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Shooting Menu Page 2

Moving on to the second page in the shooting menu. We have exposure compensation and auto exposure bracketing. So we saw how we did exposure compensation earlier on by simply pressing the AV button in the back of the camera, well this gives us another option for doing it, and I want to jump in and do a little demo here for you. I want to show you a little bit about the exposure bracketing on this camera. So the camera can shoot a series of photos at different exposure levels automatically without having you to go in and manually adjust them. You could manually adjust them and set them up yourself if you want or you can have the camera do it for you and do it very quickly. So here in the program mode, I'm just going to leave it very simple, let's go ahead and get into the menu, we're on page two, flash ... or exposure compensation and so if I want I can just go left and right to take a picture that is a little bit darker, oops I didn't mean to press that, or a little bit lighter, but if...

you turn the top dial on the camera you'll see that it is taking now three photos. So if I wanted to do a bracketed exposure, so I'm going to shoot a bracket exposure and so if I go one notch, that's a third of a stop, two thirds, one stop, and I'll do an extreme so it's really, really clear. So this is going to be a two stop exposure and just to make this quick I'm going to put the camera in the high speed continuous shooting mode and that way what's going to happen is when I press down on the shutter release it's going to take three photos very quickly and then it's going to stop, it only shoots through three and it's going to shoot them as a normal exposure and I think it goes to dark and then bright. All right, here we go. (camera clicks) Three pictures right in a row and we'll play them back. Let me go back to the first one so we have the normal exposure, let me spring up some information and we see what's going on. Sixtieth of a second, 5. and then we had a -2 exposure and then a +2 exposure and so that's an automatic bracket series and we can control that right here by turning the top dial of the camera. You'll see that it was left on and my bet, I'm just curious, I don't know what's going to happen. I'm going to turn the camera off and I'm going to turn the camera back on. I have a feeling that it gets reset. If I go into menu it does indeed reset when you turn it off, but it did stay on so I could shoot multiple series of brackets in a row. So it's a quick way for landscape photographers, typically, to take a series of exposures to make sure that they're getting one that is the correct exposure. So anywhere from one third to two stops on the exposure ... or on the bracketing there. All right, next up is flash control. Now I alluded to this before, because if you remember the flash button on the back of the camera would automatically kick us into the flash mode and so let me actually just show you that on the camera really quickly. So I'm just going to leave the camera in the program mode and you'll see over here on the side of the camera we have our pop-up flash. So that pops up there, and we're in the flash mode and let's see if I can get this angled just so that you can see. So if I press this flash button again, get my finger around there, it automatically kicks our camera into the flash mode just by pressing that button. We can also get to this by simply pressing the menu button and coming down to flash control and that gets us into flash control and so we can either get there through the menu or that button on the outside of the camera. Once the flash has popped up it will then give us a shortcut in there. All right, so let's go back to the key now and take a look at what we have in here. Now this is what I call a rabbit hole. It's got a menu within a menu and a whole bunch more items that you'd be surprised that you find in here, because there's a lot of different things in here. So the first up is flash firing. If you needed to, not too many reasons why you would have this, but if the flash was up you could electronically turn it off through the menu system. Not necessary most of the time. You're normally going to want to leave that turned on. Next up is the E-TTL two meter. This is how the camera is reading the metering system. You can turn it to average if you need to, but for the most part it's going to be totally fine doing evaluative. It's a little bit more of a sophisticated way, it will probably get you better exposure most of the time. Now when the camera is using the flash and the camera also has control of the shutter speed what shutter speed would you like the camera to use? One option would be auto where it will choose anything from 30 seconds up to 200, which as you recall is the fastest shutter speed you can use with flash. Some people might not want a hand hold a two second exposure and so there is an option that puts it more in the hand held range of a sixtieth to 200th of a second or you can fix it at the maximum shutter speed of one 200th of a second. I like it in auto, because then it will allow in some of the ambient light. You just have to be aware when you are watching the shutter speed that it is a shutter speed that's appropriate for the action and your hand holding ability of the camera. All right, so we're going to have a special little mode here, this is another little rabbit hole leading into another menu specifically for the built in flash settings. So the built in flash you can have under normal firing, which is where you would normally have it or you can have it into a wireless system. There's an easy wireless and a custom wireless and I apologize, I am not going to go into the nitty gritty details on how to set this camera up with multiple strobes. That is probably it's own five hour class right there. You can hook this up with the Cannon remote speed lights and you can do amazing things with lights off the camera and the fact that you could do it on this level of camera is fantastic, but we're not going to get into the nitty gritty details right now. In the flash mode we have the types of ways that it meters. It has an evaluative through the lens metering system, which measures the light in multiple different areas. It uses a pre-flash system to check the exposure to see if it's the right brightness and make sure that you are getting the correct amount of light on it. It will check autofocus information and it's also reading the ambient light, and so it's a very sophisticated system. It's just telling you what system it's using, because I don't you have any chance of changing that here. As far as the shutter sync we have the option of syncing the flash with the first shutter curtain or the second shutter curtain. So normally it's with the first shutter curtain and for subjects that are not moving around to much it works perfectly fine, but in the case of a bicyclist racing it looks kind of interesting to have it on the second curtain, because we have the blur behind the cyclist. It looks more like that cartoon figure with those blurred streaks coming off the back end because they're moving so quickly and so for special effects action photography the second curtains ... second shutter curtains sync, easy for me to say, works really good for those situations. Exposure compensation this is for the flash. So we were just talking about regular exposure compensation. This is where you can go in and power the flash down, and I think for most portrait photography you'd be wise to setting it down about two thirds to one in a third stop. You may want to do little bit of testing to see which works well for you. So those are all our built in flash settings, but we're still talking about flash control. If you hook up an external flash there's a lot of controls that you can control directly through the camera that we've just talked about, but it's on the external controls that you are controlling these through the camera of buttons and dials. Many of the upper end flashes will have custom functions that you can go in and customize. You could do that either on the flash or you can do that through the camera itself. So lots of different controls here in the flash control section. Another flash control section, but sitting outside of the other ones is the red-eye reduction. Now this one, red-eye is really annoying to have in a photograph. So what they've done is they've used the only technique they know, which is shining a bright light into your subjects eyes to constrict the pupil size so that there is less red-eye red bouncing off the back retina of the eye. It is effective, but it's also annoying, and this can be really annoying to somebody who's very close to you shooting with a flash right in your face. A lot of times for kids who have worse red-eye than adults kids will see the bright flash, they'll think you've taken the photo and then they'll turn away and they'll be off on to something else. So I'm not a big fan of this red-eye reduction partly because it delays the timing of the shot, it's distracting to the subject, and it can also be very easily fixed in a wide variety of other photo programs. So I would rather disable this and have it be more important getting the shot and being the timing right and you can fix the red-eye later, very easy to fix with a lot of digital programs our there. All right, the ISO stills, we saw this. There's a button on the top of the camera, it's in the Q menu and it's also here in the shooting menu. You can select which ISO you want. Typically I try to keep my camera at the lowest ISO possible, in this case 100, and then I bump it up as necessary when I need faster shutter speeds, and on rare occasions if I need it I'll put it in auto ISO and let the camera handle the settings. When you are in the auto ISO mode you can control what is the maximum ISO that your camera will choose, and so this is where you get to have standards as to how high and how much noise level you are willing to allow into your photographs. So a lot of people would have a max ISO of 6,400. Some people need a little bit higher standard. Some people will have a little bit lower standard, so it's up to you to decide what the max ISO that you want to choose or let the camera choose for you when it's only in the auto ISO mode. Auto lightening optimizer, this is where we talked about this earlier in the quick menu. This is where the camera will try to lighten up the shadows a little bit and hold back the highlights so that it fits within the dynamic range of what it thinks is best. It works for some photographs, it's not so great for others. It's really nothing that you can't do later on and so if you're willing to do a little bit of work and customize it for each photograph you can actually do a much better job adjusting your images, but it will adjust JPEGs if you do need it. It can be a little bit helpful if you do a lot of people photography where faces are in the shadows. You might be able to see them a little bit better in that case.