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Quick Menu: Top Row

The Q Menu. The Quick Menu is a shortcut to some of the most common features that people are likely going to want to change. And one of the beauties of this is that it is now customizable. You can add your own features in here. It's got a pretty good set to start with, so let's take a look at what it's got in here to begin with. Now if you do make a change on one of these, you change one of the settings, up, down, left, or right, or to any one of the different options, it's gonna give you a little red dot in the corner to let you know that it's in an altered setting at that point in time. So be aware if you see those dots that means you've changed something there. So let's take a look at what the options are here. First up is the Custom Setting. And there are seven different Custom Settings that you can make in here. And this is gonna allow you to adjust the camera to different types of looks and styles. And so if you wanna get into do this what we're gonna do, and I'll show you on the...

back of the camera right now, is we're gonna press the Q button to activate the Q Menu and we can navigate left and right if we want. And from here we can start making our changes. And so the camera is already preprogrammed with these different types of looks, and so let me explain the difference between one or two of these. And so as we go, the base is always kind of where you are currently at, so when we go from C1 to C I can see up here the Film Simulation has gone from Standard to Velvia. Now this is actually in here, whoops, I forgot this is touch screen and I gotta be careful about touching the screen. And so this is in here twice here, so we can get in here as well and change it. So yes, you can use this by touch as well. And so you can go in and change a variety of these settings and have them programmed to C1, two, three, four, and so forth. Now in general I have found a few favorite things that I like to do with these types of settings is that I will have one for just a standard look image, but then sometimes I'll wanna shoot black and white and I'll wanna have the contrast boost a little bit. And I'll save that as maybe C3, and then a different even more contrasty version as C4. And so this is not saving shutter speeds and apertures per se, but more of the look of the image. All right, next up, oh we have another little shortcut here. If you press the Q button for two seconds you can reprogram these settings on the back of the camera. So let's tempt fate and give this a try myself. So rather than just pressing the Q button once, which gives us this page, we can go in here and press it twice, and actually, let's try this again, hold it in for two seconds. And so now we can select one of these features, let's take this one in here that we have duplicated and we're gonna hit the OK button. And now we can choose something else that appears in that category. And so let's just look through here and see what else we can find. Let's just do the Movie Mode right here, so I'm gonna press Set in there. And so now I have the Movie Mode in there. So when I press the Q Menu you can see which mode I have selected and by turning the dial I can start selecting different Movie Mode options in the camera. So it's a very easy way to change. It's you press once to activate, hold in for two seconds to reprogram one of those particular features. All right, let's go back to the standard set here. All right, next up is the AF Mode. And this is choosing where you are focusing. You can choose in a small box, you can choose in a large area, and I think from all the cameras out on the market this is my favorite system for choosing the focus area. And a lot of other companies have chosen either different boxes in different places, different size and different groupings. What this does is it allows you to choose a really, really tiny box and then one that's a little bit bigger, and a little bit bigger, and a little bit bigger, and they have 10 different sizes of boxes and you just get to choose whatever size box you want. So let's take a closer look at some of the focusing options on this camera. So this is the AF Mode, this is choosing the area. And when you see a white box that's the area that's selected, when it's green that means it's achieved and it's been properly focused. If it turns red on you that means there's been a problem in the focusing. Now the camera uses what's known as an Intelligent Hybrid AF system, which means it uses a combination of contrast detection, which is very accurate, and phase detection, which is very fast. And so the phase detection is 169 points that make a very square box in the middle of the frame, it's a large square box. The contrast detection extends further off onto the sides. And so for the best focusing you wanna stay within the phase detection area for tracking subjects that are moving, which is still a pretty large area, but just not the extreme edges of the frame. The camera has 325 auto focus points, 169 phase detection, and if you wanna select a single box you can, but if you wanna move it all the way to the other side of the frame there's a lot of button pressing in there, 'cause there are so many rows and so many columns. So one of the options is they have is to simplify the system down, so it's not quite as big a number. And in this case it's 91 and 49 phase detection points and if focuses just as well when you choose these lower number, it's just easier to change the numbers, or it's easier to change the place that you have the focusing in this case. And so this is what I've done on my camera, I know a number of other people have done this as well. It's just a little bit less button pressing when moving the focusing point around. This can be controlled, of course, in the menu system under the Number of Focus Points option in the Auto Focus section. Now the phase detection AF on this is good down to EV minus one, which is very, very low light. It will do that with a minimum aperture of f/11, so it's gonna work on all lenses quite easily. So the first option is choosing a single point. And the single point is something that you can move around the entire frame, all the way off to the edges. And if you want to adjust this you can press in, you can move it around with either of the controls, and then you can change the size of it by turning the dial on it. And you can do that either with the front dial or the back dial. And they used to have five sizes, but they added a new extra small size, and so you can get in there and control that. And so let me show you on the back of the camera what this is gonna look like. And let's see what we wanna do here. Is by pressing the little joystick button here on the back of the camera we can activate this point and we can move it around. I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change shutter speeds to make it darker, so that you can see what's going on here. And so you can move this around. Once it's green and activated you can turn the dial to change the size of this. And this is our six different single point areas right here. And if we go into the Quick Menu we can change different sizes. Actually it looks like we've played around with the menu here, there's another little shortcut we can do. Where is it? Oh, oh, let's see, I need to change it into the Auto Focus Mode, I believe. And there we go. So we have Single Points, we have Zone that I'm gonna talk about in a moment, and Wide and Tracking. And these are larger areas that you can choose. So you can choose any size box that you want in there. So back to the keynote. So anytime you wanna move it back to the center you can press in on the joystick or you can even press the display back button, which isn't completely intuitive. I realize this, but that does take it back to the center. Next up is the Zone area, which is a three by three, five by five, or seven by seven box that you can move around any place that it can move to in the frame. And then finally, we do have a Wide and Tracking area, which is the entire white area and will generally focus on whatever is closest to you. Be reminded though that it's that center area that is gonna do best when you have the camera in the high speed motor drive mode. And one of my favorite options here is the All option, so that you can change very quickly from the smallest to the largest of the boxes. And so if you leave it in the All you can easily go from top to bottom in the camera. Next up is Dynamic Range. And so as you can see here this is a JPEG only feature and so it doesn't affect you if you're shooting RAW. But if you are shooting JPEGs and the problem with shooting JPEG sometimes is that you clip information, highlight information gets lost, because it is a little bit too bright. And this is a way to compensate for that if you do like to shoot or need to shoot JPEGs. What you can do is you can set it to 100 for normal shooting. And in this particular example watch what happens to the highlights in the histogram is they start getting pushed away from the right hand side, which means they're being made a little bit darker. And so up at Dynamic Range it's protecting those highlights quite a bit more. You can see a little bit more information in those clouds and in the sky. Now in order to set it up here you do have to have the camera set to ISO 800. And so another example of protecting the highlights. You can see how close the highlights are to the edge with it at DR 100 compared to DR 400. It's protecting those highlights and just bringing them down a little bit in tonality. And so for shooting JPEGs it's a pretty good idea. The downside is is that you do have to shoot at ISO compared to ISO 200. But that's part of the way that this Dynamic Range automatically works. White Balance, this is important to everyone, whether you're shooting RAW or a JPEG. If you are shoot RAW it is something that you can adjust later, but it is something that is good to get right out in the field. White Balance deals with recording the correct color of light from this red to blue along the Kelvin spectrum. We have a variety of different settings for different types of light sources, whether it be natural light or artificial light. There is an underwater setting and then there is a Kelvin number that you can specifically choose if you are interested in setting a very exact number. There is also three different custom ones where you can customize it for preset locations. If you happen to photograph in a particular arena or room or in a scene that has unusual lighting you can preset that in by photographing a white object and calibrating it and then having it stored in the camera for three different sets. You also have Auto White Balance, of course. And this is where the camera will choose, it looks at the highlight information and will choose the correct white balance for you. In general, Auto White Balance tends to work pretty good, so it's not a bad initial setting to keep on the camera. If you find that you're not getting the right color or you know you're gonna be shooting under consistent particular lighting conditions that's when you may wanna change. So just keep an eye on the color of your images as you shoot them. If you need to change it this is where you can do it.