Learning Photography - Setting Up Your First Camera

Ready to finally move beyond your phone and take full control of your photography? In this beginner camera setup tutorial, professional photographer Mike Kovaliv (20 years experience) walks you step-by-step through unboxing and setting up your very first camera — whether it's a mirrorless, DSLR, or fixed-lens model like the Fuji X100. Perfect for complete beginners who just picked up their first interchangeable-lens camera or are upgrading from smartphone photography.

What you’ll learn in this video:
• Charging the battery & inserting/formatting your memory card
• Factory reset (new or used camera)
• Adjusting the diopter for sharp viewfinder focus
• JPEG vs RAW explained (and which to use as a beginner)
• The Exposure Triangle made simple (Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO)
• Why Aperture Priority mode is the best starting point
• How to actually take your first photo with confidence

This is Video 1 of a complete beginner photography series that takes you all the way from basic setup to advanced creative techniques like portraiture, lighting & flash, and turning your vision into real images.

Timestamps:
0:00 – Welcome to the Photography Series
0:48 – What This First Video Covers
1:52 – Battery & Memory Card Setup
2:47 – Formatting the Memory Card
3:33 – Factory Reset (New or Used Camera)
4:58 – Adjust Diopter for Sharp Viewfinder
6:46 – JPEG vs RAW – Which Should You Shoot?
9:46 – Camera Modes & The Exposure Triangle Basics
11:07 – Aperture Explained (How Much Light)
11:58 – Shutter Speed Explained (How Long Light)
12:52 – ISO Explained (Sensor Sensitivity)
14:44 – Why Start in Aperture Priority Mode
16:54 – Recommended Starting Aperture (f/4–f/5.6)
18:08 – The Shutter Button (Wake Up + Take Photo)
20:50 – What’s Coming in the Next Videos
21:04 – Thank You + Support the Channel

If you’re tired of auto mode and want more control and creativity with your camera, this series is made for you. Like if this helped!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So you've decided to learn more about photography. Perhaps you've picked up your first camera, or maybe you're coming from a phone and decided you'd like to have a little bit more control and a little bit more flexibility over what you're doing. You've come to the right place. I've been a professional photographer for close to 20 years and thought it would be a great idea to put together a series of videos that take you from literally getting your first camera, setting it up, to learning the basics of how to operate it, and pursuing more advanced techniques, getting involved in, you know, perhaps portraiture, perhaps even using lighting and flash, and just being a little bit more creative with the tool and understanding how to get perhaps what you've seen other people doing, or something that you uh you know, maybe envision inside your mind that you'd like to be able to do with your camera. The first video here, we're gonna talk about getting uh your first camera set up. Uh, like I said, it could be a mirrorless camera, it could be a SLR or DSLR camera, and you know, you're wondering, okay, I've taken it out of the box, or perhaps you picked up a used one, and what do I do with this thing? How do I get it set up? I'm gonna walk you through the way that I would set up any camera that I pick up. Whenever I pick up uh, you know, a new camera or even a used camera, I go through a bit of a process of how I like to set it up, and it's worked well for me over the years, and I think maybe uh it's a very simple way to get started with any camera. So, what are the first few things that you do? Uh if you're shooting with an interchangeable lens camera, so something that you know you can remove the lens versus something like perhaps the Fuji X Series, you know, the X100, something that has a fixed lens, um, normally you're gonna put the lens on the camera, so that's a good place to start, or if it comes with the lens on the camera, you're set and ready to go. So, first things that I would check. Number one, uh, you got to have a full charged battery. So if your camera came with a battery charger, you're gonna want to charge the battery, take it out, put it in the charger, let it charge until it's fully charged, or some of the newer cameras don't come with a separate charger and have uh a USB type connector where you can plug it into a charger and charge it like your phone directly into the camera. The next thing you're gonna want to do is make sure that you have a memory card ready to go in the camera. Most cameras for the last many years use standard SD cards. Uh, some cameras, like my Nikon Z6 that I have here, use a little bit of a different format, either XQD or CF Express cards. Uh, and some of the older cameras even use uh CF cards. So, whatever type of memory card you're using, you're gonna want to make sure you have that because the first thing you're gonna do is insert it into the camera. And I would always recommend formatting the memory card. So you're gonna want to turn the camera on. Uh, in the menu system, there's going to be an option for formatting the memory card. You're going to want to go ahead and do that, press OK. Be warned, it is going to erase everything that's on the card. So make sure before you do that that you've backed up anything or that you, you know, there's nothing on there you want to keep. I just find it's a good idea to start with a formatted memory card to make sure you're starting from a blank slate, and also that the card is set up to work with the specific model of camera that you have. If you bought the camera new, um, you know, it's going to come with all of the factory settings from the uh from the manufacturer. If you bought the camera used, it might be set up however the last owner of the camera liked to use the camera. So something you might want to look for is a factory reset on the camera. Um, usually this is in one of the utilities or setup menus where you can go in and do a reset, all settings, set everything back to the factory settings. If you're not sure how to do that for your specific model, you can always Google it how to reset my specific, you know, brand of camera, specific model, and they'll tell you exactly how to do it. I know on Nikons here, it's usually pretty uh pretty straightforward. You usually go to the you know the menus, the setup menus, and there's options for resetting everything. Sometimes there's a button combination you can hold as well to reset things. So make sure you do that for the camera, just that you're starting from you know, kind of a clean slate again, factory settings, and you're you'll be good to go. Cameras are actually pretty straightforward if you break it down to its kind of bare components. Uh modern mirrorless cameras and modern technologies and cameras have really advanced, and there's a lot of settings for you know all kinds of different things. But if you actually strip the camera down, there's really only a few kind of key elements that are common across all cameras. And once you understand what those are, you can kind of pick up any camera and understand how to get it to work and how to get it to actually take photographs. Because at the end of the day, it's really only a few things that are working that make the actual image. Talking about that, the first thing that I would probably think about is the eyepiece. Uh, if your camera has a viewfinder or an eyepiece, um, you're gonna want to adjust that for your vision. Normally, um either on a mirrorless or a DSLR, there's gonna be a little switch or a dial uh that's called the diopter switch. And what that does is it just focuses the viewfinder for your eye. Everybody has a little bit different vision, whether you wear glasses or contacts or anything like that. So what you're gonna want to do is turn the camera on, put the camera up to your eye, and turn this knob until the text or until any of the things that you see in the viewfinder are in a sharp focus. Not the actual subject that you're photographing, if you're looking at, you know, your desk in my case, or if you're looking, you know, out a window or whatever, not the trees, nothing like that, but the actual writing that you'll see some letters and numbers in there. You want to make sure that those are in nice sharp focus for your eye. If your camera doesn't have a viewfinder, a lot of cameras these days are you know just have a screen on the back or perhaps a flip-out screen. Um, there's something that I would think about there. There's usually a button which is a view mode button, something that lets you choose whether the image is on the screen or not, or that kind of a thing, or whether it's in the eyepiece or both. Um if your camera doesn't have a viewfinder, it should automatically come up on the screen whenever you turn the camera on, or perhaps if it's a flip-out screen, if you open up the screen, you know, the viewfinder could come on, should come on. If you've reset the camera, like we talked about, to the factory settings, that should come up automatically and make sure that you actually see what you're looking at. So the next thing that I would think about is where am I going to be using my photographs? Am I going to be taking pictures in the camera and leaving them in the camera? Am I going to be taking the card out, putting it into my computer and editing the pictures? Am I just going to be, you know, Wi-Fiing perhaps out of the camera into my phone and uploading them to Facebook or some kind of social media? And the reason why I think it's important to think about that is to decide which format you want to photograph your images in. There's two main types of uh file formats that photographs get saved in on the camera. One is called JPEG, which is very, very common. It's the most popular format out there on the internet for viewing images. And the other one is called RAW. So why would you want to use one or the other? And the camera lets you choose which one you want to use or even both. So a JPEG is essentially a finished photograph. It's basically a saved or compressed format where everything is set. You don't really make any changes from there. You just shoot it, it saves it, and you upload your picture perhaps to Instagram or one of the social media sites. RAW, which is the other format, the other main format, uh, is basically an unedited or a hence the name RAW format. It's basically just what the camera captures without necessarily applying any settings to the image. And the reason why you would want to shoot RAW is if your intention is to do editing after the fact. So, you know, if you have editing software, if you're using something like Lightroom, DXO, or any of the uh, you know, Capture One or any of the photo editing softwares or even stuff that is available on phones and tablets these days, um, you may want to shoot RAW if that's your intention. Um it lets you shoot both. Um, so you can shoot JPEG and RAW, you know, use your JPEGs right away and have the RAW files there if you decide you want to edit the picture later. So that's up to you. Um I personally shoot RAW all the time. I think if you're uh just getting into the camera, perhaps shooting JPEG is a good idea just for now until you decide later on you want to get into editing pictures, just so you have a finished picture and it's ready to go. So uh what I would do is take a look at your camera model. Um, there's going to be an option under image settings or one of your menu settings where you can basically make sure that it's going to be shooting in JPEG. And there are different sizes of JPEGs usually. Uh, if you've reset the camera, it should be at the full size, which is ideally getting the most image quality out of the camera that you want. Or if you know you're going to be, you know, just posting it on a social media site where you only need a really small image, you might be able to set it to a smaller size and get more photographs out of your memory card. So the next thing you're going to want to think about when setting up your camera is which mode the camera is in. And before you do that, I think there's a few basics that we should talk about. As I mentioned earlier, there's only three, four, or five things that every camera does. The rest of it is really advanced features. And if you learn the basics, you can pick up any camera and really kind of figure out what you're doing. The analogy that I like to use is if you think about driving a car. So many different cars, so many different models, so many different options, right? But if you know how to use the steering wheel to turn the car, if you know how to use the accelerator to get going, and if you know how to use the brakes, you can pretty much get in most cars and you know get down the road, uh, get to where you need to go, right? So just like the car, the camera has a few primary controls that once you understand those, you're good to go. The rest of it are kind of luxury features, in my view. So the main controls of a camera, instead of allowing you to drive, really let you kind of figure out how you're dealing with the light that's coming into the camera, because that's really what a camera does, is it captures light. So there's three or four controls that you need to kind of think about that control how you capture that light and what you're doing with it. So, what are those primary controls? The first one that I think is really important to understand is something called aperture. And what that really is on its most basic level is a it's a fancy word for how large the opening is on your lens that allows light to come in. Yes, it does a lot more things than that if you get technical about it, but on a really basic level, that's what you're controlling is how much light is coming into the camera, how big that opening is. You may have seen lenses or you know pictures that you know will ring a bell here if you see them of aperture blades, and it kind of shows a lens opening and closing. And what you're doing is you know changing the size of that opening. We're not going to get into the physics or the math of it right now, but just understand that the more light that you let in, generally speaking, is a better thing. One of the other primary controls is what's called shutter speed. Most cameras that have been built have something in them physically called a shutter, which is very much like the shutter on windows or blades, you know, on window blinds. And what that does is it opens and closes and lets the light in. So obviously, when it's closed, no light is coming in. And as you open it or you know, press the shutter, you open those blades, allow the light in, and then after a certain amount of time, you close them. The longer you leave them open, the more light you let in. The shorter it is, the less light you let in. That's the basics of what shutter speed is, and that's something that you will learn to control on the camera. So aperture for how much light you're letting in, shutter speed for how long you're letting that light in. The third primary control is what's called sensitivity or ISO or ISO sensitivity. And on the most basic level, what that really is is the computer chip that captures the image or the sensor in the camera is very much like turning up the volume on that. It's allowing it to capture more light. So how sensitive that chip is to the light that's coming in through the lens. Um we'll get into that in more detail down the road, but the basics of it are the lower the setting, uh, the less noise that gets let in, you know, along with that extra light that you're letting in. So you want to, you know, ideally use a lower, the lowest setting that you can to get a nice clean, you know, or you know, the proper image that you need. So you don't want to just you know turn that setting all the way up and go, I'm good. Uh you want to kind of keep that low. That's the basics of it. So those are the three primary settings for capturing an image: the aperture, uh how large the opening is on the lens, the shutter speed or time value, how long you're capturing that light for, and then the sensitivity, how sensitive the you know the computer chip in the camera is to allowing that light to be captured. Those three settings, which uh often are called the exposure triangle, work together to let you capture an image. That's the basics of how every camera works. There is a fourth element to that, in my view, which is the autofocus or the focusing of the lens. And you know, that's really it. If you've set those three settings and the focus on the lens is set, essentially that's photography. Those are the four main things that make it work. So on your camera, there's going to be a dial or a switch or perhaps a menu setting where you can change the mode of how the camera is operating. And what that does is it essentially sets a priority so that you're only focusing on one of those three things. So you don't want to necessarily get started and worrying about aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. You don't want to worry about all those things. What this lets you do is prioritize one of those settings as the main thing you want to focus on. And what I recommend to get started is choosing aperture priority. And the reason why I recommend that is because I think it's the simplest mode, other than all of the auto modes that you're going to get into, where the camera is choosing every setting for you. I think aperture priority is a great place to start because at least it gets you thinking about one thing. And that is the aperture, that is how much light you're letting into the camera. Once you've confirmed that you're in aperture mode, the last thing you're going to want to do is find out which control on your camera adjusts that aperture setting. On most cameras, it's going to be a dial or a couple of buttons. It might have to be a menu setting depending on which camera you have. In my case, and on most Nikon cameras, it's going to be usually the front dial. You turn that setting and it's going to adjust, you know, the aperture setting for you. And, you know, if you take a quick look on my specific camera here, the Nikon Z6, there's going to be a number, which is usually indicated by an F, which is the F stop or aperture setting, is another word for it. And rotating that front dial is going to increase or decrease that setting or that aperture. And in the next videos, we're going to talk about how those settings work, why you're going to want to perhaps use different settings and what might be some great examples of why you're going to want to use different settings in different situations. So now that you're in aperture priority mode and you know the control that allows you to adjust that number, what I would recommend is setting it to the time being for to one number and leaving it that way for a while. And it does depend on your camera. It depends on which lens you have, what numbers or what settings are available to you. So as a general rule, what I would maybe suggest getting started with is something in the F4 to F5.6 range. So if you turn the dial on the camera, you'll see the numbers change. It might go up to F4.5, it might be F5, F5.6. So somewhere in that setting, F4 to F5.6, depending on what your lens is capable of or what your camera is capable of. If you're shooting with a lens a camera like perhaps a Fuji X100, something like that, the aperture setting might be on the actual lens itself. Um or a lot of um you know, perhaps older lenses have that. So you might want to just turn the dial on the lens until it indicates somewhere between f4 and f5.6. I think that's just a very safe place to kind of get started where you know you're letting in enough light to get a good photograph. The camera isn't gonna have to work too hard, and you're not you know outside of kind of a range that maybe is gonna give you a special effect type of photograph. So somewhere between f4 and f5.6, I think is a great place to start. So on my camera here, I'm gonna set it to F4 and just kind of leave it there. The last control we're gonna talk about today is arguably the most important on any camera, and that's the control that physically takes the photograph. As you probably know, it's called the shutter button. This control is normally on the right-hand top of most cameras. It's usually a round button, and pushing that down is gonna open and close the shutter and you know take the photograph. It does have a number of features, uh, things that this button will do, but today we're just gonna talk about two of them very quickly. Um, the first one is, you know, kind of waking up your camera from perhaps sleep mode. Very much like uh your phone might do is to save power, to save battery, it'll go to sleep, shut off the screen and all that for a while, and you normally have to tap the screen or touch a button on the side to wake it up. Shutter mechanism or the shutter button is going to do the same thing. Uh if you push down on it very lightly, if your camera has gone to sleep, it's gonna wake up the camera. It says, okay, I need to do something, so I better wake up. So there's a very light little touch, and you can kind of feel where it you know just starts to push or hit a hit a wall, so to speak, and that's where you know it'll it'll wake up the camera. The second part of the shutter button is of course taking the photograph. So once your camera is awake and ready to go, and once you have you know pointed your camera at your subject, pushing the shutter button all the way down releases the shutter, opens and closes, and takes the actual photograph. You might be wondering why I haven't spoken about the focusing of the camera. There's lots of different ways to do that. I'm intentionally glossing over that for now. My assumption is that because we've reset the camera to factory settings, pressing the shutter button is going to focus the camera first and take the picture. That's a whole discussion on all the different focusing types and what you might want to use there. And we're going to cover that in a separate video in the future. But for now, unless there's something, you know, maybe set wrong on the camera if you didn't do the reset, or perhaps uh on a lens, sometimes they have an on-off switch for focusing. If your camera isn't focusing, just check that that's turned on and try again. But you know, realistically, with everything we've covered, the camera is going to focus and take the picture. So that's really all it needs uh to get your camera up and going. At this point, you should have uh you know an image on your card, and you can either take the card out into a card reader, put it into your computer, transfer the photo from your camera to your phone, whatever your intentions are to use the photograph. If you just want to view them on the camera, you can press the play button and take a look at the pictures, whatever your intentions are, that's up to you at this point. But that covers the basics of getting your camera set up and ready to go. So in the upcoming videos, we're going to talk about all of the different elements in a little bit more detail and particularly why you might want to use something and in what situation you would change a setting and you know what the outcomes could be and what you could use it for creatively. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, please feel free to give it a like and subscribe. There's a couple of options now for supporting the channel, joining the channel, or you know, buying me a coffee if that's something you'd like to do to help support what I'm doing here. My name is Mike Kovalov. I'll see you on the next one.