- Hi. I'd love to try a little experiment today.

Can you still make good content using cheap cameras?

Bottom of the line, entry level DSLRs,

like we're talking $500 or less.

Can you still play the game?

I think we should start with a game.

Super excited.

I also want to have my friend Gabriel come in here

real quick, and I want him to look at the photos

and see if he can figure out which are which,

in a real time live.

Well it's not live cause we...

But you get it, so let's go.

Gabriel!

Okay, he's here, he's here.

He has no idea what we're doing in here.

And Gabriel's a professional photographer.

You make money from photography?

- Yes. - That's how you make a living?

- Yeah. - Okay, cool.

I took photos with a really entry level...

This thing. Just feel it.

- Whoa - Right?

- That weighs less than one of my lenses.

- Yeah I know.

(Gabriel laughing)

And I took some photos with the R.

I wanna show you a series of the photos,

and I want you to then tell me

what you think I shot it with.

Kay? So we'll start with this photo.

So examine that.

- [Gabriel] I'd say the first one was with the R,

and that one was with the lower end camera.

- Oh, nails it. Okay nails it.

Photo one, photo two.

- [Gabriel] Hmmmm

- [Peter] What was photo number two?

- [Gabriel] The higher end.

- [Peter] Photo number two.

- [Gabriel] Photo number one is the lower end.

- [Peter] Photo number one is the lower end.

Photo number two is actually the T100.

Photo number one was the R.

- [Gabriel] Wow. - Whew. Crazy right?

- Wow, yeah. - Crazy. Okay cool.

Photo number one photo number two.

- [Gabriel] Okay.

- [Peter] Photo number one?

- [Gabriel] That's with the higher end.

- This one right here? - Yeah.

- That is the lower end. - Really?

- [Peter] Yeah.

- [Gabriel] Oh, oh man. I started off so good.

- You were doing so good I was like this might not work.

- Whenever I have students and they are complaining

their gear isn't good enough

for what they're trying to shoot,

I just do a quick Google search,

and I pull up photographers on D-Day,

storming the beach in Normandy.

And I show them and I'm like "Are these good pictures?"

And I don't tell them what it is.

But I'm like "Are these good pictures?"

They're like, "Yeah. They're powerful. They're moving."

I'm like, "These were film cameras, under fire."

- That's actually a great point.

- Don't tell me your equipment isn't good enough.

- I love that.

Okay thanks. Let's go eat.

Oh, but I got to do the rest of the video,

then we'll go eat.

- Okay. - Okay cool.

That was fun; we should do more of that.

I'm gonna flash some photos on the screen here in a second.

I want you to remember the photos that you see,

and as you see the photos, I want you to think to yourself,

"Is that entry level camera or professional camera?

Entry or pro, T100 or R?"

And at the end I will tell you

which photos were taken with what.

I'm going to flash them pretty fast.

Here we go.

Which photos are taken with what?

(thinking music)

- That's pretty crazy right?

Maybe you were surprised, maybe you weren't.

I wasn't surprised at all.

I knew I could take good photos with this,

cause I've got a lot of experience

doing exactly what you just saw,

taking photos like that.

And we're gonna get into that more

when we sit down and talk about this.

Which, basically, sets up the whole episode.

Cheap cameras, can you still make a living?

Can you play this game with cheap gear

or do you need to spend thousands?

(rock music)

- What's up, everybody?

Peter McKinnon here and welcome back to another video.

It is getting colder outside.

That's why your seeing more and more hoodies,

and love hoodie season, love winter, love the snow,

but today, this topic is something...

I've been wanting to do this for a long time.

And it all stemmed from my buddy Mike,

who owns a company called Hook and Stem.

He was like, "Hey, go check out my grid on Instagram."

I went and checked it out,

and was like "Dude, it looks amazing.

Yeah, everything's great, love the style, the flow."

"Cool, shot everything with the Digital Rebel XT."

I'm like, "Wait, you mean the XT from 2003,

the 15 year old?"

He's like, "Yeah man I bought it on Ebay for like 50 bucks,

and a knock off 50 mil lens for another 25,

so less then a hundred bucks, and this is what I got."

Here's two images just from his account.

That's all taken with a camera

that's 15 years old, that's eight megapixels.

"That is a prime example", I thought

to myself when I saw those photos.

I was like, "Wow this would be a great topic

to discuss with you guys.

That here's a guy making a living,

doing all this product photography

to sell his business to people,

so people buy things from his shop,

and he's using a Rebel XT to do that

with a really cheap lens."

I went and grabbed the cheapest

Canon DSLR I could find.

This thing is like...

It's pretty much 98% plastic.

The autofocus was slower than...

I could order a pizza,

and it would probably be delivered

before this thing focused on an image.

It did eventually focus, but it's slow.

The bottom of the barrel digital DSLR that they offer.

It's the Rebel T100,

although all of these cameras have

like six different names for one model.

But it's 500 bucks. 500 bucks all said and done.

That's with the extra 50 mil, one point eight lens.

Now we did a video on this lens, if you haven't seen it,

here's like two seconds of the B roll.

(soft music)

They redid this lens with like a metal mount

so this is a little bit better.

The mission was, okay let's photograph something

as if I was going to sell these photos

to a company or...

That would feel like I working for someone.

Something that I would then sell to make money.

Is this even an option?

Or is it, no, you need to spend the money on good gear.

With these things in mind, we decided to make this easy.

Product photos of a mug, a super simple mug.

Actually, it's not even a mug.

It's a Mason jar with a leather sleeve.

Fun little fact, I'll be releasing these soon.

Shameless plug, super excited.

But, I mean, at the end of the day this is just a mug.

I'm on my desk, at home, in my home office.

How can we make this look good?

So, if you've watched my product photography video,

boop, thing right up in the corner there,

if you guys have seen that before

you know I love textures.

I love shooting on textures.

So I went back down to the basement,

grabbed that old box we used

for that product photography video,

and started to like build a little scene

that I could put this mug on

so that it would made it a little more interesting.

It would give it some mood,

Give it some life, give it some color,

so that this camera would have its best chance

at preforming the best it possibly could.

This is what the scene looks like,

but if you zoom right out, we're on my desk.

So it's nothing special.

But that just goes to show you,

these things are obtainable at you home.

You don't need a studio.

You don't need a fancy office with fancy lights.

Are those things going to make

everything you do look better?

Obviously, that's a whole different topic.

That's not even, that's not the point here.

It's just that we can set up

a little mock station on our desk.

We're gonna use the lowest end camera we can find.

Can we make this look good?

(Rock music)

Okay so now that I've shot a few of these photos,

I just dumped them into Lightroom.

You can see right here, they look

not half bad out of camera.

So if I run one of my new presets on them,

like moraine, that's gonna give it that rustic vibe,

that I already know, the vibe I'm looking for.

The color that I'm going for.

We just got to bring that exposure up a little bit.

Maybe mess with the tone curve here.

And just tweak little things to get it

so that it's just looking right.

And it's not a whole lot of work.

As you can see this has taken me less than 60 seconds

to get to a point that I'm happy with.

You know, where I can export that photo and good to go.

We started off with the kit lens,

which is the 18 to 55 lens.

That's what come with this camera when you buy the kit.

And we got a photo that looks like this.

Not bad right?

We shot it with an aperture of about five point six

so there's a lot in focus.

You don't got a whole lot of depth of field with that.

But it still looks good.

This, you could post that on Instagram

if you were a business selling this mug

and it would be fine.

Now let's throw the 50 mil on and take that same photo,

just change the vantage just slightly.

Get a little bit lower,

which is more of a preferred angle of mine.

And now let's take a look.

It looks a lot better.

You got that nice, creamy, smooth depth of field,

but I did notice upon zooming in a little bit,

you got some chromatic aberration and fringing.

Now if you don't know what that is,

it's when a lens has difficulty to bring all

of the wave lengths of color to the same focal plain.

It's having a little trouble

and that results in color fringing,

which looks like this.

If we zoom in you can see some of that around the edge here.

Here's a shot of my James Coffee Co ring.

I have it set up amongst other things

that are the same texture, the same color, the same style

to really pull focus into the center where that ring is.

Those things just add that nice pop on the side.

If we just had that ring on its own,

and we put it on a desk, and we shot that product photo,

it would probably look fine.

But you add all these extra things in

that share the same texture and color

and it going to make that photo more vibrant, more lively.