Lessons

Lesson Info

Menu Overview & Shooting Menu

Alright so getting into the menu system. It's gonna important to know where you are on the mode dial on the top of the camera because that's can control what's available to you in the menu system so I of course prefer to be in the full menu options so program manual things like that so that we have all the tabs available to us in the menu system. If you're only in the basic menu it's gonna kind of close out a few of those options to you so, for this part of the class you'll definitely wanna be in that full menu option area. Hit the menu button and we're gonna have different tabs and Canon has been historically very good about organizing their menus system and so we're gonna have four different tabs for the different types of settings within the camera for changing. Now, for changing and navigating throughout the menu system you can use the back dial, you can use that control wheel on the top of the camera, you can also use the touchscreen if you want. If you wanna jump between tabs, yo...

u can press that M function on the top of the camera to quickly change between tabs on the camera so that you can jump left and right very quickly so there're a lot of different control settings. Now, remember there is also a playback menu and you have to hit playback and then menu to get access into that special menu you might say. Normally on most of other Canon cameras, you just hit menu and you tab over to it and you find it but here, you gotta hit that playback menu button. Just to get an idea of how many items we're gonna talk about and how many of them are in each one of the different tabs. I just wanted to do a quick little settings map here for you and so there's a lot of things that we're gonna be talking about in the shooting menu that control image quality, basic controls of shooting with the camera. Set up menu or kind of background things that we'll set up once and then generally leave set. That's very similar for the custom functions. This camera doesn't have very many. It doesn't really seem worthy of having a custom functions tab but a lot of the other Canon cameras do so they've stuck them in there. My menu is where you get to choose which items you want in there and so this can be really important as we go through the menu system and you've come across a menu item that you think, "Wow, this is something that I would use "a lot and I would be changing it and accessing "it quite a bit." You can set that in my menu so that you can quickly find it very easily and so we'll talk about that as we get further into. Alright, so press the menu button and navigate your way to the first item on the first page in the shooting menu. This is image quality. We're not gonna talk long because we already talked about this in the first half of the class. If you wanna get the full image quality, you wanna choose raw. If you want good image quality and easy access to your images, you choose a large JPEG and if you knew you needed something smaller and that was all you needed then you could choose a smaller size JPEG if needed and you'll make those changes either by turning the top dial or using the left-right button on the back of the camera. So items in the gray are general recommendations and items in red are for more advanced users and you'll see that in the printed handout as well as on-screen as we go through the rest of the options here. Next item is still image aspect ratio. In here, we saw this before. If you want a different aspect ratio, you can choose that. Normally, you're gonna wanna leave it in the three by two because that is the size of the sensor in the camera itself. Shooting information display, This gets us into a sub-menu so once you enter here, then we're gonna have many more options to choose from. Screen info/toggle settings and so this LCD screen on the back of the camera has many different information options and you can go in and choose on the checkbox which one of those you want to see in that cycle of different screens that you see and you have grids here and levels and other information and it all depends on what you want to see. I leave these all checked off because it's pretty easy to cycle through and find which ones I like and if I want to get to the other ones, I just hit the info button a couple of times and find it. Viewfinder info toggling displays and so, for the M5, obviously because that's the only one that has the viewfinder. You can go through and choose which settings you're gonna see by pressing that info button but these can be further customized and I wanna show you real quickly on my camera so I will need to dive into the menu system. I will turn the camera on of course. That definitely helps out and let's get over to page one and shooting information display and then I'm gonna come down to viewfinder toggle settings and I would generally probably keep all of these three turned on so that I could access different ones but one of the thing you'll notice is down here. The info turns on when we come down here to number two and number three. So under here if I press the info button I can come down and say, "Do I want the histogram in here? "and do I want the grid display" Maybe I don't want electronic level in this one and then I'm gonna press menu to back out of this because that's what says menu okay. I'll come down to three and on this one I'll hit the info button and go in and program this one and I don't want the histogram and I don't want the shooting in this one. Hit the menu to back out of this and so now I have the histogram in the grid and here I have the grid and the level and so you can just customize these the way that you want and so that way when you're looking through the viewfinder and you press the info button it just goes one, two, three, one, two, three as you press that info button and so as I say, customize your camera. Make it right for you and that's one nice little option for doing it on the camera. And always be aware of those other little hints that come up at the bottom of the screen like the info for adding more options. I mentioned how you can turn the camera vertically and it flips all the information from the side down to the bottom so that you can easily read this information. I think this is a great thing to turn on in most all situations unless you're shooting straight up or straight down and then it can kind of flipping around on you and it can be kind of irritating but for most people, make sense to leave this one turned on with the M5 owners, at least. If you have the grid turned on, what type of grid do you want? Different people have different styles, three by three or the six by four or the diagonal grid. Diagonal grid is kinda nice if you wanna find the exact center point. For compositional reasons, I prefer the three by three grid. The histogram we saw that we could change the histogram in many different ways and this is where we can dig into the details about how we change this display that shows us whether our image is too bright or too dark or the range of brightness that we have. We have the basic option between brightness which is all the pixels combined together, the overall brightness of the image and then we can break out the different channels; red, green and blue if need be in this case. I prefer the red, green and blue; gives you a little bit more information about each of the particular color channels. We can also change the size of it. You can have a large size or smaller size. I prefer personally, less clutter on screen so I generally go with the smaller size but that big one is nice and big and easy to see if you like it really easy to see with. Alright, moving onward. Next up is exposure simulation. So this will simulate how bright your final image is gonna be and this is one of the great things about electronic viewfinders and using live view on the back of the camera is that you don't even need to look at any information, you can just look at the screen to tell if your image is too bright or not bright enough and so this is very good to leave it on enable for most users in most situations. If you're working with flash photography that's a good time where you might wanna be putting this on disable so that you have a nice clear view when you're framing your subject. Reverse display. This is one of the best blogging or vlogging cameras out there and so, if you wanna shoot video of yourself along with the what lenses that are a little bit wider angle the flip out screen on M5 which is right below the lens or on the M6 as it flips up above it. You can have it reversed so that you can see yourself, normally positioned but it's actually gonna be kind of reversed in the way that's recording it and so this just makes it easier to see yourself in the selfie position. On to page two in the shooting menu. Display mode. Here's where were talking about in the viewfinder is it shooting at a faster frames or slower frames per second. And for most people, I think the smooth option is gonna give you a more smooth shooting experience, more enjoyable if you are trying to save power, you could put it in the power savings. Tell you what. Do your own test. Take a look at it. Pan the camera around. Have somebody move in front of the camera and notice it what it looks like between the two and you'll know which ones you want. Viewfinder display format. So for the M5 for the people who wear glasses that have a hard time seeing the full image from side to side, display 2 gives you a little bit smaller image so that you can see the entire image area. Most people are gonna probably wanna leave it on display 1. When you play... When you shoot an image, do you wanna see the image on the back of the camera? Now, the average viewer probably would like to see it for a couple of seconds to see that they got the picture and it looks right but for the more advanced user, using an EVF in the camera, it's gonna show you what the final image looks like and you really don't need to look at it later on for color or exposure reasons and so that's why a lot of more advanced users leave that turned off. It just speeds up the shooting process without having to check every shot after you shoot it. Touch shutter leads us into a sub-menu, allowing us to touch the back of the camera to activate the shutter and so some people like this. Some people wanna use the touch aspect just for focusing and so it depends on how you're using this camera and so if you want to enable it, you can do so right here. Using the touch shutter AF frame position and so in this case what happens is that if you have it set to center, it resets to the center of the frame every time you shoot. If you leave touch point, it leaves the focusing point exactly where you touched it on the frame and so it really depends on how you like to work with but in most cases if we want to focus over on the right side of the frame, we're probably gonna wanna focus over there for several pictures in a row. Next is touch and drag AF settings on the M and so if you want to be to use the touch when you're looking through the viewfinder, you can enable that feature here. The positioning method. You can have absolute or relative and so do you want to be exactly where you touch on the frame or if you move just a little bit to the left, you just want the focusing point to move a little bit to the left from wherever it started? And so the absolute works like a tablet if you've ever used a tablet on a computer and relative would be like a mouse. Wherever the mouse happens to be, if you move it to the right a little bit it just moves the cursor a little bit to the right and so different ways for moving that focusing point around. The active touch area can be controlled. You can use the entire screen or you can regulate it to the top bottom half of different quadrants of it and that's good depend on how you hold the camera and it depends on whether you're right-eye or left-eye dominated and so I have kind of a dominant left eye so I prefer to hold the camera up here and so maybe I wanna use the left side with my left thumb over here. If I'm right-eyed that leaves more space on the right side and so maybe I want activate the right side of the screen and so figure out which eye you use to look through your camera and then that's gonna help determine what area that you might wanna have chosen for this touch auto-focus option. Quick setting menu layout. Earlier in the class we went through the quick menu and we had a lot of different options in here. This was accessed by the queue button on the back of the camera and the idea was that you'd have quick access to features that you used mostly and some of these features in here are ones that maybe you don't use and so what you can do in here is you can go in and you can take out the ones that you don't want so let's take a look at what it looks like to customize the quick menu here and so what I need to do is get my camera into the menu mode and we're on tab two. Quick setting menu layout. Okay. What do we wanna do here? So these are the items that we checked to have in there. Now if this was my camera... I don't use picture styles that much and so I'm gonna take that off. I don't really much care for aspect ratio. I don't use that very much. And this auto lighting optimizer, don't really much care for that. Now I'm gonna hit info for sorting this and now you can see that I've got some empty spaces over here on the right and maybe I wanna have let's see, what are my options here. See, I've got my focusing. I want my image quality up higher. That's the first and most important thing. I shoot movies a fair bit so that should be right next to image quality there. I got my focusing and I got my drive options. Okay, I think that's a pretty good set up so then I'll hit the menu and end. Apply these settings and we'll say okay and so now when I hit the queue menu, I have it laid out exactly the way that I wanted. So go in there and take off the items that you don't use. Organize them the way that you like to have them seen for yourself in there and nothing feels better to me than a camera that fits like a glove and that's part of it, is getting your getting it customized just way that you want it. Alright, moving on to page three in the shooting menu. The AF operation. We talked about this earlier. This was an item in the quick menu. One shot is where you probably wanna have your camera most of the time for standard photography. When you start shooting action and subjects that are really moving around towards you and away from you, that's where you wanna have the camera in the servo mode and I will say again, it's not the best camera in the world for shooting sports photography. It does an okay job just it's not the best in the Canon lineup and so don't have too high of expectations on it. The AF method which is kind of where it's looking to focus. I prefer the one point auto-focus because I like to be very discriminating about where I focus. If the action's happening over a little bit larger area and it's a little bit more chaotic. I prefer going with the smooth zone at that time and if I know I'm just gonna be doing portrait photography then face tracking would be a good option. AF frame size. We can choose between a normal and a small frame size. Just depends on how comfortable you are holding the camera steady and what size your subject is and what other conflicting areas there might be around it. Continuous AF is where the camera is always auto-focusing and this is gonna use up a fair bit more battery life and this is not how most cameras work and so I'm recommending turning this off. Normally what would happen then, when this is turned off is the camera would focus only when you press halfway down on the shutter release. If you leave it turned on, it's gonna be constantly searching for focus whenever the camera is turned on. It may be a little bit quicker at getting focus because it's constantly looking but it's gonna come at the expense of a lot of battery power and I don't think it's quite worth it in most cases. Focusing mode will allow us to go in and change from auto-focus to manual focus. There is also another interesting option called AF+MF and this is auto-focus with the option of doing a little touch-up in manual focus and so once you press halfway down the shutter release, the camera will focus and then it will come to a pause when it's figured it out and if you don't like it, you can then manually adjust the ring and there are some advanced photographers that like that little manual touch-up option that they can make at the end of the focusing system. The AF assist beam on the front of the camera will fire a little beam to help the camera focus under low light conditions. From a certain... sci-fi technical standpoint, that's kind of a cool feature but in reality it's kind of an annoying thing when somebody's pointing a flashlight in your eyes trying to focus and so I recommend turning it off on the camera just to make a little bit more discreet and less distracting to others around you.