Master Your Camera Basics: Kiss Shooting in AUTO Goodbye

1. Introduction: Hey guys, it's mass from final form agency. And in today's tutorial, we're gonna be covering all the camera basics for video and for photo. In specifics. We're gonna be covering about the setup, initial setup of the camera. Then we're gonna be talking about all the cameras settings for photo. And we're going to then go ahead and talk about all the settings for video. So let's go ahead and get started. 2. Basic Setup: Okay guys, so camera basics, this is the basic, basic setup. So before we fully jump into that, I wanted to talk about some common mistakes. Usually, this happens to every kind of person, beginner all the way through like a very seasoned videographer or photographer. And it usually is encompassed by three super common mistakes. Number one, You go ahead, you're super excited, you're ready to shoot. You go, you turn the camera on and you realize my screen as black. Why is my screen block? What's happening? My camera is not working, is my camera broken? And that's because you don't have a battery inserted in your camera, right? So number one is always make sure you have a battery inserted in your camera. To follow that up would be make sure that you have spare batteries. You don't want to be out shooting, and then your battery dies and you don't have any backup or you have to find somewhere where you can charge your camera. That's usually not going to be the best. It's going to interrupt your flow, especially if you're doing an event, something like that. Number two would be okay. You put the battery in your reading, you turn the camera on and you go ahead and you start shooting and you realize, why are my image is black. That's because you have your lens cap on. So remember, when you go ahead to shoot, make sure you take your camera cap off. And that's gonna be the number two. So last thing would be the third most common mistake. The third most common mistake is SD card. You go ahead, you shoot a couple images and you realize like after you probably shot 20, you go ahead and you want to look back at them and you realize there's only about five saved images, eight saved images. And you're like What's going on? I don't understand. And that's because you forgot to put your SD card in the camera. So the three most common mistakes at the beginning, especially is batteries, lens cap, and SD card. 3. Switching Lenses: So cameras setup. What you're gonna do is basically start shooting. You enjoy it and you have your lens. And you might realize, okay, how do I go ahead and take my lens off? Most of the time this happens when you go ahead and you want to expand your arsenal and you find yourself buying another lens or for some other people, the case will be they buy a bundle that already has the Camera Plus two lenses. So you're wondering, how do I switch from one lens to the other? Specifically, specifically for Sony and most of the time, all other cameras have the same way to go about this, which is there's gonna be a button. And for the Sony, it's right here next to the grip. And you're gonna usually click that button, hold it down and you're going to spin counterclockwise. And the lens, boom, just like this. It's kinda come off. So how about putting another lens on, right? So we would go ahead and do the same process just backwards. We're gonna go ahead, removes the lens caps. And what we're going to notice is most cameras like the Sony here, it has a button for Sony, it's white. We're going to want to match the buttons or the dots. I mean, you've got a white button here. You've got a white button here. And we're gonna go ahead, match them. Then what we're gonna do this time is we're going to be turning it clockwise. Once again, you'll hear a little click. And that's how you know the lens is n. So another thing that we want to cover is usually when you have a telephoto lens, for example, you'll notice that it has a screw mount, the lens specifically. And in that case, if you're using a tripod, what you're gonna wanna do is you're going to want to mount the lens and onto the tripod and not the camera, because it's going to put way less stress on the camera than it would on the lens. And so that's how you would go about mounting a telephoto lens to a tripod instead of just giving it once again, just this extra strength or stress, I mean, to the camera itself. 4. Lens Uses: Now that we've covered switching or interchanging your lenses, we're going to talk about uses generally, right? So with a 50, what's its main usage? Its main usage would be, you can use it for events. You can use it for portraiture, specifically this one because it has an f-stop of 1.8. So you can get some really nice bow k, which is the blurring. And it would make portraiture look really nice. And once again, you can use it for events. It's usually a lens that most people start out with and it's definitely great lens. We're gonna be moving on to another incredibly versatile lens, which is the 20th 70. This lens honestly has so many different usages. You can use it for landscapes, you could use it for portraiture as well. Street photography, street videography. It's incredibly great lens to add to your arsenal, to have its versatility, it's uses or so, so limitless, this could go from different price ranges. Usually the ones that have a lower F-stop are gonna be in the higher price point and higher price ranges versus the ones that have higher f-stops are gonna be usually a bit cheaper. So that's also another thing to look out for when you're seeing why does this line is cost a third of this other one? And usually it'll all have to do with the f-stop associated with the lens which is located. Once again, the blurriness around the image, our lens cap is off, which already. 5. SD Cards: Our lens cap is off, which already did that. The battery is in. Alright. Last thing we're gonna do is make sure that our SD card is in. I wanted to take one moment to talk about SD cards. So I would use as a base 64 gigs. I encouraged strongly, especially if you're shooting video to get SD cards that are way, have way more capacity in 64 gigs. Another thing that I wanted to talk about is speeds. The Sony A7 R2, for example, has a speed of 95 megabytes a second. So if you're buying one that has an SD card that has anything lower than that, you're not gonna be able to access the camera's full features. For example, one thing would be the continuous shooting feature, and another one would be shooting in for K for video. So now that we've covered that, let's go ahead and start the SD card. 6. ISO: So we're gonna be talking about ISO. Iso, what does it do? It determines how much light you're gonna be letting in or not. So for example, if you put the ISO at 4 thousand, you're gonna be letting more light in. Then if per se, you're gonna be putting it at a 100. You guys see how it gets darker. And the higher the ISO, the more light it lets in. We're gonna go ahead and do an example. Right now, we're going to shoot at 8 thousand ISO. And as you can see, the image is incredibly overexposed and bright. Next, we're just going to be shooting it with a super low ISO of. Let's go ahead and pick 250. And the exact opposite of that would be happening, which is the image is incredibly underexposed. So ISO once again determines the Amana light that you let N. Another thing about ISO is the higher you push it, the more grain you will have. So I would say for Sony, for example, I would not push it more than 6400 because that's already generally pretty high ISO if you want to keep it ideal and incredibly perfect, I would not go anything over 2500. So with that, what you will, but once again, I wouldn't go anything over 6400 or else you're gonna be starting to have a lot of grain and kinda keep the range usually below that if you can, depending on the setting that you're in. 7. F Stop: Now we're gonna go ahead and cover f-stop and what its purpose and function is. So basically, what is F-stop? F-stop is focal length. Focal length. It's basically in numbers. We start 1.82.4. It can go in different increments. It can go in a third of a stop of an increment or in half stop increments. So these numbers calculate the aperture and the focal length. So the smaller the number is, for example, 1.8, the more these blades are open, letting more light in the camera and less field of focus. So you're going to have a very specific field of focus when you're shooting F1 0.8 versus when you're shooting f 1414, the blades are going to be a bit more closed, but you're going to have more field of focus. Getting a wider range of focus versus 1.8, which is going to have a very specific field of focus. Also, the blades are way more open, allows more light to come in. 8. Shutter Speed: Shutter speed. It's used for what specifically, if we're gonna go into the details of it, Sports Photography is going to be shot in high shutter speed because it's very high motion stuff going on. For example, anything from basketball, football, hockey, all of that stuff. You really need to capture the action. And the only way you do that, obtaining a crisp image because you're not going to want a blurry image. It's not going to look as flattering would be shooting with a fast shutter speed versus time-lapse photography. Or if you guys have seen a lot of the images of highways, There's a lot of light streaks and stuff going on that is going to be shot with incredibly low shutter speeds. With that, we could even get into the minutes. That's how long the shutter would be open. And it would just let all this light in. And that's what would make for that image of those streaks that you guys could see going on. Versus once again, sports photography. Another instance could be nature photography, wildlife. When you guys see all those beautiful pictures, most of the time, the animal is not just waiting for the photographer posing. It's taken at incredibly high shutter speeds to capture that specific moment. 9. Taking an evenly lit photograph: Now that we've covered all these different aspects, what we're gonna do is we're gonna be taking a correctly exposed photo. Before we really get into that, what I wanted to kinda show you guys is this, this plus 0.7. This is the light meter that's within your camera. We're going to be further talking about this in more depth. But basically 0 means it's perfectly exposed. Versus this. Plus 0.7 means it's overexposed by close to a stop, 0.7 of a stop versus one. It's in minus 0.7. For example. Now, you see it's 0.7. It is underexposed by close to a stop. So with that, we're gonna go ahead and change up the settings. So in this scenario, specifically the one thing that we'd want to kinda touched last would be the ISO. We'd want to figure out the f-stop first, the shutter second, and then we're going to be compensating with the ISO last versus in a sports or nature setting, one of the first things that you're gonna go ahead and do is focus on the shutter speed first. Then you're going to be going ahead determining your f-stop. And then once again, the last thing you're gonna do is use the ISO to compensate your desired setting. So there's no such thing as fully underexposure are really overexposed. I mean, that is a thing, but at the end of the day, it also depends on your looked at you're trying to go for it, for this basics, we're going to be covering perfectly exposed images because at the beginning, that is definitely where you're going to want to go after. And then from there, as you gain more experience, you can kinda figure out an aesthetic and a workflow that works more for you and the aesthetic that you or your clients kinda want to strive for. So with that, we're going to go ahead right now and lower the ISO because it's blasted at about 8 thousand. For this example, I would not want to go with anything. Hi, I'm gonna go with 320, which is really low. You're not going to have much grain at all. And it's going to look crisp because especially with this product, you want to highlight it and not have any issues with grain. Then I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to put the f-stop all the way down because I want the field of focus to be specific to the bottle. And I want to have this nice bow King effect around it, which is the blurring. Now I'm gonna go ahead and fix my shutter. I'm going to probably put my shutter at a 100 in 25th of a second, 1 125th of the second. So as you guys see right now, it's still underexposed by a third of a stop. So let's see, go up to 400 and it's perfectly exposed. So we're gonna go ahead and take a picture. And that's how you have a perfectly metered, perfectly exposed image. 10. Drive Modes: Now we're gonna go in to some of the functions. The little bit more nitty-gritty of the settings, which is there's different styles and different types of Dr. modes that you can use, meaning single shooting. What is single shooting? Single shooting would be it's gonna be taking one image at a time. So even if I hold it down, it's only going to take one image. Versus versus. If we go ahead and we put it into continuous shooting, what's going to happen is as I hold the shutter button down, it's going to keep taking pictures. This would be used for what? Once again, either nature photography or it's gonna be used for sports because of the action. You want to make sure that as you're holding the shutter down, you can get the most out of your shots, the most action-packed, because this stuff is happening so quick that you can't just be clicking the button every time and every time you hit the shutter, expect to catch the most perfect bits of the action. So what you would do is you'd just go ahead and you'd basically get a wider range of shots, which would not happen if for example, you go ahead and you're just like, Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and shoot sports. And I'm gonna do it with single shooting mode. That's gonna be insane guys. You're going to have to be going like this. And that's just not that's just not going to work. And it's not what you'd want to use. It's not going to maximize what you want to go after. 11. White Balance and Creative Styles: So we're going to go ahead and talk about is white balance and why it's important. So white balance, if you're, for example, in a team and you guys are shooting an event where you'd wanna do is you'd want to go into the custom white balance and decide altogether, okay, what are we going to shoot it at? For example, 60,500 Kelvin. So the higher you go with temperature, the cooler it is. So the higher the number associated with the cooler it is, and the more blue it looks versus the lower the numbers are. And the Kelvin temperature is, the more warm it's going to be, and the more yellow It's going to look for the rest. If you guys are just starting out and you're just trying to figure out, oh man, what should my temperature v Kelvin temperature be for this scene or for this other scene? I wouldn't even worry about it. Just go ahead and pick Auto and just stick with that. That would be more of a post-processing thing that we will then cover in a different video. But for right now, we're going to be sticking with this. Another thing that I wanted to cover is basically creative styles. Do not use this feature. This feature is absolutely useless. I don't even know why they do it. I would not tell anybody to use this. Once again, like I just said, that'd be more of a post-processing thing. I would not just highly, highly do not recommend it. I would just keep it in standard or if you like vivid and I'm just kidding, standard. And that is covering creative styles. 12. Metering Modes: Okay guys, so we're gonna be talking about metering. So this is basically spot metering would be more so if you're trying to have a correct exposure on a specific things such as the bottle or product, then you would do Center for generally the same thing. It's almost in the center and that's where it would be metering for. Or multi isn't gonna be more of the general scene. And that's what it's gonna be metering for. I'm going to keep it in spot because we want to make sure that specifically our product has correct exposure. So you're going to be covering the focus areas. There's different focus areas that you can do. You could do a flexible spot, which is once again would work well with spot metering as well. Which is when you click it, you go ahead and you decide a spot that you want to focus on. We had clicked this which would lock it into place. And then we're gonna be focusing more for that spot versus if we're doing Center, that will be there all pretty self-explanatory. That's going to be more so focusing for the center area versus zone is going to be more. Throw a panel and wide is wide. All these different settings that we've covered would get you up and running and getting nice images and covering even more than the basic outset to really make sure you get well exposed images. You know generally what you're doing, how to adapt your settings in based of different scenarios that you might be in. We've talked about different lenses and what you'd want to use for different occasions. We've talked about shutter speed, ISO, f-stop metering. We've talked about all this stuff, which is just going to get you guys more than up and running. And the more you practice, the more this is going to come natural and the easier it will all be. And just getting up and running and gunning and just taking a bunch of different pictures, getting nice images, getting crisp images. 13. Getting into Video Mode: Okay, So Nick here and I'm gonna be giving you the rundown for the video mode. It mostly covers pretty much the same thing. So you already know what each thing does like shutter, f-stop, and ISO. But the first step to get into video mode is you should actually go to video mode on the camera. But usually it's a little film, film strip, film reel. And you can already tell that it instantly changes your composition. Usually the photos are like three by four, but the video is 16 by nine. And there's most cameras don't even have an option to change that. So just keep that in mind if you're trying to switch quickly between taking photos and taking videos. 14. Understanding Shutter speed and Frame Rate: The first thing that I would do is I would actually our shutter is really high, so it's supposed to be about double your frame rate. So if you're shooting 24 frames per second, you should try to keep it at about 50. Or if you're shooting 30 frames per second and you should try to keep it at 60. So that usually prevents you from getting weird flickers. So if you're in a room that's using LED lights that are eco-friendly, they usually have a low refresh rate. So if you're shooting at a, at a high shutter speed, so I'll show you that in a second. You're going to get weird flickering lights. So if I start cranking up my shutter, you can already see we're getting these weird streaking lights. This weird like scanning line effect. And that is happening exactly because of the high shutter. We're just kinda capturing the light as it's refreshing. So let's go ahead and drop this down to 50. And let's go into our settings and take a look at what frame rate we're shooting in. As Max mentioned before. If you don't have a fast enough SD card, you won't be able to shoot at for k, because you can see here that for the four K settings, this one is a 100 megabytes a second, and the other option is 60 megabytes per second. So depending on your SD card, it will limit you to different different rates that you can record it at. So I'm gonna go ahead and yeah, I think I'll keep it at 25. So let's go ahead and set our shutter at 50. Or videos now overexposed. So I'm going to drop down the ISO. This looks pretty good. Let's try to frame our little video. Perfect. So sometimes depending on what kind of lights are in your environment, you can still get get, get those weird effects, so you might not notice it now. But right here you can see on this blue light that you're still getting the flickering. So I would drop it down. There you go. 40 completely gets rid of it. So keep an eye out for that. There are some plugins you can usually do to fix it in post, but they cost money and we all like to save money. So just try to do it on the shooting day and try to get everything done in camera. That's pretty much it for the settings to make sure that your thing is correctly exposed. Sometimes you can see, even in this example, our shutter is at 140, or F-stop is 1.8, and our ISO is 100, so everything is pretty much at the lowest. And the video still looks a little break. And in situations like this, without raising the shutter speed, you could either compensate by putting the F stuff up. But if you still want your video blurry, you could get a thing called an ND filter. And that basically darkens, darkens the glass and it reduces the amount of light that's coming in. So you can still have lowest ISO, the most amount of blurred depth of field, still having a low shutter speed. So if you think you're, if you think your image is too bright and you're still at the lowest settings, you can always get an ND filter. 15. Color Profiles: So the next thing that I would do for video is right now VR in a normal color profile. And what that usually means is what your camera's getting is literally what it's getting. Where if you go into something like S log, you can actually get more color range in your video. But that also means you have to color graded in post. So if you're doing something for social media, usually you can just shoot in the normal standard mode, since you're gonna be trying to get it out quickly into the Internet compared to something where you're shooting a documentary or a wedding, you could shoot an S log. And that's going to give you more color, depth and more more things you can do in post with the color to really create a stylistic look. So as you can see here, v are in the regular color profile in standard. But I can go ahead and show you the difference with S log. So here you can see all the differences between the different color profiles. And usually I just stick to S log when I'm doing video, it gives you the most amount of color range that you can get. And you can really see the difference between S log here and and normal. 16. Crop Sensor: Now the next thing is, some cameras have this, especially mirrorless cameras like Sony's, is you can actually crop in and crop out using the sensor, which you can find in the settings as super 35. And we have it turned on. If you have, if you turn that off, you're going to see, you're going to have more of the image in our picture. So we're going to have a wider shot. There you go. So you can really see the difference between on and off. So this kind of allows you to be more flexible with your lenses. You can carry 50 millimeter lens like this one. And with a switch of a button, instantly turn it into an 85 millimeter lens. So this kind of gives you a quick easy access without losing quality, you're still shooting for k and you're not digitally zooming in, you're just using a different part of the sensor. 17. Sound: And then the last thing that I would want to cover is the sound. So you can always have a great, great, great video, but it can sound pretty bad. So you just got to always watch out for your audio levels. And as you can see here, they're showing up here. And you can always go into your settings and find, depending on what camera you're using, audio recording level. And I usually try to make the talking or just any general sound be at around negative six decibels. So usually you can just find negative three and then just needs to be a little bit below that. If you start seeing things going into the red, that is really bad. You're losing information there. And there's gonna be no way to bring it back. It's just going to sound really distorted. So try to keep it. Just generally try to keep it in the middle. Don't keep it to load, don't keep it too high. Just watched the bars and make sure that the sound is getting picked up. And then always the mix in cameras are usually really bad. So I would suggest either getting a laugh mike if you're doing interviews or one of those little shotgun mikes that you can get there like $17 on Amazon just to start with and anything. Honestly, anything is better than in camera Mike. So having some kind of mic is really good. 18. Outro: Alright, now that you know these video features and how to work with them, your assignment is gonna be to shoot some clips. Once again, try to keep them exposed, to try to keep them perfectly exposed. And let's hope we don't see any of the weird shutter streaking from light. So I'll know if you're using too high of a shutter speed indoors. So I can't wait to see the videos. You guys will get.