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Segment 8 - Custom and Setup Menus Part 1

we have got to the monster, the beast, the custom menu. So inside the custom menu, there are a lot of custom controls, as you have seen that we've had with this camera already, and it has broken it into a number of different groupings that are reasonably, well, logically laid out. But there is actually more than you see here because it actually scrolls down for a few more. And as we go through here, we're gonna be able to see how we can customize the camera. So let's dive into Group A. So Group A and custom function deals with auto focusing and manual focusing. And so the auto focus mode is something that we have already seen numerous times. And that is the single autofocus. Continue on us for autofocus options. My favorite picks here for simplicity just s a f for single autofocus. For those that like to be able to manually touch up the focusing the S A F plus, MF gives you that option of manual focusing the one that I switch it out to from time to time is continuous autofocus for subj...

ects that are moving around a lot. I would tend to stay away from the tracking one. It's a little inconsistent in the movie mode. You can also choose what focusing system you have, and I would recommend single autofocus for the movies as well. Full time auto focus here. The camera will focus even if the shutter release is not pressed, and this is a great way of draining your battery very quickly. Eso It's just constantly focusing whenever it's turned on. Most people are gonna want to leave this one turned off. The back of the camera has the A L A F L button, and this gets to describe how that button is particularly used. I do like it in M three. What happens in M three is that when your camera goes into manual focus when you put it into manual focus, the A T L button on the back of the camera works as an autofocus button so you can automatically jump back into autofocus whenever you want. And that's how he leave the camera. Most of the time, there is the sea to mode, which will lock the exposure. Let me get this right, locked the exposure when you press down on the shutter release all the way to take pictures, which I think works a little bit better for anyone who's doing action photography. So s one C two and M three or my favorite choices When it comes to the functions of the auto exposure lock button, the menu does do a pretty good job telling you what the different options are in there. What s to does. And I think there's an S three as well Reset the lands a little unsure on where to set this one. I've put it on on. What it means here is that when you turn the camera off and turn it back on when you turn it on, the lens is inherently set at infinity when you turn it on. And so if you are shooting a subject the same subject for a large period of time, like if you were gonna do tabletop photography, you might want to turn this off because your camera is gonna reset to infinity as you turn your camera. So it depends on how long you're staying static on one particular subject, turning the camera on and off. But I think for most people on, it's a good position to because your cameras just ready to shoot a picture at infinity as soon as you turn it on bulb and time focusing. There is a bold option on the shutter speeds and a time option and the difference with those. But they're both used for long exposures, so if you wanted to do it exposure longer than seconds. One option is bulb, in which case you would hook up a cable release and you would press down on the plunger and you would leave it as long as your fingers on the button. The shutter would stay open as soon as you raise your finger up. The shutter would end. Time works in the sense that you press it, wants to start and wants to stop. They do the same thing is just a matter of whether you want to leave your finger on the button or not. And bulb time focusing says. Do you want the lens to be allowed to focus while you are doing these bulb time exposures? And there are certain creative reasons why it might be kind of fun to throw the image out of focus while you're doing one of these shots If you would like that option, then leave this turned on. If that seems like a weird thing to do and you don't want to do it, you can turn it off. Next up is the focusing ring. We talked about how the focusing ring can turn one direction or the other direction to reach infinity, depending on whether you use a Nikon system or another system. Nikon is kind of backwards when it comes to focusing, and it throws people off. And so if you are coming from a Nikon system, you might want to match it up, because then things are very familiar to you. If you're coming from Canon Pentax pretty much anything else out of the market, you'd want to set it to the standard diagram that I have on screen. Next up is manual focus assist, and there's gonna be a couple of neat options. One deals with magnifying and one deals with Peking, and I got a nice little video demo here for you. And so this 1st 1 is image magnification, and what happens is the screen magnifies about five times so that you can scroll in and see what you're focusing on and as you can see here, I manually adjusting focus. And it's much easier when I'm much, much closer with that magnified look. The other option is something called Focus peaking. What happens here is areas in focus, kind of our shimmering in highlights, and you can see how I'm focusing on the foreground, middle ground and a little bit more towards the background, and you can see exactly what's in focus by what's kind of being highlighted there. And so there's a lot of people who really, like Focus speaking because they can see exactly what's in focus as they focus from the foreground to the background. It depends a little bit on what type of work you're going to do as to what I recommend, but in general I think a lot of people are gonna like that. Focus speaking the magnify. It's kind of hard to compose because it goes in so tightly. The magnifying is a very good tool, but only for very specific purposes. And so in general, idly peaking on and magnifying off, you didn't think we were done with Section eight yet. Just cause there's one page pate paid just goes on and on this is still dealing with autofocus and manual focus. Uh, point home. What that means is that when you press the okay button on the back of the camera, where do you want the focus point to normally be set? What's the home position for your focusing? And you can set that if you want it to be someplace other than the center, for instance. Next up is the autofocus illumination. I told you. I like to have the camera in a quiet, non disturbing mode, and so I'd like to turn off the autofocus illumination now. Technically, this does help the camera focus under extremely low light conditions where it turns on and will basically shine a light on something nearby in front of you to focus. The problem is, is it's only good for a couple of meters at the very best. So it really doesn't have much reach and doesn't help you out much at all and could be lightly distracting to subjects that you were photographing. We've seen face priority a couple of times before. As I said before, I like to leave. It turned off. A F area pointer deals with what sort of display you have in the viewfinder. As for us, did your camera chief focus Right now the standard set up is to leave. This turned on which I kind of like. What happens when you focus on something is that the focusing bracketed area will blink green at you once to let you know that it has achieved focus. And that's a nice, simple, small visual confirmation that it is in focus if it bothers you. This is where you turn it off. Continuous autofocus lock If you have your camera in the continuous focusing mode, there is a bit of a dilemma that the camera encounters when you're photographing the subject coming towards you and something briefly interrupts it. For instance, a referee. Is your photographing a football player coming down the field? Do you want that camera to refocus on the referee or not? Well, probably not, in that case, but what if it's another player who's suddenly got the ball in coming downfield? Well, then maybe you do. And so people have different needs for how quickly does it switch? This is where it's currently set to normal, and I would leave it here until you find a need to change it. You could change it too high or low as to how quickly or excuse me, how much it stays locked on that subject. So if you really want to keep it locked on that stuff subject you would put this on high, and it really stays on that subject, and it won't switch unless a new subject is in there for a significant amount of time. So this is only gonna be important when you were in the continuous autofocus ing mode. Okay, we finally got three with the first part of that custom section. We're now on to be button functions. And we did see this before in the super control panel. This is where you get to go in in control and set up all the different function buttons on the camera. And so I'm really used to using that function button on the top of the camera for I s O. I realize some people are going to say that doesn't make any sense, John, because you just have to flip the to switch in the back and get to it. Well, that's true. That's another option. Varies a couple of buttons on the front of the camera. I like programming one of those for doing focused magnification. So if I want to check focus, here is a quick little button press in front. But you also have the button on the lands, the button on the lower front, as well that you get to re program. I typically don't like to change the function number one button, because that does focusing, and that's a pretty important one that you're going to do quite a bit of the time. You can also program the downward arrow tab as well as the right arrow tab as well. So this is one of those things that you're gonna have to sit down and really walk through at home when you got some time to figure out how you want to have your camera set up and pretty much no matter how you set it up at first, you're gonna want to change it after a couple of weeks after you figure it out and fine tune the way you like your camera to work. Next up is dial button, and so what this is controlling is the dial controls up on the top of the camera and what they control so normally you can control shutter speeds and apertures, and they have their own set up. And if you want to flip them, you can flip them if you want. Next up is dialled direction. Which direction do you turn? The dials and what I highly recommend is changing this to dial number two. What this does is it reverses the turning of the dial's according to the exposure meter in the camera, and what I find very confusing about the way it's set up is a lot of times you'll see your exposure meter and you got it in the middle. Or you could go to one side or the other, and you kind of want to turn the dial in the same direction that the arrows and the lines are moving. And if you turn it to dial direction number two, it'll seem perfectly logical. But if you leave it as its default setting, you'll always be turning the dials the opposite direction. So this will definitely make it easier to work with mode dial function. Okay, remember those four little presets called my set at the beginning part of the menu well, you can have those programmed with the I auto or art mode so that you are basically using the I auto and art position on the mode I'll as my set 123 or four. And so, if you don't use the eye auto or the art mode, you get to re program those two something that you would use on a regular basis. And so it's a very quick way so that you don't have to dive into the menu to quickly throw the camera into your favorite mode or two. I told you that the lever on the back of the camera could be modified, and this is where you get to do it. There are five different modes. I'm not gonna go into all the different functions here. It is fairly well illustrated and explained as you get into these, but it's gonna change potentially, which modes that you can have access to and how you have access to them. I am pretty fine with standards set up mode one, but take a look through 234 and five and see if any of those meet your needs better than mode one. Change it to your heart's content. And so you get to change this not only in the standard position, but also in in position number two. And this is where you get to change the features of what's going on when you press those buttons. So if you find that you don't change auto focusing and metering very much, you can change it to position number two were that bottom half of the button becomes flash exposure compensation. The top part would switch over to two bracketing. So if you do bracketing all the time and you prefer that over the HDR Siri's, you can flip it to number two. Now, it does flip both of these modes at the same time, so you kind of have to pick one or the other of these groupings. Okay, we have finally made it all the way to see we have a long ways to go, folks. So hang in there. Okay? These are dealing with the shutter release and the motor drive of the camera release priority on S. I would just leave this in the off position. What this basically means is the camera must focus on a subject before it allows you to shoot a picture of it, which is a good safety protocol for basic picture taking. The standard protocol when it's in the sea or the continuous focusing mode is exactly the opposite. It does allow you to shoot pictures if they are slightly out of focus. The camera is trying to focus, but it will still shoot, even if it is slightly out of focus. And this is something that sports photographers have found is that it's more important to be able to capture the moment than to be too fussy about having absolutely perfect focusing and will enable you to get mawr sports photos that will be capturing the best moments in the low frames per second. You get to choose how fast your camera works when it's set to the low motor drive setting. The options are anywhere here from 1 to 6.5 frames per second. I think five frames per second is a nice option because you want to also get to choose the high frames per second, which can go up to 10 frames per second. And so I would set this at the higher end. As for for it when you are using the motor drive. Do you want the image stabilization turned off? Normally, you probably don't want to do it. But some sports photographers might not like it turned on, and so they could turn. This is very confusing. I hate when they get negatives like this. Do you want to turn on the off or do you want to turn off the off? So if you turn on the off, it's going to be off. And so I would normally leave the off in the off position about that. OK, Do you want the image stabilization system turned on when you press halfway down on the shutter release of the camera? I think for compositional reason, it's nice to have that there. It does use up a little bit more battery power, but it's not that big a deal. So I'm gonna have that turned on with my camera. I think it's a good system to have, and at least finally on this page the lens image stabilization priority. And so if you have a lands from Panasonic because Olympus let me get this, make sure I got this right. Olympus lenses do not have stabilization. Panasonic has some lenses, not all lenses, but many of their lenses have stabilization. And if you wanted to use the stabilization system in that Panasonic lens, what you would do is you would turn lens I esport priority toe on. So it has priority of choosing the lens stabilization system. And if you were using a Panasonic Power A. Y s lands and shooting the camera and video, you might get smoother quality stabilization. And so that's that the newest Panasonic stabilization system. Okay, let's continue scrolling down on the release and motor drive for the release and lag time. I would leave this on normal, and so it is possible to put this on short, which gives you a shorter lag time between pressing the button and taking the picture. But the downside of that is for some reason, I don't know why it affects the battery life of the camera, and it may have problems with the LCD on the back of the camera if there is a sharp impact and I don't understand why on so for that reason, I just leave it at normal. It's still a very quick release time. I don't think there's a major problem to deal with that. Okay. Moving into Group D dealing with displays, sound and connection to your computer. HTM I is the connection to your TV. Normally, you just leave this at 10 80 I because that's the resolution, and the off deal is referring to the connection to the remote control of your TV. You can turn this on, and you can control the forward and back through pictures from your TV's remote video out. You get to choose whether you live in North America, where we use the NTSC system or someplace else in the world that uses the pal system. Here. Control settings gives you a customized visual controls for the different modes of the camera, and this turns on the super control panel. And if you recall earlier in the class, when I was having trouble viewing the super control panel, I did not have it turned on here. So let me do a quick little live demo and show you what I was doing back at that time. So let me turn on the camera and I'm gonna go into the menu and I want to come in here to Group D and show you a little bit about what's going on. So the camera control settings, what I had to do is I had to go into P A s and M because that is I was in one of the manual months. Sorry. Didn't mean to touch the button. Now I gotta go back on going here. So I went into here, and the problem was was my super control panel was unchecked, and I had to come in and I pressed the wrong button again. Come down here and check it off. And so you probably want to come in here. I like to go in and just check all of these off. If I'm in, I auto those air good back. I don't use the art scene mode, so I'm not too worried about it. But you can see that there unchecked right there. Which means you can't get to them. They're trying to keep that motives simple as possible, but I would definitely come into the P A s and M mode and make sure both of those are checked off, and then you can back up out of that. So that's what I was doing earlier. Okay. What do we got next? Now? I just wanted to explain that Oh, that you hit the okay button that's going to go to the super control panel. Next up is the info settings. This is going to give you the option when you press the info button. What sort of options do you see in there? And so I would go in here and I would turn on all the options so that you can cycle through as many screens as you like. If you don't use one of the screens, you can leave it unchecked. Displayed grid. I think we mentioned this before. There is a grid pattern that you can have in camera, and I used to buy back when I had the old Nikon manual cameras that you could pop in a new screen. I love the grid screens because I thought it was really nice for composition and keeping horizons straight. But I've kind of come to the mindset that I like to have a clutter free screen toe look at, and so I I don't usually use these, but they are potentially helpful when you are trying to line things up potentially for architectural photography, sometimes in landscape photography, and you'll notice the one at the very bottom there is lined up with HD TV. And so if you were trying to line up a 16 by nine aspect ratio, but you still want to get the full image area, you would be able to see that right in camera. We've seen this before and it's here again. We've talked enough about him. We could go down to the hissed a gram settings. I highly recommend not making any changes in here. It kind of chooses the boundary for where the hissed a gram is. So basically, you can force your camera to shoot mawr. Contrast images by clipping the highlights and clipping the shadows, which very few people are gonna want to do. I don't know of any other camera that has this on it, and I have a hard time even coming up with an idea of when this might be useful. So leave it turned off. Okay, continuing to scroll down a mode guide, these air helpful little hints that will turn on as you go from item to item. You may see this as you're going through the menu right now. Normally, I would just say Turn this off. It's not a big deal, because you can turn this on and off as you're in the menu system by simply hitting the info button. So if you're in the menu right now, just hit the info. But in a couple of times and you'll see these little helpful hints appear and or disappear. Live view boosting. In general, I like to turn this off. What it does when you turn it off is it's going to minimize. Make sure I get this right. It's gonna minimize art effects so that you get the best view in the viewfinder possible. You will not be seeing kind of the full impact of the final images when you are shooting in some of those rt tight modes where it's manipulating the image frame rate. I would leave this at normal. I do like the camera in the other option, which is known as high, and that could be very good if you're shooting sports under very good lighting conditions. What this is changing is how fast it's refreshing the viewfinder, and it can't do it very well under low light conditions. So if you shoot under low light. You definitely want this at normal. You only want to switch it into the high mode. If you're shooting sports, you'll see a little bit faster, refresh and a little bit, uh, Mawr. Real time action in the viewfinder when you're shooting art, live view mode and what's happening in this one? Let me see. We got mode. One mode to and so mode to this is very similar to the live. You boost this will if you put it in mode two. It will lighten the art effect in the LCD for easy viewing, and in mode one, it will show him to you As they are recorded, you can expand a live view dynamic range, and so this is simply the view in the viewfinder. They're trying to show you a wider range, and I've tried it on both. And for whatever reason, I prefer leaving this turned off. Give it a try yourself, see what you like, flicker reduction occasionally when you are shooting under fluorescent lamps, which kind of recycle in a time that maybe matched up with the camera. You may get a flicker problem and you can have the camera automatically adjust frame rates for that, or you can specifically choose 60 frames per second. Or, uh, excuse me, 60 hertz or 50 hertz to avoid that possible flicker problem. Most of the time, if you leave it in auto, you won't see any problem at all. Live view close up mode in mode one. What's gonna happen if you put this camera that same? Let me check my notes here. Okay, so in mode one a half press of the shutter release, we'll cancel the magnification. So if you have the camera when its magnifying for focusing reasons 1/ press will eliminate the magnified view in Mode two, it will stay in the magnified mode. And some people like that and some people don't. I think it's easier to work in Mode one, but that's only when your camera goes into that magnified close up mode. Okay, peaking settings. Remember the Peking that we talked about, which was showing what's in focus those little glimmering highlighted areas You get to choose what color either white or black in general, whites a little bit easier to work with on most subjects that I have found. But there is a black option as well. How long does the LCD on the back of the camera state on after you shot a picture or after you've used it? For some reason, if you want to make this longer time, it's gonna wear down on your batteries a little bit more. Shorter times will be a little bit more efficient on your batteries. How quickly do you want your camera to go to sleep? One minute is the time that I've chosen just because the batteries are very important in a digital and I don't want him to die on me. And if I haven't used the camera for a minute, it's probably okay for it to go to sleep for a longer period of time. You can adjust this, turn this whole thing off so it just continually stays on. Or you could set it at three or five minutes if you want it longer periods of time, and that's as far as the camera going to sleep. How long is it before the camera goes into a complete power off mode? The power off mode if it stays, If it hasn't been touched for five minutes, you actually have to turn the camera off and turn it back on. And so there's kind of different levels of shutting down, going into a sleep mode and then completely powering off. And so five after five minutes, it goes into a completely powered off mode. Please, everybody, turn this off way. Don't want to hear your camera beeping. It might be kind of fun and interesting while you first learned the camera to understand when and where it's focusing. But this is something that should just be turned off. Next up is a connection mode for your computer. So if you are gonna hook your camera up to your computer, choosing which USB mode if you're gonna hook up to a printer, there's a slightly different communication protocol. Normally, you can just leave it in auto and you'll be perfectly fine.