How to Use a Canon AE-1 35mm SLR Film Camera
Hey! Jon here with Prime Studios and in
this video I'm going to show you guys how to use the Canon AE-1 35mm film camera which is one of the most commonly used film cameras by
students today. Alright, starting off I'm going to go ahead and put in the battery.
This camera uses what's called a V 28px battery. It's a small 6 volt and in my
opinion I think Varta is a great brand to get batteries from. So the actual
battery compartment for this camera is actually on the front right here. There's
a little latch that you can push with your finger to open up the door and
you'll see the positive and negative terminals on the inside. Then take your
battery positive side up and you just go ahead and insert it in there. Now if you
have any kind of corrosion in there you're going to need to clean that off
before you put in any battery. The camera itself won't work without a battery. The
shutter won't click and the winding knob will not move forward so you definitely
need a battery in order for this camera to function.
In order to test the battery
there's a button on the top of the camera right here. When you push this
button down you're going to see the light meter inside the viewfinder
move. Now as long as the viewfinder is sitting at f4 that's good for a new
battery. If it goes closer to 5.6 then that means
your battery is dying. Now in a lot of cameras you'll have something that looks
like this on the bottom and often times on film cameras this is where the
battery for the light meter goes; a little button battery. But on the AE-1
this is not a battery compartment. This is actually a compartment that covers a
winding knob that's meant for use when you attach a motor onto the bottom of
the camera in order to motorize the winding of the film. Now for those of you
don't know how to load film yet you can go ahead and check out my how to load
film video and then you can jump back to here and as we keep going.
Now after
you've loaded your film you can go ahead and put part of the film box right here
in the back to remind you of what film you're using. All you have to do you just
take your film box here and you can just rip off the front, and you just go ahead and slide it into there so
it can act as a reminder: oh yeah I'm shooting llford Delta 400 film. So that way
if you put your camera down for a month or two and then pick it back up you can
see exactly what film is in there whether it's black and white or color and what
ISO it is. So now that we know we're using 400 ISO film we're going to need
to go ahead and tell the camera that. So the ISO is adjusted by this outside
silver knob here and the indicator for ISO is this little green numbers right
here.
The way you adjust it you can move the advanced lever out of the way here
and you actually pull up on this silver knob and you can turn it. Now as I turn
the knob you'll see that the green numbers are changing and you want to go
ahead and we're going to put that on 400. Now in the camera it says ASA which
stands for American Standards Association but that has been replaced
by the more modern ISO and it means the exact same thing. Now for those of you
who don't know the basics of aperture and shutter speed you can go ahead and
check out my video how SLRs work to see all the basics of that. So the shutter
speed for this camera is this black knob here and in order to change the shutter
speed you're going to go ahead and just rotate the knob and the AE-1 has shutter
speeds from 1/1000 second all the way down to 1 second and then 2 full seconds and
it also has B which stands for Bulb mode.
On the Bulb mode the shutter door will
stay open so long as the shutter button is being depressed. And that's for really
long exposures like 5 minute, 10 minute, hour long exposures. Now on the Canon AE-1 in order to adjust aperture it uses lenses that have an aperture ring which
is this adjustment right here which I can move back and forth like this. So
this particular lens goes from f/1.8 all the way down to f/22 and it also has a
green marking, a green "A", and other lenses will have maybe a green O or green zero.
Now that means an automatic setting where as you adjust the shutter speed
the camera's going to choose the aperture for you instead of you doing it
manually.
So this is manual aperture where you directly choose it on the lens
or you can let the camera choose it by switch…by depressing this button here
and switching over to "A" just like that. The next thing I'm going to
show you how to use the light meter but in order to activate the light meter
there's two different ways you can do that. First is the auto exposure button
which is this black button right here and as you hold it down that's going to
turn on the light meter which you're going to see inside the viewfinder itself.
You
can also do this by holding down the shutter button halfway just like this.
Now I feel that this is a little more risky way to do it because it's very
easy to accidentally take a picture. Now in the Canon AE-1 the light meter is a
little bit different than most cameras. On the AE-1 the easiest way to use the
light meter is to have the aperture ring set at "A" and then you're going to be
adjusting the shutter speed using this knob here. As you adjust the shutter
speed in this mode the light meter is going to be telling you what aperture
it's deciding to use on the lens. Now if you're adjusting the shutter speed and
the needle goes into the red area, that means that the picture is going to be
overexposed and way too bright.
If you see a red light appear at the bottom and
start blinking that is the under exposure warning light and is telling
you that the film isn't going to get enough light and it's going to be
underexposed. Now another way to use the light meter is to take the aperture ring
and take it off the "A" mode. Now in this mode when you use the light meter, and
hold the auto exposure button down, it's going to tell you as you adjust the
shutter speed what aperture you should use but it's not going to do it for you
like it will in the "A" mode.
In this mode you'll have to adjust the aperture ring
to whatever the light meter is telling you. This is also an easy way for you to
over-exposure or under-expose on purpose by seeing what the light meter says and
then going one stop or two stops above or below what it says to do. Focusing on
the AE-1 is quite easy. So it's all manual focus and you're going to be
adjusting the lens using its focus ring.
As you adjust the focus ring you're
going to see a part of the viewfinder right in the middle that has a split
image and in order to know if something's in focus or not you put that
over the object and then adjust it until everything lines up. Another button on
the AE-1 is the depth of field preview button which is right here.
Now what this button does is when you push it in,
now you can take a little bit to lock it down, it will close down the aperture on
the lens to what it will do when it actually takes the photograph. This will
give you a preview of what the depth of field or basically the range of focus is
going to be. Now in order to use this button you need to remember that you
need to have the film wound and the shutter cocked in order for it to work. So right
now I have it on f/8 and if I push it down you can actually see the aperture
close down.
And if I put it in place it'll stay locked like that. To release it
I just push down this little silver thing here and it'll pop back. Now doing
this will also lower the amount of light coming into the viewfinder and it can
make it quite difficult to see. My personal opinion is that the depth of
field preview is fairly useless, and really you should just be pre-visualizing the photo in your head anyway and using the markings on the
lens as a reference for what your depth of field is. So to further explain
depth of field you can look at these markings on your lens here. Now when you
turn your focusing ring you can see that it has green numbers and white numbers.
The green numbers are in feet and the white numbers are in meters. This little
sideways 8 symbol is an infinity symbol, meaning you're focused all the way to
infinity. Now you'll also see the aperture ring here but between the
focusing ring and the aperture ring is this guide and this is actually aperture
numbers that it's talking about here.
So for example, if I focus my focusing
ring here and I shoot at f/ let's say 11 right, and I look at my guide here
there's an 11 here and there's 11 on the other side. Now what that's telling me is
that if I shoot at f/11 with this focus ring in this position, then everything
between about 8 feet from the camera and 30 feet from the camera is going to be
in focus, but anything closer than 8 feet or further away than 30 feet is going to
be out of focus. Now this small silver button above the auto exposure button is
what's called the backlight control switch. Now this button is kind of
interesting. It's basically used when you are on the automatic mode here and
you've chosen a shutter speed but let's say you're shooting a scene
that has a really bright spot in it like you're in a dark room with a single
small bright window, but you want to get the exposure right for the room. Now the
camera light meter will try to read just an average of the entire frame.
But by
holding down this button when you take the photo it's going to automatically
overexpose by about one and a half stops. Basically purposefully overexposing the
photograph in order to get the detail in dark areas. Now I think that's kind of
silly and a strange way to do it. I feel it's a lot easier just to use a light
meter to figure out what your settings should be like let's say it's telling me
at this shutter speed that I need f/5.6 to get the right exposure. But
let's say I need to overexpose a little bit because of that bright area. Well
then I'm just going to go ahead and do f/4 or maybe f/2.8 to go
ahead and let more light into the camera and without having to use this button
that frankly I think is kind of weird.
So on the top of the camera here you're
going to go ahead and find the shutter button. Now the shutter button, it seems
obvious, is what you're going to use to take the photo. Now remember a halfway
depression of the button will activate the light meter inside the viewfinder
and as well as the auto exposure black button right here those both do that
same thing. Now the shutter button has a couple functions: pushing it all the way
down takes the photo, but there's a couple other things that you can do.
This
lever on the side here, if you pull it down like this that's the lock position
for the shutter. So let's say you've cocked your shutter but you want to
throw it in your bag but you don't want it to accidentally take a picture. You go
ahead and set that lock button now it won't take a picture. Now if you flip the
lever the other way that's actually a self timer which is pretty cool and you
get this little red light indicator so if I want to take a picture now and I
push down the button, this red light starts blinking and it gives me about
ten seconds to get in front of the camera or set up whatever the shot is,
and then after those ten seconds it'll take the photo. Now if you look at the
top of the shutter button here you're going to see a little screw recession
there and what that's for is for a remote cable just like this one where
you push it down and I'll stick out a little rod there and you actually just
screw that into the camera itself and then you can activate the shutter
remotely.
Now this lever right here is what's called the winder lever and
that's how you actually advance the film. So after you've taken a picture you can
go ahead and pull this and it will pull the film this way. Now as you pull this I
don't have any film in here right now but if I did this should be turning
indicating that the film is being pulled out of the canister and across the back
of the camera. Now this lever when you're shooting should be set right here at
this angle so that's easier for you to take a picture, wind, take a picture, wind, and every time you wind the counter here is going to go forward and show you which picture you're
on. Right now it says 11, now I'm on 12,13. Now in order to change the lens on the camera it
actually kind of depends on which lens you're using. On Canon lenses you're
going to find a button right here on the ring that attaches the lens to the
camera. So what you do is you push that release button and you're going to turn
the whole lens and it's going to pop right off.
Now there's a marking here, a red
dot and on the camera there's a red dot. When you want to put it back on you line
up those red dots and without pushing any buttons you just turn it until
clicks and it's on. Now other lenses like this Vivitar lens here are going to
attach a little differently. They still have the same mount which is called the
FD mount and it's completely different from what Canon uses today. But you'll
see the red dot here. You go ahead and line those up and instead of having a
button as you're depressing the camera you're simply going to turn this ring
until it's nice and firm and that's it the lens is on the camera and then when
you want to take it off you just turn the ring back the other way
and it'll come off.
Now the last outside part of the camera to talk about is this
little port right here which has a cover. Take that off you'll, see the what's
called the PC sync port. This is an older style way of syncing flashes and it's
basically you plug in a cord here that then runs over to an off-camera flash so
that the flash will go off at the same time that the shutter does.
Now when
you're all done shooting your roll of fill in order to rewind it the release
button for rewinding the film is down here. So you're going to go ahead and
push that down, that's going to unlock the film so that you can flip this open
and you can wind the film back into the case. Now once you know that the film has
gone all the way back in the case you can open up the back of the camera by
pulling up, and it'll open up back, and then close it just like that.
And that's how you use the Canon AE-1 film camera..
