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Auto Focus System

Lesson 8 from: Canon Rebel T6s/T6i Fast Start

John Greengo

Auto Focus System

Lesson 8 from: Canon Rebel T6s/T6i Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

8. Auto Focus System

Next Lesson: Using Flash

Lesson Info

Auto Focus System

00:00:02.05 --> 00:00:07. Next up is our f area selection, and this is going 00:00:07.81 --> 00:00:09. to be a little bit more involved because there's a 00:00:09.24 --> 00:00:11. lot of options when it comes to focusing so let's, 00:00:11.53 --> 00:00:15. dive in to this cameras focusing system. Now this 00:00:15.55 --> 00:00:18. camera is using a new nineteen point focusing system, 00:00:18.75 --> 00:00:22. which has been kind of a hand handed down from the 00:00:22.08 --> 00:00:26. seven d, which is their top of the line. A psc model 00:00:26.27 --> 00:00:28. camera. And so it's a camera that I've actually used 00:00:28.75 --> 00:00:31. for many, many years and found an excellent for sports 00:00:31.01 --> 00:00:33. photography. And so for those of you shooting this 00:00:33.47 --> 00:00:36. rebel who are doing sports photography, this is definitely 00:00:36.47 --> 00:00:39. the best rebel, because it has the best focusing system 00:00:39.19 --> 00:00:39. on it. 00:00:41.79 --> 00:0...

0:45. So in order to operate and adjust these focusing points, 00:00:45.73 --> 00:00:48. what you're going to be doing is pressing the area 00:00:48.5 --> 00:00:51. button right next to the ias odile and then you'll 00:00:51.71 --> 00:00:54. be there turning the main dial or using the quick 00:00:54.08 --> 00:00:58. control dial or the up down left right no controls 00:00:58.1 --> 00:01:00. on the back of the camera so we're going to press 00:01:00.2 --> 00:01:02. it once toe activate the feature and then we're going 00:01:02.65 --> 00:01:05. to press it again to change it I'll show you here 00:01:05.09 --> 00:01:08. on the camera in just a moment if you have one of 00:01:08.01 --> 00:01:11. the options where you can choose an individual spot 00:01:11.6 --> 00:01:15. or a group of spots you khun move those spots up down 00:01:15.25 --> 00:01:17. left and right to different parts of the screen so 00:01:17.59 --> 00:01:20. if you wanted somebody on the left side of the screen 00:01:20.35 --> 00:01:23. that was moving around you could focus just on that 00:01:23.08 --> 00:01:26. left side of the screen and so you'll be able to do 00:01:26.25 --> 00:01:29. this either with the quick control dial or the touch 00:01:29.98 --> 00:01:32. pad in the back of the camera or you'll be able to 00:01:32.56 --> 00:01:35. do it with the dial control on the top of the cameras 00:01:35.18 --> 00:01:38. so there's redundant controls on this camera 00:01:39.15 --> 00:01:42. so we have three different ways that we can focus 00:01:42.62 --> 00:01:45. on this camera we can focus with a single point a 00:01:45.74 --> 00:01:49. group of points called the zone or nineteen auto focus 00:01:49.14 --> 00:01:53. points and so in the single point a f we have any 00:01:53.33 --> 00:01:56. one of the nineteen different focusing points that 00:01:56.21 --> 00:01:57. we can choose 00:01:58.09 --> 00:02:00. and so let's go ahead and do a little live demo on 00:02:00.16 --> 00:02:04. our camera here and so fire our camera up and so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hit this button once to activate the feature and then I'm going to hit it once again so that I cycle through the three different options in here so once I get to the one point then I can move the sensor anywhere I want now I can go with the dial and I can use the dial as well but I tend to just prefer to do the up down left and right it's very intuitive so I can choose one specific point to be activated now you will see this when you look through the viewfinder we won't see it here on the back of the camera but when I press this button you'll be able to see this come up I just case anyone's wondering there saying, well, this isn't coming up for me and what I did is I hit the info button normally this is not turned on so that it saves battery power so that you guys can see what I'm doing I'm hitting the info button once twice let's try this again off we have the one screen we'll talk about this one later and I'm on this screen right here and so that when I hit this button I can see it in the back of the camera now sometimes I do want to focus on someone or something off to the side of the camera and I will just put it over here and leave it over there for a bit to work with but generally if I'm going to use the single point I prefer to use the centre one it it's a little bit higher quality focusing point on this camera not by much but it's a little bit higher quality focusing point in its accuracy levels but it's just a nice simple place to have the controls is right there in the middle okay back on the kino next option is our zone a f and this is really good for action photography keeping a single point on a subject that's moving around is just way too hard and having a group of points makes this much easier to work with and so this is my preferred system when shooting action photography so let's go back to the camera and activate are focusing system cups wake our camera activate the focusing system press it wants to go to the zone I can turn the dial and rotate around all the different options I can use the touch pad on the back to go up down and left and right and so we have nine in the middle or less as we go up and down off to the side and so yes I'll set it up here in the middle. A lot of the time but if I want him off to the left or right eye will just simply move him over there and you will see the same information looking through the viewfinder and so that's one of the things you should be getting good at if you own this camera is you don't want to be holding the camera out away from you to do these things you want to be able to be looking through the camera pressing the button making all your changes so that you have to you can minimize this time going back and forth you want to be able to control the camera in its ready position so the final mode on this is the all nineteen point mode and this is where it will choose whatever it confined within that nineteen point focusing area in order to focus this is a very simplistic system the problem here is that with nineteen focusing points they're goingto land different areas some subjects might be closer to you some might be further away and the default system built into this camera as in all the cameras is that focuses on whatever is closest to the camera and that may or may not be what you want in focus if you were to just hand the camera to somebody toe take pictures I would probably put it in this nineteen point autofocus mode because that is nineteen opportunities for them to grab and focus on something whereas a more experienced photographer I would recommend the zone or the single mode so that they could be very specific about what they want and focus is that this person or this item that you want and focus and choosing that single point is going to give you the greatest level of accuracy in doing that so that's our auto focus system now it just kind of ah additional word on how this is working what it's doing this camera uses a system called a phase detection autofocus system and what this does is it looks for lines it needs lines in which to focus and these sensors are often sensitive to either vertical or horizontal lines depending on the camera now if you have older rebel cameras the information I'm about to give you in general is accurate but as faras the specifics of your camera it is different in some cases the sensors on cameras are vertical line sensors which means they're looking for vertical lines like a tree trunk that's going up and it's going to be able to focus on that maury's alie than a horizontal line one of the things that's really nice about this new six I and six s camera is that all of the focusing points are known are known as cross type focussing sensors which means that they are sensitive to both horizontal and vertical lines this is not the case on previous canon rebel cameras many of the outer points on the previous cameras were on ly sensitive to horizontal or vertical lines and in this case all of them are very good so this is by far the best action sports photography of the rebel cameras now I did mention that the middle point is kind of extra good it is known as an f two eight high precision vertical f point sensor, which means if you have a lens that is faster or two point eight or faster in its aperture setting it has an extra level that it can go to to check focus to make sure it's right with subjects that have a vertical line running through it. And so the lens that I have on here just we'll be using throughout the class is the fifty millimeter, one point eight that's faster than two point eight. So I do get an additional level of accuracy with this and that's exactly when you need that exact that additional level of accuracy is when you do have these lenses that go for very shallow depth of field so once again in review we have three different focusing systems. Single zone and nineteen point wake your camera you're going to press the auto focus selection once to activate it and then once again to cycle through the different modes on it. If you are choosing single or his own point, you can use the dial on the back of the camera or the up down left right to choose where you want that individual or group of points and then you can also turn the main dial on the camera as well to kind of rotate through some of those options and so that's the different focusing system is a little bit more complex a little bit more involved than in the previous rebels but a very good system that should serve a lot of different types of photographers in a lot of different types of photography all right, so here is kind of the weird thing is that there is a unnecessary appendage on this camera it doesn't really need to be here there's an a half point selection in the back of the camera and this is where the button is on all of the other upper in canon cameras and so they kind of felt that they needed to include it here because it's on all the other cameras and if we want to go to a live camera to show the back of the camera I'll show you that this is not a necessary but so let's wake our camera and so with traditional canon cameras what you would do is you would hit this thumb button up here tto activate the focusing system well on this camera they have located that button just tilt the camera here so that you can see it up here on the top of the camera and so both of these buttons do exactly the same thing in the sense of activating the focusing system. The problem is, is that if you hit the back button, all it does is turn it on and off. Let me let that go to sleep and show you the difference with the top button is if I hit this again, I am allowed to cycle through the different modes and so with the rebel camera, this back button here is an on and off but it's really an unnecessary button that you don't ever need to use in the shooting mode because it's a it's a complete duplicate but as you move to higher in cameras, they'll be a slightly different system for for working with the camera and you will activate the focusing system here and then you'll maybe used the dial's or some other buttons depending on the type of camera that you have and so very rare that we get an extra button on the camera we do on this one. Okay, what do we got next? Oh, there's little icon up there that looks like the planet saturn that is the focal plane mark that's. If you need to know exactly where the sensory is in the camera occasionally in certain types of movie filming or macro photography, you need to be very precise about the distance to the sensor and if you need to know where it is that's how to measure

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Ratings and Reviews

Jen Hubbenator
 

Feeling pretty good about my T6s purchase! John's teaching style was fabulous, and I am left feeling pretty confident and a lot less overwhelmed!

rodrigo andrade
 

Great Class! John Greengo is an amazing teacher. I have a t6i for like 6 months and this class helped me a lot. Totally worth the money!

a Creativelive Student
 

As a student of John's for the past 2 years with the Fundamentals of Photography, the Nikon D3300 and D5500, I recently traded my Nikon D3300 for the Canon EOS Rebel T6i. As always, the training was superb, easy to understand, and I feel better in being able to use a digital camera. The reason for the switch in manufacturers was because of the ease of use of the Canon. I look forward to referring back to the lessons if I need a refresher course. Thank you, John. Your teaching is starting to click, finally.

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