store for example we have the timecode settings a lot of these are pretty advanced these are for video recorders so if you're a pure beginner don't worry about it in the beginning we have an infrared remote control if we wanted to start and stop video recording by this remote for example HDMI refers to sending a video signal out of the camera through the HDMI port here on the side the short answer is if you're a pure beginner pure starting videographer don't worry about it high-end videographers are going to use an HDMI recorder to save the video under a different format and we have the ability to change for example the resolution we can change the frame rate as it's going to the recorder we can control whether or not information is being displayed if we don't want to see our exposure settings we could turn this off and that's referred to as Queen HDMI out there's a lot of information in here the timecode output a lot of different settings record control and we can even control recording for the HDMI as well so just keep in mind there are some really great video tools built into the camera and that's where the HDMI settings are 4k output select wants an HDMI recorder to connect to the camera and when this happens it's going to allow us to control whether we want simultaneous recording on the recorder and the memory card one or the other or certain frame rates these next few settings here the US speak connection we have a USB port on the side of our camera and we can connect different types of USB devices mass storage things of that nature this allows us to select what type of connection we have the LUN setting if you're having trouble with it essentially you can turn it to single and this will limit the number of compatibility issues USB power supply deals specifically when you're connected to a computer do you want the computer powering the camera as it's connected to the computer and then we have the PC remote settings which would allow us to determine that when we take a picture do we want it saved on the computer as well as the camera or just computer PC only we can also determine whether it's raw or JPEGs pretty useful and then we have the language setup if you're watching this video hopefully you understand English but there are some other options in there date and time setup pretty straightforward you saw this when you first got the camera in terms of setting up date and time we can do it again here if we ever need to the area setting it's asking where do you live copyright information this allows us to determine some metadata that will be written to the the files themselves whether it's the copyright the photographer we can display that once it's set up so you would come in here and type your name out Michael the Maven for example and those would be written to the to the files as we shoot them format the memory card it's going to be a clean wipe it's going to erase everything including protected images I do this every time I put a card back into the camera the workflow that you have you should try to always have two images we only have one memory card in the camera so when you're shooting as soon as you take that memory card out back to file up somewhere I usually make copy onto a hard drive and then for example if you have Amazon Prime you can set another copy on the cloud a lot of people don't know that but always try to have two copies sometimes three if it's important because if you lose your hard drive I can't tell you how many times this has happened to friends they put all of their images on hard drive over the period of eight years and the hard drive dies and all those memories are lost so always always make two copies when you have your two to three copies and you put the card back into the camera reformat it you'll be good to go the file numbering system do you want it to continue when you put a new memory card back in or do you want to reset it to zero zero zero one I usually shoot in a series we can change the three-letter designator if we want just come in here and change it page six deals with folder management we can select the folder that we're recording to if we have more than one we can create a new folder if we really wanted to there it goes boom the folder name do you want it as the letters or would you prefer to have it as the date sometimes when we put the card into a computer put it back into the camera sometimes the images won't play and we can recover the image database by this feature here we can display certain media information display media info supposed to show you the amount of space that you can record for your current setting should work for stills as well the firmware version tells us about the software that's operating both the camera as well as the lens very common to see firmware updates issued by Sony a few months after a camera comes out because of little bugs or little problems so when they do that you compare whether or not you have it and if you need the update there's a process for updating the firmware and then we get into resetting the camera completely so if you want to reset everything you can I am going to leave that off for now like it's setup so this last tab here is the grey tab the my menu tab it's going to allow us to choose specific items that we want quick access to there are so many 14 pages just in the red tab alone nine pages purple tab so 23 pages just in those two tabs plus we get another seven here 30 pages but you're only going to use maybe four or five of them and this allows us to get quick quick access to each of these so all you do is you choose the item that you want so let's say file format we can add it to this location it's added let's say we wanted to add formatting there it is those are two that I use a lot we're going to add it right here it's adding so when we come back to the menu you can see that we have a new page here two out of two come back to one out of two here are the two options I just added on video shooting so there they are and I don't have to go searching through the menu just for those two items and I know those are the ones I use most of the time we can get several pages onto the my menu tab we can sort the items delete them we can delete a whole page you can delete everything in the end as you get more experience with your camera you're going to know which items you want access to and I would highly recommend just adding them here so you don't have to go searching for them every time this is a prime example so I want to add the finder / monitor so I don't have to go searching for this when I do my gimbal shots right let's come in here add an item it's gonna have to go through all of these pages these should mirror the individual pages for each tab there it is add that and so I've added it to my menu as well that is an overview just the surface of the deep menu system on the a 6,600 I go into more of the philosophy of use on the crash course let's talk about connecting with your smart phone to the camera and I believe the most useful thing that you can do with this is to use it as a remote control to change the settings take pictures and things of that nature in the green tab we have the ability to change our Wi-Fi settings we also have the airplane mode but the easiest way to do this is to come in to control a smartphone and come to connection very important that I point out that the name of the app that you need to download is called imaging edge it used to be called PlayMemories and Sony changed it and it was an update just recently in fact also I'm not a huge fan of always staying connected it's gonna be a battery drain on both your phone and the camera so I connect manually each time I want to do this what's happening is the camera is putting out a Wi-Fi signal that we need to connect with with our camera so we have this QR code when we come into the imaging app it's asking do you want to connect with the camera unless you have already registered it's not going to recognize it so we're going to hit cancel I like scanning the QR codes when you do this it's gonna say scan the QR code of the camera can also go to the near-field communication let me demonstrate QR code it's easily going to hook us up and you're going to notice that as soon as we do this we get this little cross here I'm gonna pop this off cancel come back here QR code sweet this crosshair I know you can't really see it I'm just gonna come over here and scan the QR code it's gonna going to ask you want to join this network we're hey yes basically introduced the camera in the smartphone together they're communicating they're becoming friends throw this guy back up in here I believe this is the most useful way to use this app because we can press the shutter button here and take a picture it will download that image automatically depending on the settings we can come in and change our shutter speed we can change our aperture remotely the distance is about 20 feet or so and then you run out of range we can set a timer if we wanted to we can the burst mode single frame or multiple frames we can change our white balance very nice the app has improved over time it gets better and better you're going to notice that we have the ability to zoom should zoom by tapping we're actually remote zooming with compatible lenses we can change how we are viewing the display we have a small menu section that gives us some other options including flash settings wireless flash camera information the review options we have the ability to embed location or GPS data into our files we can turn a gridline on mirror mode so we have some nice menu settings there so really it's a pretty cool way to shoot remotely we can rotate the frame around if we're viewing it from a different angle pretty cool now the things that I don't like about this app is how we have to connect and reconnect when we want to do certain things so take for example right now we're only in a shooting mode but if we wanted to see the other menu options in the opening of the app we would have to disconnect and then we go back in so there's no way to to get out right there's no extra menu here now when we shoot an image we want to play it back we can come in here we can rate the images we can see the date and time we can do a grid display other information get all the information about image itself after you disconnect there's a couple things I want to show you real quick is that if we come back into the connection you're going to notice here on the bottom it says connect with password you can press the menu button this is a slightly different way to connect to the camera it's turning the Wi-Fi on press the garbage can button to connect with password and it gives us this password what we would need to do is to open up our Wi-Fi settings select the camera and it should ask us to enter in the password and this is the password it wants us to enter so we need to enter that in and then it connect we could also connect with near field communication so I'm going to come back into the app we're not connected but we have a couple other options in here including the ability to look at some news from Sony link see and it kicks us out of this menu I kind of want to see what's in this menu it's not a big deal when you're ready to disconnect come back in to your tab and select connection and it should kick you out there it goes disconnected in a perfect world once they pair you should be able to connect but there are some glitches and bugs but I you know you come back out to this menu and you want to look at perhaps some of the settings so we can copy the image size and go the original size or 2 megapixels if I was to give some feedback to Sony we would like to be able to access this part of the menu I know they're trying to make it easy to connect to the shooting part of it and then to make it really easy for it to connect it's gonna look it's probably going to fail so there are some bugs and some kinks if you run into them you are not alone but in my opinion the fastest easiest way is to use the QR code or the near-field communication and you get access to the remote shooting I wish it was easier to reconnect instead of needing to rescan or not using a password but very useful if you ever need remote shooting and that is how we connect our smartphone to the sony alpha 6600 one of the first accessories that you're going to want to get is a set of tripod legs you can spend a lot of money like on a bogan moderato setup the one that I use it's about four hundred dollars if you're a beginner and you're on a budget I would recommend staying away from the Walmart brand tripods they're very flimsy they break very quickly it's just not a good investment of money if you're on a budget check out one of the tripods that I sell on my website we have an entry-level one very affordable at the time of this recording $89 and we're looking for those prices to drop I've personally inspected them they're very good and then when you're ready for a more expensive tripod upgrade when you have the money if you do any kind of video recording you are going to want to invest in an external microphone in the past I used to recommend the road sell our microphones I don't recommend those anymore because they're bigger they're heavier and they're far more expensive some friends and I have done some research and we've found an outstanding quality microphone that is very affordable that link is in the description as well it is the Maven mini mic great value if you are just getting started I'm also happy to announce a new program that if you get the crash course within two weeks if you let us know we will give you a coupon code that will allow you to save 20% off the tripod the microphone camera straps filters anything we sell on the store when we're talking about lenses there are some very important pieces of information I need to share with you there is some confusion on the sony e-mount lenses you we hear this amount but the e-mount can mean aps-c sized sensors like the a 6600 or it can also mean full-frame lenses that we see on the higher-end a 7 Series F II is full frame emailed in plain e should be aps-c but you have to go in and you read the fine print whether this is designed for full frame or aps-c it's a very important distinction because there's a lot of lenses that are out there that are designed specifically for aps-c and full frame lenses that will work on your aps-c camera the reason why I say that is the full-frame lenses can be expensive but there's also this benefit of being able to swap back and forth so if you know you're going to get a full-frame sony camera in the future it kind of makes sense if you know you're just gonna stick with your camera then you should stick with the aps-c lenses I also have to make you aware of the crop factor on your lens it is 1.5 what does that mean when I say that basically because we're shooting with a smaller sensor there is going to be a magnification on your focal length your field of view in your depth of field so if you're shooting with a 100 millimeter lens it is going to behave as a 150 millimeter lens it's a very important thing to remember when you're planning the lenses for your camera if you are a pure beginner the six two-fifty kit lens is a good place to start it's not a bad lens it's very compact I have saved mine simply because there are times I want to go very light I don't want a heavy lens hey I still use it to this day if you're looking for something a little bit more telephoto you're probably looking at the 55 to 210 as an entry-level kit lens it's it's a good place to get started in prices on lenses from there go up the high end Sony lenses are the G masters and these are lenses designed to work on the full frame cameras there's the 16 to 35 2.8 the 24 to 70 2.8 70 to 200 2.8 there's a 100 to 400 sport shooting lens it's amazing those four lenses right there gonna cost you 10 grand there are tons of other great lenses Sony just announced a 16 - 55 2.8 it's expensive but it is designed for aps-c and its smaller size it's more affordable than some of these higher in G masters the Tamron 28 275 is very popular keep that in mind build your lens collection according to what you shoot but in the beginning stick with those kit lenses the 16 - 50 - 55 - 210 until you are ready for something more at some point you are going to want to get a flash system and the flash that I've been recommending for Sony shooters is the godox TT 685 s it's about a hundred and ten hundred twenty dollars you can also get it with an off-camera transmitter this is the exact flash that I demonstrate and teach on the crash course so I know flash can be very intimidating there's about a 40 to 50 minute crash course lesson on it and it will demonstrate how to get started with the flash how to do off camera flash it is a very powerful tool to put into your arsenal if you enjoyed this free tutorial and you want to take your education further about the sony a6000 i've always said this the best investment you can make is between your two years check out the sony a6000 crash course I will teach you the basics and then show you how to shoot like a pro in no time comes with a 100% money back guarantee in any event hope to see you guys on the Facebook group thank you for watching and I'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Michael The Maven

Views: 256,300

Keywords: Sony A6600, Sony Alpha A6600, Sony Alpha, Sony A6000 Series, Sony A6400, Sony Mirrorless, A6600 Tutorial, A6600 Training, Sony A6600 Tips, A 6600, Directions, Manual, PDF, Tips, Sony Focusing

Id: bTd5_sUiTr4

Length: 139min 24sec (8364 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 16 2019