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Menu Functions: Shooting Menu

All right, folks, it is time to dive into the menu functions as we go through this. There's a long list of features, and I would generally just conceptually put him into three different categories one things that you will never use and you never need. And that's probably about half the items in there. Then there is going to be a section of them that you're gonna want to tweak once when we go through the camera, and that's gonna be where you're gonna want it for the rest of the life with your camera. And then there's a small percentage that are going to be once that you want to come back to and change or turn on and off on a more frequent basis. Keep those in the back of your mind because there is a section called my Menu, where you can have a collection of your favorite features. And so if there's something that you really think I'm going to utilize this a lot, there is a way to make a short cut out of it. So let's go ahead and dive into the menu functions of our camera, so obviously w...

e're gonna hit the menu button on the back of the camera and that is going to open up the menus, and we're gonna have a number of different tabs for different main tabs here, where you can have information stored or might be stored. Now there is 1/5 tab, the playback one. But you do have to hit the playback button and then the menu button in order to get access to that. And so we will go into all of these in this section. Now the mod I'll matters where it is turned because there are some of the automated settings which will give you access to a limited collection of menus. And for our class, we're gonna want to have access to the full menu. So make sure that your camera is in one of the more manual settings so that you can get access to the entire menu of your of your camera. So I'm gonna leave my camera in the aperture for aperture value mow just cause I want to have it in a nice, simple mode. So first up in the far left top of the menu is our shooting menu, which deals with things that are primarily associate ID with the actual process of taking photos and first and foremost is image quality. Now, if this seems familiar to you, yes, we did actually cover this material. It was in the quick menu because they wanted to have a shortcut access to this information. But we considered in here, and we get a full screen of information and a little bit more details about what's going on. And once again, I recommend raw for the more serious shooters, but at the very least, the largest J peg option. Now you'll notice that there are two different large is there's a higher quality and a lower quality. The lower quality is smaller and file size, and you can get more images on the memory card, but it is throwing information away. So it's not something that I highly recommend unless you know that works for the purposes that you have intended it for. And so basic high quality J pegs for many and high quality Ross for a lot of you, more serious photographers. Now, as we go through this on the keynote that you see on screen as well as the Pdf that we have, is the download I have my recommendations is where I think the cameras should be set. Now, the general recommendations are gonna make in gray on the right hand side. But I will have advanced recommendations for more advanced photographers or people who are a little bit more serious or more manually orientated about making settings in red. And so you can kind of follow those as we go through this section of the class and set your camera appropriately once again. Here is another deja vu moment. Didn't we already talked about aspect ratio? We did. This was in the quick menu, but everything is in the full menu and they've taken a few of the top items and put him in the quick menu. And so once again, I would choose the three by two, because that is thief full aspect ratio of the sensor on this camera shooting information display. So that info button on the back of the camera, how many times do you need to press it and what sorts of information come up? And this is where you can go in and choose what sort of things that you're going to see when you press that info button. And so I would say, Just keep him all checked off have all all of them as options because you can just simply cycle through by pressing the button one more time. But if you find that there's one that you never use, you can jump in here and turn it off. The next option is a grid option that you can turn on and off, and they have two different grids that you can choose from. The top one is the rule of thirds, which I kind of like. And so it's a good compositional tool to use. It's something that I normally turn off. If you're wondering, well, should I turn this stuff on, or should I turn it off? My tendency is at first turn everything off and have the cleanest viewfinder possible. And then Onley turn on those few things that you actually know that you really need and want to use. The hissed a gram will show us either a brightness, hissed a gram or an RGB, hissed a gram, which gives us additional information with the colors. And I prefer the RGB history Graham, because it does provide us with more information, and it's more colorful and looks nicer on DSO. This is gonna be showing up on one of those info displays when we have the the hissed, a gram showing up. Next up, reverse displays. Okay. Is there anybody out there watching this class that likes to shoot selfies? Please do not raise your hand. You don't want to admit this in a public forum, but if you do, you want to turn on reverse displays. Because what happens is that when you take the LCD screen in the back and you flip it all the way up on top, it will reverse the image so that it's not upside down so that you have a much easier time framing yourself in the in the camera. So I think that's in general going to be something most people are gonna want to dio on the reverse. Next up is the display mode. There is a power saving mode in a smooth mode for the external viewfinder, and this looks like it has to do. I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but I think it's using a faster refresh rate in the camera so that you get a little bit smoother display, and it's a little less jerky, especially if you're panning around from side to side. And this is Onley applied to the external viewfinder on the camera. So if you do have it, I like to have his nice of you finders as possible. I don't worry about battery power. Carry an extra battery, so I would go a smooth in that case image review When you taken image, how long do you get to see that image afterwards? For most people, two seconds will be good. Juicy. A nice brief look to see if you got the image that you thought you got Touch shutter. And so this is an option for us to actually use the touch screen to take the photo. So let's do a little demo right here, and I mean, make sure my camera is turned on and I need to jump into the menu and change this feature from disabled to enabled. All right, now, let's take our camera and let's put my little remote out here in front, give ourselves a little bit of a zoom. And so now what I can do is if I want to focus on the remote at the bottom of the screen. I could just simply press on it. If I'm going to do it in the back, I can simply tech touch the shutter to do that. Now, I do notice that I haven't in manual focus. I'm gonna switch it back into auto focus. And so now, by simply touching the camera will focus. Okay, It's showing me the playback image, so I need to go back to my live image. So are we alive? We're live now. Okay, so now I'm going to focus on the cameras in the background, and the camera will automatically take a picture. And so So we live. We're live. So I just focus on the foreground, and it can automatically go back and forth in so you can use that if you like to use the shutter for taking photos. And it is just simply a good way focusing and shooting on the back of the camera. And so normally, I'm gonna leave. That turned off. So I'm going to leave that and disable right now, but that is a personal choice on how you want to leave your camera. But I'm gonna leave it on disabled. Okay, Next up is the A F operation Deja vu. Again. We talked about this before in the quick menu, and this is controlling how our camera focuses Either Singley. And then it stops once it figures out what the subject is or for moving subjects, putting it in the server mode and so said it. Wherever you're most likely to be shooting your next photos by default, I think one shot is a good place to leave it for most people, the method once again something I think we've talked about before. This is where you can choose one point or all the points with the face and tracking detection. And so, for the more discerning photographer, you're gonna want to choose where you're focusing at in the frame and you'll be able to move that point around. Member. There is a button on the back of the camera that allows you to move that focusing point around. But if you are shooting action that is a little bit more unpredictable, then you might want to be using that face tracking mode on the camera, continuous a f. Now, this is something that I like to have turned off. This is where the camera, if you turn it on the camera, will always be focusing. And this can really use up a lot of extra battery power when it doesn't need to be doing that activity at all. It could be kind of nice if you're shooting lots of video so that your camera is always trying to focus on whatever is in front of you. But for general photography, you maybe just holding the camera around your neck, and it's gonna be trying to focus if it's turned on at this point. And so for battery conservation, the camera will only focus when you press down halfway on the shutter release. If you have this turned off, which is what I recommend, autofocus plus manual focus is a option where we'll let the camera do its auto focusing. But then we can go in and manually focus afterwards. And so the way this would work is that you would first press halfway down on the shutter release and then the second stage that said, press down halfway on the second on the shutter release. There we go, and then the second part of this is that you would go into the focusing ring and manually touch up or adjust the focus afterwards. I don't find this really necessary, but I know that there are some people who do very critical focusing work with their cameras and they like to touch up. They like the help of the autofocus, but they want to have final control and final say themselves. And so there's some serious photographers that like to lead this on. But I think most people can leave. This turned off all right, the Peking Settings. This is an interesting little feature that will allow us to see how our camera is focusing. So we're gonna do a little live demo on this. So let me go ahead and just set things up right here. And so I'm gonna need to go into the menu system. And where are we were at the manual focus, peaking settings. Now I'm going to turn this on, and there are some various controls we can turn the levels on high or low. I want it really easy to see. So I'm gonna turn on high, and then we can choose different colors and reds of pretty easy color to see. And what we're gonna be using this for is for manual focusing so that we can see where we're focused. And I've got the little pdf for this class laid out right here in front of us, and I'm gonna go into manual focus. And so I am in manual focus, and when something is in in focus, you'll see it glimmer in red. And there we can see it if you can see real closely on screen, where it's shimmering in red. So it very close up and then on the back side of it. And if I was to pan up to the wall, if I can pay, go all the way back there, don't see it notices much as well. But the cameras in the background are getting highlighted in red because that is what is in focus, and I'll go back to the paper here in front of me and manually focus, and you can see that exactly showing us the zone of where the camera is focusing. And so this is a tool that has been around for quite a while, but it's starting to see receipts starting to see it on more cannon products, and it's a very helpful tool for anyone who wants to manually focus. And so I think it's incredibly helpful. But it could be a little bit on the irritating site as well. And so in general I'm gonna leave. That turned off those of you who like that sort of thing, you know, to leave it turned on. All right, so that was peaking. Next up, the image stabilization settings. And so we have a couple of different modes here and in mode one. What the camera does is it uses Elektronik image stabilization. And the downside to this is that you lose a little bit of wide angle cause you're cropping in on the sensor a little bit, and it does make your picture steadier, but you're giving up pixels in order to do it can. So I I think two is a better quality system for people who are a little bit more sure about themselves and holding their camera steady. We don't get this image stabilization this Elektronik image stabilization with it, but we do get the full use of the sensor on it. And so, for a more basic user, I think the one setting and form or advanced user the two setting. The other option on the I S is. Basically, you can turn it off or you can leave it turned on and on its called continuous years so that it's always trying to stabilize the camera whether you're shooting or not. All right, next up is lens aberration, correction, and so lenses can have a little bit of a problem imperfectly recording the light in. There is the option for the camera to correct For that Azaz, I will say several times in this menu section. If you shoot raw, this will have no effect on your images, because when you shoot raw, you get all of the original information. If you shoot J pegs than these sorts of image manipulation features, well, then kick in. So first stop in here is the peripheral illumination correction, which is another way of saying dark corners. And so this picture the corners are a little bit dark because the lens doesn't let in as much light over on the sides, and so we can have the camera correct for that, which I think would look better in this particular photograph now, before you turn this on thinking it's the magic bullet to fix all your images. It's something that I actually add in on other types of photographs where I'm trying to draw the eye more towards the center of the photograph. And so in general, I think probably just leaving this disabled for kind of the more advanced user makes sense. But I'm I would guess that some people might want to leave it enabled toe have it fixed up for them. Chromatic aberration, color Ghostie. This is where you shoot an object that has a bright background, and the color kind of gets tweaked a little bit as it's coming around the subject and causes a fringing of a kind of bluish and reddish look to it, and nobody likes this. So this is something that you're probably one I'm gonna leave en able to fix your JPEG images and so basic users I think enable and enable will be fine on this. Correcting these things saves you the work from having to do it later for the darkening of the corners. Peripheral illumination. Some users might like that look, and they could leave that disabled once again if you shoot raw. None of that matters. All right, so we're under the third page of the shooting menu, and here is the auto exposure bracketing. And in this one, this is where the camera will automatically shoot and adjust. The exposure for different brightness is, and so if you said I think it's this but shoot a lighter one in a darker one. You could set it up in here, and in this case you can adjust it in various different increments whether you want to shoot a stopover in a stop under or just make it 1/3 of a stop, a very tiny amount or even a larger amount. Now the camera is limited toe Onley, shooting three frames. I know there's other fancier canon cameras that allow you to shoot five or seven frames, but this camera will only shoot three frames, which should be good enough for most situations. I s O speed now, we did see an another place for changing the I S O. But we do have a little bit more fine tuned controls in here. First off, we can change the speed of the I s a 102 104 100 so on. It's also where we could get our auto setting on it. On this, we can also dive in and do some customizing of the auto eso speed, which is how fast a shutter speed or how high of eyes so the camera will allow it to go. Let's just say, for instance, that you found eso 12,800 to be noisier and a knicks unacceptable to your liking, which is about where my opinion is. And you said I don't want the auto is so to go up there, you could select that the auto eso has a max of 6400 and so the camera would use anything from I s a 100 up to 6400 and not go beyond that point. And so you can set your own parameters in here. But these would not be bad settings. I s a 100 with an auto asso max, maybe of 6400 because the quality image quality does tend to fall off quite a bit after that. All right, next up is highlight tone priority. And let's take a little visual example on this one here and so What highlight tone priority. See that area in the top of the archway? It has gotten blown out. And so it's over exposed area. And if we turn on this highlight tone priority, what the camera does, is it purposely and kind of Behind the scenes under exposes the photograph so that you don't get any of these overexposed highlights, and then it tries to bring the image back to where it's supposed to without overexposing the highlights. And in theory, it's a really nice, helpful thing. The problem is, is that no longer allows us to shoot at I s a 100. And once again, for those of you shooting raw, this is not gonna have any effect on shooting raw. This is only gonna affect the J peg shooters, and so it can be helpful in some tricky lighting situations. But it does have that drawback of not being able to shoot it. I so 100 anymore. Auto Lightning optimizer. We talked about this one before, and this is where we have further control of it. This is where it's trying to lighten up the shadows, and it will also try to hold back the highlights a little bit a swell, but for the most part it's lightening up the shadows. And for some very general photographers. Probably leaving this on Standard is gonna help out in some tricky lighting situations for the more serious photographer. They want to kind of get this straight information right off the sensor, so leaving this turned off would be the choice metering modes We've talked about this before. The evaluative metering system is really good. I highly recommend that for everyone in almost all situations, Onley rarely do I ever switch it off there. There is a few special situations, but only very rarely. All right, flash control. So this is a bit of a rabbit hole, folks. This is a menu within a menu. So from here we dive into the flash control menu where we can first control the actual firing of the flash, and it is normally set to auto. But I don't think that's a good mode. I think if you are going to use flash, it should be a very conscious decision that you want to pop it up and you want to fire it, and it's gonna fill in light on subjects that are fairly close to the camera. And so I think on or slow synchro and special situations will be the two best choices in here. The type of metering system that the camera uses can be adjusted once again. I'm a big fan of the value to metering system, breaks it up into 384 different areas. It does a very good job. Can't recommend it enough. So the camera has a red eye reduction mode where it shines a bright light at your subject and helps reduce the red eye. It technically works, but it's not super effective, and it is somewhat on the annoying side. And so, at risk of disturbing your subjects, you would leave that turn on. I think Red Eye is fairly easily fixed in post production, so I would recommend just turning this off and dealing with Red Eye after the fact built in flash settings will allow us to do a number of controls. If we have our cameras set in the more manual controls of the camera, we can choose the flash mode the E T T l, which is the way it reads the light or a full manual mode if you wanted to. So there's some experience. Photographers who know exactly what they're doing with Flash and wanna have specific control. You can do it in here, but I think most people are gonna want to let the camera figure things out. In the Elektronik TT Elmo metering system, the shutter sink has a option of First Curtain and second curtains. Think so. For subjects that are moving where you are using slow shutter speed, you can get some very interesting fund results using the second curtain effect. It's probably safest if you're not doing these, just to leave it in. The first curtain is that that's the way that most cameras work. But if you are using it for motion, blur with those subjects than the second curtain would be a nice option to turn on for those situations. Now the camera uses a T T. L metering system through the lens metering system for flash, which is generally very accurate. But from time to time can be a bit off, and so dialing down the power of the flash will give you a more natural look for skin tones in a lot of situations and So in many cases I recommend setting this to minus one, and if you do a lot of people photography, I think you'll appreciate the slightly softer look of the flash. It's not gonna be quite as harsh on the subject's face, and so that varies a little bit. But I think minus one is a good setting if you're going to use the flash. If you want to hook up one of the external flashes, you can jump in here on the menu and make changes on the flash so that you don't actually use the buttons on the flash unit itself. They'll end up doing the same thing. It's just a different way of controlling it. And so that is the whole little sub menu of the flash control in there. And just as a reminder, the top flash speed on the camera of the top shutter speed while using flash is 1 2/100 of a second, all right, moving over to Tab number four on the menu system. We have a custom white balance, said briefly mentioned this before. If you were getting unusual colors in your photograph and you wanted to correct for it and calibrate the cameras light meter color to the light that you're shooting under. What you do is you would photograph a white sheet of paper, and as you can see, my photograph of a white sheet of paper on my desk looks very orange because I have a tungsten light on my desk. So what you do is you photograph your white object. Second step is you go to custom white balance, which is where we are in the menu system right now. And you would select that photograph, the camera would look at the light that's hitting that particular, uh, white piece of paper and then correct for it. And we would set our cameras to the custom white balance, and it would be set to the type of lights that were working under. And so, if you're under tricky lighting and you have a little bit of time to set things up, you can get things fully corrected for any light source that you might encounter. If you wanted to tweak the white balance correction, you can do it here. I have never had to do this on my camera, and I'm thankful for that. But if you found that the white balance just didn't seem to be on on your camera. This is where you would change it. Next up is our picture styles, and we had talked about this before. This was in the quick menu, and you can change kind of the style. Look the contrast in the saturation of your images and most interesting the are those last three on the list. The user defined 12 and three because that's where you get to go in and make changes yourself when you use a higher ISO setting. And that isn't specifically said, but it's probably in the I S 1600 up range. You can let the camera apply its own noise reduction to those images. And the question is, are you satisfied with the noise reduction that they are applying? And so the more serious user is gonna want to do it themselves, which is why I have that recommendation. It turned off for somebody who wants to just, you know, let the camera do most of the hard lifting. You might say you could leave it on standard. I would be very careful about setting it any higher than that, and it's going to try to clean up some of that noise if you set one of the very higher I Esso's. Another related one is long exposure noise reduction, and this is when you use shutter speeds longer than one second. The camera will have some added noise to the photograph. That's just the nature. It's just part of long exposure shooting, and you have the same options here. I think the more serious shooters probably gonna turn this off. Somebody who doesn't want to fuss with working on their photos later on can just leave it on Auto Digest type. All right, So this hybrid mode, which is where the camera was shooting short little four second video clips prior to the photos being taken, you can decide whether that you get the still photographs included in the video or not. So this little video collection that you have either has the stills or does not have the stills. And so you're probably gonna want to include the stills because you're probably a still photographer. If you bought this camera, so that would be my I d. On that. But I'm guessing that a lot of you are not gonna be using this feature too much. The A F auto switch. This will switch the auto focusing modes from single to serve A. When your camera is in the scene. Intelligent mode. And so for the person who doesn't know a lot about how the camera focuses, and it just wants to do it on its own, I can see leaving it on enable. But for them or educated photographer, the person who wants to be a little bit more specific about how the camera shoots you probably don't want your camera switching back and forth between different focusing modes as you move the camera from subject to subject. But this is only going to be applied in the scene. Intelligent mode. All right, One more setting down here is the keep setting and in the Let's in the creative assist mode. And this is where it was the protective play pan, where we could make little adjustments to the color and saturation and a few other features, like the lightness in the darkness of our cameras. Does the camera keep the settings that you last had in there when you turn the camera on and off or do they automatically reset? And so if you kind of know what you're doing, it's probably nice toe cab, those same settings in there, so you don't have to keep going back in and re setting them back on. But this is only effective in the creative assist mode, so we are on to page five of the shooting menu, and this is where you can set the specifics for the movie recording aspects. Now we did see this before in the quick menu again, and this is where most people are gonna probably want to set their full HD at 1920 by 10 80 at 30 frames per second. But there are other options if you have other needs. The camera has stereo built in microphones. But if you want to go in and start controlling the sound yourself manually, you can do so here. It does not have headphone jacks. It's not real easy to get in here and make controls, but if you were recording more of ah ah, studio session, where you have a little bit more steady control over the sound, you could go in here and manually set the audio controls yourself When you're in the movie mode, you can have servo, which is a continuous focusing turned on and for your basic kind of mom and pop just shooting basic video of the kids on vacation, things like that I could see leaving it enabled where the camera is gonna be, focusing all the time with whatever it thinks it needs to be in focus. But for the cinematographer of personal but more of a cinema buff who wants to get very specific about what the camera focuses on, you're gonna want to disable this so that you have specific control of where you are focusing and that is Onley effective in the movie mode. All right, Do you want to be able to focus with the shutter release when you are shooting movies? This is only apply to shooting movies, and it is a nice control the have, unless you accidentally bump it a lot for some reason. But it is a nice control, the have so that you can change focus from one area to the next