(whistling)
(relaxing electronic music)
- Hi there!
Welcome to camera basics part two.
I'm sorry it took me so long to get back to this
because I've actually been meaning to
make this video a lot sooner.
It was like five months ago in April when I made it.
So that's what we're shooting today.
I'm very excited so grab your cameras, make some coffee,
and prepare to learn more about
this art form that we all love.
So let's do it.
How'd you like those camera moves?
(blues rock music)
(hand drumroll)
(electronic pop music) What's up everybody?
Peter McKinnon here.
Welcome back to another tutorial.
Feeling good. Feeling caffeinated.
It's a bright, sunny day.
That makes me happy.
And we're talking about camera basics, part two.
I've been meaning to make this video for five months now.
Made the first one in April and was like,
"I'm gonna do another one of these like next week!"
And then, now it's today.
A little bit of time, just a little bit, a smidge,
has passed in between.
But I am here to talk about today, just two things:
white balance and focus modes.
My goal with these videos is to kind of go through
a whole bunch of different settings that your camera has,
that all cameras have, so that you have a very good
understanding of camera basics.
So when you go out to take photos,
you know what all those things mean.
You know what all the buttons mean because I've been there.
And I was looking at all these weird abbreviations
and weird buttons and I had no idea.
You'd flip into something by accident and
suddenly that image is super blue and you're like,
"How do I get it?
"Should I turn it, should I take the battery out?"
like this is your first day.
Let's start with:
white balance.
What is white balance?
It's kind of hard to explain.
Because there's a way to explain it that's very scientific
and confusing, and gets very in-depth
with percentages and colors and waveforms of light.
And there's a very, kind of basic way to explain it
which is the avenue I'm going to take
for this camera basics video.
So that you're out there using it tonight and
you know exactly what you need to do.
Basically, your camera's gonna compensate for different
types of lights in different settings.
Okay.
You walk into your house at night, all the lights
are on and it's very orange.
You start taking photos and you're like
(gasps).
It looks like a pumpkin exploded inside.
Everything's covered in orange.
This looks terrible.
How do I make the light not look so horrid?
Well that's where white balance would come in.
You can hit the white balance button on your camera,
scroll over to that tungsten setting, choose that,
and your camera will compensate for how orange
that light is by adding more cool tone, cool light
to that scene to balance it out so that you don't
look orange, you look more balanced.
It looks normal.
And the same thing goes if it's, like, dawn,
and you just woke up, and the sun's not up yet,
and everything's looking a little cool, blue.
Maybe you wanna balance that out a little bit better.
So you could go to the cloudy setting,
or the outdoor settings.
Those settings are going to, again, compensate for how
blue it is by adding more warm tones to the scene,
balancing that image.
That is, basically, white balance,
as basic as I can make it for you.
Now there's an auto white balance setting
and that does everything for you without you
having to think about it.
But for the people that really wanna, kind of dive in
and customize their settings and really understand
the ins and outs of photography, I recommend
using these different modes.
Because they are going to help you.
Cloudy settings, you know, is gonna add more warm tones
so if you're shooting a sunset
you're gonna flip over to cloudy.
It's gonna make that sunset look even more colorful
cause it's gonna warm it up even more.
If you wanted to cool down the picture you could
go over to Kelvin which is represented by the K icon.
But you can actually customize the degree of cool tones
that go in your photos or your videos,
and the warm tones, just by moving that wheel.
As you increase the level of Kelvin, from here, to here,
to here, to here, it's either gonna get colder, or from
here, to here, to here to here, it's gonna get warmer.
So sometimes people match their Kelvin settings.
I remember shooting weddings back in the day with my
friend Jesse that you guys know here on YouTube,
and when we were shooting in the same environment,
like inside a wedding ceremony,
the light looked a certain way.
One of the first things we would do
is set our white balance.
We'd make sure we matched our Kelvin.
"Hey are you shooting at 5600K?"
"Yup."
"Okay. I am too"
So that way when we merged the footage in post
after the fact, from multiple cameras, one wasn't
set to tungsten light, one was on cloudy,
and this guy was at 4500K and everything looks
totally different.
And you're trying to color grade it like, "ugh!"
Or you're trying to edit the photos and you're like,
"Why does everything look so, so different?"
Because everyone's white balance was different so
everyone's camera was reading the light inside
a different way.
So white balance helps you balance the scene so that
everything looks, for the most part, hopefully,
normal and balanced.
That is white balance in a nutshell.
Comment below if you wanna know more about it
and get into the scientific explanation as to
why your camera sensor captures light a certain way
versus the way our eyes see it.
Let me know if that's something that you're interested in,
and maybe we'll dive into that in the future.
Now, moving on to: focus modes.
Okay let's talk about focus modes.
These, I switch between all the time.
It's really going to heavily depend on
what it is that you're shooting,
what your interest is in photography,
or, maybe the specific job that you happen to get.
That's gonna determine how you're gonna
focus on your images.
For example, maybe you got a job shooting hockey downtown
for a newspaper, and you're out there shooting
these players rip across the ice.
Or maybe your job is a portrait photographer and
you're taking stills inside a studio and
no one's really moving around.
Or maybe you photograph kids, or animals, or real estate.
Depending on what it is that you're photographing
will determine the mode you're gonna use
to focus on those subjects.
We've kinda got three main focus modes to go over.
There's continuous, there' single focus,
then there's manual focus.
Okay so let's start with continuous focus.
If you are photographing something that's moving
towards the frame, away from the frame,
through the frame, whatever.
If it's moving, you wanna use continuous because what
that camera's doing is it's not locking
that focus into one specific point.
And if that subject moves out of that point,
they're not in focus, what it's doing is constantly
checking and re-focusing on that subject as it moves.
So an athlete is skating from one side of the rink
to the other side of the rink, they're obviously
moving across that plane.
So you would be able to lock focus on, hold that shutter
halfway down on continuous, and track them across the
rink and the camera would keep them in focus
as they moved across.
Same thing if they were walking towards you.
Let's just say here we were and, bam, Matty was
walking towards me as I kept my camera on continuous focus,
so that it would continuously, continuous focus, it would
keep him sharp, tact, and in focus as he moved
through the plane towards the camera.
And you can see in these photos,
(camera shutter clicks rapidly)
it starts in focus and it ends in focus.
So that's when you would use continuous.
If your kids are running around, if your pets are
running around, if anything is moving through the scene and
you wanna track it with your camera, keep it on continuous.
Also known as AI Servo depending on
what brand you shoot with.
Okay, now let's talk about single focus.
And it is pretty much what you think it is.
It's exactly how it sounds.
It's when you lock the focus onto a subject
and then you snap the picture and they're in focus.
Nice and crisp. Nice and sharp. Nice and clear.
However, if you lock that focus and the subject moves,
maybe forward, maybe backward, left or right,
and you still snap that photo, chances are it's going
to be out of focus now because they've stepped outside
of that plane that you set when you held that
shutter button halfway down and heard that beep.
If I'm going to take a picture of this mug,
and I focus right here and you hear it
and then this guy kind of goes this way
or a little bit back or forward and I still take
the picture, it was locked on focus here, not here, not
here, not here, it was locked on right here but we moved.
If that subject's moving, like I taught you, you go to
continuous, and you would track them.
But if you're on one shot, or single focus, and you've
got it locked, you wanna make sure that subject
isn't moving out of the way.
So if you're photographing things that aren't moving
very much, single focus, one shot focus, is a great option.
Maybe you're a product photographer, maybe you're going
in to shoot real estate so that
you can take pictures of rooms.
Rooms aren't going to run away on you.
They're not going to move left and right unless you are.
So you can walk into a kitchen, set your focus point,
hold it down, hear the beep, fire off that shot,
it's gonna be in focus.
That's when you would use single shot.
Another thing you can do with single focus is
actually reframe once you've locked focus.
Let's say you have someone standing in front of you,
you can hold the camera out, lock focus on them by
holding that shutter button down halfway, and then
you can change your composition, continuing
to hold that focus down halfway.
So you hear the beep, then you reframe, and then you
can fire the picture and that person will still be
in focus because you've still maintained that lock.
So you're holding it down, beep, and then you're moving left
or right, or up, and you're just slightly changing that
composition.
You're fine.
And that's a good way to change the scene without having to
completely move out of the way, refocus,
change the focus point.
So if you are photographing a model and she's moving
around or he's moving around or whatever is happening, you
can hold that focus, reframe, hold that focus, reframe,
fire.
And it's a nice way to get off a lot of shots without
having to just slow down and change the focus points
by using single shot.
That is single focus.
We've talked about continuous focus.
Now we're gonna talk about manual focus.
Now manual focus is exactly as it sounds, focusing manually.
You can get there by either just flipping it over on your
lens or you can go into the settings and actually switch
the drive motor to manual focus, but your best bet
is to just do it right on the lens itself.
I don't use it very often.
I almost never use it.
It's almost exclusively used in like the TV world
and the film world where they have people who their
sole jobs are to pull focus.
They measure these things out so it's absolutely precise.
And if you wondered what this symbol is on a camera,
that symbol right there.
That's exactly where the sensor is sitting, in the camera.
At that location.
So that's how people measure.
They know the sensor's right there so they measure
from the sensor to the subject, get the actual feet
or distance that it's going to be and they
pull focus to that exact spot and that's how they do it
in film and the movies, and that's why it's
someone's sole job to do that.
On higher-end cinema cameras, where that sensor is sitting
there's usually a little screw plate that sticks out
a little bit from the body that you can actually tie a
string to or a measuring device and get that
precise focus spot.
So everything's done manually in that industry.
But in this industry, what I'm assuming is what you're into,
which is making home videos or vlogs or just videos for fun
and taking photos for fun, I don't really know that you
need to manual focus because auto-focus is such
a strong technology these days.
But back to reason I don't use it, is I just miss
all the time.
I think I'm in focus but I'm focused way further than
I should be or way too shallow or the subject's moving
and I'm just, I can't depend on myself to nail it
when it's manual focus.
So I keep it in auto-focus and I use either continuous or
single shot.
So that's my advice to you but it is something that I
recommend you play around with because having the ability
to manual focus well, should anything ever happen where
you need it, that's a good skill to have.
Like if it's too dark and your camera can't auto-focus
on its own and you need to flip over and manual focus,
being able to do that is going to help you get that shot.
It's gonna help you get the footage.
There was actually a time when I was in Switzerland
trying to take pictures of the Matterhorn
but it was pitch black.
And I was trying to get a time-lapse out my window
but I needed to get focus on the mountain
so that it was the subject.
But you couldn't see anything.
So what I was actually doing is I flipped over
to manual focus and I would take a picture, see how
blurry it was, then I would just adjust the focus slightly,
take another picture, see if I was far off.
It took me about half an hour to get to a point where I
manually focused, in the dark, just by luck, and managed
to get that mountain in focus.
And then I was able to get a time-lapse and it worked out.
It was only like a three second time-lapse but it worked
for what I needed it to.
That was another instance where manual focus came in super
handy because I needed it.
You just had to use it.
Got continuous, single shot, and manual focus,
and those are the focus modes you wanna play with
that are gonna get you the results you need,
depending on the photography that you're into
in your shooting.
So that is it for today's video with camera basics.
I hope you guys enjoyed it.
I hope you learned a little bit more about your camera
that makes you a little bit more comfortable so you can get
out, take better photos, be more confident with your gear.
If you got anything you want to learn for camera basics
three, by all means, drop me a comment below.
Tell me what you'd like to hear.
I love hearing from you guys.
I love chatting with you down below.
So, if you do have any recommendations for something
you are just dying to know in the next video,
I'd love to hear it.
And, before I go, I'd love to announce the winner that's
going to take home this super awesome, tasty, delicious
little aperture light that I told you guys about
a couple weeks ago.
And the winner is:
(drumroll)
You won the light!
I love the idea of you attaching it to your skateboard and
ripping down the street for long exposure photography.
I think that would actually look really, really cool.
Please tag me in the photo if you, in fact, do this
because I would love to see it.
So congratulations!
I will message you to get your details so I can send
this on over and you can start using it.
Thank you to everybody that participated and commented
in the comments.
Hit that like button if you liked this video.
Smash it, if that's something that you're into, 2018 style!
Oh we've only got a few months left before I gotta
switch that phrase.
Subscribe if you aren't already.
And I will see you guys in the next video.
Bye!
I get a coffee before I start a tutorial.
And almost every time, I forget to drink it,
I finish the tutorial, and then it's cold.
I need a new system for this.
Good thing I still like cold coffee!