My Canon DSLR Journey Part 2 – Shooting Basics
Overview
In this post I will go through the tips, features and techniques I learnt.
Camera Functions
OVerview of the buttons:
Menu options:
Customise:
Modes
File Format
Always try to shoot with RAW files where available. RAW files allow post manipulation because the file contains information of the picture rather than a processed and compressed picture already typically in JPEG format. The downside to shooting RAW is the file size is magnitudes larger than a JPEG and it also means the camera memory buffer will fill up a lot quicker so burst shots will slow down very quickly. I will describe more on the RAW file aspect in another post.
Framing & Composition
Framing a picture is processing of deciding what goes into the photo and composition is how the subject and scenery is angled in the picture. See 10 rules of photo composition (and why they work) for more details.
Picture Preview
Don’t trust the screen preview image because it is no match for a modern day monitor (or T.V for that matter). Use the histogram and zoom in to check the image quality. General rule of thumb is to better over expose than to under expose. This is because no light is no captured by the sensor but too bright is captured and can be toned down in post processing. Clipping is also bad. This is where the lines of the histogram reaches the top of the graph on the y axis.
Summary
Master the functions and settings to get a feel for how to change things and the effect they have. The modes explain when and how to use them depending on the situation. All this will help taking photos.
