Lessons

Lesson Info

Menu Functions & Lens Detection Menu

It is time for us to get into the menu functions of this camera. This has one of the shortest menus out there, so this is a good thing, but there's a lot of important things in there, and some things that you may not be totally aware of. And so we're gonna dive in and dig deep and figure what out these are. So, on this camera, the menu system has four different pages. Really, it's like 3.2 things, 3.2 pages of systems. Be aware that there is a little scroll bar over on the left-hand side so you can quickly see which page you are on very, very easily. Now, one of the neat options on this is that you do have a favorites setting here. And when you have something entered into the favorites, that becomes your new page one or potentially your page two, 'cause you have up to 15 different items that you can put on those first two pages. Now, if you're somebody that only has a few things, just only put eight of 'em, and then you'll have one page of favorites, and then the rest of the menu syste...

m in there. So, anything that you need to get to right away, you can usually get to with just a couple of button presses. You'll be using the directional pad for navigating and controlling your way through the menu system up and down, obviously. Go to the right or the center button to enter, and then if you wanna back out of any particular feature that we are talking about, you're gonna hit the return or to the left button, and that'll just back you out of any particular feature in there. You can use the wheel as well for scrolling up and down, and sometimes that's a little bit quicker. So you get to choose which one you want to use. If you wanna exit, you can either hit the menu button or the playback button, and that's kind of the same as hitting the left button to back out of a particular feature. All right, let's dive into the menus here. We're gonna start on page one. The first item is lens detection. And so in this, you can have the camera automatically figuring out, reading the six-byte code, which lenses are on the camera. And if you are using a different, older lens, you can manually choose it if you want, and if you are using the M to R adapter, you can choose which specific lens you are doing. Now, I actually need to grab one of my lenses from over on the shelf, so let me grab that, 'cause I wanna show you what it looks like with the R lens attached to the camera. So, we've got the R lens on the adapter here. Let's take a look at what's going on in here with a normal lens first. So let's turn our camera on, hit the menu button, and get the menu here. And so, in here, let's see. So I wanna get past the favorites here, so I'm gonna hit this play button right here. And so lens detection, go to the right on here, and so if I go in here to manual, you can see all the different lenses that Leica makes, and you can select which one, and that'll be logged into the metadata there. I wanna back back out of this. I can go into the R and select these. And so if I was, hit the menu to get into the regular part of the menu there. To set this on auto, it'll automatically select whichever lens is correct. But now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take off my M lens, and I'm going to put on my R lens with the R adapter on there. And now, when I go in here, it's automatically selected this R adapter, and I can go in here and I can choose which lens. And so what I would do with this particular lens, it's a 180 3.4, and so I would set that lens in there, and so it's got a 180 3.4. So let's gonna log all that data for the metadata. Now, if I decide that I wanna switch this, and we turn the camera off, and put back on my 50 Summilux, turn the camera back on, go back into the menu system, you can see it's back in auto. So if you do go back and forth between new and older lenses, you don't have to go back into the menu system and change anything. It automatically recognizes that you would normally want that on there. And then if you do wanna manually change it, you can. So, it's a good, good, good system, and it's improved over previous systems. Next item in here is the drive mode. So when you press down on the shutter release, what happens. There's a lot of different options, so let's take a closer look. The first option is the single shot mode. And so this is where most people will leave their camera, most of the time. You press down on the shutter release. You're gonna get a single photo. When you wanna take an additional photo, raise it up halfway and press it down again, and you will get a second photo. The camera does have a continuous firing system, and it can fire upwards of above five frames per second. And so just leave your finger pressed down to continuously shoot. If you are shooting raw images, you'll get about 30 images in a row before the buffer fills up. If you're shooting .jpg, you'll get about a hundred images. And this may vary from card to card, depending on how fast that card reads information. Next option is an interval timer. You can use this camera to record intervals between images and take those images to create a video like this, a time lapse video. And so this can be very interesting. I added the slider effect in here, just to get a little bit more movement in it. And so in here, you can choose a number of frames. And so if you're gonna be shooting a video series, you probably want to have a decent little clip of around 10 seconds is what I like to shoot. And so that's gonna be about 300 images. Sometimes you can't something longer, so that number's gonna be quite a bit bigger, and the reason it's 300 is because most video runs at 30 frames a second, and I want 10 seconds. That gives me 300 frames. Interval time on this is the distance between the images that are being shot. And so you can choose different interval times in here, and so usually, it's gonna be something between one second and a minute. 10 seconds is pretty common. It really depends on what you were wanting to shoot. And so, let me go in real quickly on the intervalometer and show you about some of that little settings in here. So, let's go ahead and turn the camera on. Let's go down to the drive mode, come on over to the interval settings over here. Let's, let's set a number of frames. Let's do some little interval right here in class. I wanna delete these numbers off of here. Let's do a short one that's not too long. Let's go with four images, and that's it. Very, very short time lapse. And yes, that is what I want, four images. And let's have these images three seconds apart right here. And so that's our interval settings. It's set in the interval mode, and so now, when I press, (shutter snaps) we have picture number one. (shutter snaps) Three seconds later, picture number two. (shutter snaps) Picture number three, and then our final one in the series, picture number four works like that. And so you can jump back in here, go back into other drive mode right here, and then you would probably want to turn this off by setting it back to single or continuous or something else. And so it's a very easy setting to make, and it's something that can be very interesting in many different environments. I encourage you to play around with an interval time lapse. It can be a lot of fun. All right. Next up is the exposure bracketing option. So in here, it allows you to shoot automatically a series of photos at different exposures. This is commonly used in landscape photography when you're not sure of what the correct exposure is. You can shoot through a series of photos at predetermined increments. The first adjustment you have is you can either set it to three or five frames, depending on how many you need, and then you can control the increment between the images. A third stop would be a very, very small amount. Most people are gonna do it in one, two, or three stop increments, and if you want to, you can add exposure compensation on top of the entire factor. And so if you want everything a little bit lighter or a little bit darker, you can do that. So the first option you have in here is how many frames you wanna shoot. You can either do five or three, depending on how extreme you want to go on these. You will then choose the f-stop range that's going to adjust between each image, because as each image changes, the camera's gonna set a different amount of exposure value between these. And so one, two, and three stops are gonna be the most common for most people, and you will see that indicated down there on the bottom by how wide that bracket is getting. You can add exposure compensation in as well, and so let's go ahead and set up the exposure bracket to do a pretty simple one. We did a manual one before, but this way, it's all done at the same time for you. So let's go ahead, hit the menu button. We'll dive into the drive mode, come down here to exposure bracketing. Let's do kind of a big one here. Let's do five stops, and let's do this at two-stop exposures. So this is a pretty big difference in here. We're not gonna use exposure compensation in this one. And so, we'll hit the button here. So we are five stops with two stops of exposure compensation. I'm gonna set the lens to, let's go to 1.4, so keep things going quickly here. And so now when I take a photo, (shutter snaps repeatedly) it's gonna shoot through five photos very, very quickly. Let's play these photos back. Looks like it was still finishing up on one there. Let's go hit play button. So here's our four stops overexposed, two stops overexposed, proper exposure, minus two, and minus four. Now, these blinkies are something that we'll talk about here. And so here is where we can see them without the blinkies. It might be a little bit easier to see. The blinkies are something that you can turn on to let you show what is either underexposed or in this case, in red, what is overexposed. And so we'll talk more about that coming up. So then I'm gonna go back in, and I'm gonna turn off the exposure, this exposure bracketing by going up and just selecting single. All right. Next up, here is the self timer option. So we have a two-second self timer, and we have a 12-second self timer. And any time you want to restart the self timer, you can just press lightly on the shutter release. And so if you start that 12-second timer 'cause you're trying to get in the shot, but then something happens and delays you and you can't do it, rather than going into the menu system and resetting it, just press halfway down on the shutter to reset it. And if you wanna cancel it, you can just hit the menu button. So it's very easy to get in and out of using that self timer. And that is all of your drive modes in the camera. Next up is exposure metering. We have three different options, spot, center-weighted, and multi-field. So the camera has traditionally used center-weighted metering, which means most of the information is in the center of the frame, and this is the only option that's available when you're using the standard rangefinder mode on this camera. If you're in live view, then you'll be able to use all three options, because it's using the sensor of the camera to do the metering. Normally, it's just measuring the light coming off of the shutter blades on the camera, and so it's a large area of central brightness. It is slightly more weighted towards the bottom of the frame than it is the top of the frame so that it doesn't get influenced by bright skies, but it's ever so slight in that regard. When you are in live view, you can choose to use the spot meter, which is a 3.5-degree meter, and there is a small central area. So if you do wanna get a very, very correct reading on a very small area, you can have that. The multi-field breaks the scene into 24 parts and would be a very good generic metering system. But it's only gonna be for use in live view where it's applicable in that case. So the way that it's working in the center-weighted metering is that there is a light meter in the base of the camera. It's pointed at the shutter blades that are lightly colored, and it is measuring light off of that area. And so this is how the center-weighted system works. And so, the spot and multi-field once again are only effective in the live view option. Exposure compensation, you can dive in here. We're gonna see some other shortcut ways. We've already talked about one, which was pressing the focus button on the front of the camera and turning the back dial on the camera. You can also dedicate the back dial to doing exposure compensation, but if you wanna do it in the menu system, for some people, it's easier to see on the back of the camera, it's right here for you. If you were gonna add a flash to the camera, there's gonna be a whole submenu filled with options when you are attaching a Speedlite to this. The first option is the sync mode. Do you want to sync the flash with the beginning or the shutter or the second shutter? So as you can see, there is very clearly a difference between the look of a subject that's moving with the start of exposure versus the end of exposure. The maximum flash sync time is something that you can choose in either a specific shutter speed like 1/60 of a second, 1/125 of a second, or you can have it something in relationship to the focal length of the lens that you are using. And so 1/f means it's gonna look at the focal length of the lens, and it's gonna choose that as its shutter speed, because that's often a good handholding limit. But some people have different needs, and so sometimes they want it a little bit faster, which is why there's a 2/f and a 4/f option on this. Flash exposure compensation is important because sometimes flash fires a little bit too powerfully. And so if you are getting a little too much flash, which is what often happens with standard TTL flash, you can power it down by one or two stops or as much as you need. And this is gonna be really helpful in portrait photography, where you want a natural look and natural skin tones on anybody that you're shooting. And so dialing this down to minus one would be a very, very common setting for a lot of people. So, if you wanna work with the flash exposure compensation, you may need to work with it on the flash unit itself, or you may be able to do it on the camera, depending on which flasher that you have attached to the hot shoe of the camera. The ISO setup is gonna allow us to go in and customize various settings with the ISO. There's a couple different things to look at in here. First up is the M setting. This is where you get to manually choose an ISO number for when you turn the dial to the M setting on the camera. Most people would probably have this at 12,800, 'cause it's just one step above the last setting of 6400. But if you find that you really like ISO 250, this is really the only way that you can get in and do it easily on the top of the camera, is just to set the M setting to 250. Whenever you turn it there, you have it at 250. Next up is maximum auto ISO. And so if you are using the auto ISO option, here is where you get to choose, what is the maximum ISO that you want the camera to use? And this is kind of your, your image quality limitations as far as, you don't like how much noise it gets above maybe 6400 or 12,500 or something like that. You can go in here and set what you think is the highest quality setting. And so I think for most people, 6400 would be a pretty good setting. You'll see my recommendations in here as to where I think a good place to start is, but of course, it's something that you're gonna wanna adjust according to your own need sand what you think is best for your camera. Next up is your maximum exposure time. When you are using the auto ISO, it bumps you up to a higher ISO when your shutter speed drops too low. And here is where you get to have a say about what shutter speed is actually too low for you. For some people, it's a handholding limit. For some other people, it's a specific shutter speed that has to do with the action that they're shooting. And so one of the interesting options in here is the one over the focal length of the lens option. So what this means is the minimum shutter speed when using a 28 millimeter lens is gonna be about 1/ of a second, 'cause 1/28 and 1/30 are pretty close together. If you know that you want to get really sharp photos, and you don't want any hand movement from holding the camera, you might do it in the one over two times the focal length, which would give you 1/60 of a second. If you really wanna be sure, you can go to one over four times the focal length of the focal length that you are using, which would end up at 1/125 of a second. So, if you want to compensate for any sort of hand movement, if you're photographing faster action, that's when you would make those settings that would give you a little bit higher ISO, excuse me, a little bit higher shutter speed. And so one over the focal length I think is good for most people in most situations, but of course, there's a lot of different situations where you may wanna change that. Next up is white balance. And so, in this case, you can choose different settings according to the light that you are shooting. Let's take a look at what the different white balance settings will accommodate for. And so for natural lighting, daylight, cloudy, and shadows, they have slightly different colors that you're going to get in those situations. The one that is most different is the tungsten setting. And so if you have tungsten lights and you're trying to get natural colors, you would wanna set the camera to the tungsten setting. There are different fluorescent lights for warm and cool, and then there is one for flash as well. The camera does have an automatic white balance where it will look at the scene, especially the highlight area, and try to just automatically correct for what is the correct white balance for that situation. If you want, you can manually set the Kelvin temperature yourself if you know exactly where you want it to be, or you're working with lights that have a very tricky setting and none of the presets on the camera will work. And then there's a greycard option, where you can sample the light and take a test photo and then correct for that white balance with what you see in the camera. And we're gonna do a little, little test here with that here in just a moment. And so you wanna set whatever is closest to the situation that you're shooting. Auto white balance is gonna work most of the time. But I wanted to show you how this greycard system works. And so what you need to do is photograph a white object, and so you select a greycard or a white card or anything white or photograph anything that's white. You're gonna photograph that neutral color subject. You will then move the crosshairs to the desired area and press the center button so that the camera can read that area and then correct for the color, and then you can press the center button to confirm, and then the menu to escape. Now, I forgot to bring my white balance card with me, but luckily, the background here does have a bunch of white on it here. So we're gonna do this in-camera. So what we're gonna do first is we're gonna go select the greycard option in here. And so we are working with white balance. We're gonna come down to white balance, go to the right, and you're gonna see all our different options, and we're looking for the greycard right here. We're gonna come to the right, and it says please take a picture for the settings of the white balance. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna make a few adjustments on this lens so that it's generally about right, and I'm gonna point it over at our wall here and take a photo. All right, so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move. It's a little bit on the dark side, so, why is it on the dark side? Because, I am gonna make another adjustment. We're gonna take another photo, just to be safe here. (shutter snaps) And I'm gonna take yet another photo (shutter snaps) to lighten that up a little bit. So now what's gonna happen, now I gotta go back in. I took multiple photos, and so I gotta go back in and go back to my white balance and select my greycard. And you know, you can go up as a shortcut. We'll go up, go to the right. It's gonna take a photo. All right, so now you see that crosshairs in the middle? I'm gonna go put that crosshairs on something that I believe is white. And so I'm gonna go to this little tiny area right down in here. Let's see. That looks pretty good right there. And then I'm gonna hit the center button, and it's gonna correct for the light there, and then I'm gonna hit the center button again and save that. The white balance is set. So now when I take a photo or this situation, which I am getting some really darK stuff, so I'm gonna make an adjustment with my ISO here. (shutter snaps) Ah! And I wonder if I just have my screen set on really dark. So let's do this manually. I think I, oh, I had this set. (shutter snaps) I had this set, I don't have the display the way I normally set it up. This is the way you get it from the factory. So it's giving me the exposure when I press halfway down. And so I have neutral colors. That's the topic we're talking about, folks, is colors, and so we are getting natural colors once we have that greycard set to this particular situation. So that's how the greycard works in that regard. So you can measure it under any unusual lighting and get it perfectly set up. If you don't have a greycard and you just wanna adjust the temperature, you can go in and adjust the temperature. I've done this a few times myself under tricky lighting, and it usually takes me three or four guesses to really nail down the exact, correct color temperature, 'cause you'll adjust it to where you think it is, and then you might need to warm it up or cool it down a little bit by changing those numbers. The file format is adjusting the way that the image is being recorded on the memory card. So let's look at the few options that we do have. The camera is using a .dng raw format. Now, .dng was invented and created and distributed essentially by Adobe as an open standard. I wish all companies would use the .dng system because it is something that could be used freely and available by lots of different manufacturers. Leica is one of the few manufacturers that has chosen to use this. I think it's been a great decision. So, it is a 24-megapixel sensor, so 5976 by 3992 is your resolution on that. File size will be somewhere in the range of about 28 megabytes per file. One of the options is raw plus .jpg, where every time you shoot a photo, you will get two pictures, one in raw, one in .jpg, and one of the curiosities of the camera, I don't have a good explanation why, but it is, is that the resolution of the raw and the resolution of the .jpg are slightly different by just a few pixels. And so if you are shooting raw plus .jpg, and you're combining or using those photos in some way, there is a slightly different resolution that you need to be concerned with when you are cropping those images. And so in this case, the .jpg image is about six megabytes on top of the 28 that you're gonna get for the .dng. And then of course you can record in straight .jpg, which is available also in a 12- and six-megapixel option that you'll see here in a moment. And that's gonna give you about a six megabyte file size. And I'm gonna assume that most people who shoot with this camera are trying to get the highest quality images possible, and they'll be shooting with the .dng. But for many people, they do need the .jpgs for quick workflow, and so there is that option in there if you have that need. If you have a raw, you can make a .jpg. If you have a .jpg, you can't make a raw from that.