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In this video, I’ll show and explain some basic concepts of photography and DSLR cameras.
The lens is probably the most important piece of equipment you’ll be using. The quality
of glass is largely the difference between your phone and a dedicated camera when taking
a picture or video. Lenses are usually manufacturer-specific, so Canon lenses fit on Canon bodies and Nikon
lenses fit on Nikon bodies. But some third party manufacturers, such as Sigma, will make
lenses for the big name brands. The distance measurement on your lens, in millimeters,
is the focal length, or the zoom rating, of that lens. This basically means that the lower
the number is, the wider your image is, or how close you can get to the subject to have
it still fit in the frame. Low focal lengths are wide angle lenses and large numbers are
zoom or telephoto lenses. When there is just one focal length, the lens doesn’t zoom
and is called a prime lens. When it has a range of numbers, it’s a zoom lens. Lenses
can also have a switch for autofocus. It can either be on manual focus or autofocus. Some
will also include an image stabilization in the lens itself, which detects movement in
the lens and mechanically realigns to stabilize the image a bit. You can also try to fix unstable
footage in a video editing program or even let YouTube try to fix it with their auto-enhance
feature. Your camera has three main ways to affect the final image by altering the amount
of light that’s let into the camera. The first of which is the aperture. This is the
ratio of one-to-the largest the aperture will open. If it’s a zoom lens, it will have
a span because when it’s zoomed in, there is less light that can make it through the
lens. For example, this lens is 4-5.6, so its widest aperture is 4 when zoomed out all
the way, and 5.6 when zoomed in. The camera’s aperture is a hole that lets in light. The
wider it’s open, the more light that’s let in. The aperture also affects depth of
field. A low aperture, or f-stop, is wide open because it’s actually a fraction over
one and it creates a shallow depth of field because it lets in more light. A higher f-stop
number closes the aperture to not let in as much light, but more things will be in focus.
It’s very comparable to our eyes. The reason a smaller aperture allows for more to be in
focus is because it’s limiting the different angles the light is coming from. Check out
this minutephysic’s video explaining the process. If your eye had no lens, light from
a single source would hit your retina in lots of places and result in a smeared out mess,
which is exactly what happens when I take the lens off of my camera. A lens focuses
that spread out light, corralling it into a crisp image. The shutter affects the amount
of light and blur in your image. A good rule of thumb is to keep your shutter speed around
the same number as the focal length of the lens to avoid blur, when handheld. Otherwise,
just use a tripod if you need to slow the shutter speed. Another rule of thumb, when
working with video, is to make your shutter speed double the frame rate. So, if you’re
shooting 30 frames per second, you might want to try 1/60 of a second for your shutter speed.
The ISO affects the amount of light and grain or noise an image has. A higher ISO shows
more noise in the image, but lets in more light. Some cameras handle high ISOs better
than others. You can also manually change the color temperature by changing the white
balance. It’s measured in Kelvin, which is a unit of temperature that ranges greatly.
Until you use it a lot, you might want to rely on the white balance presets and possibly
even auto white balance, but if you’re shooting video, the white balance might change in the
middle of recording. In photography, sometimes people say they shoot RAW. This is a style
setting that captures more accurate and dynamic colors than other picture styles, but the
files that are created are huge. Shooting in RAW gives you more dynamic range in your
image, which means that there is more detail in dark and bright areas of your image. It
also allows for more work to be done in post production. If you shoot too dark, for example,
you can adjust it in Photoshop without losing much quality. But if that image were shot
as a jpeg, which is compressed, the color range is much less and has little area for
correction. While most consumer DSLR’s today don’t shoot RAW video, they do take RAW
photos. They don’t shoot RAW video because the processing power and storage would be
too high. The next best thing to shooting RAW video is shooting flat images. The reasoning
behind this is that if your image isn’t over-contrasted by the style profiles, then
you can preserve more data in dynamic range. To achieve this effect, you can lessen the
amount of adjustments the camera is doing. There is a pretty good preset that I’ll
link to that’s free called Cinestyle, which flattens the video as much as it can. Because
it flattens it, you’ll need to edit it later on to add color and contrast. The frame rate
affects the look of your video. For example, when The Hobbit was shown in 48 frames per
second, people commented that it looked home videoy or that it just looked off because
most movies were previously shot in 24 frames per second and most home video cameras have
a slightly higher frame rate. Unless you have a specific look you’re trying to get, remember
to keep your frame rate half what your shutter is. So, if you're shooting 30 frames per second,
you might want to make the shutter speed 1/60th. Hopefully this video was a good introduction
to your DSLR camera or you’ve got something out of it and if you’ve got a question about
your camera or anything related to it, go ahead and leave a comment below the video
and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for watching.