The M50 is an interchangeable lens camera. That means you can add lenses to it.
Usually it comes with this 15 to 45 millimeter lens. Basically called a kit
lens. It's pretty simple. It works decently well. Gives you some zoom on
there. Let's put it on. Got this little white dot. Line it up with the white
dot on the lens. Rotate... that's it! You also have to undo this little travel
lock thing here. Otherwise it just won't work. Do the same thing to lock it down again.
You can see when the lens is locked you can't do anything the camera
besides going into the menus if you want. However we undo the lock and at that
point you can use the camera. On the top of the camera you have the mode dial. It's
very important for using the camera. We are in the automatic mode. It's got a
green icon with a little 'A' inside. We can go to program, shutter priority, aperture
priority, full manual, video mode. And we've also got the creative filters,
scene modes, and also the hybrid auto. We're gonna focus only on this automatic
mode today. You can see in the menus you can hit a little drop-down. Get some more
information about each setting. So if you went to program.. Hit the drop-down, gives you a
little more information. Let's go back to the main automatic mode. So it's called
"Scene Intelligent Auto". This is a very basic mode. It gives you some ways to adjust
the photos, but if you want to learn more about actual photography with the main
settings: shutter, aperture, ISO.. you don't want to use this mode all the time. You
want to eventually grow from this mode. But this is a basic one. It's a good
starting point to just use your camera properly. Get some decent photos out of it.
In this automatic mode you have very limited setting. But you can adjust things.
Let's go into this little icon down here. See that gives you a few options. Also
have a setting enabled to give you some more information on that. You can hide
that if you want. Background blur, brightness, contrast, saturation, color
tone, color tone, and monochrome. Also use the flash if you want by physically
popping it up. The most important thing about cameras is focal point. With lenses
like this, with cameras like this.. they have a large sensor. There will be a
difference between what is in focus and what is not in focus usually,
depending on your aperture. You can actually adjust that in the settings here.
So we go into background blur. You can do fully blurred or sharp. What that is doing is
changing the size of the hole in the lens to give you more depth of field. You
can learn about that in the future, but basically it gives you a simple.. simple way
to adjust background blur. You can see when I select different areas of the photo...
This becomes blurry because it's in the foreground and the background. So if we
go back to that blur setting, we can see that it does help this foreground object when we
switch from blurred to sharp. But there is only so much it can do in this setting.
It's really important. You need to learn that in your photography. You
want to control where the focal point is. Certain situations it won't be as big of
a deal, but in this case these things are very close to the camera so you can see
a very big difference between what is in focus and what is out of focus.
So in the background that 'P' is in focus when I touch it, and the little figure here is
in focus when I touch it. This little icon on the top here you can undo whatever selection
you made. And just let the camera try to focus. See, it makes it a little white box
where it's trying. And you can also decide. Cancel it out. Works pretty nicely!
You have a few different settings here on the side. So one for single shooting
high speed continuous.. timers. The second icon is image quality. in here we can do
JPEGs and RAWs. Basically, JPEGs are images that are pre-done for the most
part. And just take those. You can have those printed automatically. And the RAW
images are much larger. They give you a lot more flexibility. But you need
special software to deal with those. Now, if you want to kind of future-proof
yourself, you can do both of them at the same time. Which I would suggest. And you
just use the JPEGs until you feel comfortable trying to work with the RAW
images. So these are different quality levels for the JPEGs. 'L' with the
nicest little icon there is the best one. And then it goes down into lower
qualities. And then also press the info button to
go into the RAW images. You have regular raw and compressed. Compressed just gives
you a little bit more space. You don't use as much for each image, but it is
good to do RAW if you can. If you have large cards, it's not a problem. This icon here
is for automatic shutter. When it's on you can just press the screen and it will
take a photo. So I'll just tap the screen here. It automatically takes a
picture where I wanted it to in that focal point.
I personally don't like that,
but you can turn it on if you want. If you don't want to keep pressing this
little icon on the screen, you can use this 'Q' Set button to pop up the menu.
Let's go into brightness. So in brightness it's pretty self-explanatory...
The darker the darker and you just go to brighter if you need that. What you want to
look for here is things what are really super bright or super dark. That won't be
great for the photo. So you want to turn it down a little bit, maybe. It really
depends on the situation. So if you just want to fine-tune your photos a little
bit you can do it with this. Or reset it right there. This big area here you can
see it's changing. As I put more brightness in the photo or less. That's
called the histogram. Basically you've got one side which is dark. One side which is
light. You want to get it in the middle. Kind of a nice little curve, but that way
if you want to adjust the brightness... You look at this histogram. See it's a very
dark photo right now. It's having a little bit of peaking in some areas, but a lot
of it's super dark. So we go back into this menu. Change the brightness.
See it did change a little bit. It took some of this darkest area kind of expanded it to
this side. So you can adjust the brightness and deal with this little
histogram to kinda improve your exposures. With contrast you have low and high. You
can see an example here. Changes how it looks. You can see more in this photo.
It's not super dark or super light. However, go to the other side, it gets very
extreme. This is very... The blacks are very dark.
The lights are very light.
So you can adjust that as you'd like.
These only apply to the JPEG photos, of course.
Same thing with saturation, but in
this case it's colors instead of luminance. With neutral we've got the
colors very muted. We go up to vivid. The yellow gets much more yellow. Color
tone... We can mess with these. This is basically white balance. So we you can see it's a
very blue image. Or if you want it a little warmer you can go to amber.
But all these are very self-explanatory. Same one with the second adjustment. If you
want more magenta or more green in your photo, you can go to each one of
these and adjust them as you would like.
And monochrome is pretty self-explanatory. You can add
kind of that sepia look if you want there. A classic look of
no colors or one color.
You can see this little flashing arrow. That basically means that
the camera thinks you want to use your flash. What we can do there is just pop it up
physically, and then take a photo. Uses the flash automatically. See it's not
great. It's something to use with caution. It is an option if you see that little
icon show up. That's basically telling you you might want to use your flash. So
we've got one photo and other... Very different looking!
So this is the one with the flash. This is the one without. There are few things
you might want to change into your menus. Down here the menu icon.. Press that so
you have four different tabs. You can actually go into a more advanced menu
system if you want. On this fourth tab. What you do is just press ok on this screen. It'll
switch between standard and guided.
Once you go it there.. Switch here to standard...
See it just looks different. It doesn't have that large screen. So go back into the
menu. This is the standard look, but you can also change it back to the guided.
Let's just do guided for now. Let's go back into the menu, and you have the four tabs.
One setting for functions. One for playback, and one for standard photo
settings. Let's go into the first tab. Standard settings...
One thing you might want to turn on is this eye detect autofocus.
You can see it's give you some information If you hover on that...
So you enable it. It'll allow you to
press on a person's face. It'll pick up their face potentially, and it'll be a
little bit easier. A little bit more consistent when taking photos of people.
You can also disable the camera from automatically trying to focus all the
time. It'll save battery life, but it won't be as consistent.
You can see the
camera is not trying to constantly gain focus on something in the scene. So
that's one option if you want to try that out.
One thing you could turn on and off is this auto focus assist beam. There's a
little light on the front of the camera that will help you focus in dark
situations. It can be obnoxious. It can be distracting to people that you're trying
to take photos of. I would suggest disabling it unless you really need to
use it. One thing you probably want to check out are these touch-and-drag
autofocus settings. When this happens is that when you're specifically using the
viewfinder only you can use the back screen to adjust your focus. Tapping on
the screen as the camera is up to your face, and adjust the focus point.
In the IS settings some lenses have stabilization in them. Basically true avoid shake
your photos. Now, this specific lens does have that in the lens and it is
automatically enabled. And in this specific mode on the camera you can't
disable it. However this digital IS is related only
to video. You can enable or disable that if you want. If the digital IS is enabled,
but you do lose a little bit of your framing. See it doesn't crop in nearly as
much with it disabled. But there will be more shake in your video files. Here you
can adjust which type of video modes you want.
I'd suggest simply using the 1080p 30 frames a second. Now, if your are in
Europe. You can actually adjust the camera to use those settings like 25
frames a second if you want. But you have to go into a different menu area. In the
function settings, page 3, it says for NTSC on this video system. You can go to for PAL.
The PAL region, which is 25 or 50 frames a second. Instead of the 30 and 24. Let's
go into function settings a little bit here. One thing to keep in mind is
the format card. So when your SD card... If you wanna clear out all the files you
can use this to do that. Just be careful, of course. And then also you have your
wireless settings for an app on your phone if you want to use that.
On page 4 of the function settings if you don't want to use the viewfinder at all you
just want to use the back screen... You can actually set it to manual. And set it to
either the screen or the viewfinder. So if we do screen here... You can see when I put my
finger over the sensor it's not going to switch to the viewfinder. So that's
pretty much it. There are basic settings here in this
mode. If you want to go into program. Or one of the other ones like shutter, aperture, ...
full manual which is what I use usually on this camera those are options.
Those are things you want to go into eventually.
I hope you enjoyed the video. I'm Scott of Photography Banzai, thanks!