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Display System

Lesson 7 from: Canon Rebel T4i / 650D/T5i Addendum Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

7. Display System

Lesson Info

Display System

We're gonna talk about the display system on the camera, which is basically the viewfinder and the lcd monitor on the back of the camera. So let's, start with the viewfinder display. And this is how you would normally shoot pictures for the camera. You hold it up to your eye. You look through the viewfinder, the view finder that you see when you look through the camera is ninety five percent accurate is not one hundred percent accurate. You were going to get a little bit mohr than you see in the viewfinder, so if you line up the very edge of the frame with the edge of the building, you're going to see a little bit beyond when you get your actual picture taken. And so it's just kind of a safety margin, so you don't cut off uncle dave's head. Next step, you will see the nine focusing points that we have already talked about in there. All of these are cross type, but they are the outer edge ones beyond the center one r on ly cross type with lenses that are two point eight and faster. The ...

center one is cross type with lenses that will go down to five point six s o the center one is in general, the best one in the one that I highly recommend selecting for many types of photography. The circle around that center point is the spot meter in area we haven't talked about me teary but there is different options for meter in and one of those options is the spot area it's a very personal small precise area in the middle and this just is just showing you where that is at the bottom is the led information you will never see it all it up like this thankfully, but this just kind of shows you the entirety of what's going on so let's just kind of run down the list of what you are seeing in here. There's a lot of warnings there's some important information first off the little asterisk means that you have pressed the a lock button if you recall the thumb buttons on the back of the camera means that you have locked that in and the exposure is locked. The flash ready light is the lightning bolt. Now I did say that the top shutter speed you could use is one two hundredth of a second. Can I totally lied to you on purpose? Generally two hundredth of a second is the highest speed, but if you do get one of their external flashing it's you can put it in a very special customize mode to get into faster shutter speeds. But there's a lot of little games you gotta play in order for that to work there is the other option of flash exposure locked I talk about I talked about this briefly when the flashes up pressing the asteroid button to do a test picture with the flash and then it's ready for the next picture. Flash exposure compensation. We're going to get into this a little bit more in a little bit. But you can lighten the flash or darken the flash highly recommend lessening the flash effect. The first big number siri's that we have here is the's shutter speed information. Next to that is our aperture information. And so in general, most of these are fractions. But it is not showing you the one over one one thousandth of a second, for instance. So if it says a thousand it's really won over one thousandth of a second, same thing with apertures we have our exposure level. I like to call this the light meter in the camera so it's showing you if you are overexposed under exposed or how much light is coming in the camera, the d plus is something called highlight tone priority. And this is just a warning that a feature has turned on that I will explain later next up we have our eyes so speed city it's you know you've gotten good at the camera when you can adjust your eyes so speed setting without taking the camera away from your eyes because the ice so button is right there in the dials there too, and if you're good, you can do it without moving the camera way save some time white balance the standard settings for white balance like fluorescent and tungsten can be adjusted fine tuned and this lets you know that you've gone in and fine tuned it not something I recommend but it's a good morning one of the options in the picture stiles is to shoot black and white images and this is something that you might want to know before you get your camera left in this mode when you go on vacation, all your pictures will come back black and white so just a little warning that you've made a major change in your camera. Now this next number is the maximum burst. This is the number of pictures that you can shoot at five frames per second at and this number may very depending upon what size the card you have in there but probably more likely it's just gonna be different whether you choose j pegs or ross if you have your camera set to raw there's a good chance that this number is going to be six so you can shoot through six pictures which is about one point two seconds worth of photography before the buffer fills up on your camera and your camera slows down to a slower rate of probably one or two shots per second. If you shooting j pegs, you're pretty much unlimited in the number of burst the burst that you can shoot so it depends on if you shoot j peg or raw and also this maximum burst is going to be affected by a couple of menu settings that we're going to get into after the break and then finally there's a focus confirmation. One of the ways that your camera confirms focus is by bp, which I think is really irritating on dso you can turn that beep off, I'll show you how to do that, but there is a little light in the viewfinder that turns on the lets you know that the picture is in focus, and the nice thing is that you can also use this in manual focusing and so if you have a manual focus lens or you just are manually focusing, you could just look for that light to turn green. All right, so that's, what you're going to see in the viewfinder next let's move over to the lcd monitor on the back of the camera there's lots of things that were going to be working with here, from dealing pictures to going through the menu system now you mentioned the quick control button the q button and we're going to come back to this now. So when you press this button this polls open I kind of think you know, the quickie mart in the simpsons you know, they got they got a little bit of your basic needs there. This is kind of the quickie mart of the camera, okay? They didn't have everything but it's got all the basic things you might need. S o if you press this, you're going to get the screen on the back and you, khun to make changes on here, you can use the cross keys or you can use the dial to make changes. So you press the cuba you navigate to whatever feature you want to change and what's kind of cool is you can just turn the dial to make a change or you compress the set button to kind of go into that mode to seymour information about that particular feature and then when you do have it all set up, you compress the set button so let's just kind of go through top to bottom what's going on in here, the top row of information is things that you were going to change typically someplace else on the camera, but you can do it in camera and you could even do it on the touch screen if you want exposure mode shutter speed aperture eyes so these are the really important things that you need to know about your exposure. Next up is our exposure of the light meter also our exposure compensation. So if you have your camera program you're doing a plus two compensation. You would see that with a little indicator moving below the zero the one in the two over on the right hand side is flash exposure compensation. There was a warning in the viewfinder. So let me explain a little bit more about this right now when you pop up the flash and the flash fires the flash fires with what the flash fires with what is called t tl which stands for through the lens, automatic flash technology and in general for people photography in my opinion and a lot of other people's opinion it's a little too much light. What would be good is if you powered it down a little bit by, say, one stop or two stops. And so if you plan to shoot people with the built in flash, I would highly recommend dialing it down to minus one and leaving it there the whole time here's another scenario and this one's a little bit trickier because she's got a dark top on and there's a dark background and the cameras trying to balance the flash with the background with the dark sweater and it doesn't do a very good job with standard t t l in fact, my preferred choice here is minus two, and so you may need to power the flash down quite a bit before you get a decent people picture, so I would leave it at minus one and maybe go down to minus two in some situations very rarely what I leave it at full t t l just a little tweak a lot of professionals will do with their own clashes and cameras. Ok, next up in the camera, we have our picture mode. Hey, didn't we see this before on the camera? When remember where we saw this there's a button on the back of the camera, the little cross keys once again, just at the quickie mart so that you can have quick access to it here with all your other functions. White balance once again, it's not the first time we've seen this there's a key on the back of the camera for it, white balance adjustment seems kind of a prominent place for this. This is not something I would recommend and going in adjusting, but you could tweet the pre set parameters for the white balance you could also do something called white balance bracketing, and this is where you would shoot a syriza pictures that have a slightly different color cast to them to hopefully getting unusual situation right another way around the solution which I prefer is just to shoot a raw image and adjust it later in the computer until it looks the way you want it to look auto lightning optimizer okay let me explain the theory on this one all right so you take a picture and we have to deal with different levels of light in many situations this picture suffers from the fact that the shadows are a little bit dark if we lightened up the shadows we could see what's going on there a little bit better which might be a good thing and so in some situations it would be good to have the lighter version of the shadows here and this is the theory of what auto lightning optimizer does is it plays around with lights and darks typically the most common thing it does is it brightens up the shadows and you might think well hey that looks pretty good let's turn that on and leave it on well the problem is is that not all shots look good when you lighten up the shadows it depends on the type of photography you do and your personal preference for the way your pictures turnout if you shoot raw this doesn't matter ok it's not going affect your images because you're getting the raw data off the image sensor but if you shoot j pegs you have the choice to turn it on or off my general feeling is to leave it turned off, but it depends on what you do and what what you need to have done to your photographs. Next up is flash control. We're going to get into this in the menu system, but this is where you can go in and control control some of the features about the way that flash works in its particular getting towards the bottom. We have our auto focus mode, which is duplicated from the button on the back of the camera that says a f same thing, just different place drive mode once again duplicated on the back of the camera arm eatery mode. This is the first time we've seen on how to change this, so let's talk a little bit more about the media remote. As light comes in through the lands, the camera has a number of different ways of working with the light. Evaluative is probably the most common system people are choosing today and it's, the one I would recommend in most situations. What it does is it breaks the scene up into many different areas, compares contrasts and comes up with one kind of nice, even solution for the whole picture, and in general it does a really good child. There is also a partial mode which contains a pretty highly concentrated area towards the middle. Where it's reading the light it's ignoring the things off to the side if you want to get really precise than you have the spot mode which is using that area just within the little circle that we talked about before and then traditionally on cameras many years ago they only had center waited, which is kind of a big fat spot in the center and some people just got very used to that. So they include that in there as kind of a legacy feature. Not too many people choose that most people are leaving their cameras and evaluative sometimes I'll use spot, but that's typically the only two that I will use ninety nine percent of the time evaluative one percent of the time spot. Then we come to that all important setting for file type. This is the type of file that your camera is writing to on the memory card and the choices we have here are j peg raw or a combination of the two the large medium small one small too small, three options those air all j peg options in general. I would choose if you're going to choose jay pick, I would choose the large fine quality which is in the top left of the choices there, and it has that smooth side, which means it's getting us fine of detail as problem as possible if you choose medium rather than getting eighteen mega pixels, which is what this camera is an eighteen megapixel camera, you only get eight megapixels, and if you choose small, you'll get anywhere between four megapixels in two and a half megapixels it's kind of designed for people who didn't have computers to resize their images, and so, in general, I would choose large j pig or I would choose wrong where you're going to get obviously, as much information is coming off a sensor. Now, you do also have the choice of shooting raw and a large j pigs, so every time you take a picture, you're going to get two copies of that picture on your memory card. There are a few special situations where this might work out for a special need that you have or you need two copies. You need j pegs right away, for instance, but for most people it eats up space on their memory card very quickly eats up space on their hard drive, and if you have the raw image, you can always create a jpeg image as long as you have a computer in a photo program like light room or photo shop for many other programs. So for anyone who's trying, tio, get the most out of this camera I would recommend. Large j peg and moving on to raw as they have the right software program because you do need to have the right software program in your computer. The camera comes with that in the box, but I'm not a big fan of the cannon software, but it can do it. Lots of other programs will do it as well down at the bottom just a reminder that there is a touch screen options down there so you could hit the cuba nor the return button and then we have just a little indication over on the right to let you know to make the dial. So once you're hovered over the image that are the icon of the feature you want to change, you can just turn the dial you don't have to dive in with the set button and use the cross keys. You could make very quick changes in the quick menu and that was maybe about fifteen minutes, so I think that puts a spot on for our break, right? Awesome. Can we take a couple more days to a few questions? Definitely. All right, we had a question about the focusing tumbleweed thirty three if you have the meeting mode set to evaluative and the auto focus set to centerpoint, does the auto focus point override the metering mode to spot metering? No, it does not auto focus and me during our separate issues and so you set your meter and you set your focus and they don't intermix so you know one of the things that people would get confused on if I choose thie left focus point that's not where it's going to meet her the meter in is always in the center. You could focus in any individual area want so separate issues the question from julian v is the focus system of the viewfinder different from the live you focus system? Yes, it isthe at first I was thinking she was asking about the dye achter of it, focusing the viewfinder just so it's clear so that you can see the screen first off let's make sure you want to have the doctor adjusted which is appearing the corner so that you can see through the viewfinder properly. But the focusing system when you look through here uses the nine focusing points when you put it in a live view, then you're using the two different areas for focusing. They have kind of a large area which is using contrast, which is so so and then it uses a face detection area. Fancy words in the middle that's, the fancy ferries that do a better job but still not as good as the nine point focusing when you have the camera held up to your eye, so if you want to focus quick for a still shot you want to have the camera held up to your eye like that? Okay, rocky folk let's see where's the corner um ok rocky ass focus confirmation appears on camera to come on only momentarily is that the way it's supposed to work? Let me double check on that so it's for make sure I'm in focus can return on well the focus light that I mentioned does stay on continuously as long as your fingers on halfway something additional that I didn't mention before along with the little chirchir red lights will briefly flash in the viewfinder when it comes in focus those air only on briefly but in the lower right hand corner the green light does stay steady as long as your fingers down and you may have just answered this but uh f l f l joe says does the camera have hidden focusing points like the came in five d and mark two wow they really know their stuff no it does not have any hidden focusing points focusing points in the viewfinder are pretty clearly outright and uh mg hewitt has a t two I she says that it shows how many photos you can shoot in the lower right corner where is that show that I'm the tea for I on the tee for I let me just turn my not it has it in the lower right hand corner of the screen on the back it does not show you the total number of pictures left in the viewfinder, but it does show it to you on the information screen on the back of the camera. Here. Okay, carrie, from new york, ask. Is there a way to turn off the shutter sound? It would be great for street photography. Thiss camera has a shudder unit. It has a mere it takes up a little bit of noise. There is a camera called the five d mark, three that has a very quiet shutter, but that's like the quietest one out there that cannon, yeah, at the camp, but this one does not know. Sorry, you can turn off the beep. You could turn off the red eye reduction s so that the camera is it, making a lot of displays, and so that's, a slight, wayto quiet your camera.

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Canon®T4i

Ratings and Reviews

user-bd4b1d
 

I always loved photography and even did a 12 year stint as a correspondent for a local newspaper, back in the 35 mm/film days. In 2005 I bought my first Canon, a Rebel XT. I had fun with it but never really knew what I was doing. I would get a good photo about 1 ever 100 shots, just from sheer luck. I bought a Canon Rebel T4i in Nov. of 2012 and having never taken a photography class, have been fumbling along with it ever since. When saw John's Photography Starter Kit, I immediately signed on and loved it. I was so thrilled when I saw he had specific classes for specific cameras and dove into this class, head first! It's like a dream come true! I love John's teaching style. He's concise, gets right to the point and doesn't waste time on needless fluff. I just bought this course yesterday and have already finished it and am ready to do it all over again, until I get it all right. I even learned something with the first glimpse of his slides and the photos of the T4i...I didn't know you could open the back screen, turn it around and re-seat it and have your display right there on the back of the camera without it sticking out and in the way! This course is going to be a huge help in getting the very most out of my camera. Thanks, John!

Getting a lot better
 

I am a huge fan of John Greengo. John is pretty much my Elvis. I learned everything, and I mean everything about this camera,though I kind of felt john could have been a little more enthusiastic about the T4i. I shoot mostly video with 4k super 35 cameras in raw. I understand top of the live vs. consumer grade. My point is, I think this camera deserved a little more enthusiasm than I felt it got. Throw a high quality lens on this machine and it is magnificent. The T4i is only entry level in price point. The photos I've taken with L-series lenses are stellar. Video is very acceptable as well, even with the H.264 codec. I would't have gotten that feeling after watching the video. From a leaning stand point this series of videos is worth the price and then some. I would just hate for people to walk away feeling they bought a toy. They most certainly did not.

Frank Siebert
 

Excellent course and superb tutor. I thought the pace of the tutorials was perfect. I was particularly impressed with the coverage of the course, which was extensive and thorough. I liked the tutorial so much that I have now purchased 3 more of John Greengo's courses.

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