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Custom Menu E: Exposure/Metering/ISO

All right. So this next section in the custom menu letter E for exposure metering and I S O. R is gonna be a lot of settings that you're gonna set once, and then you're gonna leave with First off is your exposure value steps. So when you're clicking upwards and downwards on your shutter speeds and apertures, this is gonna be third stops, and most people are going to leave it in third stops. But you can change it toe half stops or full stops if you want. But 1/3 stop is there, and it's what a lot of photographers like, cause it's about the smallest amount of light that you're gonna be able to visibly notice from one photo to the next. Next up is long exposure, noise reduction. And this is where the camera is going to dive into one of the photographs that you've taken and try to improve it. And so, as an example, we have low noise in this cropped photograph and then high noise and where the camera goes in and reduces the noise and this is going to seem like Well, yeah, of course I'd want...

this. Definitely I'd want this The problem is, is that the way that the camera does? It may not be to your satisfaction levels, depending on your standards. So for the entry level or maybe intermediate level user, you might want to leave this on auto. Just let the camera do it. You don't have to worry about it. For the more advanced user, you're gonna probably want to turn this off and manually do this where you'll have much more control over it later on in some other program, like Photoshopped, Light Room or many of the other programs out there. And so this is something that it kind of depends on your level of interaction with the photos after you've taken the picture. Next up is our noise filter, and this is the same type of noise reduction. But this is being used on high I esos and so one is for long. Next. The previous one was for long exposures, which are typically photos longer than one second. The noise filter is the same type of fix, but for high I esos and once again for the more advanced user, leave it off slightly different settings here, and so standard form or of an entry level user who didn't want to mess with these sort of things after the fact V I s O setting is something that we have direct control of a couple other places in the camera, but we can do it here as well. We can also adjust the steps to third stops to full stops. And I know there's a number of photographers who Changi Esos very quickly and they don't need all the third stop, so they'll switch it over to one stop. So there's there's a reason for it. But sometimes if you want to be very exact about your I s so you can leave it at 1/3 increments. I s O auto set allows you to go in and set the parameters. If you have chosen auto eso where the camera is automatically choosing I esos for you. The nice thing about this is that you can basically put a ceiling on how far up you want the IAS owes to go. So if you deem that I s 0 3200 is unacceptable quality for what you're doing, you can say a high limit of 1600 it won't go any higher than that, and it can also set the default setting is to what you would normally start at. And so great control for anyone who does use auto eso on a regular basis is mostly figuring out where that ceiling is that you don't want it to go beyond. Next up is I s O auto and this is controlling, and I don't really understand why this is on the camera. To be honest with you is in what modes can you use auto? I s O. And normally I would just want to be able to use it whenever I wanted to use it, which is in the program and cheddar and aperture priority modes. And you can specify which modes you can't use it in. And so this might be something better. If you were gonna be loaning the camera out to somebody, you didn't want them to use it in that mode. But normally, if it's your camera, you should be allowed to use anything you want whenever you want to. So I'd say Leave it on. All next up is the metering system. We've already talked about this the digital E S P metering system is kind of their standard multi segment metering system, which I think does a great job pretty much all the time and so very little reason to change that. A. L metering is simply what happens when you press the auto exposure lock metering and it locks the meter. Which meter do you want it to use automatically the one that you have already chosen or to choose one of the other types of meters? And so it's kind of another way of further customizing that e l button in the bulb timer mode. You can set the camera up to shoot longer exposures. Normally, you're gonna be able to set this camera up to a 62nd exposure. Tell you what. Let's just do a little live demo here. Let me put this in manual exposure. Wake our camera from its little break that it's taken, and let's put this in live use so that we can see something that's going on. Come on, me and my display there, we ***. So let's get some information up here so you can see by changing the dial in the back. We're changing our shutter speeds, and we can go down to 60 seconds. We can go down to something called Bulb in live you and live composition. And we're gonna be talking about these in just a moment. So let's just talk about Bulb for the moment. So now what I can dio is I can go into the menu system and let me position this so I can see it actually easier on the camera. And so now I can go in here And can I? I don't want life bulb. I wanted bulb time or this is what I wanted. And so here is where I can choose periods of time longer than 30 seconds. So I have my one minute all the way up to 30 minutes now, I haven't tried a 30 minute exposure with this, and I would I would be dubious and thinking about getting good photos at that amount of time. Usually what happens is the sensor heats up and you get a lot of noise and it doesn't look very good. And so the bolt timer is just simply a way for leaving the shutter open for a much longer period of time. So back to the keynote. And so That's for your night time photographers. Next up is your bulb time monitor, and this is the brightness that your monitor is when you are shooting bulb, and sometimes when you're shooting bulb, it's very dark out, and you don't want that screen on cause it might be reflecting off of something that would be changing the exposure of your image. And so you can bring the brightness of that down in that one instance. Next up is live Ball, and this is one of the coolest features I've ever seen for night time photographers. If anyone has had the pleasure of working in a traditional dark room and you take your your exposed paper and you dip it into the developing trade and shaking it back and forth and all of a sudden there comes your image, that's basically what happens in this mode. I've always wanted a bold mode that didn't just show me the results after 30 seconds, but show me as it is building. And so if you'll see the example here in the Kino, you press the shutter release. OK, I need some more light, and we'll leave it open a little bit longer. A little bit more. And then wherever you think it's the right brightness, you can press the shutter release again and stop the exposure. And it does have limitations. Depending on what I s o you have set how many times it can update your image. It's not at live, continuous update, but it conceit. As you can see in the display screen there you could. It updates either nine times up to 24 times, depending on what I s o your at. And I don't know why there's limitations on this. I think this is something that we'll see more of in the future. And so, if you are shooting bulb exposures at night, this is a way to judge and get the right exposure without having to do test shot after test shot after test that you can get it right the first time in camera by just looking at the back of your camera. Very neat feature. There is a live time a mode, and there is a very subtle distinction between bulb and time. And so let me demonstrate on the camera in front of us. And so let me put it in bulb. Here is a bulb. Exposure of three seconds. You ready? One, 23 Okay, so that was a three second bull of exposure. Now let me set it up for a time exposure. And here is the difference. One, 23 And then I manually turn it off. And so one I have to leave my finger on it the whole time. The second time, I'm turning it off and I'm turning it on. They both do the same thing. It's just different ways of controlling when it's on and when it's off. When I'm doing a say, I was waiting for a bolt of lightning. I guess I could do that either way. Yeah, I think time is a better system. Especially if you have a cable release. You press it wants to start and wants to stop. Okay, so that's live time. Now, this one confused me to no end. This one did not make sense. I remember setting this camera up and going Let me do this and to be this. We tried that way and that way, and things just did not make sense. And so I had to do a bit of research and figure out what it does, and what this composite setting does is it's a It's mainly designed as a nighttime exposure mode, but it could be used during the daytime. And what it does is it takes a picture over a period of time, and then it takes another picture and it compares the two and it adds new information that was not in the original photo. And so if something was there in the 1st it's not gonna added in the 2nd 1 And so I took it out the other night and I wanted to shoot a freeway scene of Seattle, and I did a standard 62nd exposure on the on the right, and you can see that the headlamps from the cars just over it got overexposed. Now on the left, I did a live composite shot for 60 seconds, and it added new car saying over on the right hand side, where you can see their tail lights a little bit more easily. But what it was doing is it was taking an eight second photo and then there another eight second photo, and it was kind of looking at new places. Lights were not in the previous one. And so this is a way that you could potentially shoot star trail shots with a digital camera, and this has not been possible on any other previous cameras. So I think there is some areas for exploration and investigation on all of your part. Who owns this camera? Because I think there's some great capabilities here, and you're gonna need to really find side. This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. And so I'm not gonna explain everything for you because I don't know everything, but I think this is gonna be a really fun one for anyone who does nighttime photography. That's great. Thank you, John. And in fact, photo Maker had asked about that feature a much earlier on in the beginning of the class and has been participating a lot. So thank you. Photo maker. Check that out. Let us know. I did have a question, though. A swell with regard. Teoh Bold. And that was, if the camera is set for a certain time limit for a bulb and you want to use a cable release on lock, can you use the cable release for the desire time? Or will the time set in the menu be the override. Does that make sense? Well, I'm No, it doesn't. You can set it to a particular time right in the camera. And that's gonna be the time the shutter is open, right? That's for the live time versus bulb. Or maybe Well, either one, I think. Right. I think either one that would that would be the case. What are they trying to do? What they really asking? I think the question is, will the time set in the menu be the override if you're using a cable release on bulb. So maybe photo maker saying that looking at doing that once, But I had it right. Haven't really I haven't tried that one, so I don't have a definitive answer on it. Okay. If you have it set up, you can set the time in the camera. You can trigger it with the cable release. If you haven't set toe a minute, I don't think press. It's gonna it's gonna wait for that minute. If you do do a bulb exposure and you're just like, Wait. No, I'm done. You could just always turn the camera off. It's maybe not the best thing in the world, but I think it goes to a protocol where it it stops it down. You're not You're not gonna damage anything like that. But you could just turn it off and it would in the exposure, I believe at that point. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Sorry. I wasn't more clear on that. Well, sorry. My question wasn't more clear. I haven't I haven't tried every possible combination of things that you can do on this camera. I've tried a lot, not all.