Canon Rebel XSi Body
The first thing that I am going to do is take in through the most important buttons o n the camera button. The first is the shutter button; this is two-phase button, meaning that the button has two positions. The first is half way depression and the second is the full depression, which h will actually take the picture.
You need to train your finger to feel where that first depression point is. It is a very soft click when you push down. It is al most like you just breaking through a stress point or something. And then if you to push it down all the way, it will take the picture. You need to train your finger, to feel the sensitivity between these two positions.
The second most important external button is the main selection dial. I also call this your primary selector; it is located directly above the shutter button. And you will notice that it rotates to the left or right.
The third most important selector is on the back of the camera. It has little AV and a plus-minus sign next to it. This is your exposure compensation button. It is critically important that you are aware of this button and what it does.
The next most important dial, I would say it is the Mode Dial, this allows you to control which mode you are shooting in, whether it is a basic mode, where the camera is going to have a lot of the automatic settings done for you, or if it is a Creative Mode. It is the mode where you are going to tell the camera what to do.
Out of all the buttons in the camera, you are going to use these four more than anything. I promise you that.
Let us look at some of the secondary buttons on the camera, so you will know what they are and what they do.
If you look on the opposite side of the Shutter Button, that side of the lens, if you look half way down there are going to be an oval button. That oval button is your Lens Release Button, you are going to push this down everytime you rotate a lens on or off of the housing. Below that is your depth of field preview. We will go into this a little bit more later, but it allows you to see your depth of field through your viewfinder inreal time.
The button directly above the Lens Release and the Depth of Field Preview is the Force Flash Button. This Button is useful if you ever wished to force your flash to fire.
Let us finish the top of the camera, right behind the Primary Selector Wheel, we have a button that says ISO, and that is your ISO Selector Button. This is new button on the XSi and will allow you to change your ISO easily with out being confuse. You are going to use this button quite a bit.
We have our on and off switch, obviously, pretty good one to know. And then if we look on the back of the camera, we have several buttons and it is really not that bad. The Menu Button is very important button and you are going to be using it often. This is will allow you to access the menu of the camera and tweak the settings of the camera from there.
I have a whole portion of this video dedicated to the menu that it is set p for you to know exactly what you are doing and hope it will save you sometime. The Display Button, just after the right of the Menu Button, will allow you to power the display On or Off. You know, if you are trying to save batteries or whatever, you are just going to push that and if you want to see display, push it and it will pop and display back up.
Just after the bottom right of the LCD Monitor, we have our Playback Button and you are going to be using this button quite a bit, because everytime you take a picture, if you want to see how it turned out, you will press the play button and the image will be shown on your LCD monitor.
Just at the right of the Play Button, we have the Delete Button . It has this little garbage can icon next to it and that allow you delete images if you want.
Now, above these two buttons, we have five buttons and I call this the directional pad Selector, because you will notice that there is this little arrows on each of them. And this will allow you to do things such as move through the menus or when you are looking at the picture to move, to zoom in and move round and the picture and it is pretty intuitive easy thing to use.
Now you will also notice that there is these little icons next to each of these buttons and these buttons act as a way to manipulate your settings of the camera. I am going to show you have to do this when we go through the LCD Monitor portion of the video, but to quickly name them, the top button is your muttering mode Button, the right button is the auto focus mode. The bottom button is your picture styles button. And the far left Button is your shooting drive mode. The middle button, the set button is really a select button.
Above the directional pad selectors, we have another button that has two little icons next to it. One is WB, that is the one you really need to know, that is your white balance and it will allow you-to set your white balance on your LCD monitor. The little blue icon you see refers to the print order or the transfer order if you are looking into print directly from the camera or transfer directly from the camera. This button is going to allow you to do this. I really think that you should just invest in a flash card reader and take the card out and just use that. But this features there if you need it, I do not cover in this video do because it does not, think it an obsolete feature.
The last two buttons are also s upper important, the far right button is your auto focus point selector. When you push this button, you will get red icon lighting up in your view finder on any of those nine auto focus points. Once you use your primary selector, you can designate which of those focus points you would like use as your focus selector. Now I am going over this a little b it more lately. The one to the left top is your exposure lock button or your flash exposure lock button if you are using the flash. I have a whole lesson on this video specifically for this and it is going to take some time to explains. Just know that, that is what is for. If you look below these two buttons, you will see the plus magnifying glass and the minus magnifying glass. This allows you to zoom in and out of an image when you are in a playback mode.
So that is the over view of the camera, we gone over all the buttons and we briefly reviewed what they do. I promise you that if you practice, the day will come and you feel you have complete control of your camera and it feels really good to know how to do everything. There will come a time when you may forget which button does what, you can just come back here and look at this menu and I walk you through again. And we will go through each of these settings individually, so you k now when to use them and what they do.
If you found this video helpful, you maybe interested in my new DVD, Canon Rebel XSi Crash Course. It contains every three hours of lessons, which h will get you on the fast track to take great images. It can be ordered directly from my blog, which also features my latest images, free photograph tips and reviews at www.michealthemaven.com
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