Lessons

Lesson Info

Back Side: Auto Focus and Quick Menu

All right. Next up is an AF-ON button on the back of the camera. And if you've just taken the camera out of the camera box and you haven't made any changes on your camera, the AF-ON button, well it does auto-focus the camera, but it's not gonna do you much good because that's the only thing it does. And that's exactly what happens when you press down on the shutter release. And so this will come into much more use when we turn off the focusing of the shutter release and we turn the camera into a back button focusing machine. Right now it's just kinda there. You can auto-focus with it if you want to, but when you press down on the shutter release it's gonna redo whatever you were focusing on on the back. And so that's, as I say, gonna be helpful when we get to back button focusing. Now if you did wanna jump in and do that right now you're gonna need to go into your custom functions number four. And you're gonna go into the shutter release. And you are going to un-select the auto-focus o...

ption on the shutter release. And you're gonna make sure that the AF-ON button does have the auto-focus release listed. And that way you can use your back button for focusing. A lot of the more serious photographers like this because then they can separate the function of focusing and actually shooting the photographs. If you focus on subjects and then move them off to the side, this'll be very handy because you don't have to refocus on that subject on a regular basis. Next up, the star button is our auto exposure lock and flash exposure lock. And so let's do a little demo on the auto exposure lock button. So let's make sure you can see what's going on in the screen. As you can see I have it in the program mode right now. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit so we get some variance on our exposure readings. And so one of the things you'll notice is if I move back and forth, the shutter speeds change on here according to what the background is and what I'm pointing the camera at. If I figured out that this was the correct exposure right here, I can press in on the star button and it is now locked in. And so as I move the camera from side to side, that shutter speed is locked, at least until the camera times out again. And so I can find that spot and I can lock it in and I can move the camera and then I can take a photo. And this might be handy in a couple of situations that you find yourself fairly frequently. If you're gonna be taking a picture of a person who is standing next to a bright window, or something that is a very different brightness than what they are in, you could point your camera at your subject, get them in focus and the reading off of them. And then you would lock in the exposure as you move the camera. Now it goes without saying or it will go with saying 'cause I'm gonna say it, this is not for manual exposure. This is for program, time value, and aperture value. Another good reason that you might wanna use this is if you are photographing a sunset, you have your camera pointed right at the sun as it's going down on the horizon. But the picture you come out with isn't quite the correct brightness. What you can do is point the camera a little away from the sun, get the sun out of the frame, lock your exposure, and then move it back into the frame. And so this is gonna be very useful for people in aperture value, time value, and in program. There are some people who never use this. I'm one of these people who I prefer to be more in manual exposure or I'll figure out other ways around the problem. It's just a different way of accomplishing making your photos lighter or darker in a different way. But that button can also be reprogrammed to do something that you find more useful. And so we'll see that when we get into the custom settings for the controls on the camera. Next up is our auto-focus points button and we've already talked about this. It basically activates the whole focusing system, turns it on so that you can start making changes with the front of the dial or by moving the focusing point around on the back of the camera. The Q button, we've played a little bit with this. This is the quick menu. It is a quick access to a few of the key settings in the menu system. So let's take a look at the key settings that it is getting us access to. And so this can be very handy if you were working up on a tripod and the camera is up so high that you can't see the top deck of the camera, the top control panel. So working on the back of the panel, you can clearly see which mode you are dialed into. And you'll also even be able to make shutter speeds and aperture changes in here. Now remember this is a touch screen and so if you wanna get in here and change it via the touch screen, you can do that. So we'll have our shutter speeds, our apertures, and our ISOs. And it has the same range as changing the dial functions exactly on the camera itself. Next line down deals with our exposure compensation. Once again you can make it brighter and darker. This is the same as turning the back dial on the camera. We have flash exposure compensation. So the built in flash will automatically fire with as much power as it thinks it needs. And it is measuring light through a system called TTL, through the lens technology. So it's measuring the light coming through the lens, landing on the sensor, bouncing off the sensor to be exact. And it's trying to see how much light your subject needs. Now the fact of the matter is is that a lot of portrait photographers have found that what the camera thinks is the correct amount of light is just a little too much light. Flash in many cases needs to be a little bit like spice on foods. You want a little bit of it, not too much. And so if you wanna power the flash down, which I highly recommend, powering it down about one stop is where a lot of photographers like to flavor their flash, in that they're getting some light on their subject, but it's not so much as to be very harsh. And so it really depends on the lighting situation, a bit of the background, and the other colors in the photograph. In some cases the TTL is really gonna blow out your subject. In this case because of the dark top and the dark background and I think TTL -2 gives us a better skin tone rendition. And so somewhere between TTL -1 and -2 is where you might want to be for a lot of people photography. And so I would definitely get in there and play with that for anyone who uses the flash. Next up is the Wi-Fi signal. And this is something, a quick shortcut for you to turn on the Wi-Fi so that you can do a camera to phone connection for either remote control or downloading photographs. And I'm gonna go through more of those Wi-Fi functions in the second half of the class when we get to the Wi-Fi functions in the menu system. We'll be doing a live setup using a phone and using the camera, using the phone as a remote to trigger the camera. Next line down we have picture styles. And so in this we can select how our images look. And so this is a little bit like the old days of film where we had Fujifilm and Kodak film and different styles of film even within the brands. We can choose the color and the contrast and the tone of our subjects by choosing these different modes for landscape, portrait mode, and a variety of others in here. But be aware that there is an info detail set, which allows you to go in and really customize each of the modes. Every once in a while I read reviews on cameras that people have done and sometimes they'll say, well the JPEGs from this camera are a little over-processed and too sharp. Okay, well that's fine. You can just downplay the amount of sharpening that is done on those particular JPEGs. And so if you don't like the way your JPEGs are looking, you can go in here and tweak them. For those of you who shoot RAW, this has no impact on the final image. You can do whatever you want to these and it won't matter if you're shooting RAWs. It only impacts the JPEGs and potentially the images that you are looking on the back screen of the camera 'cause when you shoot RAW, you're actually looking at a JPEG preview on the back of the camera. So if you don't like the way it looks on the back of the camera, you could adjust it here as well. Next up is our white balance. And this is the color of light that we are working under. And so there's a variety of different types of lights that we might encounter. And they will have different color temperatures on them. And so there are different settings on our camera to calibrate that lighting system. The one that is most likely to be different is incandescent lamps which give us a very orange glow. Beyond these settings are a couple of more manual ones. One is a color temperature, or Kelvin setting, where you can go in and set the Kelvin temperature yourself. So if you knew what the temperature was at the lights that you were working under. Let's say that you were working in a studio that had studio lights that had a very particular color temperature. That would be a good case for setting it. Another good case is if you're gonna be shooting photos with other photographers and you want all of your results to look identical in color, you could all get together and come to a conclusion as to what color setting to set your camera at. The next one is a custom one. And this is where you would photograph a white sheet of paper. And then the camera would then learn what color lights you are working under. And it would set that temperature for you. So if you didn't know the Kelvin temperature, this is a way for you to use your camera as a kind of color meter to figure out what the correct color is. And then finally there is auto white balance. And what this does is the camera will look at the scene itself and try to determine what color the light source is. And it does this generally by looking at the highlight information to figure out, are the highlights more blue or yellow and it tries to make them white. And in general it does a very good job in my opinion. This is one of the few areas where auto on the camera tends to do a very good job. And I'm pretty happy with it most of the time. If I know that I am in some sort of different sort of scenario, I will switch it myself. But that's only from time to time. So generally I think auto white balance is a great place to leave it as a default setting. If you're not happy with the white balance settings and you wanna make a subtle adjustment, let's say you have it in the cloudy mode, but the cloudy isn't just quite right, you can go in and tweak it with this setting here. For the most part, I would say stay away from this. You probably don't need it. It's very very subtle adjustments. This would only be used, I would think, for people who are maybe shooting JPEGs and they're trying to meet some very very specific requirements of how those JPEGs are being used. And it really doesn't belong here in the quick menu in my mind at all. There is also the option for bracketing as well, which I don't know many people who actually use that feature. Next up is an auto lighting optimizer. And this will go in and it's going to tweak and play with the tones in your photograph, the lightness and the darkness of it, to try to get a better photograph. And this is something that has no impact on people who shoot RAW. But if you do shoot JPEGs, it can give you a little tweak in colors. Custom controls is a shortcut to getting to all those little buttons that we can change on the camera. We will cover this in more depth and do some examples when we get into the menu system. But it's good to know that it's here because a lot of people like to tweak with the little buttons on their camera and it's a nice quick short access to that. The AF operation is a button that we already talked about. That's the AF button on the top of the camera. But we do also have it here in the back. Some people prefer to work on the back of the camera with the touch screen or just as the LCD on the back. Focus area, once again this is gonna seem reminiscent, deaja vu. We talked about this earlier. But we can access it here using the touch screen. Same as the metering system. And these are all buttons that on the top of the camera. As well as the drive mode. Same options available to us there. And then finally we have image quality where we can shoot RAW or JPEG or both RAW and JPEG at the same time. So as many of you know, RAW gets us the full image from the sensor. JPEG is a compressed, smaller size file. Which is a little bit more easily shared between computers. The serious photographers like to shoot RAW 'cause they get their original information. They can tweak the image as much as they want. And then they'll make JPEGs according to their needs and send those out. Some people like JPEGs 'cause it shoots a little bit more quickly in the sports and action modes because the file sizes are smaller. But there's a little bit less correction that you can do once you are using JPEGs. And so I'd recommend people to either shoot RAW or kinda plan on shooting RAW in the photo. There still are good situations for shooting JPEGs, but if you wanna get the highest quality out of your images, it's gonna be taking the RAW and doing a little bit of work later on. So that is the quick menu. A lot of good things in there. Next up is the play back button. And so this is obviously where you are gonna hit when you wanna play back your images. And this is a little bit different than when you normally take a photo and it shows you the photo on the back of the camera. It's a little different when you actually hit the play button because now there's a variety of other buttons that are going to work on your camera. So you can use the back dial to simply rotate to go to the next or the previous image. There is a zoom button where you can zoom in and out to take a look at your image. Remember this is also a touch screen. You can use that as well. You can check out for more information on the back of the camera with the info button. The garbage can for, of course, deleting your images. And the top dial is used for jumping 10 images at a time, which can be very handy. And then the quick button is gonna allow you quick access to a number of features that you might not see in other places. So let's take a look on my camera. I don't think I've taken too many interesting photos so far in this class. Let's see if we can find something. All right, here's an image that we're just in play back mode right now. So first off, I can hit the info button. And we're gonna get additional information about our aperture and our shutter speeds and our ISO. We can get a histogram which will give us a good graphic representation of our brightness levels in this photograph, as well as other information about how our camera's been set. And then back to nothing in the image. So if we wanna zoom in, we can go over here. And you'll notice it's in blue. Play back is in blue, garbage is in blue, and the zoom in and out is in blue. So we can zoom in and we can use the four way controller to zoom around. And then we can come back out. And if we go all the way out, we can press out again and we get to thumbnails. And we can get to thumbnails. Now once again, this is a touch screen so we can scroll through our images. We can find an image that we're interested in. We can double-click on that. Let's see. There we go. Now we can get in and move this around to see if it's nice and sharp. We have a return button right here. And so we have both button controls and touch controls. You don't have to use the touch. You can do everything with the other controls if you wanna zoom around or get more information. And finally, we do have the quick menu which allows us to go in, and a lot of these are features that we'll talk about when we get into the play back menu of the camera. But we can, for instance, lock the image so that we can't delete it. We can make some other post production crops and we can rate our images. And so we can play around with our images a little bit here. Not too much, but just a little bit. And that's all accessed through the Q menu right there. So play back your images. Scroll around, zoom in, check to make sure that they are sharp. And so here are those different functions that you can have access to when you are in the play back mode. And some of these will seem like they're a little bit goofy. At first I thought rating your images. Wouldn't you wanna do that on a real computer when you have time? Well, If you've ever been stuck in an airport with a couple hours to kill and nothing to do on your way home from a big trip, well you can get a jump on your editing process by going through because all of those star ratings carry forward to programs like Bridge and Lightroom. So there's a variety of other things that you can do in here. We're not gonna spend a lot of time going in. One of the other ones that's kind of interesting is a RAW to JPEG conversion. So if you shoot RAW, but for some reason you just need a quick JPEG straight off the memory card and you don't have your computer with you, you can take a RAW and you can convert it into a JPEG image right there. See if there's anything else. We do have our send to smartphone. And so once we talk about the connection up at the camera, that would be another way to quickly get an image from you camera to your phone so you could post it or email it right away. And so some nice good options in there. We'll talk more about many of those when we get into the play back menu. All right, we've talked a little bit about the back dial on the camera and the multi controller and the main dial. All of those can be locked with the multi function lock. It also locks the touch screen on it. And so you can also go into the multi function lock and you can decide which items it actually locks. For instance, if you still wanna have access to the touch screen, you could uncheck that box and just have it lock the items that you want to lock. So very customizable camera. We have a speaker system up on top. And so if you're playing back a movie and it's got sound, that's where the sound is coming from. There's a little access lamp over on the right hand side, which lets you know that the camera is writing or reading information from the memory card. Most importantly, do not pull the memory card out when this lamp is on. That may damage or corrupt files on the memory card. Ideally you wanna turn the camera off. But generally the camera will just stay on and keep doing its work until it finishes processing whatever it's doing with the card at that time.