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Lesson Info

Set Up Menu Page 4 (Custom Functions)

Onto page four in the set-up menu we have our "Custom Functions" and this is a little bit of a rabbit hole, but we're gonna have a whole bunch of features in here that we get to customize to the exact way that we work. Not too many of these items are items that we're gonna come back to on a regular basis, although there is a few in here that you might come back to. First up, is the "Exposure level increments". The camera is currently set to work in third stop increments, which is a nice, very precise way of working, but some people prefer half stops. If ya like it, you can set it here. If you wanna expand the ISO expansion and allow you to shoot up to 51,200, I like leaving this turned on. I don't like to be told what not to do by the camera. And if I wanna set it there, I wanna set it there. Now, I don't really shoot at 51,000 ever, but I like to be able to have that at my fingertips if I do want to shoot it. "Exposure compensation auto cancels". So, if you remember, you can use expos...

ure compensation on this camera. Now, normal process is that when you use exposure compensation and then you turn the camera off, it resets when you turn it back on. That's because most people, like myself, would probably forget that they had their camera set on minus two exposure in their last photo. And so, the safe choice is to leave this enabled, but there are some more advanced photographers out there that might wanna turn their camera off between taking photos to save battery power and they don't want their camera resetting on them. And so, in that case, you would disable it and whatever you set stays set until you change it again. "Highlight Tone Priority" will protect the highlights from getting overexposed in an image. Now, this only works in .jpeg images and the way it does this, is it shoots all of the images a little bit on the dark side and then brightens them after the fact... Through software. Now, because of this you can no longer shoot at ISO 100, which I think is a major disadvantage. And so, this is something that only works in .jpeg images. If you shoot in raw images, you're gonna be able to recover those highlights as much, or more than this is doing here in this highlight tone priority, but if you do shoot .jpegs, if you are getting a lot of blown out highlights, this is something you could use, but I don't think it's really necessary in most shooting. "AF-assist beam firing", so I told ya before, there's a little light on the front of the camera that will shoot out a little orange light and it does this to assist under low-light focusing. Now, the things about this, is that it's not very powerful and it's kinda distracting and annoying to anybody that might be looking at your camera 'cause it is kind of a bright light looking at it. Now, you can also use a add-on flash by either the flash firing multiple times to add light or the infrared emitter emitting a light that the camera can focus on. And all of these, from a technology standpoint of view, are pretty cool, you know it sends out a light and your camera can then focus. The problem is, is it's really annoying to any subjects out there and it has a limited distance that it can work. And I found that if you get pretty good at auto-focusing, which means knowing where to place the bracket on areas of high contrast that has good lines and easy areas for the focus to pick up, you don't need this at all, and so I leave these turned off in order to be a little bit more discrete as a photographer. "AF area selection button", so if you recall, normally you would press that button on the top of your camera for changing the different modes in which focusing mode you're using. Some people prefer turning the dial. If so, you can do it here under number six. "Auto AF point selection: Color Tracking". Alright, so when the camera is tracking subjects that are moving, if you turn this on, what it's gonna do is it's gonna look for identifiable colors, oftentimes skin tones, and use that information, add it into the other information it's receiving from the auto-focus module, as to how to track the subject. And it's not... 100% on this case. It tends to help people who don't know a lot about shooting sports and action photography and how to work with the camera. And so, if you're just beginning, if you're not really an expert on shooting action photography, and you wanna get the best results as quickly as possible, you can enable this and it's probably gonna help out. But once you know what size of points to choose, where to position them, when to... And how to move the camera and follow your subjects in, it's probably not gonna help you out. The pros don't use this when they're shooting in most cases. And so, the more advanced photographer is probably gonna be able to outdo what the computer in the camera can do. But the camera can probably outdo what somebody who doesn't know what they're doing and so it depends on your skill level as to what you'll probably wanna choose here. The camera has 45 focusing points and it's helpful viewing where those points are when you are using them. Some people want them a bit more visible, some people want them less visible, depending on... The exact process. There's several different steps in the process of focusing. There is simply just viewing through the viewfinder. There is pressing halfway down on the shutter release to actually focus. There's when the camera is achieving focus. There's when the camera is shooting. How many of those steps do you want those focus points visible? Well, in general, if you select number one, they're gonna be more visible. If you select number four they're gonna be less visible in the process. And so, if you don't like when those focus points are visible to you, you might wanna go in and experiment with these four different options here to see if you would prefer to see those focus points less often. Some people, for the focus points, they're distracting in the composition and framing of their subject. I think the standard selected option at zero, which is their constant setting, is perfectly fine for me, but other people this is where you get to tailor your camera to the way you like it to work. "Viewfinder display illumination". Those focusing points are normally gonna show up in black when you are under bright light conditions. Now, when it gets dark, what happens is that they start showing up in red so that you can more easily see them at night time and it automatically switches according to how bright the lights are that you are shooting in. Now, if you want to enable those red ones to turn on all the time, you could do so by selecting one or if you never wanna see the red ones, you could select number two and disable them completely. Here's one of the few modes in the custom functions that I might come back to on a regular basis. "Mirror lockup", now this is necessary in a single lens reflex camera, due to a slight problem with the single lens reflex system. And let me explain it visually. When you are shooting pictures with a single lens reflex, as I mentioned before, the mirror needs to get up and out of the way when you press down on the shutter release. When it does that, it causes a slight vibration throughout the entire mechanism and that is right when you are shooting a photo and it may cause a blur in some situations. And then, when the mirror returns, you can see what's going on in shooting, but it's actually causing a blur because of that vibration during the shot. When you engage mirror lockup, it goes to a two step triggering device. What happens here is, on the first press, the mirror will lockup and it goes up, just as it always does, it causes the same vibration, but you're not shooting a photo right now, you're waiting. You're waiting a couple of seconds and then you'll press the shutter release again and that will actually fire the shutter when there is no vibrations going on in the camera. And so, you're able to get a shot that has less vibration with the camera and if it seems like I'm bein a little nit-picky here, well, things can get very critical certain times. As an example, I was shooting a photo of these trees, and I looked at the results and I noticed that they didn't seem to be as sharp as I expected them. And then I remembered, I'm shooting at an eighth of a second, on a tripod and I was not in mirror lockup, so I put my camera in mirror lockup and you can see that there is a significant difference in sharpness between the two. And so, if you think about all your different shutter speeds, those right around an eighth of a second, are gonna cause the most problems. Anything from a 30th of a second, down to a full second is where you would probably wanna use mirror lockup. You don't need it at the faster shutter speeds, because those fast shutter speeds are stopping the motion and the slow ones, the... Vibrations are settling out and are not really a problem in that area. And so, anytime you're on a tripod, with a stationary subject in those vibration zones, then you're gonna probably wanna use this mirror lockup mode. Normally though, you would leave it disabled. If you recall, in the viewfinder, there was that exclamation mark that you could see in the lower right hand corner. When do you want to have that turned on? And so, I like to shoot black and white, but I also might forget about it, so I like leaving that turned on when I'm shooting black and white. And so, you can leave all those checked or check only one, whatever fits your needs. Alright, "Shutter/AE lock button". So, for those of you who are more advanced in your thinking and you want to work your camera the way a lot of professionals work their Canon cameras, which is with back button focusing, this is how you can get it programmed. Normally, people will leave this on zero, where the AF before the slash is what's going on with the shutter unit. After the slash is going on with the AE lock button. The AE lock locks the exposure. I prefer it in number one, where the camera will use auto-focus on the back of the camera. So, if you want to focus with the back of the camera, you press down on that little star button, it focuses, and then you can shoot a photo whenever you want... Regardless of where that camera had focused previously with the thumb button there. And so, if you wanna experiment with that, that is the way a lot of professionals shoot, separating focusing from the exposure. We do have a couple of other options, number two and number three, depending on exactly how you like your camera set up. But this number one option and actually number two and number three are all back button options for focusing for those of you who wanna give that a try. The "SET" button on the back of the camera, under normal photographic operations, doesn't do anything. And so, if you wanna assign it a function, well there's lots of different functions that you can go in and assign it. And I say, why not go in, find something there. For instance, the menu display is kinda nice because then you can reach it with the right hand on the camera. You don't have to cross over to the other side of the camera to hit menu display. And so that's a pretty popular option for the SET button. "LCD display when power ON", and so this little LCD display that you see on the back of the camera, do you want it to show you the previous status or just display on? Usually, "display on" is gonna be fine... Where it comes back to this same screen, which is the most useful one of the group in my opinion. "Retract lens on power off", there is a few lenses that have an electronic extension and when you turn the camera off, what it will do is it will retract the lens back into the... Extension of the lens back into the lens, back into its kinda home position, so that it is a safeguard against any sort of bumps and bruises and so forth and so usually that's a pretty good thing to have turned on unless you're the type of person who is taking multiple shots and you don't want the camera to reset itself every time you turn the camera on and off. But I think most of us would prefer to leave that on enable. So that is our "Custom Functions". A lot of different functions that you can go in there and tweak and adjust to your liking. Alright, if you have not been paying attention for the last two hours in class and you have been messing with your camera and you wanna get set back to the factory reset, you could go in here and clear all the camera settings, you could clear all the custom functions settings. And so, if you are maybe picking up a used camera or you're selling your camera, and you just wanna reset all of your particulars out of the camera, this is how you can quickly go in and get it all set back to the factory default settings. Copyright information is really cool, because you get to add your name into the camera so that every time you take a photo your name is on the metadata of the photo, so if it gets uploaded somewhere and someone wants to know, "Hey, who shot this photo?", they're gonna see your name right there in the metadata of that photo. Now, it can be easily overwritten, so it's not there permanently by any means. But it is something that does allow you to get in there and add it in there. There is a QR code reader that you can get. You can get an app for all of your phones that reads QR things and this camera has a little QR code on the back of the camera. Scan it with your phone and you'll have a PDF instruction manual available to you in a moment's notice, be downloaded right to your phone. And so, hopefully you don't need it after this entire class, but if you do need to check some of those specifications or something else in there, it is a quick way of accessing it via a phone. Little certification and logos that they have met. Don't know why you need to see that, but it's there in the camera. The firmware is the software that runs the operation of the camera and from time to time, Canon, like all the other manufacturers might find a bug or an improvement and they issue a new firmware. What you need to do, is you need to download the firmware to your computer, transfer it to a memory card, put the memory card in the camera, come here to where it says "Firmware" in the camera and then you can upload the new firmware which will have any sort of bug fixes or new features. As far as the time of this recording, there has not been any firmware adjustments since when the camera got introduced, which really wasn't that long ago. Now, on this level of camera with Canon, it's not very often that they issue firmware... updates. And so I don't expect to see too many in a camera like this. On some of their higher end cameras, they do it a little bit more frequently, but ya never know, they could decide that they wanna add some features or functions or fix a bug and so go to Canon's website. It's free to do, it only takes about 10 minutes of time. And I highly recommend you always keeping your camera up to date with the latest firmware.