Lessons

Lesson Info

Rec Menu

As we go through the menu setting, I have found that there are generally three types of items in the menu categories of number one things that you don't care about that don't affect your type of photography and you don't need to do anything on and that is probably about half the list in the menu. The other two items are things that you need to change once, and these are things that you just going to set it up once that's the way I'd like it to work and you're done with it and then the third type of item is the type of item that you're going to come back to on a regular basis, and so might be handy to have this out so that you can highlight or underlying it so that you can kind of remember where that is because there's not gonna be probably more than a dozen or two of those type teachers that you come back to on a regular basis. So to get into the menu, you obviously hit the menu button, and what panasonic has done is they have grouped like features into different categories. So we have...

recording, which are features general to the recording process of taking pictures. They've separated out pretty much all the video functions into the motion picture, setting it's a little bit harder to distinguish the custom and the setup mode they both have little rich tools down there, the setup tool is more about basic setup of the camera, whereas custom is more of your customized modes that you like to have, and the playback is everything to do with playback. Now, whenever you go into the menu, if you want to exit out, remember that function for button down at the bottom is what's going to back you out of it, and you'll simply be navigating either via the touch screen or using the navigation to go left right and up and down. You can also use the dials on the camera to either change tabs with the top dial or just navigate through the tabs with the back tile. Now, before we jump into the menu realized that where your camera is on the mod ill is very important. You're probably going to want to be on manual shatter priority aperture program as we go through this section of the class for most of it, because that you will have full access to the manual menu. If you have your camera in the video mode, it basically goes directly to the video functions and you still, and you will not be able to get to some of the regular recording functions when you are in the video mode. If you're in kind of one of the other specialty modes, you will get the full manual full menu but you'll also get a custom menu depending on which mode you are in so if you're in the scene mode, you'll be able to go up to a scene tab and adjust different settings within the scene and that would be also true with the other various modes that you're in and so be aware that the menu changes slightly according to where your modi a less all right so what you're going to want to do is hit the menu button and navigate over to the first item on the list and let me do a quick little live demo make sure everyone's on the same page here hit the shuttle release to wake my camera I'm going to hit the menu button and right now I'm in the motion picture setting and I want to get up to the camera setting and what I can do is I can turn the top dial of the camera to go up and down through the five different tabs or aiken tab up actually I need to go left to activate the tabs on the left and up to the top and then I'm going to hit menu and now I can come in I can see that I'm on page two of six and I want to get up here to one of six and now we could go back to the keynote where I can bring in little extra bits of information to talk about so first up his photo style, we talked about this briefly in the quick menu. If you are shooting j pigs if you are shooting movies, this determines kind of the final look of your image, and for the most part I highly recommend just the standard setting because it's goingto give you a very clean with non manipulated image because once you change something it's kind of hard to change, undo it in many cases and this gives you avarice, simple and standard setting for the pictures. The one exception to this is if you have an interest in shooting black and white photography shooting in monochrome here, and if your camera is in raw, the raw will record the original full color image. But in the black and white or monochrome setting, you'll be able to see a preview in the viewfinder and on the lcd what your image looks like. Your subject looks like in black and white, which can be very helpful if you want. You can go down to photo style adjustments and you can create your own version. For instance, you like the vivid look but it's not vivid enough for you or you can go in and you can pump up the saturation if you want or you can decrease the contrast or you can change the sharpness of any one of these settings let's let's do a live demo and see if I can actually do that on this camera here so we haven't in photo style I'm going to hit okay because I want to jump in here and let's see what our different modes are we have vivid and natural monochrome all right let's say I want to go into monochrome, but I wanted to adjust it I'm going to go down and let's say we want to bump up the contrast of it we can see that it's getting more and more black and white I can go back down and make it less contrast t orme or contrast t you know, saturation or saturation is not going to much here a ce farrah sharpness I could bump up the sharpness if I want to I can adjust the contrast, but I think I'm pretty good here and I'm gonna make a custom setting and I'm going over right the previous monochrome settings that panasonic had programmed in and now I have a new custom mode that has my particular black and white look to the camera, so if you shoot raw, this doesn't really matter for those shooting movies for people shooting j peg you can get in and tweak it although I think images are much better tweets later on, which is why I'm recommending standard to start with for most people next up his aspect ratio we talked about this briefly before the camera uses a four by three aspect ratio, chances are you're going to want to shoot with the full frame if you have special needs and you want different size frames, the main advantage of cropping this out is it's just a little less information that you're recording and if you know you're not going to use it, you might find it a little bit helpful to crop it out that way you can see the framing of your subject. For instance, if you know you're going to shoot to a square and it has to be a square well, then you can put it in a square and you can actually see that square framed right in the viewfinder. Next up, we're going to be looking at the picture size, and this is simply how many megapixels are you recording with jpeg images? Chances are you're going to want to leave this at large setting quality. This is where we see once again what we saw in the quick menu, referring to j pegs and raw from arm or advanced users. I definitely recommend ross so that you can get is much quality as possible out of this camera for some of the newer users you can use large j peg I would plan make plans on shooting raw in the future because you want to get as much quality out of the images as possible because you don't know what's going to happen down the road and what sort of great software we can use that can go back to that raw, original data information and squeeze out even more information from it and so large rock or excuse me, rock or large j peg, are my recommendations there lots of other reasons why you might choose something else or you why you might want to shoot both at the same time more of special circumstances. As you can see, I'm leaving my recommendations up here on screen, and as we go through the rest of the menu settings, I'm going to have my advanced recommendations in red for the slightly more advanced users in a general recommendation just in gray, so just keep that in mind, and I do have that on the hand out sheet, the pdf comes with my full list of kind of recommended settings, kind of as a starter set moving forward, the media remote. We talked about this before different types of metering system in the camera multiple is a good basic metering system to lead your camera. All right, we're switching to page two of the recording menus there's two of six, so you can always kind of keep track on which page you're on. So the first rate we've talked a little bit about this going in and controlling how fast the camera shoots when you put it into the continuous mode with that mode ill on the top of the camera and so I generally wouldn't want to have the camera in the super high mode it takes a lot of pictures very very quickly and they are forced into small j pegs and so if you want to shoot high quality images you want to leave it at l him or ate it all depends on how fast of action you're shooting auto barack ity all right, so this is what I call a rabbit hole so we've come along to an area and there is a menu within a menu and so with an auto backing we're going to kind of dive into another sub menu in the first option in here is do when you shoot bracket bracketed shots do you want to shoot them individually or in a group as a siri's? And I know there's a lot of hdr photographers out there that want to shoot their pictures as close together as possible and so continuous would be a good option there's a few cases where you might want to do it individually but generally you want to shoot him all off as quickly as possible now we also have the option of shooting different numbers of frames three five or seven frame bracket siri's the standard, for the most part is three frames, but there's a number of people who want a wider area covered in the tonal range so they'll be shooting five or seven frames and you can, of course, adjust the step level one third, two thirds or one stop levels. How far apart in exposure is each of the individual images. Another little customize setting that you could make in here is with him is which images shot first in which image is shot last. The standard system is to have the normal image shot first and then a dark one and a light one that way, as you're setting the camera up, and as you take the first picture, you can kind of check to make sure that that one's right, and then it kind of backs it up with a underexposed and overexposed. But some people like the layout of dark, medium and life and so personal preference on your part. Okay, so you hit the return kind of back back out, and we're going down to the self timer menu. So with self timer, we have simply three options. You've got a ten second self timer, we have ten seconds that shoots three pictures as well as a two second self timer, so ten seconds is kind of the normal standard setting in that case. The eye dynamic is where the camera goes in and adjust the exposure and brightness levels I tend to want to have this turned off so that I can control it later if you were not wanting to fuss with images later on and you wanted to try to get things as right as possible in camera and you shot a lot of people photography then the eye dynamic might work fairly well it's not something that you would run a leave turned on I think with landscape photography but I would encourage you to have a program that you can download too that you can have much better and precise control on later on next up is I resolution and every once in a while I have a question on something and I got to go out and I got to shoot a syriza photos so I went down to the local japanese garden and wanted to shoot a syriza pictures and what I resolution is is it's built in sharpening and so if you'll take a look and if you'll notice especially the red post on the top you'll notice right around the edges behind on the left and the right side of it how clear is that edge line around it and you'll notice in high it's a fairly distinct line and it's a little bit lower in low and you'll notice in the cement blocks it's a little bit more contrast ing and high had a little bit of a hard time figuring out what extended is and it's kind of like hi it's, basically making the images sharpened for large prince, and so in this case, I tend to want to leave it off, because once you sharpen an image like this, you can't uncharted it with the right software, you can sharpen it with much better precision, and so if you want to get straight out of the hey images straight out of the camera that are sharp and you can play with this one but realize that you are damaging your jpeg images, this has no impact on raw images. Once again, anything that affects image quality generally is not going to be affecting a raw image, and so this would not affect raw it's only going to affect j peg turning it off. If you want to turn it on, I would leave it on pretty low because it can damage photographs in some ways that you can't fix later on next up is an hdr section. I'm not going to go into this too much, but you can go in and control the cameras shooting of three pictures automatically, you can have the camera choose how far apart those exposures are, or you can set it yourself at one two or three stops order difference now. This does give you kind of a different look on your images, and I know a lot of the hdr fans out there prefer using a program like photo matics, but you can do it in camera if you have a high contrast he seen that's got dark darks and light lights, you might want to try this, see if it works out for that particular shot. It does help quite a bit. Having the camera on a tripod on this one, there is an auto align on feature within this if you are trying to hand hold the camera, the tricky thing is that you have to hand hold the camera as still as possible for three different shots, so enjoy and have fun with that one. Next up is multiple exposures. Once again, we're going to head into some sub menus because there's a lot of little controls within here, the first one is simply starting to shoot multiple exposures. Next up is something called auto gain, and this is where the camera will kind of jump in and adjust exposures according to how many images you're going to shoot. If you just want to play around with the cameron, just kind of goof around with the multiple exposure mode, you might want to leave the auto gain on because it will adjust exposures for you if you really have an idea of exactly what you want to do and you know exactly where your exposures need to be you could turn the auto gain off because in that case you can make accommodations for the fact that you're going to take four pictures on you'll adjust exposure yourself on that so the advance users will probably want to leave that turned off next up is overlay and overlays really nice you know, when I first heard about multiple exposures in camera, I kind of thought it was a joke because you can do this in photo shop with much better effect and control than you can in camera, but the key about having multiple exposures in camera is this is that when you line up your second, third and fourth shot, you will see an overlay of where the first image was taken, so if you're trying to get something positioned just so you can do so with very good precision and so that overlay works quite nicely so that you know that you're not overlapping on areas that you didn't want to overlap. And so in most cases you're probably gonna want to leave that overlay on and then we can back out of that back into the record and down to the next one the camera has time lapse photography, which is a great and fun little tool you're going to have a sub menu about starting how long you're going to shoot how many pictures and how big of interval between the shots so let me give you a couple of time lapse videos. Here is a time lapse from the duck dodge it's, a boat race here in seattle that we do in the summertime on lake union, right in the middle, middle of the city, and in this case, I shot a picture about every thirty seconds for forty five minutes. I'll give you one more time lapse. This one is in varanasi, india, at a reasonably busy intersection in town, and you'll notice the subtle zooming back action that's something I did in post I simply recorded straight in camera, and then I added a little bit of ken burns effect later on in post, and so this is one of the fun options with time lapse photography is finding something that looks good speeded up like that, and so you could have a lot of fun creates a nice little videos in there with the time lapse option. All right, next up is the elektronik shutter. We've talked a little bit about this and the like we have a question he actually got a couple questions about military exposure and about the time lapse shows for jesse b is, do you know if auto bracketing continuous can be combined with the time lapse function? I haven't tried those two in combination the problem with that that I just I'm guessing is that in bracketing you're only shooting well, I imagine they're probably trying to shoot three pictures every time they showed a time lapse I haven't tried it my guess is that it probably doesn't do it. And for dude oreo, what controls the number of stops between each pick in the multiple exposure photo? So can you set the settings differently for each picture in the multiple exposure that you can have total control you can control by simply said in your camera in manual or shutter priority or aperture priority? What I am not one hundred percent clear on is that when you set a shutter speed in an aperture and a nice so and you have the auto gain turned on, you are shooting at that shutter speed and aperture but it's darkening that image so that it's you know, if you shoot to images at a sixteenth of a second that's essentially like shooting at a thirtieth of a second cause you're combining those two light levels and adding them together and I'm not sure exactly what technology it's using I think it's just turning it down a little bit and so that's why some of the more advanced users don't want to leave the auto gate on they want to take it into account when they said it manually themselves touching and maybe one more really quick I'm going back a little bit can you move the point of the spot metering mode like we move the focus points and you know you can't spot meter it is directly in the middle of the screen we're middle of the frame thanks very much let's get going all right so the elektronik shutter is as I mentioned and described at the very beginning of the class using electronic shutter rather than a physical shutter and we're going to be a little live demo here in going over to the camera and I think I have the normal shutter turned on right now and just I'll hold the microphone up close so you can hear it all right so that's kind of your standard sounds now what I'm going to dio is I'm going to dive into gotta look over to my notes page three of six go down to elektronik center I am now going to turn it on and it's not going to make any noise if I have something turned off so I'm gonna go check on something else that I know needs to be checked on which is uh not there there it is the beep so normally there is an electronic shutter sound I'll leave this on high right now and so so you could hear it firing and electronic sound to let you know when the shutter was taken if I turn this off which I will do right now when I take a picture listen really carefully the only thing you're hearing is the aperture sound closing down so what I'm going to do now is I don't have a camera in aperture priority and I'm going to turn the aperture down too oh one point four which is the maximum aperture on this and listen to nothing while this camera fires an electronic cheddar that's it nothing and so if you want to take truly silent photos, you can do that with this camera. Here is the downside here's a couple of examples for you the top example was shot in the studio of a graph pattern as I am panning the camera because the camera does not record all the pixels information of exactly the same time you get this kind of slanted look this is a jello effect on when you are panning with a car down the street, you'll notice the buildings behind it seeing a little tilted to the left and that's because with the elektronik shudder it doesn't record the information in the same way that it would with the physical shutter. So if you're doing sports photography or you're doing a lot of panning work, you probably don't want to use the elektronik shudder but if you do want it to be extremely quiet it's a nice option on the camera okay shutter delay this would be possibly for scientific type purposes maybe a studio environment product photography normally you're gonna leave this turn off how long a delay after you press the shutter release do you want the picture taken one two, four, eight seconds or off you could also possibly be using this may be for astrological photography or you're going to hook it up to a gigantic telescope that has a lot of vibrations to it and the elektronik shutter would work very well there because there is no movement in the camera at all no shutter moving back and forth no mere moving no aperture moving if the apertures open moving forward onto page four of six the flash mode now, once again we have reached another rabbit hole a menu item with a whole sub menu, so we're going to dive into the flash mode here. First off firing mode can be changed from t t l, which stands for through the lands to manual and wireless and the wireless option. Let me explain a little bit about why you might be interested in that the on camera flash is fairly limited in power and direction it points straight ahead and you often end up with very harsh shadows of your subject. Getting the camera giving the flash off the camera is one of the keys to getting better flash images and if you can use multiple strobes in different locations it could help out quite a bit, so this image on the right was shot with three lights. The main light is over to the right of the camera there's a phil light on the left and then there's a hair light kind of in back to the left. You could get much more interesting and satisfying light with multiple light sources and using the other panasonic flashes, you can set that up. I'm sorry we're not going to go into the full wireless tt l two taurel here, but it can be done. Next up is the basic flash mode. Just leaving it in the general flash mode is recommended, as I say, there is that red eye reduction, which I'm not a big fan of because it delays the actual taking of the photograph by a second or so while the camera fires its pre flashes, we have slow sink, which will work with slow shutter speeds, and then we have a slow sink and red eye combination, so set as need be next up synchronization you, khun synchronize the flash to fire at the beginning of the exposure or the end of the exposure with the first or the second curtain. If you are shooting action there's a good chance that your subjects will look mohr normal, you might say with second curtain sink. Appears more like the cartoons we remember his kids where their streaks air coming out from behind the person because they're moving so fast and so it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world just to leave your camera in second sink all the time, but it's only really going to matter when you're photographing action and they are moving very quickly. Next up is flash a just and this is kind of a strange word because most of the time other companies call this flash exposure compensation and here's the issue. The camera is using a t t l meet a ring system, which is an automatic through the lens metering system that does a pretty good job overall measuring the light, but it tends to overexpose people with flash a little bit. And so what you want to do in this case is you want to power down that automatic flash by a little bit, maybe one stop, maybe two stops. It depends in this case I like t t l minus one I think it's got more natural skin tones than the straight tl flash in this case, she's wearing a dark sweater and there's, a dark background and the flashes overpowering the face to try toe average the scene in this example, I think detail minus two has more natural skin tones and looks a little bit better this will change according to the subject that you shoot but I think a safe place to leave this is that t t l minus two thirds of a stop that kind of takes the edge off of some of the power of that flash we'll give you a little bit more natural portrait now you can do your own test and figure out your own examples as to what you think works with your set up all right digging down even further into the flash function auto exposure compensation in general I would for basic users I would leave this turned on what happens here is it combines exposure compensation with flash exposure compensation so it kind of everything works together for the more advanced user you could turn this off so that you could independently control the flash exposure versus the rest of the exposure and so this gets into a very detailed area that not too many people work with in the flash mode but if you do a lot of that flash work I would turn this off so that you can maintain independent control between the power of the flash and general exposure. Next up is manual flash adjustment if you want to get in if the camera is in manual this is probably going to be great out in your menu system unless you have up above this I think on page one have selected manual exposure you could go in and control the manual power of your camera. This is going to be obviously things like full power half quarter power eighth power all the way down to one hundred twenty eighth power if you are hooking the camera in a wireless system, you will need to choose a channel system to work with your different flashes. You want to have them all on the same channel so that they can communicate now. I mentioned before that the camera's match maximum flash synchronization speed was one one hundred sixty eighth of a second. There is a subtle little lie in there and that you can use this camera at a faster shutter speed, but you do need the panasonic flash. The flash does need to be in this f peen mode, which is a very special mode where the camera fires a repeating syriza flashes while the camera opens the shutter for a period of time or for a very short period of time. Excuse me and you are able to use a very fast shutter speed like one one thousandth of a second. However, the flash is good for a very short distance of distance from the from the camera and it's, often on the order of a couple of feet depending on how powerful, what lens you're using, its mother variables and so it's kind of a special flash system that not a lot of people use digging down further into the flash the communication light the built in flash will communicate with the external light and you can change the power of that light and if you leave it on high it can just better communicate if you never use an external flash it's not going to really matter where this is set but there's not a lot of great reasons why you need to lower this down wireless set up if you are working with a group of flashes you can select and work with them in different groups for instance, you could have group a on the right side group b on the left side in group c behind your subjects and you could control the power of them from the camera, which is a really nice system so they don't have to run around the studio or your home or wherever you're shooting to go re power all the flashes so you could maintain control of all your different clashes and group them in different areas. So there's a lot of things to get into if you want to get into flash and that in some ways is a whole nother class I'm sorry if this is just the tip of the iceberg but we're going to keep moving through here all right red eye removal I tend to want to leave this turned office I've said a number of times before because it delays the shuttle release it also has a very annoying flash that disturbs people, and I found that kids these days are quickly and easily distracted, and if they see a bright light, they're likely to turn away because they think the picture has already been taken unless you have clearly explained what's going to happen, so play around on your own if you want on that next step I esso increments normally we're gonna leave this at one third you can change it to one stop, even increments it's just nice to have very fine tune controls over this extended aya, so this allows you to shoot down at one hundred twenty five and up at twenty five thousand six hundred I don't recommend shooting at either of those modes, but I recommend turning extended on so that if you do ever have the need to turn it on, you don't have to dive back into the menu system to allow yourself to to use that mode long shudder, noise reduction. So when you leave the shutter open for a long period of time, typically with nighttime photography shots where the shutter is open for more than one second, the camera in this case would go in and fix the noise, so in this example we have low noise, we have high noise and we have the camera going in and fixing it with its own noise reduction system and while it's very nice that the camera wants to come in and do this work for you the problem is is that it kind of has a standard fixed for everything that it wants to do you do have some subtle adjustments that you can change in there but for the most part you're going to have much better control if you work with this later on in a computer with a good software program once again this does not affect anyone who was shooting rob general recommendation here is just to leave it off so that you can work with it later one of the problems with this mode that I don't like is that is if you have your camera set up to do a ten second exposure at night what's going to happen is your shutter will stay open for ten second and then your camera will do a dark exposure or process basically that information for another ten seconds so you won't be able to take pictures during that period of time and so it's going to kind of lock you out of it and seeing how you could fix it later and do an even better job out of it that's taking critical shooting time in the field away from you so I want to leave that's why I want to leave it turned off working my way through page five shading composition this is also known as vignette e some lenses pretty much all fast lenses have a darkening of the corners and it doesn't look very natural when you have a sky like this that gets darker towards the corners, so the camera knows how to fix this and can automatically fix it in camera, which you might be thinking, hey, this sounds like a pretty good idea get more even exposures the problem is, is that some people like this look in their photograph of darkening the corners to draw your eye in words and this is something that can also be fixed later on so that's why I'm kind of recommending turning it off in those cases and once again does not impact people shooting raw so this mode is available on lee in medium and small j pegs, and what it does is it magnifies a small portion of the image into the full area of the image. Now granted, you're not able to shoot raw and large size j pegs here you are shootings medium and small but at a more telephoto setting its pretty much a useless mode. If you ask me next up digital zoom this is kind of what I just said here, but you can use it in the other modes and you're going to lose quality you could do a two x or you could do a four x it's going to look like you have a stronger telephoto lens on but it's doing the exact same thing is just cropping an image later on in photo shop, light room or whatever program you're using, so wanna leave these things turned off to keep the highest image quality color space refers to the total number of colors that you're able to record. The camera comes preset to srg b, which is the way most of the internet is right now, but if you want to print your own pictures, you want to get the most color information. Adobe rgb gives you a whiter color gamut when you record raw images, you inherently get adobe rgb with it. If you were planning on taking pictures with this camera and simply posting them on facebook, you would probably be better off with just s rgb because that's the color space that they that they use. If you have any desire to use all the information that this camera records you want to set it to adobe rgb, the stabilizer function is on ly going to be important. If you have a lens that has a stabilizer function built into it, what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to turn it on or off or put it into a panning mode if you are doing specifically panning type shots and you would normally leave this turn on if you have a lens on your camera that has stabilizing option on it. You would want to turn it off if you are working on a tripod, and so keep that in mind for those landscape and product photographers out there. All right. Nearing the end of the recording section, face recording. Your camera can memorize faces, it can recognize faces, and it can memorize them, and you can input into this next sitting right here. Profile. Set up let's, say you have two or three kids, will. You can photograph their face, and you can add their age and their name. And, yes, you could do this for pets as well. It will recognize their face, and you can put in their birthdays. And it will automatically add their name and their date to the metadata, not the actual photograph, but the meta data of their photograph.