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Custom Functions Menu

Okay, the next final big section in the menu is the custom functions, and this is where we are gonna tweak things probably once and for good in most cases, for how we like the camera to operate and the displays to work for us. So, there's a few very important ones in here, but most of them are just kind of background, things that are happening in the background. The exposure levels. Do you want to have two stops or one stop between all the different whole numbers for instance? In most cases, people prefer 1/3 stops. I know I have the light meter that works in half stops, so if I wanted to match it, I could choose half stops, but most people like 1/3 stops just because it's a slightly finer increment. It's the way most devices work on the market. Next is 1/3 stops on the ISO, and so 1/3 stops is kind of nice because you can be very precise about where you're setting things, but there are some people who prefer to stay with full stops on ISOs simply because it's quicker to change from IS...

O 100 to with fewer clicks and all the ones in between. I think most people don't really need the 1/3 stops in between, and so if you want to quicken up the process, go with one stops. If you want to be very precise, go with the thirds. Bracketing auto-cancel. So when you put your camera in the bracketing mode, do you want it to immediately stop shooting in the bracketing mode as soon as you are done with that first bracketing series? And once again this is kind of, are you on a bracketing rampage? Are you shooting everything in bracketing? And there are some people who shoot a lot of HDR stuff, and they're shooting a whole HDR series of photos. This is something that you would want to turn this off so that it doesn't keep kicking you out of the bracketing mode after you're done with a series of shots. The sequence of the shots that you shoot is normally the normal exposure, and then the dark one, and then the light one. And I know there's a lot of photographers who find this a little disorientating when they look at their photos later on in photo programs and they would prefer the first version where it's darker, middle, and lighter. And so it's a little matter of personal preference on how you want these to come up in your computer later on, which order they're shot. For those of you who are shooting bracketing, you have the choice between the number of shots. Three, two, five, or seven shots. A traditional bracket was always three shots, and so it depends on what you're doing. I know a lot of times if it's a really tricky exposure, I would prefer to do five shots and I know there are some people who do HDR bracketing in a really big range, and they'll be shooting seven shots. And so, lots of different choices for different needs. Safety shift. All right, so if you remember earlier in the class, I set the camera to time value, and I set a really fast shutter speed, and we got a really dark photo. Because the camera didn't have an aperture that could work with it. And so, what safety shift would do is in a time value mode or in an aperture value mode, if you chose a setting that was gonna result in an overly dark or overly light photo, it would override the inputs that you put into the camera, so I think I put in like 1/1000 of a second, and it would say, hold on John, we can't do 1/1000 of a second. The best we can do is 2/50 of a second, and it would let me shoot not at 1, but at 2/50 of a second. And so it's kind of going behind my back to catch me from falling. And so, I guess the question is, do you want the camera to save you from mistakes that you might make? Or are you doing things, that hey the camera just doesn't understand what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to do something special, and I don't care that it thinks it's bad. And so for the more serious photographer you want to leave this disabled so that you can set your settings as you want to. But if you were setting this for somebody who wasn't so sure about themselves, then you could turn it on to where it will adjust the shutter speed and/or aperture, or it would adjust the ISO to a different ISO setting to save you. But for the more serious photographer you're probably gonna want to leave this on Manual. All right so the next grouping of functions deal with autofocus, and as you can see these are grouped into exposure, focus, and then general operations. And so these all deal with auto focusing and this is a rather long list. Now I really wish that I could give you very specific setting adjustments on where these should be, but there's a lot of things that you can tweak it up a little bit and you can tweak it down a little bit. And what you're gonna need to do with your camera is to shoot a lot of action photography for the most part to see how your camera performs, and if it's not doing something, it's not tracking the subjects, it's misfocusing in some way, these are functions that allow you to go in and tweak those for any sort of consistent problem that you're having. If it's inconsistent, there's probably something else going on. The first one deals with tracking sensitivity, and if you can imagine being focused on a football player, and having the referee cross between you and the player, do you want the camera to switch focus onto the referee? Well do you want to stay locked on or be responsive and jump to that new focusing point? It depends on the type of sports. In that situation, we probably want it in a more locked on position. But if we're shooting the end of a cycling race where we want to shoot whoever is winning the race, whoever is in front, then we might want it more responsive. So that's a good example of why you're gonna have different needs according to who you are and how you shoot. Acceleration and deceleration. If you are shooting subjects that change speed very, very quickly, if you're shooting the 100 meter sprint in the Olympics, and you're shooting the start of the race where they're going from zero to about 30 miles an hour in the course of about four seconds, you're gonna probably want to have this on a faster change. Or if you're shooting football players that stop and start very quickly, basketball players for instance, you might want to have this a little bit higher. If you're shooting auto racing where the cars stay at a constant speed more or less, then you're gonna want to have it closer to the zero setting. How are the subjects moving around the frame? Do they move from one point to the other? And so if it is moving more quickly you can change how responsive it is to moving these back and forth. So I see we have a question in class. John, what about bird photography, or rapidly moving animals? Would you consider that like sports? Yes, and so are animals predictable or unpredictable? For the most part they're unpredictable, and so that would be more in the rapid acceleration, deceleration case. And this one that I'm talking about right now, autofocus point switching would be very important. How quickly do you want it to jump to a new focusing point? And it also depends a little bit, for instance on bird photography, are there multiple birds in the sky, or one bird? Now obviously it's impossible to change this while you're shooting. You have to set it up and decide, this is how I'm going to shoot and this is what I'm trying to do. So if you knew that you were photographing an eagle, and I was in Alaska one time, and eagles were coming out of the trees and they would drop down and pull a fish out of the water, and then go back up. And then about two minutes later, another eagle would come down. And so I could kind of predict what was gonna happen. It's gonna be a single bird, and I could tell the type of movement it would have. I could go in and I could tweak these type of settings. And that's why it's really hard for me to give recommendations, you should set this one at one or two, until I hear exactly what they're photographing. And this can even be slightly different depending on where they're standing, or what lens they're using, how far away they are from the birds and so forth. But this is for people who do something on a regular basis that are not getting consistent results. And so autofocus point switching deals with how quickly subjects are erratically moving left, right, and up and down. How quickly you want to have focus points switch around. AI Servo first image priority. So AI Servo is the continuous focusing mode, so that's the action mode. First image priority. When you shoot that first picture, the camera is trying to do two things. It's trying to focus and it's trying to take a picture, and it needs to draw a balance between, well should I wait for perfect focus before shooting? Or should I get pretty close and then shoot? Or should I just shoot? And, different sports and action photographers have different parameters. A lot of sports photographers don't mind slightly out of focus pictures so long as they capture that best moment and it's pretty close. So this is balanced in the middle which is probably a good starting point. But if you find that that first picture is not happening quick enough for you, you would go to the release mode. If you find that that's not quite sharp enough for what you would want, you would go to the focus mode, and if you do, your pictures are gonna be a little bit slower in happening. The response time is gonna be a little bit slower, but your pictures are gonna be more in focus. And so, it's a struggle to do this perfectly, and this is just the balance with this. So that was AI Servo first image, all right? Now the second image, you can also choose whether it's more important that it happens quickly or it happens correctly. And so, some people say, well I'm not too worried about the first image being perfectly in focus, just get it going. And then on the second one, they'll have that one, I want that one to be a little bit more in focus. And so, it's gonna depend on the type of shooting that you're doing, but it's gonna require you to shoot a fair number of shots in a similar type scenario, and play around with the different settings. As I say this is gonna be different for baseball versus auto racing. AF assist beam firing. So this is that other little technological cool thing. There's this little light that comes out that helps you focus, and this is just kind of annoying, and so what we want to do is we want to disable this in most all cases. Now there is an option that you can use an external flash, and you can use the external flash to illuminate your subject, or you can use the infrared system, which is much harder to see but can be no less distracting to a lot of animals and people as well. So, if you can disable these and focus in some other way, I would highly recommend it. These are kind of last minute items, and these would be perfectly suitable items for nonliving subjects, because this is something that may distract people or animals in some way. And so I prefer Disable on these. All right, next up, lens drive when autofocus impossible. This is mainly for people who own the really big white lenses. And so, most cases we're gonna want continue to search, and this is where the camera if it can't find focus, it just kind of searches throughout the range. The range on the larger lenses is so big that the camera will go out of focus for quite some time, and so it's better if they just stop focus. And so if you own like a 300-28, 500 f/4, 600 f/4, you probably want to have stop focus search. There are four different focusing modes. I think all of them have their time and place, and when they might be used. If you don't like them, you can uncheck that box and not even have it as an option for you to cycle by, but I think there's a reason for all of them, so I would probably keep them all checked off. Next up, autofocus area selection. So normally we press the AF Point Selection in the back of the camera, and then the AF Selection on the front, and we just kind of press that front button several times. If you would prefer to use the dial to dial through the different options, you could. It's just a matter of personal preference. Orientation linked AF point. So if you were to choose the top points in horizontal, and then rotate the camera vertically, now what was on top is off to the left-hand side. If you choose separate for this, you could choose one set for horizontal, turn the camera vertically, and choose a different set for that. And so if you go back and forth between horizontal and vertical in your shots, I find this very helpful, because it just allows you more options on where you're framing subjects, and you can keep it framed up somewhat similarly between horizontal and vertical images. And so there is also the option between one and two, whether it's the area and the specific points or if it's only the point that you are keeping the same. All right, initial AF point tracking here. Okay, so I gotta refresh my notes. Okay, so this is probably one of the most confusing options in here. It took me so long to figure this out, and so I have to give you an analogy, okay? Suppose you were in your home and you were listening to the radio station, all right? And then you decide, I'm gonna get in the car and I'm gonna drive someplace. Now when you get in the car and you turn on the radio, which radio station do you want to listen to? Is it the one that you were listening to when you were in the house, or when you were last in the car which might have been tuned to a different station? And so, do you want to go where you were just at, or what you were last at in this mode? And so that's what this is kind of determining is do you want to use the focusing points you were just using, or focusing points you were last using when you were here before? And so, that's the idea, and so, we have a Manual setting in here. We have Initial and Auto, where it will try to remember and just figure out, I haven't figured out how the Auto works in there. And so if you choose the Initial setting, it remembers the focusing point from the last time you were in the auto 45 point mode. If you choose Manual, it keeps the focusing point from where you were in the single point focusing. And so you're gonna probably have to play around with this because probably what I just said is complete gibberish. It sounds gibberish to me, and as I said, this is one of the more complicated, very subtle modes, and it really only deals when you go from a single point focusing to 45 point focusing. Which point is then the active point? All right, so, the camera has some very cool technology for focusing and tracking a subject, and they've been working on this technology for about 30 years, and it's kind of, pretty trustworthy stuff. And it tracks subjects pretty well. And this is something kind of new they've thrown into the mix, and what it does is it's looking for humans, and it's looking for color that it can track that motion and kind of track on that, and it's not just using depth information as to how far away that subject is. It's trying to figure out, is that a yellow jersey or a red jersey? And I'm gonna try to follow that subject. And in theory, it might do a better job at tracking motion. From what I have seen of professional sports photographers, they haven't really fully engaged in this mode here because they've found it's a little bit finicky and it doesn't work quite as consistently. And so you may need to do your own test to see how well it works for what you're doing. Probably the safest protocol would be to turn this off, but you may find that it works really well for the type of subjects that you shoot. But it's probably safer to turn it off than to turn it on. All right this is kind of fun. If you're way off to the right-hand side selecting a focusing point, and you want to get to the left, what do you need to do? Well you need to go left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left to get all the way over there. Well if you turn the continuous on, you can wrap around the back edge and kind of do a time warp over to the other side of the universe so you don't have to take all those steps. And this will work up, down, or left, right, kind of going around the back edges of the frame. And so I have that turned on to Continuous. Doesn't hurt anything. All right, the AF point display, I'm not gonna go through all the options here, but how many different points do you want to see, and at what point do you want to see them? Because there's all these different times, like what if I'm just looking through the camera? What if I press the autofocus button? What if I'm switching? What if the camera is in the process of focusing? What if the camera is already focused? Do you want to see focusing points? Because sometimes they get in the way for people and they want them out of there. I like to know where I'm focusing so I want to see them on. And so I think the standard option, Constant, is a good option. I think one, they're turned on all the time, there are just way too many points too much of the time. But if you want to play around with two, three, and four, you'll have to see if that works for you, but probably zero, the standard selection, constant, is gonna be good for most people. All right, so the viewfinder display illumination. If it's bright out it's gonna show you your focusing points in black. When it gets dark out it's gonna show you your focusing points in red. Some people don't like these red focusing points, and if you want to turn them off, you can. Autofocus micro adjustment. So the camera, when it focuses, it is programmed from the factory to try to figure out where the lens is supposed to focus. And it's a bit of an estimate because it is looking through the lens, but it's not looking at where the sensor is. It's got that mirror below it that's focusing. And so if you are having misfocusing, if your camera is either front focusing or back focusing, which means focusing in front of your subject or behind your subject. So let's say you focus on a model, and you want her eye in focus, but it's the tip of her nose that's in focus, or her ears are in focus. And that's happening on a consistent basis. You probably need to do an AF micro adjustment on your camera. Now, what you need is you need a focusing target, and you need to be able to measure whether you are focused in front of or behind that subject. So I usually use a yard stick and a ruler so that I can be a little bit precise about this. Now you can buy something like this from LensAlign, which makes the process a little bit simpler, but that's something you've got to buy to do it. You can do it yourself with books or a yardstick and a ruler as I have setup here. So I'm gonna focus on the vertical ruler and I want to see if that 10 is in focus on the camera. And so, I did this and if you go into your camera, you'll be able to adjust your lenses from minus 20 to plus 20, which means either in front or behind your subject. And you can see from these results, my lens is not too far off. The zero setting is very, very close to the 10, but it's a little bit in front, and I probably adjusted this lens to something like a plus four setting so that it was focusing exactly in the right spot where the camera was intending to focus. And so if you want to do this, it's for the intrepid here, you're gonna need all the stuff in order to make the highest quality photos possible. You're gonna need to set your camera up to get the shallowest depth of field and the highest quality so that you can zoom in and see if you are getting sharp photos. And so you should unfocus your lens and then let the camera autofocus. You'll need to use mirror lock-up because you want to get the sharpest photos possible. Play it back, you don't even need to download it, you can just look at it in the camera. There's enough magnification in the playback mode. You can really judge this pretty well in camera. Now, you probably don't need to do this. If you own a lens that goes from 3.5 to 5.6, and it just doesn't shoot with enough shallow depth of field. If you have an 85 1.2, a 50 1.2, 100 f/2, a 135 f/2, a 300 2.8, anything that's moderate to long in focal length that shoots with a really shallow depth of field, and you are consistently getting front or back focus is when you would need to go into micro adjust. And there are some very nice settings in here about adjusting the micro adjust for different types of lenses. And so, let's jump back in here. So I am going to jump in on the camera real quickly because I want to show you one thing that I may not have in the key note here. So I need to go find this in auto focusing, and it's the last item on the list. And so, we can go into this and let's adjust by lens. And so we can go into Q and we can register this lens. Now because I have a zoom lens on here, I can register a setting for wide angle at one setting, whether I need to focus it a little bit further away from my subject or closer to my subject. And then I can also make a separate setting for telephoto, and this is something that a lot of other camera manufacturers are not doing. They just have one number, but this number can vary with a zoom lens, so this allows you to really get very precise about how you do this. And so, info lens value, so you hit the Info button and you can see if we had a particular lens, for instance if you had two different 50 millimeter lenses, it would keep them separate so it knows that this serial number we do one thing with, and this serial number we do something else with. And so we can also use Cancel and hit Menu to back out of this. And so, Info button gives us a little bit of help here. Not much. But if you are gonna do this, you probably don't want to choose number one. It's doubtful that it's just your camera that needs to adjust everything by a little bit. You probably need to adjust it by lens. And as I say, if you have a 3.5 to 5.6 lens, I wouldn't even bother with this. You're not gonna notice that very, very small difference in it. It's only gonna be for those very fast aperture lenses. So, have fun on that one. Give yourself an hour at least. All right, so that finishes up the autofocus custom functions, and now it's time to get into the general operations, some other things. All right so remember that warning in the viewfinder? Well there are four different reasons why it might come on, and if you don't ever want it coming on, you can uncheck all of those. I know from time to time I like to shoot black and white, and I want to do it in camera and I want to be reminded that I have my camera in black and white, because I may not always want it in black and white. So I would definitely have that one checked off, but you can choose which ones are selected and when you will see that little exclamation mark in the bottom right-hand corner. All right, I got a bit of logic problem with Canon on this. So, if this is your exposure, and you'll see it's off to the left-hand side, and you want to move that needle to the right-hand side, how would you turn that dial? Would you turn the top of the dial, or the bottom of the dial? If you said, I would turn the bottom of the dial, then you're thinking like Canon. All right, so that's what's considered normal. And so, I think the reverse direction is the more logical system, so that you turn the dial in the direction that you want that indicator to go. Now, where this doesn't work out too well is if you have the vertical grip on the camera and you're grabbing the camera from the other end in the bottom of the camera. Then you would be using the bottom of the dial. But I think if you don't have the grip, reverse this direction, and it will make setting manual exposure and exposure compensation more intuitive. I see so many people, they're dialing it because it logically thinks, I want to go that direction, I want to go left, I want to go right, and they're just trying to follow the visual cues in there. And why they've chosen the bottom I'm not completely sure. So that'll help things. There are some lenses that will extend and they will stay stuck out when you turn the camera off. So, this feature here will retract those type of lenses. There's very few of these lenses. I think the 40 millimeter STM and the are two of the only lenses that'll do this. So it will retract the lens before turning the camera off. And then we get into the custom controls and this is where you can customize the buttons in the camera to what you think are gonna work for you. So there's a couple of modes that I want to show you on how to set your camera up. So one of the modes that a lot of people like is back button focusing. So let me dive into the menu system. And we're gonna go into Operations and Others, and here we are at custom controls. In order to do back button focusing, we have an AF On button that works right away, but it doesn't do us much good if the shutter release is also focusing as well. Because we can focus here, move our camera, and then we press down and the camera is gonna refocus on something new. So what we need to do is turn off the autofocus on the shutter release button. And so, what we're gonna do in here is go in, and we can work with all the different buttons, and it shows us graphically where we are. We're gonna go into the focusing or the shutter release button, and we're gonna turn the autofocus option off right here. Now we can also turn it to this one here where it locks the exposure, but I just want it to meter but not focus. And so now, I can press down anytime I want and the camera's not gonna focus. It'll focus if I press back here, and then I can shoot as much as I want. And so, that's the secret to back button focusing is turning off the focus on the shutter release. Now another one that I think may answer a question for at least a few people in our audience, is I'm gonna go ahead and hit Set, and I'm not gonna go through all the buttons, but if we just jump into, let's say this Autoexposure Lock button, I don't use Autoexposure Lock personally, so I can go in here, hit Set, and I can choose something else that it does. And so this might turn the autofocus system off. I could change it to do flash exposure lock, or I could have it do nothing, and different buttons will have different parameters as to what we can set it to do. The Set button, which is the little button right here in the back of the camera, normally when you're shooting photographs, that button does nothing. You could say, hey get to work, I want you to do something. I want you to activate the menu when I press it so I don't have to go all the way over to the left to turn on the menu. Or I could change the quality or the white balance, or something else on the camera. And so you can have it make it do something. I'm gonna let it do the menu because that's a nice way to get into the menu with one hand. All right, you can change the controls on the top or the dial if you want to switch time value versus aperture value so that they're in opposite locations. But the touch pad here, which is used for moving the focusing points and navigating through the menu, when you are normally shooting doesn't do anything, so I'm gonna hit Set, and now it's gonna be able to change the focusing points. I'm gonna hit Set here. Unfortunately I can't really show you what's going on, but I can say right now, the points on the far right-hand side are activated, okay? So, one, two, and now let's take a look. The focusing points are over on the other side. You'll see this in the viewfinder, so if you quickly want to change focusing points, you can move it around by just simply pressing this, and it will move the focusing point. So, you don't have to press any of these other buttons, and so it's a very quick way, and the hot new button on all cameras that you must have is a direct button for focusing. So, the next higher in camera, the 7D Mark II has a specific joystick, as does the 5D Mark III and a lot of other new cameras. And so you do have that on this camera. And this camera is now programmed to do that. So those are a couple of my favorite custom functions that you might want to go in and play with, and see what works for your type of photography. And if you haven't been paying attention for the last 15 minutes, you can clear all these custom functions, take them back to the factory reset position, and then you can kind of start fresh from that point on.