Sony A7C Tutorial Training Overview - Free Users Guide Manual

this tutorial on the sony a7c is brought to you by maven filters this is my own filter line that is coming out in early 2021 there's going to be some huge discounts if you guys want in on that special offer make sure that you're subscribed hit that notification bell and when we launch you will get first dibs on the offer and if we've already launched i will put those links in the description so you can find them if you're an experienced photographer and you know your way around a camera you may want to take advantage of the table of contents if you hit control f or command f depending on the browser that you're using type in the keyword that you're interested in it should highlight in the table of contents click the time code next to it and it should jump to that chapter marker we're trying to make this as an interactive video guide for the a7c another cool technique is that this video is going to be about two hours long and you may not be able to watch all at once no problem you can watch up to the time code type that in in the comments and when you come back you'll have a little marker that will tell you exactly where you left off if you are brand new to photography i have to give you a word of warning this is going to cover the operation of the camera only i'm going to try to teach you as quickly and as efficiently as possible but there are some other things you're going to want to know about the basics of photography which is why i recommend my digital photography crash course it's a 20 course it will get you up to speed on the fundamentals very quickly now having said that there are many advanced features about the camera that i can teach you including strobe and video in the different kinds of shooting and i can demonstrate how i use the camera for landscapes and portraits and sports and some of the advanced features this is something that i typically put into a crash course but i have no idea how interested you guys would be in this so if you do want an advanced course on the a7c find the link in the description to my blog leave your name and your email address and if i get enough people interested i will make a full crash course on the a7c typically the price is between 40 or 50 and that also includes the digital photography crash course so if that's something you're interested in let me know on my blog and we will reach out to you as soon as it's ready as a resource i want to offer to you i've put together a facebook group for the sony a7c just come on in no trolls allowed nothing negative this is just the best place for you to interact with me ask me questions i can't answer everything but usually when we have the community of people helping each other out it has been a tremendous resource i like to get feedback of potential problems and sometimes i'll make videos about it and sometimes camera companies will fix those problems i want you to know you can become a master photographer if you put the work in we're going to eliminate the learning curve i got your back this is going to be a great experience we have a lot of information to cover so let's get started before i put a lens on i wanted to show you a couple things real quick and then we're going to go over the external buttons and controls something i love about sony cameras is that as we hold the camera the lens release is right next to our right ring finger so we can grab the camera power switch is right here and so with one hand we can turn the camera on or off and we can also release the lens so we will push and hold this down and rotate the lens as we look at the mount counterclockwise and you'll notice that we have this little notch right here that also corresponds with the white dot found on what is referred to as the e mount so every lens for the e mount should have a white dot on it and we want to align that white dot with the white dot on the mount before we rotate it clockwise and then you'll hear a little click and it will lock now the lens i'm about to put on here is an older kit lens it's a 28 to 70 there's a brand new 28 to 60 that's a little bit smaller this version of the lens i've seen it on ebay for less than two hundred dollars and the new 28 to 60 brand new is going to be available sometime around the start of 2021 it's like 499 dollars if you if you were to purchase it separately with the kit i think it adds another 300 something like that and i do like these little kit lenses because they are smaller they're more compact the g master lenses are really nice but they're also really expensive and really big and sometimes you just want a nice general shooter there's also a number of third-party lenses primes that have come out recently that are really nice compact so in the end start off with a kit lens find what you don't like about it and then start purchasing you know you know selective purposeful lenses such as primes or wide apertures and you know uh zoom lenses depending on the shooting that you're doing so on this lines you can see the white dots right here i'm going to line that up with the white dot right here and rotate until it clicks now it's on and when i'm ready to release it i will push the lens release right here something else i want to show you real quick is that every lens cap on just about every single lens if you look under it it will tell you the filter thread in this case it's 55 millimeters which means if i was to purchase a circular polarizer or uv filter whatever it is you're putting on the front of your lens you'll need to know the filter thread sometimes it's written on the lens itself but you can always find it underneath the cap of the lens that covers it so let's talk about some of the ports over on the left side of the camera we're going to talk about memory cards real quick so we have one sd memory card slot and hard to see the fine print down here it says uh s2 which means we can use uh s2 compatible cards uh s2 real quick the difference between a uh s1 and uh s2 are the number of pins so this is a uhs2 and this is a uhs one card you can use uhs-1 cards no problem uh s2 cards are a little bit faster and they're also more expensive i tell my students to purchase the largest fastest cards that they can afford if you're on a tight budget i really like the sandisk extreme pros the uhs1 cards they're very affordable but the minimum requirement for 4k video you're going to notice right here there's a little symbol u3 there's a little u and a three in it that is the minimum sustained speed for 4k video so it's not some one of these things where you can just pick up a memory card that you have laying around and throwing your camera very common question that i get is how come 4k recording isn't working most likely it's a memory card issue and i like sandisk something else you'll notice i just bought a bunch of these is sandisk also includes some rescue recovery software if there's ever a problem i've only had it happen to me one time in the 13 or 14 years i've been shooting have i had a problem with sandisk and i've i've probably had 30 or 40 of these things i mean we're talking about hundreds of thousands of images if not more i mean just thousands of hours of video pretty reliable pretty happy with them there's a little symbol here that shows you the orientation by saying the notch should be on the top so we're going to insert it until it clicks and now we know it's all the way in and we can shut the memory card door so on the top we have our microphone input you'll notice it's red it's easy to remember that so red is for record and it also says plug in power which means that if you have a microphone that doesn't have its own power is that the power will be drawn from the camera you have another one down here this input is for your headphone jack so when we're doing video recording and we want to listen to the audio coming into the camera we'd plug our headphones in here i actually use a pair of old apple earbuds because they're small they're light i plug them in it won't work with a lightning connector but if you have a 3.5 millimeter jack it'll plug in and some people prefer nicer headsets you'll also notice we have a little teeny mini hdmi terminal will allow you to feed a video signal out of the camera it's actually video in audio so if you're doing high-end video production and you have an atomos ninja for example you want to record to an external monitor or if you just want to play it back on your tv this is where you'd plug it in be very careful because this is a very small hdmi port and uh it could break okay so just something to keep aware of there's there's three different sizes of hdmi it's a b and this is the d size the smallest size it's the easiest size that will break so something to keep in mind and then we also have a usbc port the usbc port is important because our cameras most of them did not come with a charger and it comes with a cable and then a power jack and the idea is that you can charge the battery in the camera a recommendation i would definitely make is to purchase a second battery absolutely and there are some dual chargers on amazon very affordable i think i got mine for like 15 20 bucks something like that and it allows me to charge the battery outside of the camera and the reason why is we spent you know with lens close to two grand on the camera and we don't want to use it as a charger maybe we want to be shooting with it instead of charging a battery and so that second battery we can just drop in there and we can take the camera out and shoot we're not you know limited by charging the battery in camera sony's older uh cameras had a much smaller battery and we i mean i remember when the a7r ii came out i had to buy five or six batteries just to go out and do a shoot and the battery capacity now is outstanding it's wonderful also almost impossible to see but there's a little light right here it says charge and this will light up when we are charging the battery in the camera so let's put a battery in uh obviously we're going to open it and when you open it you'll get a little icon that's showing you the orientation of the pins so here are the pins and so they are going to go to the outside of the grip and we push it in until it clicks and to remove the battery obviously we just move that blue slider over and then we need to actually lock the outer door something you'll notice on this camera is that i have a little metal shoe on the bottom of my camera it screws into the bottom of the camera it's something that you're going to want to obviously look into in order to use a tripod this is for the bogan manfrotto series it came with the ball head this is an older 496 rc2 they have something compatible like it but anyway i i take this little shoe and screw it into the bottom of the camera there is another kind called an arca swiss it's shaped a little bit different i like these because it has a lip that allows me to lock it in and it'll it'll actually lock just like that i just think they're easier to use it has a little safety switch here but as long as this is on there this camera is locked it's not coming off the arca swiss is more kind of a slide in and then and then rotated knob but i really like this for the speed looking from the top down of the camera let's go over some of these buttons and controls obviously we have the power switch so we want to turn the camera on this way turn it off we have our shutter button which is really a three phase button this is the unengaged position if we push it you're going to feel this little resistance and that's going to engage the camera's auto focus i'll demonstrate this a little bit later and then we push it all the way down it takes the picture if we can train our finger to feel where that halfway depression is we will know intuitively how to focus the camera without actually taking a picture and pushing it down all the way when we're ready video record button to start and stop video recording press this this is our mode dial this allows us to tell the camera how to behave in what it'll do to help us whether it will control the aperture or the shutter speed or maybe we want it in manual control you'll notice we have this little film strip that is for video recording snq slow and quick it's high speed and slow speed video recording we have three custom settings that we can set the camera up the way we want and it will remember those settings we have the green auto mode which i call the dummy mode a lot of people like to shoot on this mode the camera is going to do pretty much all the work for you it's going to determine the settings and we're just taking pictures for pure beginners i do recommend starting on p mode and encourage you strongly to learn a mode as quickly as possible and we'll talk more about that a little bit later but for me personally i almost exclusively shoot on aperture priority manual and video this little guy over here with the numbers is our exposure compensation dial i'll be demonstrating this kind of hard to see you'll notice these little gray marks in between the numbers those represent one third increments so we'll talk we'll talk all about this in the exposure lesson this right here is our hot shoe cover so when we remove this there it is the hot shoe is for our flash for video recording there are a number of accessories we can attach here i have a an atomos ninja five that i'll connect here but it's really generally made for flash this center pin here will trigger a signal to the flash in in terms of the timing and when to fire it's nice to have these little covers if you're not using it just just to cover it up and protect it let's talk about some of the things that we see externally on the back of our a7c obviously we have our evf right here so it's a little tv monitor and this little switch right here basically tells the camera when we've placed it close to our eye and it'll shut off the back monitor and there's different ways we can set this up if you're shooting on a gimbal for example we might want to turn this off and have the back monitor on only because the gimbal sometimes will trigger this to turn off there's also a little eye cup accessory that clips on here it's not on right now just for the sake of demonstrating this little wheel right here that we can rotate is called the diopter adjustment kind of push and rotate this controls the focus of the evf so if you wear corrective eyewear you can adjust the focus using this little wheel right here deep menu button you'll be accessing it every time you jump into the deep menu this control right here is where we change a lot of our exposure settings it's pretty much your main dial sometimes i call it the rear wheel and we rotate it to the left or right you'll notice that we have a number of icons we have an af on button which can be customized this will engage our focusing systems if we like to shoot sports with back button focus this is where we would be doing it we'll be talking about button customizations when we get into the menu system next we have the fn button or function button this guy here on the back has a number of features it looks like it just has a scroll wheel that we rotate to the left or right which can be used to change our exposure settings but there is also a directional pad built into this so we can push on top bottom left right and you'll notice that it has corresponding icons so depending on which icon we're pushing on in what mode that we're in we can change different things so for example if i wanted to change my iso i would push to the iso and i could rotate to the left or right if i wanted to toggle my display i would push up if i wanted to for example drive modes which is what the camera does after we push the shutter button down all the way we have a timer we have multiple frames per second on the bottom we have a grid to inspect our images suffice it to say lots of controls here and very importantly in the center it's a set button but it acts like an enter or return button would on your computer so if you select something and want to enter you would push this center button so there's three controls here the rotating wheel the directional pad and the set button on the bottom we have the play icon obviously if we want to play or see our images we would push that and then we have the garbage can icon next to it the c designates a customizable button that we can we can also set up differently depending on the mode that we're in something that's great about the a7c is that the monitor rotates to the side that is very nice in the past the monitors would mostly just tilt up or down i personally do a lot of video recording so i like to take the monitor and flip it around facing the front of the camera so i can see myself you know my framing i can check my audio levels all of those things are very important to videographers and that is the back of the camera so let's turn the camera on get it set up real quick obviously i'm an english speaker i'm going to set up the date and time i'm recording this in hawaii we don't have daylight savings so i'm going to leave that off so obviously push up or down left or right and then when we get to the point that we like it we're going to hit enter we can also change our format and also hit enter there's a new app for sony cameras they give us control on our smartphones i'll be demonstrating this hopefully a little bit later this one's called the imaging edge it's changed a couple times over the years in the memory card that i've put in there is brand new so whenever you put a memory card into the camera and you're starting from scratch we do want to format it and i will point this out when we get into the deep menu section so we have a ton of information on our monitor and you're probably wondering what all this means we're going to go over that but there's a couple things i want to demonstrate real quick the first is the display feature right here so i want you if you don't have your camera there's going to be some examples it would it's going to be very helpful to follow along what i want you to do is to push up on the display button and watch how the information shown on the back monitor also changes and just get into the hang of cycling this because there's going to be times you will want this information and there's other times you can you're going to not want it so you'll notice there's about four or five different screens so we have all of this information here tons of info and then we make it go away then we have our histogram in the bottom right hand corner then we just have our basic shooting information and then we have this black screen with tons of information we're not getting a preview of what we're shooting so now i want to start walking you through what all this stuff means and on the bottom right here very important there's a couple settings you should always be aware of the first is written as a fraction one fifty one fiftieth of a second this is our shutter speed which tells us how long the sensor will be exposed to light so it's a time setting anything with an f refers to an aperture f 4.5 tells us how wide the lens is opening so we have the two major controls of light how long and how wide the lens will open over on the far right we have something that says iso and right now it's set to auto and i'm going to i'm going to have to come in and set the timer the timer is up a little bit differently because it's falling asleep iso the easiest way to think of it is how much boost the camera is adding to the light it's an electrical signal and auto means the camera is going to do whatever it thinks it needs to make the image evenly exposed for example uh in the beginning auto is very tempting but i'm going to ask you to turn it off and the way we do that is we're going to push right to access iso and you can see the auto setting right here and i'm going to leave it on about 400 and i'm going to be giving you some demonstrations later when we talk about exposure and exposure compensation as to why i turn this off for beginners we don't want to rely on it too much there is a time in place to use it so once i've selected 400 i'm gonna hit set and so now i have an iso of 400. these three settings shutter speed aperture iso are critical if you look through the viewfinder on most cameras you'll also see it on the bottom of most cameras very important to constantly keep an eye on it looking at the top left hand corner we have this p the p stands for program mode the mode indicator corresponds to the mode that we're setting with our mode dial so if i rotate rotate it to a you'll notice that the icon is changing it's always important to be aware of what mode we are shooting in so i'm always sneaking a peek just making sure that i'm in the mode that i want to the right of that 6660 it's the number of shots remaining for the selected settings on the memory card to the right of that three by two is the aspect ratio of the sensor so we have three by two measurements it's the proportion and next to that we have 24 m which you probably guessed 24 megapixels to the right of that we have the setting that says fine this deals with our current jpeg setting the compression that'll be written and saved as this little hand icon that's shaking is a warning indicator it's telling us that the shutter speed that we have selected is pretty slow and the camera might be a little bit shaky so if we were to change some of these settings and we get to 1 60 of a second you'll notice it changes i'm going to show you something real quick turn it up a little bit higher so it's kind of giving us a warning about that 1 60 of a second shutter speed we'll be talking more about that a little bit this is saying hey you know your hand might shake a little bit basically what it's saying be careful now we do have a built-in stabilizer which is amazing it is uh fantastic on sony cameras and when you get a good lens on it you can take some pictures in pretty long shutter speeds but we'll save that for another discussion to the right of the compression settings we have our battery life indicator below that we have our metering mode the metering which i'll demonstrate tells the camera how to measure light based on patterns below that we have our white balance indicator dynamic range optimizer this right here designates our creative styles the creative styles i like to think of them as sets of instructions that tell the camera what to keep and what to throw away especially when we're dealing with jpegs not all of the information is saved and we can tell the camera maybe if we're shooting portraits to get more accurate flesh tones if we're shooting landscape you know to have more vivid blues and greens below that we have these this little uh palette it's turned off i almost never use them and these two guys right here are telling us which controls do what and both of them are set to av in this example which means that if i rotate either of these two wheels i'm going to be changing my aperture value av that's what it's saying we'll talk more about this in the exposure lesson over to the far left we have our focus mode indicator we have our cluster indicator over here we have our picture profiles and those contain huge amounts of settings and variables that we can change how the image looks we can get into our our log modes for video a lot of great powerful tools in here for beginners i don't recommend getting in there too much and then we have whether or not our face detection is on or off the face and eye detection is amazing hopefully we'll cover that in a focusing lesson so let's take a look at some of these other screens and i'll try to point out a couple cool features obviously minimalist right something we're going to point out later is that the back monitor is touch sensitive for our focusing squares this is a very fast and easy way to tell the camera precisely where to focus it's not quite all the way to the edge it's pretty close tremendous coverage we can push the set button to turn that off this is our level i'll demonstrate this real quick so the electronic level is as i point it down you'll notice these center tick marks are now orange and then when i get it lined up now they're green and obviously if we go side to side so this is completely level right and if we go side to side we can tilt this and you can see we get that orange marker on the edges again so this is going to tell us if the camera is lined up which brings us to the fn or the function screen there's seems like there's a lot of crazy information here most of it we've seen already there's a couple settings that are different so this black screen the function screen we activate the settings by pressing the fn button and when we do that you can see we get this orange highlight that we can move around and the highlight allows us to change the settings so if we were to highlight let's say our white balance and press the set button it would pull us into the white balance menu and we could choose all of these settings we're going to go through these really quick on the very top we have a single square this is our drive mode it's what happens after we push the shutter button down all the way and when we come into this menu let's take a look at it you can see that it will tell us what these other settings are so we have single shooting we have continuous high shooting and if i'm pushing to the left or right when there's these little triangles we have these other settings we have a medium amount a mid amount of bursts and we have a low burst of continuous shooting for sport shooting you're going to want it on continuous high then we have our timer and it says 10 seconds now i push to the right now it's five and two so i can control the length of time that the timer works if we go down to the next one it's self timer with multiple images so we get a 10 second delay and then the camera will take three images great for family shoots we just did a christmas family shoot and if you want multiple images taken we can just come over here and keep pushing to the right you know people blink and if we keep pushing to the right we get different sets of seconds and images two seconds five images very handy if you are in the picture if you need to run over there and be in the picture people blink you don't want to have to run back to the camera each time right coming down a little bit more we have our continuous bracketing mode bracketing means the camera will change the exposure between each image for us and again because we have these little triangles i can push to the left or right and we can determine these different packages for bracketing right so it will change the settings by three exposure values and it'll take three images so now it'll take five we demonstrate how bracketing works on the crash course just think of it as the camera changing the brightness between each shot and we have the number of shots coming down a little bit more we have a single bracket and so what's the difference between single and continuous single means that we push the shutter button down each time continuous means the camera will automatically do it for us otherwise this information here is still the same two exposure values over five images if we come down a little bit more we can do white balance bracketing which means the camera will change the white balance either on a low or a high setting so if you have a really important shoot and the color is mixed and you're not really sure you can come in and back i almost never use this then we have our dynamic range optimizer bracket same thing high or low the dynamic range optimizer is where the camera kind of cheats a little bit for our dynamic range if we have highlights it tries to make it so they're not blown out shadows a little bit more detail i leave it on low but this is how we can change our drive modes there's a number of other ways we can do it for now i'm going to leave it on single shooting some of the other features in here include flash control so if we wanted to control how the flash works i'm not going to demonstrate it on this video if we do a crash course there's like a good hour lesson on flash how to use flash how to set it up how to use it and you can see we get the slow sync and rear sync modes for those of you who understand what those mean if you need to do it because there's no flash on it it's not set up i'm going to leave it off we have our auto focusing modes we'll be talking about this in the focusing lesson there's a lot of them very confusing can be confusing and we also have our clusters we'll be talking about those in the focusing mode as well here's where we change our picture profiles there's a lot of information in here you can select which one you want and then you can come into all of the different settings in here it's it's just way too too much information for this video come back out oh we're gonna turn this back off so this little setting here with the box around the head is our face and eye detection to turn it on or off very powerful if you are a portrait photographer i'll demonstrate how to use this later i use it all the time it's a great feature we have our beep menu if we wanted to shoot silent we could come in here so i'm going to turn this on take a picture didn't hear anything right so it's a full electronic shutter useful in some situations certain wedding photographers might want to use it film sets very very cool feature and when it's turned off you can hear the shutter actuating coming over to the right column we have our metering modes we'll be talking about those a little bit later white balance i'm going to demonstrate this a little bit later here's our dynamic range optimizer our creative styles i don't really recommend them right now i just leave it on standard if you're a pure beginner these guys here are picture effect uh kind of gimmicky i don't really use them they're kind of fun to take a look at maybe i'll demonstrate those a little bit later then we have our aspect ratio i definitely recommend just leaving this on three by two if you wanted to change the aspect ratio let's say one by one let's take a look at that you can see that the the we've cropped off the sides of the image and now we're like shooting for instagram so i do have some friends that actually change their aspect ratio my dad likes to do it shooting for magazines sometimes they like to shoot four by three just because the the layout is different or if they're shooting for cinema looks 16 by nine my dad likes to do that for most of us however three by two just leave it right there and then we also have our formats so we come down here we can also set this up in the deep menu but it's whether we're going to shoot raw raw and jpeg together or just jpeg we're gonna leave it on just jpeg for now some of the other information in here that we haven't really covered is you'll you can see this huge grid here it says five four three two one and a negative in one two three four five and a positive this is our bracketing indicator we can also use it to designate our exposure compensation which i'll be pointing out later we have a histogram on the bottom and we have our electronic level that covers all of the black information screen i use it sometimes but there is a better way to do all this is that when we are in our regular shooting mode if we want to access some of those menu items we don't see here we can just push the fn button and now we have a two by six grid that has all of that in not all of it most of the information available to us so if we wanted to change for example our white balance or our drive modes and a cool thing about this is we can customize which of these features appear so when i am changing these secondary controls and features i'm almost always doing it from the fn menu i'll just come in and hit the fn menu and then change if i wanted to go to high speed continuous burst or if i wanted to change my white balance this is usually where i do it from i think it's an easier way another thing about this is it gives us a little bit of a preview in some of these features in terms of what we're changing something i do want to do right now is turn off the auto timer because as i'm teaching it keeps turning off and it's driving me crazy so i'm going to come into the menu so in the yellow tab page two out of six so this power save start time basically means is that when we're not using the camera how much time should the camera wait before shutting the camera off and because i'm teaching right now and it's bothering me i'm gonna leave this to five minutes this is a battery saving feature if you don't like your camera turning off so fast you might want to come in here and change it as well we're going to have that on five minutes for now before we get into the exposure and white balance and focusing i do want to point out something real quick is that we do have a couple new icons in here exposure compensation we'll talk about and we also have steady shot which deals with this stabilizer built around the sensor if we wanted to turn it off we would just come in here and select off all of these other icons that we see we have talked about somewhere else we have our mode indicator right there so something else i want to point out is that we have the garbage can says question mark which means if we want information about the particular item if we just forgot we want a little definition sometimes the definitions are kind of short it'll tell us if we hit the garbage can icon so that is the function menu while we are shooting in our exposure preview screen real quick let's talk about playback and deleting images i rarely delete images on camera because i can't tell you how many times i thought i had a bad picture i brought it home and i looked at it it was actually fine so you can see a lot more on a big monitor the playback is obviously right here and there are some touch features built into this that initially it doesn't look like anything's happening but if i press for example the magnify icon i can touch and drag to zoom in this is this is far easier to inspect than you know just pressing on the directional i think it's easier we can also zoom in and out by rotating the wheel see how we're rotating out another thing i can do is push down and it gives me the grid view we can also come over and move up and down by pages so when we get lots of images let's take a bunch of images real quick so play grid view here they are we can come over and we can jump up and down and then when i want to inspect an image i push set there it is i can zoom in i can zoom in or out using this guy right to exit i press menu and then i can toggle to the left or right you can see the number of images at the top here 5 out of 10 and as i go to the left or right it's also changing so just a brief introduction to how to view images zoom in pan around look at them you want to delete an image we can do that as well we're about to get into the exposure control lesson but before we do so there's a very important setting i need to demonstrate just to make sure we're all on the same page if you press your menu button you're going to come into the purple tab page 8 out of 10 and you can navigate to these pages by pushing to the left and right 8 out of 10 live view display we want to make sure that this says setting effect on what this does is this tells the camera to give us a brightness prediction if for example you are shooting in a dark studio that would be a case to come in and turn it to off so if you're using strobes and flash you have mixed lighting you might want to come in and change it to off but for now for this lesson the one i'm about to demonstrate let's make sure that this is set on most of you should have it on unless you've changed it by default it should be on so once that's set up we're going to come out and start talking about exposure before we get into it i want to make sure that you guys are not on auto iso turn it to iso 400 or iso 800 we do not want this otherwise this isn't going to make a lot of sense so i'm going to go to 400. exposure is really a fancy word for brightness so whenever you hear that word exposure that's what they're talking about it's how bright or how dark an image is so in the beginning there's going to be a temptation to shoot on the dummy mode the green dummy mode and you'll notice that when we do this we don't have any control of our shutter speed our aperture or even our iso the camera is going to be making all of those changes for us so the four modes that every photographer should at least know about are p the program mode a aperture priority mode s which is shutter priority mode in m which is manual each of these modes give us a different amount of control over our exposure our brightness settings so the easiest way for me to teach this is to talk about aperture priority mode first tons of wedding photographers use aperture priority and i just think it's easier to struggle and learn it so what is aperture priority mode what i want you to do is notice that we have these little icons on the bottom it says av on both of them so our rear control wheel is going to change our aperture and the directional pad will also change the aperture that's what it's telling us so just come in and rotate your aperture control and we can see this orange mark the camera is telling us that we're changing our aperture now i talked about this more in our digital photography crash course it's included in the a7c crash course is what are apertures and why would you want to change the size so what do those f numbers really mean as a quick introduction i have a really old lens my dad gave me and if you look on the inside of this lens you can see that we have these little blades most modern lenses have this this is a prime lens which means the focal length stays the same it's a 50 millimeter 1.8 so if you see those blades in there what our aperture does is it controls how much those blades are open or closed so as an example and this is a manual lens that you change the f-stops using the lens so if you see those blades in there i'm going to open them up this is f 1.8 the smaller the number the wider the opening and if i was to rotate it in the opposite direction let's say f19 or f22 you can see that that opening becomes very very small it's not letting in as much light as this and that is what our aperture control does is it tells the lens how much to open or close and one of the effects of that is how much light is coming in so with this in mind what i want you to do is to change your aperture just practice changing it and you can see the orange numbers is this is what we're controlling so if i was changing my aperture and i am using a tiny opening like f29 you should be asking the question why is this not dark if i'm using a teeny tiny opening or if i go in the opposite direction 4.5 it's a much wider opening why is this not pure white if i have a larger opening the preview is staying the same how is that possible if i'm changing the size of the opening in the lens that's that's impossible you should be thinking right so what's happening in aperture priority is i want you to take a look at the shutter speed over here wait a second the shutter speed is changing but we're not changing it we're changing the aperture so aperture priority mode means that the camera is changing the shutter speed for us we dial in the aperture the camera makes a measurement and it gives a recommended shutter speed and i can prove this to you i want you to take your hand and slowly just move it in front of the lens blocking the amount of light coming in and you'll notice the shutter speed is changing so what's happening is the camera is measuring the amount of light that is entering the camera and it's changing the shutter speed accordingly this is why aperture priority is so powerful is that you can just dial in your aperture and the camera is going to take care of the rest of the work but this is why myself and others like it so much is because it takes the decision making of changing the shutter speed away from the photographer we don't have to worry about it now there are a couple rules about this i want to point out 1 60 of a second in my mind is the limit for a beginner if you are shooting with a slower shutter speed than 1 60 of a second and we get this flashing warning that's going to pop up it's going to say hey you're getting into slow shutter speeds if you're using a shutter speed slower than 1 60th of a second you're running into the risk of a blurry photo you you might have correctly focused it but if the shutter speed is long and you're moving and people are moving it's a very long shutter speed it's going to come out as a blurry image so what i do is when i'm shooting an aperture priority i am constantly sneaking just a little peak at my shutter speed i'm just looking over okay 160th i'm good now that shutter speed recommendation is going to be different if you are shooting sports a moving athlete fast motion subject matter requires faster shutter speeds so if it's a kid running around maybe we should be closer to 1 250th of a second because they're so quick right if it's a an adult athlete now we're talking about 1 500 maybe 1 1 000 of a second a much faster shutter speed so our shutter speeds should be given some thought based on what we are shooting but for beginners handheld portraits i like 160th of a second sports yeah 1 500th of a second those are two good places to start so you're probably thinking all right michael that's great we can change your aperture and the camera's changing the shutter speed but how do we change how bright it is that is a great question and this is where this dial right here comes in the exposure compensation dial the short answer is you just rotate it in a positive direction so plus numbers make it brighter you can see the screen getting brighter if i go up to plus three it's really really bright and if we want to make it darker we would just go in the opposite direction that's the short answer and it's a great skill to have so let's take a picture at an even exposure where this number is zero and let's add a plus one and let's add a plus two and we'll just take a look at those three play them back this is the plus two this is the plus one and this is the even exposure so the short answer is we can change the brightness of our images by changing the exposure compensation dial that's the short answer we can make it darker what not so some of you are probably asking though what is going on i mean there's got to be more to it when we just rotate this dial right and the answer is absolutely you are correct so when we change our exposure compensation dial what i want you to do is to take a look over here at our shutter speed shutter speed is changing a little bit right i'm going to show you mathematically something that's super cool what do these numbers mean what is a 1 mean a 1 means one stop of light so what's a stop a stop represents twice the amount of light as a previous setting double the amount of light okay so every time you get one stop you're doubling the light or you're halfing it depending on which direction you go so i'm going to prove this to you mathematically look at our shutter speed 1 60th of a second and when i go up to plus it is now one thirtieth of a second one thirtieth of a second is twice as long as one sixtieth right because if we go 160 plus 160 back to back that's 2 60ths which in fractions is really 1 30th of a second so if i was to go to plus 2 add one more stop what do you think this fraction would say if you said 1 15 you were absolutely correct and there it is and if we were to go up to three stops about 1.75 right 1 8. so what would happen if we went to negative 1 stops we're currently at 1 60 of a second right so what is twice as fast as 1 60th what's half the speed right if you said 1 120th you're absolutely right it's 1 125th because that's how the camera is set up if we were to go to negative 2 and you said 1 250th you're absolutely right in negative 3 would be 1 500. so what's happening with our exposure compensation dial is we're telling the camera to cheat the shutter speed just a little bit in the direction that we want it to be brighter or darker so in this lesson alone we've covered aperture priority what it does how the camera compensates we talked about apertures themselves changing the brightness and what is happening and so you have a really good basis right now for aperture priority mode uh you know when i shoot weddings i use it because i'll be indoors you know in a chapel it's dark here comes the bride and groom they're walking out now we're in the lobby this all happens within five seconds right well the lobby's a lot brighter and i don't want to fumble with my shutter speed now we're outside bright sunny day those are three different environments aperture priority tells the camera to make those changes for me so i don't have to worry about changing it and missing the moment plus i'm looking where i'm walking you know i'm backing up and i just don't want to worry about shutter speed so that is why aperture priority is so great same thing with sport shooting if it's uh you know sporting event i'll choose the aperture i want and let the camera handle the rest here come the clouds oh it's a little bit cloudy it's going to change the shutter speed for me i just sneak a peek to make sure it's fast enough now something i want to point out real quick the kit lenses they don't really open up that wide let me get this guy in here you can see the opening on the kit lens is pretty small right that's not going to let in a lot of light even on its widest setting compared to something like this and what's going to happen is you're going to be shooting with your kit lens and you're going to notice that in low light situations the kit lens just doesn't let in a lot of light and you would want to upgrade to maybe a wide aperture prime why because it's going to let in a lot of light very handy in low light situations and another thing is is the wider your aperture opens the faster the shutter speeds you can use so that's why you want to upgrade to wide aperture lens so let's take a look at shutter priority mode and something you'll notice immediately off the bat is that these numbers here the tvs these controls no longer say av they say tv tv stands for time value so if we change this guy or this guy you'll notice the orange numbers over here and what's happening is is that we change the shutter speed and the camera is going to change the aperture here i'll prove it to you real quick we'll go with a very with a longer shutter speed take your hand put it over the lens and you can see that the aperture is now changing so shutter priority is the opposite of aperture priority we dial in the shutter speed in the camera changes the aperture there are there's a time and place for it i know sports photographers who use shutter priority they just prefer it to lock it in i'm not a huge fan of it simply because most of what i can do can be accomplished with aperture priority or manual right but if you get into a situation where you're shooting shutter priority and you get these flashing and this blinking let's say we're shooting a sporting event and we're at 1 500th of a second we got to have that 1 500th of a second for the speed and it's too dark the lens won't open up anymore we've we've maxed it out at 4.5 that's what this kit lens can do and if i zoom in 5.6 it's even worse what can we do to solve this this is going to happen to you you're going to be in a situation where it's going to be too dark and you don't have enough light this is the instance where we should bump up our iso if you said that great job that is exactly correct and so what i'm going to do is add a bunch of iso to make it brighter focus there we are so the iso is adding an artificial boost to the light what's the trade-off on this well i'm going to exaggerate this and turn turn it way up you'll notice the camera can go up to 204 000 iso we're gonna have to actually use a faster shutter speed just want to demonstrate what's going on with iso now i'm going to turn my iso away back down to 400 i just want to demonstrate and i'm going to use a longer shutter speed the differences in iso 130th so having taken those two pictures and let's look at the one right before we're gonna zoom in you'll notice that the blinds are very grainy this is a straight line on the blind it should be nice and clean and it looks like there's salt and pepper everywhere this is what two iso 200 000 will do for you if we take a look at the one at 400 and zoom in look how clean that is we got a nice clean line almost no salt and pepper right so higher isos are going to add grain to your images and most that's the short easy cut to the chase answer and that's why we don't use higher isos all of the time uh most sony cameras do really well 3200 6400 i try to stay as low as possible you know 1600 or less 400 especially if you're outside but once you start at getting over 6 400 you're going to start seeing these this grain in the salt and pepper in your images and that's why we do not use really high isos all of the time it's it's not real light it's artificial light it's a gain it's a boost it's kind of a cheat for the camera but there are situations where you have to do it and i totally understand that so that's what you want to keep in mind if you get into a situation where you don't have enough light you can always boost up your iso you can get a wider aperture lens to let more light in you can use artificial light you can use a longer shutter speed you know so there's different ways to get more light into the camera all that said i really don't use shutter priority that much so let's take a look at program mode program mode is sort of like the dummy mode but you're taking the training wheels off a little bit and you'll notice that they both say p both controls are saying p so if i what happens when we rotate it well we don't get anything orange and it looks like both of them are changing and that's exactly what program mode does program mode gives us different combinations of shutter speeds and apertures so you can just pick the combination that you like okay 4.5 at 1 60th and there is a very famous wedding photographer who shoots in program mode he just prefers it for whatever reason and his pictures are astonishingly good there's nothing wrong with shooting in program mode you just don't have as much control over the exposure settings same thing if you want to brighten or darken an image in all three of these modes aperture priority shutter priority program just move the exposure compensation wheel and the camera will make the adjustments for you a lot of people like program mode when they're getting started it's just easier for them they don't feel any pressure and program mode is is sort of like an automatic mode it's it's going to handle the aperture and the shutter speed for you but you'd still need to dial in the combination that you want let's talk about manual mode manual mode intimidates a lot of people because we have complete control over the shutter speed the aperture and if you're not on auto iso the iso you'll notice the control indicators have changed now this rear wheel is our aperture this rotating wheel is our shutter speed so we have our aperture under one control and our shutter speed under another control and we just dial in what we want and we fire away now something you'll notice that's interesting is the exposure compensation wheel doesn't do anything i'm rotating it and nothing's changing so in manual mode exposure compensation does not work and the question you probably have is michael okay well how do i make my images brighter or darker we do that by using our aperture control or our shutter speed control so if i want it brighter i use a slower shutter speed i'm on a tripod 120th of a second it's brighter or i could use a faster shutter speed and make it darker if my aperture opened wider i could come in and open it as wide as i can that's going to let in more light it's not very bright here so i'm going to bump up my iso and this is what manual does for you is it gives you complete control i use manual mode when i am shooting with strobes or if i am not rushed for time i typically go into manual it's usually a time thing if i'm in a rush almost always aperture priority you'll notice that this little indicator now has a plus 0.3 so that is telling you about how over or how under exposed the image is it's two stops underexposed it's one stop underexposed it's two stops overexposed this is really this really this becomes more of a meter a light meter that's telling us how bright or how dark it is so in summary manual mode means that we dial in the shutter speed and the aperture in the isofor not on auto super powerful mode one question i always get is about auto iso in these examples we've been using a setup iso but there is a time and place for auto iso i'm going to turn it on and you can watch what happens when we get into auto iso everything's nice and even suddenly we get the exposure compensation indicator back on and i can change the brightness using the exposure compensation but the shutter speed and the aperture don't change so what's happening here we're in manual mode right what's happening is the camera is adjusting the brightness with the iso we've locked in our shutter speed we've locked in our aperture and this adjustment just tells the camera to use a little bit more iso another thing is it'll still work if we cover the lens shutter speed and aperture don't change but the camera is making adjustments you can kind of see it in the bottom part of the screen by bumping the iso up the question i get on this is when would we use that great question indoor sporting events are pretty good especially when there's lots of lights flashing and changing so mma mixed martial arts got a lot of lights changing and if i was shooting mma what i would do is i'd come in and dial in my shutter speed maybe 1 500 maybe even a little bit faster dial in the aperture i wanted set it to auto iso and that way if there's lots of flash or changes in lighting the camera is going to handle it all with iso i'm locked in on my shutter speed so i know that's going to be fast enough i don't have to worry about it anymore so auto iso basically becomes a fifth mode where we're telling the camera we want these settings make the adjustment for iso so ladies and gentlemen that is the exposure lesson we've talked about the modes in changing the brightness of our images i know it's a lot of information that is probably the most important lesson on this video is changing the brightness of our images in each of those modes so let's talk about the focusing lessons i want you guys to turn your iso back to a set number 400 to 800 something like that and the reason is this is something you should definitely learn instead of just putting it on auto iso and letting the cam camera handle it this is something you're going to want to to have a good grasp over is to be aware of your iso so set this back to a regular iso number let's talk about the camera's focusing systems this is probably the second most important lesson i can teach you on this video and the reason is the focusing systems are very powerful they are very complex and they can be confusing the way i tell my students to think about it is the how the when and the where how when and where for focusing simplifies it greatly so how does the camera focus out of the box a halfway shutter button depression is going to engage the focusing systems unless you've changed the setting this should work you should get into the hang of feeling where that second depression point is and when we get to that point you'll notice that we have a little green dot we have these green squares on the middle here we hear a beep all of those things are indicating the camera is focusing you'll also notice on the back we have this af on button that we can customize how the camera will focus when we press it but this is also engaging the focusing systems we get a different icon we don't hear a beep and we see these parentheses i'll explain that in a second but that that is engaging the focusing systems in this case i can also push the set button just based on the way it's set up you can see it's a different box even i'm going to change the display to make this easier to see we can also touch on the screen designating where the focus box will be i'll talk more about that in a second but we can also then engage focusing the short answer on how is a halfway shutter button depression we can press the set button to get out of that so the next part of this is the when the camera is focusing whether it's a one-time focus or whether it's over and over and over again to access our camera's focusing modes the win we're going to come into af here it says afa and you'll notice that we have these different options in here and i'm going to explain each of these real quick single shot auto focus means the camera will get focusing and then it will stop so it's going to get a focus lock and as long as i'm holding this shutter button halfway down the focus will not change which means i can also rotate the camera in any direction that focal plane is staying exactly where it is once i push the shutter button halfway down single focusing lock and this technique is referred to as recomposing on dslrs it was more important for portraits we have eye detection now so it's not quite as important but this is something you should be aware of get a focusing lock recompose to make it more aesthetically pleasing push the shutter button down all the way it's a good technique to practice coming back in let's take a look at auto focus continuous this is exactly like it sounds if we push the shutter button halfway down you'll notice we get these parentheses around the green dot you will not hear the beep and what autofocus continuous does for us is it refocuses over and over and over again it is updating as we hold the shutter button halfway down this focusing mode is better for sports and fast moving athletes kids running around birds in flight why because the objects are moving and the other one single shot is better for still subjects maybe you're dealing with cooperating human maybe landscape images so depending on the subject matter you have you would want to choose your focusing mode accordingly fast moving subjects autofocus continuous still or slow moving subjects autofocus single coming in to the focus mode menu we also have this automatic af and this is a hybrid of the two it combines single with auto focus continuous and the camera makes a judgment hey if this subject's moving i'm going to use continuous autofocus it is a hybrid of those first two modes when we use it you can see it's there it is engaging the single and if it was moving it would try to track it so coming back into our focusing modes next we have manual focus manual focus is exactly like it sounds we are going to use the focusing ring on our lens to dial in precise focus and get a lock i'm going to demonstrate some of some of these techniques that we can use this is using a feature that allows it to zoom in quickly and there is another mode in here which is direct manual focus which means we have the ability to get focus as we normally would auto focus and holding that down we can rotate our lens ring and jump into a manual focusing mode it's like a hybrid between manual focus with auto focus so the five focusing modes which deals with the when are auto focus single one time auto focus continuous over and over and over again we have the hybrid we have manual focus which lets us use the focusing ring of the lens then we have direct manual focus which is auto focus plus manual focus and that is the win the next part of this is the where the camera is focusing this deals with the camera's focusing clusters also called focus area can get a little confusing but if you think of this in terms of the area the camera is considering this is easier so wide obviously is a wide area in this case it's designated with these little corners this mode when we engage our focusing systems we're telling the camera to find either the area of greatest contrast or the closest subject to the camera or a combination of those two things it's just it's looking for something that's close to the camera that has a lot of contrast in the beginning it's going to be tempting to use this but when you get into complex subject matters it's not going to allow you to be as precise as you might want to but it's good to know about what it is for a couple reasons i'll point out a little bit later the next one is the zone and when we select that you'll notice that we get these nine boxes with these arrows pointing to the left and right for our directional pad we can also touch on the screen in different directions and in this case we are restricting the area we're saying only look in this area for something of great contrast and you can see the camera engaging that way the center focusing square is really meant to be the center we're not moving it around but we can touch and that flips us into a single square mode something to keep in mind jump out of that you can see the square changing again and then we get into our flexible spot modes which i think are super useful we have these little triangles to left and right so we can change the size of it from large there's a larger box coming back in there's a small box you can change the position specifically using the directional pad we can touch on the monitor very handy for precise focusing and there is also a medium so small medium and large single focusing point so this is pretty useful depending on what you are shooting let's come back in we also have an expandable flexible spot which is a small spot and then we have an area around it so it's first looking in the tiny spot and it's looking in these other boxes uh sport shooters in my opinion i mean it really depends on the sport you're shooting if you are shooting your own child playing with 20 other kids you may want to go with something like a flexible spot depending on how you shoot if you're shooting birds in flight fast moving subjects you know against the sky i would go with wide so we change our focusing area depending on the subject matter some sport shooters prefer this because they can tell the camera to look in a certain specific area it really depends on what you're doing macro photographers you might want to go with something like small spot mode now something you're going to notice is that when we come in here and we try to go to tracking expand flexible spot it's grayed out why what's going on well let's come into auto focus hopefully that will turn it on and there it is so what is this mode all about we also have wide zone center it looks like we have all of the different focusing clusters in here right so what does this do let's take a look so when we have this mode turned on depending on the cluster we're using you'll notice that instead of those little boxes we get a bigger green box with these lines on the side and what that means is the camera will automatically track the subject so if this subject is moving it is going to follow the subject it works better with single subjects with higher contrast you know like uh you know maybe somebody skiing down a white mountain for example it's going to work better than 22 football players you know where you have lots of subject matter changing but the truth of the matter is once you get that lock it does a pretty dang good job of following that subject so it really depends on what you're shooting but in some cases it is just spectacular and that is your tracking focusing cluster come back in here i'm going to come back to flexible spot large something i want to point out with a single focusing square is we can't touch obviously there will be times you'll be looking through the viewfinder and you'll want to change your focusing square you can do so by using the directional pad the idea on this is that we press in to the camera set button and then we can push on the directional pad to use it as a joystick now that we've covered the how the when and the where of focusing there are some additional accessory techniques i want to point out the first of which we have to be in manual focusing for and dial that in we're going to come into our menu it is the red tab page 13 out of 14 and on the bottom it says peaking setting i am going to turn this to on and i am going to select the color red because it shows up pretty well when we have peaking turned on and we zoom in so if manual we should start to see this red outline you can see it a little bit just on the edges of this plus target marker so what the peaking does is for manual focusing is it shows us the edges of high contrast in a specific color this is very useful when shooting video if you want to get a precise focus on something and make sure you got it dialed in something you'll notice is that when we zoom out if i tap the shutter button we can see it on the blinds but remember this is only working in manual focus so if i come in and i turn it to afs it's gone and so that's something that's confusing sometimes peaking is great because we can also choose different colors we have yellow blue white and it's a focus assist tool in this menu there are some other pretty cool tools mf assist is that zoom feature so if i come back to manual focus and i rotate my zoom ring i'm not punching in anymore so some people love that feature some people don't if you are manually focusing do you want it to punch in or not there is a focus magnifier if we just want to zoom in so i push set here i can punch in manually and then focus how long do we want this focus magnification to last what is the initial focus magnification when we're dealing with a still image 1x or 5.9 x and then we have auto focus available in focus magnification this is turned to on i'll demonstrate this real quick so what is that what does that even mean if i have my focus magnifier and i zoom in with these little crosshairs if i push the shutter button halfway down it turns green it's allowing me to focus in a magnification mode so those are some quick great focus assist tools and i'm going to bring our model in real quick so here's our model handsome guy stepping in for us thank you very much here's the truth of the matter is that when we start shooting people we have some amazing tools available to us and let's make sure that we have them turned on so we don't see it here we saw it in our black screen so here it is right here on the bottom this is the face detection there's a number of different ways to get it we can get it to it in the menu i'm just showing you one of many ways to get to this we're going to turn this to on so face detection there it is you can see that it recognizes that i have a face and it's jumping to lock onto my eye incredibly powerful for portrait and wedding photographers because in the past you would have to try to get a focusing square on somebody's eye and if you recompose sometimes you would miss we don't have to worry about it anymore we can just get that focusing lock and the camera finds it we have to recompose we get a higher number of keepers really great features so another place we can find this is in our deep menu it is on page 5 out of 14. it says af2 face and eye auto focus set so when we come into this here we are face and i priority af there it is on subject detection human what what would it be besides humans animals so there are a number of companies that now have animal eye detection cats dogs certain kinds of birds it doesn't work perfectly but it it's pretty cool when it does work in it and it works more often than you would expect so i'm pretty happy with both of these for portraits and humans though really outstanding we can even determine if we want the left or the right eye which one by default do you want a face or an iframe so if we turn this on now we get this little gray frame when i'm focusing there it goes coming back into that menu and then we also have animal eye display now remember when i was talking about the auto focusing mode if we come into this this focusing square and we choose wide you'll notice this gray box around my face that's automatically going to be tracking now the thing about this that is important to remember is that if you choose a focusing square that's smaller and you have face detection on i want you to see what happens here so i'm going to go with center center is this little white four corner bracket i'm gonna move it over here when you're focusing square is looking in an area where a face is not with face detection on and i hit focus it doesn't work now this throws some people off they're like what's going on well when we choose that center focusing square we're prioritizing the camera we're telling the camera look here first if there's no face focus on it if that square in the face line up now we're saying look in this area and now it does work and for that reason there are going to be times that you're going to want to go with something like wide focusing square where you can just get you know your focusing lock no matter where that person is or if you have two people talking for example and you want your eye detection to kind of more favor one of them you could do something like this put that one person on the side and it wouldn't look at that second person so there's different ways to get this to work with the focusing squares it's something to keep in mind but yeah eye detection it's phenomenal for portrait photographers real quick we don't have a lot of custom buttons we have this af on we can use the garbage can there's different buttons we can customize but there's just not a lot of them and what i recommend is customizing your af on button depending on the type of photographer that you are so if you're a portrait and wedding photographer that loves eye detection you can customize this we can also customize the set button to be a focusing button i'll show you how to do this in a second if you're a sports shooter and you do a lot of sport shooting you may want to go with back button focusing so let me demonstrate how those two things work real quick so to do this we're going to jump into the deep menu purple tab it's the second one page 9 out of 10. and you'll notice here we have these three different settings that say custom key each and we get these little icons next to each of them this deals with still shooting this deals with a video and this deals with playback so what the camera is saying here is that we can customize certain keys depending on which mode we're in so if we're in a stills mode it'll be different than it would be for a video mode it works the same on all three of them but let me demonstrate this first one and we get these different highlights depending on what we're looking at it's also showing us that how the camera is currently set up depending on you know whether or not we've changed things or not so af tracking on so this is tracking on that's why that box looks look different at first garbage can icon here this is set up for white balance the third one focus standard was the set button then we have our drive mode we have our iso control in number six this bottom one is not set when we're shooting so we have a slot here we can use so if i wanted to customize this for eye detection i would select it so if we wanted direct eye focus this is the the mode whether it's on or off so we don't want that we want i af i autofocus that's the one so now our iaf is set up with our af on button there it is see and it's even working outside of the cluster it's basically telling it to look no matter where a human subject is in this viewfinder get that a get that i focus lock directly super powerful now if you are for example a sport shooter i know there's many of you who are interested in back button focusing how would we set this up well we would look for auto focus on what that does is this this tells this button to engage focusing we also need to turn off our eye detection if we're using this as just regular back button shooting so i'm going to turn this to off in this example only and i also need to remove focusing from the front shutter button which can also be done oh it's right here auto focus with shutter so this is back button focusing now that we have the af on this is it going to engage focusing depending on which cluster we have let's change it to center and it removes the focusing from the shutter button why would you want to do that it basically gives sport shooters precise control over when the camera is focusing versus when it isn't so they can maybe reframe and shoot without the camera locking onto the background if you set up back button focusing and you forget that you've done this you're going to be like why is my camera not focusing when i push the shutter button halfway down it's crazy it's maddening if you don't remember so just keep that in mind if you want to have your halfway shutter button depression work you're on page 5 out of 14 the menus are very deep and confusing which is why we've built a table of contents so you can find these these subjects a lot easier so that is some button customizations for eye detection and back button focusing there's a couple of things i need to point out real quick i've put a target and then i have my face target here so these are different depths and they're in different focal planes when i choose a focusing square flexible spot i can designate where that square is but you'll notice nothing's changing the focus is not changing and the reason is the camera wants us to engage focusing in this case with a halfway shutter button depression now if for whatever reason you want the camera to do this automatically where we touch and pre-focus on page 5 out of 14 we have pre-af i am not a huge fan of this in still stills mode because it focuses all the time so with pre-af turned on and i touch on this you can see it's jumping to the new target just by touch i'm not a huge fan of it because it can drain the battery so in most cases i say leave that turned off and in a stills mode you will have to engage focus otherwise to rack or pull focus now the reason why i say this is because when we flip over to video mode we're going to talk about video here a little bit might as well start off with focusing stuff and we come in to our focusing modes you'll notice we only have afc and mf there is no afs in video you're like what why i think it's for the sake of simplicity because now what happens is when we touch on the screen the camera focuses so all we need to do to engage focus in the video mode is touch on the screen in this technique pulling focus when we're telling the camera to look at this subject no look over here very common in hollywood movies it allows the director to tell the viewers where to shift their attention a couple years ago you could not do this by touching on the screen it was really the probably maybe five or six years ago when when the canon 70d came out did it really great but for video shooters now this is amazing because all we have to do is touch on the screen and the camera changes its focus we also have our manual focus stuff you know if you don't want the camera changing we would come in and we just choose manual focus we could use our focus peaking it's still turned on there it is i don't have the punch in feature turned on right now but i use manual focusing all the time for video you can see now it's on the back so peaking with manual focus super powerful for video stuff face tracking we can also do that let's just turn it on let's just come in here do this come into our face turn that on tap the shutter button you can see that it recognizes the face and there it goes it's starting to track very very useful when you're dealing with gimbals and you're tracking a moving person and you get this continuous focus on their face it's very smooth i have used it in production shot of film and we used it on the a7r ii we had a really tricky tracking shot no problem face tracking did it wonderfully this is five years ago so it's even better now there are some other techniques that i'll demonstrate on the crash course if there's enough interest is that what you can do is take a single focusing square and put it somewhere in the frame put it on afc and whatever is in that square is going to be updated and focused on over and over again so there's tons of really cool focusing techniques that i can show you on that crash course so just a quick word on our exposure settings is that we want to choose a shutter speed that is about double our frame rate so if we're shooting at 30 frames per second i would go with 1 60 of a second and then i dial in the aperture i want and then i adjust with my iso and when you're ready to record you hit the video record button a little timer right and this is just the really most basics of shooting video stop to end video recording we'll be talking about some of the video record settings in the menu a couple other things about videos are our quick function menu we now have over here our audio record level which determines the amount of gain for the microphone so the short answer on this is we want to stay in the green range but if it was too loud we could come in and we could turn this down this is going to lower the audio gain gain is like a boost for the audio signal something very important to keep an eye on when you are recording video especially with a mic plugged in and most of the other settings pretty much apply we also have this feature down here touch on touch screen very nice to be able to touch on the screen and use it you'll notice that we are in the film program mode i don't like that i prefer manual when i'm shooting in the video mode so you'd come in and hit manual exposure this would allow me to come in and set it up the way i like it so that is a really quick introduction to video we'll be talking more about the video settings in the deep menu real quick let's flip back over to our stills mode so we're in a regular shooting mode and i want to talk about our metering modes real quick so if we jump into this guy right here metering modes the easiest way for me to explain this is to talk about spot metering mode first so i'm in manual mode because i want to show you something spot metering mode there is this little black circle in the middle of the screen see it right there now that you've seen this circle i'm going to flip it over to aperture priority mode you can still see the circles there and you you're gonna notice i have this headlamp set up and right now our exposure compensation is set to zero is that when i move that circle over the lamp everything starts to get really dark what is going on here metering modes tell the camera to sample light from a specific area and in the spot metering mode we're telling the camera to only look in this little teeny circle so you remember when i was covering the camera with my hand and the exposure settings were changing this is this is what metering modes do is the camera starts sampling from specific areas and in this case that little spot area mode so this can be pretty handy if you're shooting a heavy backlit subject let's say we have light coming in in the corners and we want to expose for the front the face of the person well we would go into spot and we would tell the camera only look at this circle and that's what metering modes are all about there are some other metering modes in here for example multi which breaks up the scene to different parts this is really probably best for beginners you can see i'm moving and scrolling over the light nothing's really changing because we're telling the camera to sample all of the areas and if we come into something like center weighted we're telling the camera to give more value to this larger center area so as we get into the center now it's recommending a faster shutter speed because it's saying hey there's something pretty bright in the middle here and if we were to come in we have our spot we have just an average of the entire screen this is different than the multi the multi gives different weights to the corners the mid center in the direct center and this one's just a straight up average and then this last one is exposed for highlights only in the beginning i would recommend the multi-metering mode in some cases it's fun to experiment with spot but that is a quick overview into the metering modes there is something cool i want to show you is that when we come into spot metering mode we get that circle there it is you can see it in the deep menu on page 8 out of 14 on the bottom spot metering point center or focus point link when we have focus point link what that does is it it tells the camera to move the spot point to wherever our focusing square is with a single focusing square so pretty cool probably a little bit more advanced but just know that you can link your spot metering to your focusing square let's go through changing our white balance so auto white balance for the most part for beginners it's going to be great we're worried about focus and exposure in our compositions a lot to think about for a beginning or an intermediate photographer and that's why i say just leave it on auto white balance for now something you'll notice is we have a little arrow and we see those arrows it tells us there's there's another feature that we can get to i'll demonstrate this a little bit later but below auto white balance you'll notice that we have a sun icon and below that we have a shade icon then we have a cloud we have incandescent light and you'll definitely notice that my white blinds are changing colors then we have fluorescent lights we have flash underwater auto kelvin a lot of this stuff is pretty confusing in the beginning stick with auto white balance if you are shooting and you'll notice that all of your images the color looks off then is the time to ask yourself what is the light that i'm shooting in because if you're shooting in the daylight this setting is going to make your pictures look more natural so what's happening well the human eye is amazing we can see all different kinds of colors we can walk indoors to outdoors in different kinds of lights and our eyes adjust automatically camera sensors don't do that and different light sources give off different temperatures in terms of whether it's blue or it's yellow and we were telling the camera hey we're outdoors now we're shooting in daylight the camera knows okay i'm going to adjust for the sun and if you're in the shade you can see how this is turning orange right so the idea on this is to change the icon according to the type of light or situation that you're shooting in if you're in a cloudy situation you would choose the cloud icon if we were using incandescent lights which are or tungsten bulbs we would come in and choose the light bulb icon see how blue it is and then there's some fluorescent lights and if we were using flash we would use this icon uh sony cameras are great for underwater shooting underwater has a completely different set of problems so here's our underwater white balance this guy here is kind of a bad name color temperature slash filter this is our kelvin and so as i see this little icon and i'm pushing to the right i can select the kelvin temperature i'm shooting in i'll go into that just a little bit more information and then we have these last three here which this icon little dot above two triangles is the custom white balance so if you're shooting in a mixed lighting situation we could come in and select set i'm going to hit enter take a capture by pushing the set button again we're measuring the light on the blinds and the camera is determining the correct settings for this to be pure white so kind of a situation this would apply is if you're a wedding photographer and you're shooting in mixed light you're indoors and there's fluorescent and tungsten light it's all mixed you can't really dial it in on a standard setting take a picture of something white in this situation it could be blinds in this case it could be a white wall a piece of paper bride's dress and we're telling the camera this is white and the camera will come in and make adjustments and we'll leave it on custom white balance so we'll hit enter that is how you custom white balance our camera come back out you can see that we have our custom white balance on so what is happening this is a lot i know there's a lot of information but what is happening with all these different colors so i'm going to demonstrate this in the kelvin because the kelvin setting allows us to specifically set the temperature of light we're shooting in this is confusing because temperature can refer to both the kelvin setting and it can also refer to the color itself for example blue lights or a blue look is sometimes referred to as cool yellow or you know kind of an orange look is sometimes referred to as warm but the temperature of kelvin is something different probably a lot of information but let me demonstrate this real quick is that when we're shooting in very low kelvin temperatures you can see how blue this setting is and this is counterintuitive intuitive because why because low kelvin temperature lights are orange think about candlelight you're like michael it's blue right so what's happening is the camera is adding blue to balance out for the orange light so if i was shooting in candles and i was you know 2900 k is the color temperature ish of candles the camera is going to add blue so the image would be balanced now if you had a very hot light like a blue blow torch think about that low torches are very very hot right that is a much higher kelvin temperature so when i'm turning the camera's kelvin temperature up to let's say 8500k now i'm shooting with blue blow torches everywhere the camera is going to add orange to balance it out and make the scene white i know that's a lot of information but that is what's happening when we're dealing with white balance is the camera is adding different amounts of blue or yellow in some cases magenta or green even sometimes to balance the scene out now there is another setting i want to demonstrate you don't have to worry about it i'm just going to tell you what's there is that when we come to any of these we can shift the color of that white balance using our white balance adjustment i almost never use this on sony cameras you can see that we have these different colors and we can come into this gamut in really shift in one direction or another this is definitely a more advanced feature i wouldn't have beginners do it but you can also see it's giving us the reading of how much color g is green a is amber m is magenta and b is blue and it's telling us how we're mixing these these white balances i like it on all zeros for pure beginners so we're going to leave it there and that is your brief introduction to white balance for the sake of time we're going to jump into the menu section i'm going to make some recommendations based on some of the general settings if we do a crash course i'll go into far greater detail and depth the menu systems are deep uh there is a lot of information in here so if we come up to the very top you'll notice that we have these different tabs that are different colored and this does help with some of the navigation so we have red which is mostly still shooting purple which is mostly video in customizations then we have our network settings which is like a tealish green color this deals with mostly you know connecting to your smartphone app things of that nature then we have our playback tab blue we have our camera setup which is yellow and then we have a customizable gray tab here on the far right to navigate those pages you'll you'll see that we have the total pages listed over on the far top right so 1 out of 14 in the red tab the first number tells us which page we're on out of the total pages and the thing that's kind of confusing about this is that to navigate through those pages we have to be highlighted on one of the pages so then i push to the left or right this allows me to navigate through the individual pages and you can see when i get to 14 and keep pushing right it jumps to purple right so it doesn't stay within the tab and when you're jumping around like this it can get a little confusing so just keep that in mind the highlighted tab will show its color and then the page that you're on will show the number of the page that you're on this first item here file format deals with what we're recording whether it's a jpeg or a raw file when we come in here you can see we get different combinations whether it's just raw raw and jpeg or jpeg only the rule of thumb is if it's an important shoot or you're getting paid or if it's you know your child's graduation pictures for example probably going to want to shoot on raw mixed lighting conditions raw the trade-off is raw files are a lot larger but they contain a lot more information jpegs can be anywhere from 10 to 20 percent the file size of raw and the camera is going to throw away a lot of that information when it creates the jpeg there's different times that pros would even use jpegs for example sport shooters a lot of them prefer jpegs i know wedding photographers who shoot jpegs simply because they're taking thousands of images and you know the workflows faster so two different ways to record those images and raw file type deals with the type of raw file that is being saved compressed essentially has the color information all the color information is a little bit smaller file uncompressed means that it's the original raw data totally uh uncompressed meaning that all the data and information is there it's just a lot of this is a matter of preference i don't see a difference until i get like really zoomed in and i'm looking at super small little details it's not something that most people would ever see jpeg quality deals with the amount of compression which is basically where the processor looks at adjacent pixels and if those colors are close enough it'll just say okay you're close enough and it'll throw out some color information very difficult to see this to the naked eye if you're just getting started finds probably going to be totally okay jpeg image size i recommend sticking with the 24 megapixels simply because it's very easy to downsize it's not as easy just to shoot in smaller megapixels and then upsize say six megapixels there are times that you wouldn't need more than six megapixels if you're posting something on ebay for example but the truth of the matter is you can always downsize from 24. aspect ratio i recommend sticking with 3x2 if you want a different aspect ratio maybe 4x3 16x9 or one by one you could come in here i demonstrated this earlier so if you were going to shoot for you know a square format like instagram you would come in here and select one by one but again we can always crop that if we wanted to and save the original size for another purpose the aps-c super 35 millimeter deals with telling the camera to use the smaller part of the sensor about the size of a crop sensor or super 35 they're very similar in size auto means that we're telling the camera to recognize the lens so if we put a crop lens so an e-mount lens designed specifically for crop cameras it would jump into crop mode there are times that you might put a full frame lens on here that you want to go into crop mode so you would select on and obviously this is going to use fewer megapixels of the sensor you're not getting that 24 megapixels there is a lens that i use it's the 10 to 10 to 18 f 4 which is a crop lens it's very wide angle it's very small and it's also image stabilized so that is a crop lens that i will use sometimes on a full frame sony camera and in those cases i'll turn it off simply because i know that at 13 or 14 millimeters i almost get full frame coverage this is one of these weird things with these lenses so it just really depends on what you're doing you can shoot in crop mode there's there's a lot of cool things we can do with it but just keep in mind this is where we change it probably a little bit too much for a pure beginner in in the beginning leave it on auto you'll be good to go so that's the first page long exposure noise reduction anything over a second tells the camera to clean up some of the noise that might occur in the images and the same applies for high iso noise reduction when we use very high isos we can expect to see a lot of grain this is a processing feature that helps clean it up a little bit color space we're going to leave it on srgb unless you're shooting for a magazine and you know what adobe rgb is just leave it on s rgb lens compensation deals with software used to clean up some of the errors found naturally in lenses for example wide angle lenses they may have vignetting in the corners this is referred to as shading composition and so what will happen is the software will come in and make those corners not as dark and all good camera companies have lens correction software in their cameras and it tends to be uh camera companies correcting their own lenses so if it's a sony camera with sony lenses the software tends to clean up the sony lenses better than it would if you were adapting let's say a canon lens over and especially when you get into video work this becomes really important because the software does a great job and there are some defects and lenses that are very difficult to fix in post so the short answer on this is leave it on auto if it's a sony lens it'll probably be recognized and this software will apply to it we have shading composition we have chromatic aberration which is a color fringing of blue or yellow next to areas of high contrast we typically see this in lower end lenses higher end lenses don't have it as much and another thing is you can typically make your aperture smaller and it will also correct a lot of this if i had a very wide angle lens we might get this option of distortion compensation lighting up but that is what this feature does page three the drive mode is really what happens after we push the shutter button down all the way we've covered these already single shooting multiple frame got our timers this is just a menu place to access it we have our bracket settings we talked a little bit about this when we were talking about the function menu the bracket settings allow us to add a timer so we have different timers for the bracketing 2 5 or 10 seconds and it also allows us to determine the order from the even under exposure or overexposure or under exposure even exposure overexposure that's basically plus minus means brighter or darker the interval shooting function is a built-in intervalometer and if we get into the crash course i will demonstrate how i use this for beach shoots an intervalometer is a set of instructions we give to the camera to take pictures at specific intervals so we don't have to sit there and press the shutter button down each time when you activate this when you come in and turn this on we determine when it starts then we determine the amount of time between each shot up or down you notice that it's giving us the amount of time that we'd be shooting for so if we were to shoot 30 shots three seconds between each it would take one minute and 27 seconds then we determine the number of shots we can have auto exposure tracking and this deals with changes in lighting conditions there's a second page here which allows us to shoot silently and the intervals we can give priority so when this is all set up you would come out tap your shutter button and you'll notice that we get the intervalometer timer here so i started it it's basically telling you how many shots you've taken and every three seconds we're seeing this little blink electronic shutter's working buffer is writing to the card that's the intervalometer it's a cool feature to know about probably a little bit more advanced so to end it we push the shutter button down again you need to come in and turn this off so we can talk about some of these other features let's talk about the memory positions for our custom settings our custom mode dial you'll notice on the mode dial we have numbers one two and three those deal with custom saved profiles for our camera so let's say you shoot birds in flight and portraits two completely different shooting styles and you don't wanna have to readjust you know your drive and your focusing modes maybe your auto white balance all these settings you have to change them over every time so the idea on this is you set up the camera the way you like it come into this memory setting and highlight the position of those numbers one two or three and press the set button and it will register your settings so the next time you change your shooting style and you've saved all your settings to one you would flip over your your dial to the one position and you wouldn't have to reset up your camera very useful it's a huge time saver some of you will notice in here that we have some other numbers in here m1 through four those deal with more like software positions there's there's not a physical control that will allow us to to jump into those but let's say we set it up for the way we like bird shooting come in here and save it to m1 the way this works is that when you come into your menu it's going to be grayed out but when you turn the mode dial to any of those three numbers one through three and you come into the menu now we get the ability to select it in recall so this recall position deals with these four numbers here one through four and we could jump through another additional four settings so this allows us four more positions than the three positions on the custom dial very useful if you do lots of different kinds of shooting i think the first three are the ones you should use first and then if you need the additional four set those up this guy here register custom shoot settings i don't really recommend it allows us to essentially save camera settings to a specific button if you were to come in here you could choose the settings that you want it to remember and then you could register it and then we would assign that to another custom button i just think in the beginning it's easier to assign those settings to a custom dial or an m1 through four come back out so a lot of these we've already talked about in different places we have some focusing settings we're going to be getting into the focusing mode deals with these five focusing drives over here that we've talked about whether it's a single or a continuous focus manual direct manual we can emphasize how we want the camera to behave in auto focus single or auto focus continuous in the beginning balanced is fine sport shooters depending on their style they may want to come in and emphasize auto focus before the release if you do that you will notice slightly fewer frames per second if you emphasize release it's going to shoot at its maximum frames per second but you might miss some of the focus and so this balanced emphasis is kind of weighing those two together the focus area deals with our clusters just a different way to come in and select this in our menu we could limit the focusing clusters we have available it's very intimidating when we see all of these together but just remember the tracking focus is mimicking the original focusing cluster squares so if you don't want to cycle through you know seven options every time you're picking a focusing cluster you'd come in and turn these off in the beginning i don't recommend doing that because i'm demonstrating what you have available occasionally i get emails from students who say hey i can't find all of my clusters and they come into their menu and for whatever reason they've turned it off and they just didn't remember that switch vertical horizontal auto focus area right because you're supposed to know that that's what that means essentially what this does is that when we have a focusing cluster selected let's say we have this square over here and we're shooting in the landscape orientation and then we take a camera and rotate it 90 degrees this way and we're in the portrait orientation this tells the camera to remember the position of the focusing square the last time you were in that orientation now the reason this is cool is because you're focusing on something you might be jumping back and forth and you don't want to change your focusing square every time you move the camera right so this is kind of a handy feature i i personally do like it you can choose auto focus point only or you can have it for the auto focus and the area so it will remember the type of cluster and the position so it's pretty cool autofocus illuminator there's a little light little lamp we have next to the shutter button on the front of the camera and if it gets too dark if you have it on auto it will light up if you want to turn that off we can do so face and eye detection set these are the settings for our face and eye detection this is in the deep menu where we can turn the feature on we also have the ability to choose whether we're dealing with humans or animals remember the animal eye detection is not going to work as well as the human eye detection simply because there's a lot more animals out there than there are you know species of human and the algorithm is not perfect so just don't have really high expectations for it i have some students in forums who will go out and they'll try to shoot sports with animal eye detection like birds in flight or running animals and they're like hey i didn't get 100 keepers and i'm like yeah it's gonna be tough to to do that with any focusing system a good keeper percentage is like 85 90 that's really good but the animal eye tracking eye face detection stuff i mean if it's over 50 it's probably doing pretty well uh i think the human stuff is much higher and even then it's not really designed for sport shooting so just keep that in mind we can determine which eye the rider left eye auto will choose for it for us i like having these two frames on so we can see the frame that tells us that it's recognizing the face it's a little gray frame when this feature is on it's going to come back out we can tune in something i need to point out back up a little bit is you'll notice that in the front of this word here we have this little square the square with the mountain designates a still image feature so photography there's another one that looks like a film strip and that deals more with video so this is asking us the auto focus tracking sensitivity for stills and we can come in and make it more or less responsive i think three is a good place to start as you get more and more into sports shooting you might want to come tweak it aperture drive and autofocus leave this on standard for now this allows us to change the lens to be more quiet if it had a silent priority option or just getting the focus so it really depends on what you're doing standard is great to start but the idea is that we can change the loudness of our focusing motors with compatible lenses focus with the halfway shutter button depression leave this on if you're a pure beginner those who use back button focus will turn this off pre-autofocus is telling the camera to constantly focus in stills mode i leave it turned off because it drains the battery faster and i can always engage it with the halfway shutter button depression this feature here is going to be grayed out unless you have a compatible alpha lens that you're adapting over with a very specific adapter it basically starts focusing when we look through the lens i would say don't worry about it for now auto focus area registration allows us to save the position of a focusing cluster in a specific place that we would then set up a custom key to use so it's telling us we press and hold the fn button on the shooting screen and this will allow us to assign it a recall on a custom button when we set up our custom buttons so the idea on this is that we would have a focusing square in a very specific position we would press and hold the fn button and so we've registered that focusing area and then when we set up our custom keys we could assign that to a custom queue it's obviously an advanced feature but just know it's available if you need it we could also delete the registered area go ahead and do that focus frame color typically it's this grayish white but if you want it to be red you can choose that autofocus area auto clear basically means that when we've selected a cluster we usually get a frame of some kind maybe it's the four corners maybe we see something like this focusing square so the idea on this is that after we've used it this would disappear and for beginners that's kind of confusing i like to have the reminder of what you have selected and accessible and where you need to focus this deals mostly with autofocus single same reason when we're dealing with autofocus continuous and we're dealing with the wider zones we want to leave this to on same basic idea if you remember when we were talking about moving the focusing square with it using the directional pad left and right the circulate option means if we go to the far right it'll jump over to the left side and vice versa or top to bottom and that's what circulate does for us we can also control by how much it moves that foam that frame is moving we also have some auto focus micro adjustment i wouldn't mess with this in the beginning be very careful dealing with this this allows us to fine tune our lenses if they're not focusing precisely the focusing systems on sony cameras are pretty good built into the sensor so in the beginning don't mess with this if you know that something's wrong sony techrep might talk you through it page 8 deals with exposure settings the exposure compensation feature in here allows us to electronically dial in our exposure compensation could be kind of confusing if you're used to doing it up here but you'll notice we have five stops of range on each side we can reset that electronic exposure compensation we have our iso setting pretty straightforward the iso in here is the same that we have access to by using the right button on our command wheel we can also set the range so it's typically by default should be set up this way but if you want to limit the range you could do so the minimum and maximum values so if we are using auto iso with something like aperture priority the camera needs to know at what point it should stop adjusting the shutter speed so we would set a hard limit on it at 160 second for example and when we got to that 160th of a second then it would make the adjustments to the iso so this is the hard limit that we're setting for the camera when we're using something like aperture priority and it's adjusting the shutter speed metering modes we've talked about this is a different place we can select them in the menu they're all over there on the left face priority in multi-metering mode essentially means that we're telling the camera to meter based on a face it recognizes it's pretty cool because it will give it a priority and help adjust the exposure accordingly when you're shooting portraits if you don't like that you can come in here and turn this off again remember it's only going to work in the multi-metering mode spot metering point we've talked about and i have it set up linked to a single focusing square when i move it around i just think that's kind of handy and cool to meter from the same place i'm focusing from again this only works on spot metering mode the steps when we're changing our exposure values i prefer one-third stop increments some people like half stop increments right there auto exposure lock with a halfway shutter button depression basically we're telling the camera that when we push the shutter button halfway down to lock the exposure settings in p s or a modes that's an automatic feature we can also set it to on all the time or we can turn it off if you don't like that exposure standard adjustment i would recommend not playing with this it essentially allows us to tweak our metering modes to be a little bit brighter or a little bit darker so if you're using your spot metering mode and you're not happy with it you come in and tweak we have some flash controls so when we do connect a flash unit to our camera the flash mode we can determine the type of flash we're using if i do a crash course on this there's a godox tt685 flash that i prefer they're like 110 bucks and i will go through the different shooting modes of the flash the truth of the matter is i change my flash settings from the flash i don't recommend doing it from the camera for many reasons just easier to access and keep track of on the actual speed light flash compensation deals with how much flash power we're outputting in the exposure compensation set we can tell it to deal with this in the ambient or the existing light in the shooting situation it'd be something like the sun you know just the light that's available uh i have it set up for ambient and flash so if i was to bump up my exposure compensation here it would apply to both of them ambient only would not bump it up for flash so we'll leave that there for now a lot of these other things wireless flash obviously it's beyond the scope of this video red eye reduction if you turn this on this will help remove red eye very cool and then we have our external flash set obviously we would need to have a flash set up for this again beyond the scope of this video hopefully we'll do a crash course and i will show you some of these other really cool features so this is just a different place we can select our white balance priority set and auto white balance means that we have some tweaks that we can make it a little bit more ambient it's hard to see the difference between these two or make it a little bit more white or we can have standard auto white balance we have our dynamic range optimizer with hdr so if we wanted to use hdr here it is hdr high dynamic range is really great when we're shooting in situations that have bright highlights and dark shadows together i do some sunset shoots on the crash course where i demonstrate the hdr and this is asking us how many stops of range do we want with the hdr we can also determine the same with our dynamic range optimizer typically leave dynamic range optimizer if you're just getting started it's fine or if you want you can turn it off altogether the creative styles these are basically recipes that tell the camera how to cook or prepare the jpegs you'll notice we're getting these slightly different combinations of contrast when we're looking at the blinds sunset it's interesting how yellow it's turning because it's adjusting compensating if we were shooting during sunset right the short on this is i would say don't mess with these in the beginning there's so many of them it's easy to select one and forget you have it just start off on standard for now probably a little bit more useful when we're tweaking for video but we'll save that for another discussion the picture effect is something i don't really use but if you guys wanted to see what these are they're kind of these gimmicky you know like toy camera you know posterization color they're pretty wild and wacky just kind of fun camera looks picture profile huge amount of information in here this is going to allow us to tweak how our camera is recording jpegs so you would select a picture profile you want and they come with pre-determined sets in here so far beyond the scope of what we're doing far more useful for video and there's there's guys on the internet that have like their recipes of all of these settings you'll notice it has the color mode each of the picture profiles will have a different color mode in different tweaking for each so this is where you would find you know our gamuts for video but the short answer on this is just leave them off for now if you get into high-end video tweaking as you're recording this is where we could change them again we could apply picture profiles to stills as well but far beyond the scope of the beginning photography discussion we can lock our auto white balance this feature on page 12. sometimes we'll get into the menus and you'll find stuff that's not accessible and if you highlight it's going to say oh you're in continuous auto focus mode and so we would need to come in and change your focusing mode so if you see that that's what's going on sometimes it tells you what's happening or not the focusing magnifier is a feature that we can access it gives us an orange box and when we press the set button it will zoom in kind of useful has a time and place we can determine the magnification time whenever we're using that feature or the manual focus feature that zooms in automatically from two five seconds or no limit when we zoom in the first time how zoomed in do we want to be we want to be at 1x or 5.9 x that will change if you're in the crop mode by a little bit we can focus when we're using focus magnification we talked about that i demonstrated it in the focusing lesson the manual focus assist means that if we have this turned on and we use our uh manual focusing ring on the lens it'll automatically punch in it'll automatically zoom i like that so i have it turned on in our peaking settings that's when we get the blue red white or yellow overlay on areas of high contrast demonstrated that in the focusing lesson as well again that only works with manual focus anti-flicker shooting deals with certain types of lamps sodium based lamps uh certain types of fluorescent lights might flicker and what you'll see and notice is if you're shooting in a high-speed continuous burst is that the color of the situation you're shooting in is changing from shot to shot so the flicker shooting feature anti-flicker tells the camera to look out for this and time it in such a way that there is consistent exposure and color when shooting with these lamps that's the idea in practice when you're actually shooting in those conditions with a high speed burst we might notice some not not quite as many frames per second but it's it can be a real saver if there's nothing else that's working i leave it turned off until i notice it and i've only used the feature a couple times in my life face registration means that we can come in here set up a new registration i would need to have a person in front of me but i could basically say yeah that's what i want we can take a picture of the frame and save it we can order delete or delete all the idea on this however is that we can register faces so if your kid is at the birthday party and there's 10 kids there the camera would would prioritize your child's face over the other kids that's the idea of it's not always perfect we can register so giving this registered faces priority is what that does turn it on or off very cool feature so those are the 14 pages of the red tab there's a lot of information in there the first part of the purple tab obviously deals with video recording tells us right here we got some great boxes we're going to flip the mode dial over to the video record icon or the filmstrip icon and then we press and here we go so you'll notice that this first option here we are given the ability to choose how our movie mode is working most of the time i recommend manual we dial in the shutter speed the aperture the iso and the camera doesn't adjust any exposure settings there are times when i'm going from very bright situations to very dark situations or vice versa that i will set up the camera in such a way that i have something like auto iso or maybe you know shutter priority because i want to stay within certain frames per second it's not something i do a lot of but if i am shooting and changing lighting conditions this is what it looks like probably a little bit more of an advanced technique but we want the ability of the camera to change the exposure if we're going from very bright very dark settings quickly like on a gimbal probably beyond the scope of this discussion the short answer is set it to manual exposure for now you'll also notice that we have an exposure mode for slow and quick which if we rotate it to the dial should light up come back in and there it is and again i'm setting this to manual slow and quick talk about that in just a second come back to my regular film strip mode file format we have a lot of strange letters and whatnot the short answer on this is i like recording in 4k so i'm going to turn this up to 4k xavcs4k there it is and when we select 4k we can come down and we can see the different frame rates so there's a lot of confusing numbers in here this middle number deals with the number of frames per second in this case 30 frames per second if i'm shooting for youtube i am on 30 frames per second if i am doing more of a film-like project documentary i'll probably go 24 frames per second and the number after it is the data rate 100 megabits per second it's how fast data can be written to the memory card and i always prefer to keep it at the highest setting so 100. so if you're shooting for youtube and if you're doing an instructional like this i would go 30 p 100 if you're doing more of a documentary or maybe a film storytelling go for 24 and we cover those techniques in the crash course as well get a lot more into that proxy recording deals with recording smaller files that are easier to import and easier to edit so there's actually when we turn this on we have two sets of files we have the full size files video files and then we have these smaller proxy files that allow us to edit the proxy files and give instructions to that for full size files it's a lot to go into but just know that if if your editing system is overwhelmed you have this ability it's beyond the scope of this video so i'm going to flip the dial back over to slow and quick setting so the slow and quick settings this is something that i'll talk about on the crash course if we have one basically allows us to record at faster or slower frame rates so if we record at 120 frames per second that's four times faster than a normal video camera and what happens is that when we play it back at 30 frames per second it is going to be slow so that's the short answer on this we can also play it back at 24 frames per second we can change the frame rate to be something much slower one frame per second and then play it back at 30 frames per second it would be all jittery and fast motion but this is where we determine these settings 120 is pretty cool for slow motion but that is your slow and quick settings something else i want to point out real quick is you'll notice that it gives us a much slower bit rate 16 megabits per second so as we change our frame rate the megabits per second also changes in this mode something to keep in mind and that is our first purple tab page two in the beginning i would recommend not changing a lot of these things so the transition speed is how fast auto focus would change in the video shooting mode if you wanted to be faster you would move it to the right if you wanted to be slower move it to the left we can also shift the subject sensitivity can make it more locked on to a certain person or focusing square or you can have it change be more responsive auto slow shutter is something that i actually turn off this is something that i don't like my shutter speeds changing or being changed by the camera when i'm recording video i almost always have my shutter speed locked to twice the frame rate so if i'm shooting at 30 frames per second i'm at 1 60 of a second and this is why i use auto iso to change the exposure because i don't want it to change the aperture either probably a little bit too much information we have initial focus magnification when we're in video mode we can go from one or four our audio recording definitely something i recommend leaving on i like recording sound into the camera it just makes my workflow easier a lot easier if i do very high end production we'll record separately on on better microphones but for run and gun shooting yeah i plug the microphone into the camera and you should be familiar with setting your levels and keeping an eye on this when you're doing video recording if you're getting red and your sound is clipping out you're going to want to turn this down if the audio levels aren't really responsive you might want to turn it up this is where we do it very powerful feature hit okay onto page 3. audio level display in our video shooting mode is something we definitely want to have on audio out timing definitely on live there is a lip sync feature that is going to try to match it up to when somebody's talking for example if they're further away i wouldn't mess with this right now wind noise reduction i've never noticed a significant difference it's never really helped me so i'm leaving that turned off marker displays are really overlays different kinds of overlays that we can have on our viewfinder as we're shooting they help aim things of that nature and this is in the marker settings is where we toggle them on or off so if you don't have these turned on you're not going to going to see them let's just go let's go with we have our aspect ratios safety guides if you want to see them i'm going to turn all these on so you can see them and then i'm going to come back into my menu make sure this is on tap the shutter button so you can see all these different types of markers we can aspect ratio rule of thirds we got our center point things of that nature it's for helping to aim the camera compose and if you don't want those displayed we would turn those off tap the shutter button and away they go video light mode uh this has to do with an accessory light so obviously beyond the scope of this video and very common question is how do i start and stop video recording with a shutter button this is where you would turn it on so a little confusing is after page four we're no longer really in movie settings we get into customizations quiet shutter something to keep in mind so i'm going to turn the camera back to still shooting go to aperture priority and we get our silent shooting which is an electronic shutter so if you turn this on it's going to be completely quiet there's a problem with this is that when you're shooting high shutter speeds in led conditions is that we start to see banding problems let's let me dial this in real quick open this up use a faster shutter speed something like that turn my iso up a little bit so when you're using electronic shutter and i am shooting in led light you would see this banding pattern and a lot of photographers who are unaware of it they think their camera is broken no this has to do with the flickering lights of leds i've actually made a video in terms of why this happens the fix for it is to shoot at one 125th of a second or less so let me see if we can fix this our shutter speed and turn my iso back down shouldn't be there very faint i can barely see it but that's how you fix it and if we were to continue to turn our shutter speed down 1 60 of a second just dialing in settings here you can see that it resolves it so that's something to keep in mind so that is the silent shooting feature lens with release without lens this is on enable same thing without the card basically means we can actuate the shutter without having a lens or even a card in it this is useful when we're adapting manual focus lenses over for example that that are not recognized you would have to have this turned on for the camera to work there's no internal memory so if you don't have a memory card it's not going to be remembered somehow in the camera you have to have a memory card steady shot it's our ibis definitely recommend leaving it turned on i get a lot of questions about when when you put it on tripods should you turn it off i think for long exposures you know anything over you know a second consider a long exposure probably a good idea to turn it off because remember that's a moving part and if it jiggles during that long exposure it could result in a blurry photo and then we have our steady shot settings if we wanted to adjust them which i don't recommend we'd come in here and turn this to this this deals with adapting over a lens that isn't recognized by sony so if you have a manual focusing prime lens for example and we want to tell the ibis the focal length which is that is basically going to set the sensitivity of how much stabilization you get probably a little bit too much information here i'm going to turn this to auto come back out page 6 deals with some zoom settings now there are electronic zoom lenses i don't have one of those i just have the standard little kit lens the 28 to 70. most the time when i'm zooming i'm using the lens i'm just rotating the zoom ring zooming in or out there are a couple cool features in here i just want to point out real quick that if i turn this to digital zoom or clear image zoom digital zoom is just magnifying the pics the existing pixels that we have and you can do it in post it's not really helping us you're not getting more resolution sony has something called clear image zoom that when we turn this on you'll notice we get the zoom feature that's active and you'll notice we get this bar here and the idea on this is that i can zoom in with my lens as close as i can and then i can start using this clear image digital zoom now there's some technology in here that's supposed to really make up the pixels you're not supposed to lose any resolution and there are applications where this might be pretty handy especially for video if you are you know in a video mode let's say see if this works just want to make sure and i want to zoom in on that video record could make a difference it's something to play with probably more of an advanced feature if you're a beginner i wouldn't worry about it too much but this is how you access it you set it up here it will go back to optical zoom only and it disappears you'll also notice that we have the zoom ring focus it's grayed out but it allows us to determine which direction electronically zoomed lenses when you rotate left or right so this guy right here the display button when we push it up and we're toggling through the screens we are able to determine which screens are appearing if we're looking on the back monitor or if we were looking through the evf so if you don't want to toggle through all those screens or even if you want to add some screens you can do that just depends on how you want it set up the finder monitor switch deals with this guy this little infrared switch that we pick up and move to our face when we're shooting right right now it's set to auto which means every time my finger gets close to that sensor it's turning it off if we just wanted to leave the back monitor on we would set it here for gimbal use for example if we just wanted this viewfinder on we would turn it here otherwise leave it on auto what's the frame rate you want i have it set to standard if you wanted more frames per second you could come in here and turn this on zebra setting is a display that will tell us when we're starting to overexpose so we can turn this on and then we can determine how much exposure there are the zebra lines so at 70 exposure we would start to see it a lot of the people that i know have it turned on to like 95 or even 100 that we won't see those lines until we're actually over exposing see if we can turn our iso up there it is and that would just be a warning indicator hey it's pure white in here you might want to change your exposure settings i'm going to turn this off grid line so we have our rule of thirds we saw this once up with some of the displays with video shooting so we'll just turn this on real quick so you can see there's the grid turn that off so the exposure set guide is is basically when we're changing the settings we get this overlay that appears turn that off for now live view display is exposure preview it's this exposure simulation it's grayed out because i'm in video mode i'm going to turn this over to a stills mode in video mode it's automatic it's going to happen no matter what can't turn it off continuous shoot length this deals with a burst that if we're shooting we'll get a little bar that will appear over to the left and it'll tell us basically how fast our buffer is filling up kind of a cool feature and then when we take a picture do we want it to auto review and if so for how long basically display the picture as you're shooting sport shooters don't like this because they want to stay in the moment they want to stay shooting another thing is if you do a lot of sport shooting you might want to change your finder frame rate to the high speed one this one should be a little bit smoother something to keep in mind and then on page nine we come into the custom settings for our buttons depending on whether we're shooting in stills video or playback we can customize the buttons the way we want them we get a little overlay that designates which button we're changing and then when we select that we come into 27 pages of options probably might be a little bit too much if you're just getting started just know this is where this is all happening for the key customizations it's on page nine the function menu set has to do with our fn overlay tap the shutter button press the fn and we can see these 12 features here right so if we want to customize this we're going to come into the menu and we can determine which features we want where we have a set for still shooting we have a set for for video shooting i really like having the audio level feature on my video for example so after a certain amount of shooting you're going to want to customize this in a way that is easy for you so you can access these items quickly and to do that you would obviously come in let's just select something like our shooting mode because we have that in the top left-hand corner anyway and we can come in and choose from 15 pages of options right really cool we can also customize the dials and how they rotate move we can put some custom features on there as well basically the idea in here is that you can come in and choose from a number of different settings i don't really recommend this because it starts getting confusing but the idea is that you would push a customized button that would allow us to access other controls here for now i would say don't even worry about it and then we can also control whether especially in manual mode which dial is changing which setting page 10 we can control the direction of which changes which so there's a default and then we can reverse it we can set up our exposure compensation to work on the dial if we wanted to i don't recommend that because we have a dedicated wheel up here it just doesn't make sense to me do you remember when i was touching on the screen to focus we can change how that works there's one called touch shutter i don't recommend it simply because then it starts taking pictures every time you touch the screen we can set this up to be an automatic tracker i would leave it here for now if we want to lock our dials and wheels we can come in here and hit lock if you do this rotating these are not going to change any settings it's very frustrating if you forget that you've done that i leave it on unlock for the most part and then that beep signal do you want to hear a beep well if you don't want to you can come in and turn it off so that is the purple tab we're trying to get through these so we can talk about wi-fi which is mostly in this tab i'll come back to this when we talk about syncing it with a smartphone and come through here a lot of these are pretty self-explanatory we have the ability to protect images on our cards so we don't accidentally erase them we can rotate images by pressing the set button we can delete images if we wanted to go all of them on a date or multiple images we could come in and just mark it for deletion and when we're ready to delete we would hit enter and it says you want to delete those two images they're gone so if you're doing bulk deletion i i typically don't do that i like to get them all on the computer and look at the images on a large screen before i delete it anything but if you're if you run out of space and you have no choice that's a fast way to do it so we can add one through five stars in a rating system come in here i'm going to press the set and then rotate to the left or right these ratings would be respected when we import them to lightroom or bridge come back out if we wanted to have a rating set on a custom key we could do that so the idea on this is that you would go into the playback customization buttons and select rating and this would allow us to add a rating to an image so i'm going to come out of this for now we could print from our camera if we were connected to a printer i think it's just easier to put a memory card into the printer but you could select multiple images and then you can come down and select the print settings just briefly some of these features are kind of nice you can enlarge images the photo capture allows us to export a frame from video if you have a video file then you can enlarge images magnify them we have the continuous playback for our intervalometer so the slideshow feature will allow us to use the camera to play back images directly from the memory card we would plug an hdmi cable from the camera to a tv choose our settings so we could loop it what's the interval and then we'd hit enter and then it would start playing the images kind of a fun feature uh the view mode when we're playing back images how do you want to view i have it by date view we could also go by folder or what type of video file format we have different ways to play back so if you wanted to to view by date you can come into the calendar mode if you wanted to look by stills and then we have the formats over here image index so when we're displaying the grid here do you want it to be nine images or 25 images i think nine's good there they are if you want it to go with 25 there those are display as a group i like this on default display rotation yes i think it's a good idea otherwise when you shoot portrait it's not going to have it rotated and then we have the ability to jump by rotating the dial it's asking do you want to jump one by one or by 10 by 100 by protected images this allows us to scroll through images more quickly for example if we were by 10 just leave it on one for now and that is a quick overview of the blue tab jumping into the yellow which is the camera settings a lot of these are pretty straightforward we have the ability to change our monitor and viewfinder brightness when they're set to auto a camera will do it automatically obviously when we come into the manual settings we were able to adjust the brightness up or down and on the viewfinder brightness it wants us to look in the viewfinder as we're adjusting this but on on certain uh you know bright sunny days obviously we may want to turn it up or down depending on what we need we can also change the color temperature for the viewfinder in here telling us to look at the color gamma display assist this has to do when we were shooting with a uh s gamut or s log and so that's recording in almost like a faded kind of look for video and the gamma display assist would allow us to see what it will look like when it's graded correctly so we have all these options in here it's a video recording feature when we're using those those gamuts that might desaturate the look volume settings of our sounds which you can adjust here pretty straightforward and the delete confirmation i do recommend leaving it on cancel first if the option is to delete first sometimes you can accidentally bump it and delete so this is asking when we play back an image and we hit delete which of these two options do you want highlighted i like cancel i think it's a good idea display quality if we go to high obviously the display is going to look a little bit better some people report that it will drain the battery faster when we're using these higher frame rates or higher qualities of the monitors and viewfinders power save start time when is the automatic shut off when you want it to happen i have mine set to five minutes because i'm teaching right now and then we have the auto oh yeah okay so a lot of these cameras will overheat they'll get hot and this auto power off temperature basically means if your camera is overheating a lot you can turn it on to high and it won't turn off until it gets really hot that's basically it if you're in the u.s we're obviously using ntsc if you are on the pal system in europe this is where you would come in and change it to pow we have the ability to clean our sensor this is something i demonstrate on the crash course it's one of the final lessons on the course where i show you how to take care of your sensor and then the touch operation of the screen if we wanted to turn it off completely we could this is where it happens so this idea of a touch pad it essentially means this back monitor when you are looking through the viewfinder it becomes the touch pad and this is where we can turn that on so if you want both the panel which means just the back monitor not looking through the viewfinder and the pad are touch active you would turn it on to this when you're looking through the viewfinder you can change the focusing square by touching on the pad and that's really what it's for is quick you know focus cluster movement the touchpad settings this is this is what it deals with is what part of this back monitor do you want active looking as you look through the viewfinder i am left eye dominant which means my nose is over here so i don't really use it but right eye dominant users with their nose off to the side of the camera they can use it to change their focusing square in the operator area is asking what part of this touch frame do you want to be active and it is designated in black so if you want the whole screen active you would select this first one if you just want the half right side it would be this one just depends on where your nose is really leave it there for now and then we can also determine the difference between absolute and relative position so absolute is where you're touching on the screen it matches the frame of the sensor and then the relative is just a directional kind of thing you know it's not precise but it's a preference thing let's see probably a lot to go into so the tcub settings this is for video recording it allows us to determine how we set up our counters probably a little bit more information than a beginner would want our hdmi settings this determines the output of our hdmi we can determine 60 or 24p if you have a ninja 5 you may want to come in here and play with this time code output do we want to output the time code or do we want to clean output we would turn this off i demonstrate a lot of these techniques on the crash course the 4k output select will not be highlighted until we plug in an hdmi cable and this feature is going to allow us to determine where 4k should be directed whether it's the hdmi cable only or a combination of the cable and the card so you can record simultaneous very handy if you're looking to backup or if you're shooting on that atomos ninja 5. the usb connection i have it set to auto but we have the ability to connect to mass storage there's a couple other cool things for the most part you're going to have it on auto i use the usb for charging the camera occasionally if i if i don't have my charger with me but there's some other cool things we can do with it so just jumping through these quickly if this isn't turned on we won't be able to charge our camera by usb language hopefully you are an english speaker if you're watching this video but we have some other options in here date and time setup we kind of went over this in the very beginning but if we wanted to change the date and time we could do so here we could also change the format and if you live in an area with daylight savings it would automatically change the time when those changes happen we can choose the area that we're shooting in based on the map so every time we take a picture there's sets of information we can record onto the file called exif data it includes things like our shutter speed or aperture but we can also add copyright information so if you wanted to set your photographer name you could come in here and by highlighting and pressing a button it's kind of tedious to do this but if you really wanted to you could you type in your name like michael andrew photography or maybe your business name you would hit okay and that would allow the camera to to write that exif data on every image that you took we could also do it for copyright and toggle this on or off if we want that information written i don't have anything set right now so there's nothing in there but if you did have it set up it would be displayed under display copyright info some of the other features we have in here is to write the serial number of the camera on our images format is pretty important this is a feature that you should be using every time you have backed up you have two copies of your images and you put the card back into your camera i almost always reformat the memory card critical to remember make sure you have at least two copies before you you erase it so when i upload i have two hard drives and i also share a hard drive with my assistant we sync it through dropbox and he has copies of everything that i shoot so we really have three copies and the reason is hard drives fail sometimes you're gonna have a hard drive it's gonna fail you want to have a backup some people do it on the cloud but make sure you always have two copies i have a friend who lost a hard drive all of their kids pictures are gone for from like 10 years so just keep that in mind we can select which folder we're recording to if we have multiple folders right now i just have the one this is where we can create a new folder so we have a new folder and if i come back up here we should see two folders you can see the number changing in front of it probably a little tedious you know i just shoot to all one folder and then go in but if you had two important shoots you may want to separate them and then our file and folder settings we can do a series we can set the file name three digits depending on whether we're using srgb or adobe rgb so you get a little underscore here on adobe rgb we can name our folder by standard name or by date so these are just folder customization options so the file settings allow us to change some limited parts of the file how it's recorded reset the series something in here that's pretty important is the version this will tell us the firmware or the software we have on the camera as well as the lens and if we need to update the firmware this is where we would check to see which version we had and then we could reset the camera settings if we wanted to that is the yellow tab which is the camera settings finally we're coming in to the my menu settings this is really cool because we've gone through it seems like over a hundred different menu options probably more and you're not going to access them all the time you're going to access maybe four or five of them you know it might be the video settings and format and maybe quality and that's about it so instead of jumping through the menu to find all these things this my menu settings allows us to determine what we want so if i want to add for example file format i'll just add it right now add it to this location okay what else uh well there's the format memory card is something i do a lot so i'm just scrolling through there we go right it's added maybe might do and you can see we get the names of the items we can add in here maybe my exposure mode for video just as an example added right so i'm going to come back out and i have those three items and so the idea on this is you see i'm on page two now is on page one i have those items available i can just jump to them if i want i don't have to go searching through this whole menu and if i want to add or delete or sort i can do that say okay i want to move file format i'm going to move it down here and then the my menu would respect that so it's a really cool way to organize your files it's not highlighted because i'm on video come back out that is a great way to organize it and then we can delete an item we can delete a page we can delete all of them we can turn this on which would automatically set up the my menu when we press the menu button so if i come over here to that let's say orange tap the shutter button press the menu button and it jumps to the gray tab so it's just a way to to really establish a shortcut i know we covered a ton of information but that is just to get you familiar with the deep menu and i hope you guys enjoyed it so let's talk about connecting our smartphone to our camera to give limited remote shooting it's usually good for about 20 or 25 feet something like that in the past sony had other apps play image play memories app i think was the last one this one is called the imaging edge mobile you can download it from the apple app store it should be a similar one on the google play store i'm going to demonstrate this on an iphone 10. download the app have it on your phone and when you turn it on it's going to ask you know if you greeted the terms if you have access to location you know change the settings of your photos so there's been recent updates that in order to have access to our images we have to turn on certain permissions and things of things of that nature so if we want to give access to our photos we can go all photos this is going to allow the photos to move back and forth from the smartphone to the camera we have some other settings in here the copy the image size 2 megabytes or the original size it's going to take a little bit longer for original really the idea of this originally was to get images off your camera to upload onto social media you don't need the full size for that but if you wanted the full size you would select there and it gives us some other controls and options using cell data things of that nature so that's the first step make sure that you've downloaded the app you've given access the second thing you're going to notice is that i have a number of sony cameras in here the alpha 6600 the a7 mark iii a 6400 had an a9 an a7r mark iii and so my smartphone is keeping a list of these cameras that i can connect with because this is a new camera i'm going to select connect to a new camera this can get a little quirky depending on how you set it up so i'm going to show you what i think is the best way so we can scan a qr code we can connect with near field communication we can use a password but in order to do this we have to get the camera in our smartphone communicating so we're going to come over to up here this tealish greenish color tab so we want to connect or control with our smartphone control a smartphone we're going to turn this to on and we're going to work on this connection right here or turn it on so what this is doing is this is broadcasting a wi-fi signal we have a qr code that we can scan the qr code the crosshairs it's going to be hard for you guys to see this there we go and now it's asking do i want to join the network i'm going to hit join and essentially what we're doing is we're giving the phone permission to connect to the wi-fi network of the camera so it's asking imaging edge would like to find and connect to your local devices we're gonna hit okay i need to clean that screen off and saying start remote operation it is necessary to set the bluetooth off on the smartphone okay we're not gonna show that again and you can see that we're set up for remote shooting once we get to this screen we are in good shape now over the years these apps sometimes they work great sometimes they disconnect it it really depends on a number of factors so i can't promise it's going to work great for you every time so the thing that's awesome about this is that it gives us remote control over the camera settings where we can change our shutter speed touch and drag we can use the arrows very nice right bulb setting we didn't talk about that that's as long as you hold the shutter button down very long exposures we can change our aperture we wanted to open it up we could change our iso bump that up so we have control over our exposure modes i'm on i'm in the manual mode so if we flip the camera over to aperture priority it's taken a second to think about it there it is we can change our exposure compensation in real time pretty nice we could change our focusing mode single focus we can take a picture so you can hear it focusing it takes the picture we have auto exposure lock if we wanted to we could change our display change our metering mode so we have a lot of really nice controls in here this looks to be improved it looks to be better than the last time i saw sony's app you can come into this little menu and we're given a number of options look at all the options that we have that we can change so they have added a ton of features that we can change and adjust obviously we've gone through these on the camera i'm not going to go through all of them now we can change our drive settings look at it it's pretty pretty awesome uh and so that is that is the i believe the meat of the app in terms of the remote shooting i've used this for video shooting so if i were to flip the camera over to the video icon like if i'm in the frame i will use this to inspect the image to see where i'm lined up see we have the led problem going on right now no problem just go to 160th it's a little bright turn that down just a touch something like that and then we can start and stop video recording remotely really nice really really fun we don't have quite as many options for remote video shooting that's okay and we can even rotate the display if we want to play our images back we can do so here we get some information about the date and time which number we can should be able to rate them up here this i gives us an exif data about the file including the focal length of lens very nice we can go from a grid display these are some images i took when i was deployed over on the big island we were responding to the volcano over there so something you're going to notice pretty quick is that even though we have all of these great features there's not an easy way to leave this particular feature short of resetting the app or disconnecting in the menu so if we reset the app now we're back out to this main menu so it's kind of this weird thing i think this is probably being done to prevent people from being accidentally kicked off of the app because when we come back out to the main app we have a number of other settings in here including loc linking our location if we wanted to do that we could the camera remote power on off we could turn it on or off if we wanted to we have we can view the transferred images and if we wanted to download we would press the download button and you'll notice that we don't have access to this this menu feature easily so maybe it's something that's in the app that sony hasn't addressed maybe it's for connectivity reasons we have settings in here lots of cool things right but it's kind of weird that when we come into the app and we connect the remote operation we start it we can't easily leave this we can't go back to that menu short of disconnecting so i wonder you know what the reason is for doing that but it's it's improved it seems more stable than in past uh iterations of it the thing about these apps is that there there are updates and even by the time i publish this there may be an update within a week or two so this is the most current version of it i i am asking myself the question you know why does sony not want us to be able to jump in and out of the main menu from the live view shooting menu maybe that update's coming i don't know so one last side note is that after we've connected and we're done using the mobile app be sure to come into the menu where we connected and turn this to off otherwise our camera is going to be broadcasting a wi-fi signal and it will drain your batteries a lot faster so just remember to turn it off when you're done so ladies and gentlemen that is a quick introduction to remote shooting and some of the features of the imaging edge mobile app from sony and i hope you enjoyed it let's talk about some of the accessories you're going to need for your sony a7c number one probably the most important accessory is going to be a tripod and tripods can be very expensive i personally spend about four hundred dollars just for my tripod legs i know that's a lot but you have the legs and there's also something called the head that fits on top of the tripod legs i personally use the 496 rc2 or it's equivalent from bogan manfrotto as my ball head and i use the higher end carbon fiber legs that set up could be five or six hundred dollars if you're looking for something under a hundred dollars the best tripod i found i actually sell on my store i will put that link in the description if you're looking for something kind of in between carbon fiber with a ball head i like the bogan manfrotto b free it comes together as a set it's a little bit lighter weight but it should be enough in those range from 150 to about 250 depending on which one you get so as you know i have my own filter line coming out in first quarter of 2021 filters when you buy your camera the camera salesman or your checkout page is going to try to push different kinds of filters on onto you at some point you're probably going to want to get a polarizer if you do landscape shooting if you don't do landscape shooting you may not want it i have a fantastic polarizer the maven blue polarizer it's blue ring easy to identify and it's blues to help you remember you're going to use it for skies or reflections on water the other kinds of filters you should be aware of are nd filters and these come in different strengths or intensities and their purpose is to reduce the amount of light coming into the camera if you do a lot of video work i would recommend three stop nd filter it is completely color neutral so you can throw it on your camera and you have to worry about crazy white balance problems if you do longer exposures you're probably going to want to take a look at the six stop nd filter that one is purple and if you do any long time daylight exposures you're probably going to want to look at the 10 stop maven filter it is gold to remind you to use it during the daytime and heavy sunlight so quick question about uv filters for the most part i don't recommend them uv filters are a really splash and spray protectors to to protect the front of your lens they don't really offer great physical protection your lens hood is better for that but when i am using my very nice lenses down by the beach and i'm dealing with sand and dust and dirt or sea spray yeah i put it i put a splash guard on it and the maven splash guard will also be coming out later this year it's a very high-end splash guard you may not need it for what for what you're doing if you just want something cheap just buy you know a lower end one throw it on your lens the maven is silver makes it easier to identify for flash systems sony has some very expensive flash units i personally like the godox tt685s i demonstrate how to use that on my crash courses so again remember if you want the advanced course go to my blog let me know i need to see a certain number of people interested before i will make that which brings us to a quick discussion about lenses there's something really important to remember about sony lenses it is the e mount and because the a7c is full frame when you purchase lenses absolutely read the fine print to make sure it says f e full frame e mount now the reason why this is important is because sony has lots of e-mount cameras that are crop sensor aps-c if you use those lenses on your full-frame a7c you're going to get a cropped image it's going to be blurry and dark around the corners so we want to make sure that we're using full-frame e-mount lenses to take advantage of our sensor having said that you can use e-lenses on the a7c for various purposes cropped video not as many megapixels you can get away with it so if it's all you have i get it i actually have the 10 to 18 f4 for steadicam use and i use it all the time in crop mode why because it's a small light wide angle lens i can put it on that that gimbal and move it around and it gets almost coverage at around 13 millimeters so that's just something that i know from experience but for the most part you're looking for fe lenses the general purpose kit lens that ships with the a7c is great if you're just getting started if you didn't buy that you can purchase it i think it's a 28 to 60. it's a little bit more compact than some of the other kit lenses that we've seen like the 28 to 70 that's the one that i use uh you know just for a small general purpose shooting lens there are a number of lenses sony has a huge amount of lenses that we can now put on our e-mount cameras sony has basically four different classes there is the non-descript lenses the 50 millimeter 1.8 that's less than 200 bang for your buck it's a wonderful lens so the nondescript ones they have a number of those then they have the zeiss lenses that have been out for a long time and they're pretty good most of them are pretty good some of them are not the sharpest then they have the g series which are considered equivalent to canon's l class and then they have the g master which is considered the best of the best i shoot with the 24 to 72.8 g master uh for most my video work and then i have the 70 to 200 2.8 it's an it's incredible fantastic lens they are also both very expensive we also take a look at the 100 to 400 sony has a lot of really nice g master primes and zooms they are expensive if you're looking for a quality affordable lens i'd probably steer you towards the tamron 28 to 75 2.8 very highly reviewed a lot of people love that lens but you're gonna want a general shooter and then as you progress you're going to invest into a high-end lens specifically for what you are doing just remember the best investment that you can make for your photography is right here between your ears this is your brain the knowledge this is going to make the biggest difference and if you've enjoyed this tutorial and would like to see an advanced crash course on the sony a7c leave me some comments on my blog and say hey let me know when it's ready that's all i need to see and when i finish it it takes about six to eight weeks i will send you an email and it will be a game changer for you in any event i am michael andrew thank you guys so much for coming and i hope to see you in the facebook [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Michael The Maven

Views: 211,467

Keywords: Sony A7C, A7C, Sony Alpha

Id: ktTBhDSZQ2c

Length: 182min 33sec (10953 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021