Lessons

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu Part 1

I'm going to be diving into the menu section on the camera now so if you do have the download for the class, the pdf the menu system and might want to have this one out to go ahead and kind of make your own indications of features and settings that you want to have like having this all on one page it's easy easier for me to scan through rather than to go through the multiple pages of information on this particular menu system and just in general in the menu system it's one of the better ones out there they have actual page numbers so you could say go to record menu page three and you would know exactly where that item would be able to be so let's go ahead and flip it over to my keynote and we'll go ahead and get started here in the menu system so obviously this is going to be activated by pressing the menu on the back of the camera the menu button there are five different groups of settings on here is you can see recording motion picture customs set up and play back and things are well...

they are pretty well located by logic so that's where you'll be able to find these things now as you enter into these different features you will be able to exit using that function to button which is also the exit button so any time you want back out of something you moved your way into a feature that you really don't want to deal with just back out by pressing the function too you can always press the shutter release and that kicks you back into the shooting mode as well to navigate you're going to be using the little four way controller on the back of the camera to go up down left and right to move around within the menu system and then you can actually change tabs using the top diallo or the back dial on the camera so something to note about what mody or in on the camera because that affects what you will see in the menu system so if you want to be in the full menu you need to be in either the manual shutter parity aperture priority program or the custom one or two modes if you are in the motion picture mode then you're going to get to the video menu and then in many of the other modes you're going to get the full menu for manual menu but you'll also get one of the other specific menus to that particular control and so that's something that you won't see if you're in the full manual nodes so let's go ahead and get started inside the menu system and I want to be just a quick little live demo here on the back of the camera so that you can see what's going on and so, obviously you just hit the menu button on the back of the camera to get into the menu itself, so obviously just hitting the menu button to get into the menu, you can use the dial on top to switch through the different tabs on the left side and then moving the backed out to go up and down. You can also use the touch screen in here to go in two particular features, but one of the other things that I like is if you want to flip from page to page over on the right hand side, you haven't up down arrow, so if you just simply want toe, scroll down one page at a time rather than going down one item at a time. It's a quick way to kind of jump to exactly the page that you want to be on so let's go to the top record one on page one and photo style and as we go through these menu settings, realized that a lot of these settings that we're going to talk about we've already talked about. They are in here in the camera, in sometimes three different places, the full menu, the quick menu, and then there might be a direct access button control on the outside of the camera, so we might have already talked about something twice. And we're not going to talk about a lot because we've already discussed it, but if it's new, we will discuss it so photo stiles was for the jpeg images, and it described the exact look of the images, the color, the contrast, the saturation generally, I like to leave this in the standard mode just so that it allows me the greatest freedom to adjust the images later on if you want to, you can really create your own style. For instance, panasonic came up with their own vivid mode, which probably has a little boost in the saturation and maybe a little boost in the sharpness, and if you wanted to back off or out onto that, you could go in and create your own photo style adjustments by going in tweaking the current ones or creating your own in the custom option and so not really important for most people, I would just say shooting it at standard, and if you need to adjust it later, you'll have much better control of it is a better solution for those that have a little bit more time and energy to go in and work in it. Afterwards, we talked about the aspect ratio before the sensor on this camera is a four by three aspect ratio, so that's where you're going to want to keep it at most of the time unless you're working on a very specific project where you would be cropping the frame, the advantage to cropping is only that you that is what you would see in the viewfinder itself. And so if you're trying to align something up, you would know what the final picture is going to look like picture size is going to control how many megapixels your image is. Generally, most people want to have this set at the largest possible setting, the quality is kind of kind of related it's going to be choosing between j peg and raw for the more serious shooters you want to be shooting wrong? If you're new to this camera new to photography, you might want to start with large j peg, which is a very simple form to use because you can download it, email it moving around from computer to computer very easily, but it doesn't give you the full total range that the raw image has, so you're going to be able to work with a raw image much better after the fact. If you want to adjust the shadow areas and how light and dark on doing all sorts of these types of tonal adjustments, you're just going to have much more room to play in a rock, and so I highly encourage you to either shoot raw or plan on shooting raw in the near future. You do need to have the right software the camera comes with its own software I much prefers software from other manufacturers. My favorite is adobe light room it's a great program for organizing and working on your image is it's the most popular photo program among photographers out there for that sort of work that cataloging and organizing as well as developing of your pictures? And so take a good look at that program because it's a very, very good one. Next up. Oh, as I will mention, as we go through this, you're going to see my recommendations on screen, and sometimes I have to recommendations. Sometimes I have just a general one and then one for more advanced users. Advanced users do not mean professional photographers, it could mean a wide variety of things, so if you see my settings in their eyes, will sometimes have those two recommendations as we go through this and so kind of take note of which one and where you want to be, and I guess as I would, I should have mentioned at the very start of the menu section. The menu, in my opinion, has three different types of items within it. The first and most common type of item that we're going to run across is something that you don't care about doesn't concern you, and you don't need to do anything with and there's, just a lot of menu items that cover a lot of different territory and, well, more than half the items in here. I make no setting adjustment at all on there's another, but twenty five percent of those that are ones that you will set once you'll get it set where you want it and then you'll absolutely be done with it and there's another twenty five percent that you're going to go this one's kind of nice, I'd like to come back this one, and so those are the ones that you might want to note as you go through on your page, which ones you want to come back to? Because we are going to be able tio come back and maybe set these as a short cut it in the function buttons and those are the ones that you really want to keep track of. So most of these were just going to get set right once and move on so let's move on ourselves. Next up is the meter in moment we saw this in the quick menu, it's going to make sure my camera stays awake here, it's going to make sure it's going to enable you to adjust the meter, even though do it just the way the light is red by the camera and so the multiple media remote is using a multi segment metering system and it's checking the light in many different areas and it's balancing shadow areas with the lights areas and is a good general purpose one if you want to get a very exact reading, you probably want to go to the spot reading center waited is more of a traditional media and system that was used on older cameras. Page two is going to start with the burst rate, and so I had showed you the siri's of the track runner shot at forty frames per second, which is of course, using that elektronik shutter in the camera is the only way you could get to forty frames per second. And so for most people, I think the medium setting is going to be fine for general action. If you are wanting to get into the higher rates, there is a downside because when you shoot at the low frames per second of two and four, as you look through the camera and you take a picture, the camera will quickly jumped back to the live you so that you can see what's going on and then it will take the next picture as you get up to higher and higher speeds. What happens is that the camera doesn't have time to show you what you're actually looking at through the camera and in lieu of that what it does is it will show you the picture that you just took, which is a little bit hard if you're pani because as you're panning here, the cameras showing you what you shot when you were over there and so it's hard to track action because you're basically I have second behind whatever they're doing and so it's a little bit challenging using this for action type photography and as you get to those higher speeds on the shutter, you're going to miss that live view capability, so play around a little bit with the different burst moz and see what works for you in the type of action that you shoud auto bracketing if you recall the bracketing section, this is where we were shooting a number of different pictures at different exposures, and I said that you could find tune this in many, many different ways and so there's a whole sub menu within this one item to control this first off is continuous or single shooting where you shoot these bracketed pictures either in a continuous bunch, which is what a lot of people like to do or individually choosing when each picture is taken for a lot of nature photographers there capturing in hdr siri's and they want to capture them and is quickly in a short period of time as possible so the continuous option is probably the most popular in this case. The step indicates how many frames you want to shoot. Three frames is a pretty normal bracket, but some people need more frames than that. So there is a five and seven frames option. You can also choose the step levels as faras thie exposure increments one third two thirds as full as a one stop increment in the difference between one exposure and the next. Another control that you have is in the sequence. Normally, the camera wants to record the normal picture first, then a dark line and then a light one. Some people prefer to re order that, but I prefer to stay with the standard set up because when you take the first picture, which is where you were, judging all your focus and exposure that's the normal one. But if you need it as faras dark, medium light, you can set it to that. Next up is thie control for the self timer. Normally, if you want to get in the picture yourself that's going to be a ten second self timer. You can also set it up to do ten seconds with a three shot. Pictures so if you're going to take a group picture and you wanted to make sure somebody didn't blink in that first one and you have a couple of them for safety you could do that there's also a two second self timer which is nice when you're on a tripod like this so that you can fire the shutter release get your hands off the camera and the vibrations have settled out after that first second or so no movement of the camera next up is highlight and shadows and this is a way for you to go in and manually control the jpeg images as far as the brightness and darkness and if anyone's ever worked with curves and photo shops this is the same type of curves in the camera and it's basically basically controlling how white and dark different regions of the image are and let me give you an example of what this looks like and so here first we have a normal picture with a straight line and we can turn this more into an s curve which gives more contrast to our subjects so the darks or darker and the lights are lighter if we do a reverse s what we're doing here is we're making the lights darker and the dark slighter which in essence is we're lightening up the shadows is most apparent in this image and you can go ahead and you can create any sort of graph you want that's going toe, lighten or darken your images in many different ways. Once again, I'm not real into doing photo shop in the camera. I prefer to adjust my images on a computer where I have a much better view of what's going on, and I have much better tools and fine tune controls for making those changes, but if you are shooting j pegs and you don't like the way that you're j pegs look and they're consistently off, this would be a good way to go in and make a little tweak on those j pegs. But as I say, I leave this just at standard on my camera, I'm gonna work it in photo shop for light room or some other program, so I leave this turned off next up very closely related is thie I dynamic, and this is where the camera chooses where to set the highlight and shadow range, and what it's trying to do here is we saw on another earlier example is it's trying to lighten up the shadows? And if you stick this on high dynamic high in most cases, it's going to lighten it up way too far, and so if you don't want to spend any time in any sort of program afterwards, I can see setting this potentially it I dynamic low or maybe standard but for most people I would say just turning this off is the safest bet and working with this afterwards and just as a reminder neither of these two have any effect on raw images next page so page three is I resolution this is where the camera will use intelligent information it's brain to go in and adjust the sharpness of your picture I try to test out and I don't know if this is going to show it very clearly but you gotta magnify any a large portion or a small portion into a large picture here and there is a number of different options low standard high and an extended and if you look at the high setting, you'll notice that by the red pillar there's a little bit more defined white line around it which is how it tries to sharpen it tries to highlight that contrast more than in the low setting. The extended setting was a little hard to figure out supposedly it's there to make more resolution for large size prince and it's ah limited limited results in my opinion and so this is one of those other settings that I am just going to want to leave turned off I'll deal with sharpening in some other program that has much better control where aiken better see it on my image hdr is the way that you can go in and take multiple pictures that cover a wide exposure range in case your camera can't handle it all in one shot so you can turn this on and off as well as getting into making the specific settings, and I decided to give this a try out in the field and in this particular shot this is a standard raw image in the area that you're probably going to want to pay attention to is the shadowed area in the lower right hand corner because as we go into an hdr mode it's going to start lightening up that shadow but the first difference and let me just jump back to the first image here you'll notice is I jumped from raw two hdr the picture has zoomed in a little bit and what the camera is doing is it assumes that you have hand held the camera and you've moved it a little bit and so in order to get identical pictures it crops out a little bit of the edge so you lose a little bit of the white angle and I don't like that at all so we have hdr one hdr to keep an eye in those shadowed areas and the hdr three you could see the shadowed areas have been brightened up the blue sky is maybe a little bit darker let's look at all of them at the same time and it's a subtle difference you probably see a better better if you shoot it on your own camera and downloaded to your computer, I'm not a huge fan of the hdr look, I think you could do a real good job just working with a straight raw image in most cases, but it is nice to see it included in the camera as an option. Next up is kind of a fun little feature that I don't use very much, which is multiple exposure so you can shoot two exposures on the same frame, and so this dives into a whole separate menu again, and you're going to be able to start, you're going to have an auto gain option and gain is the brightness you might say, uh, if you leave the gain on what it's doing is it's adjusting the brightness automatically as you should pictures? And so if you have not shot multiple exposures from before and you're not familiar with exposure, I'd leave this turned on because then the camera's going to automatically compensate for you if you kind of know what you're doing and you have your manual exposure is set, and you know what? Shutter speed and aperture you want, you can leave this turned off because you could kind of work around it and so it's just trying to take into account the fact that you're shooting multiple pictures onto one frame. One of the great things is to turn on the overlay I prefer this and this will only work with raw. I don't know why, but it will only work with raw and not with j peg, and what this allows you to do is it allows you to see the previous images that you have shot so that you can see if you have overlap in the right areas and that is very helpful when you're trying to line up a shot like this. And if you have not been to seattle, no, we do not have four space needle's, that's, a nice little trick with multiple exposures, of course, and so all of these are controlled within that multiple exposure sub menu, you might say now in order to really use this system, first thing you need to do is just go ahead and take your first photo and then come into the menu setting multiple exposure start hit the set button, and then you start taking your second photo and you can redo this, you can continue taking photos, and so if you want to do some creative in camera fax it's, one of the a few cameras on the market there's, not a lot of them that do multiple exposures these days. Next up, we have the time lapse option, this is a lot of fun. Not in many cameras, and this gives you the ability to shoot a picture let's, say every ten to twenty seconds and then compile that into a video in one of the nice options is that you can compile the video right in the camera so let's, take a look at a time lapse shot here, so this one is from seattle's lake, union duck dodge. They have a kind of a boat race in the summertime on everything that's every wednesday, tuesday, tuesday night, right? And so I was set up on a bridge and shooting a picture about every ten seconds or so. Another one I shot with this camera was downtown seattle, showing the sunny setting sun down pine street. I believe we're at and so great little fund funding to have when you are in one location and on a tripod in most cases, ok, so that's the time lapse and next up is stop motion animation, so I think that would have a lot of fun with this as a kid, stop motion is where you it's kind of like time lapse. The main difference here is that you get to choose when the pictures were taken, and so generally you'll start it and then you'll take one picture, you'll do something and then you'll take another picture, do something and then move and take another picture. And so you'll go in here you'll have to get this thing started and then you could leave it in auto shooting, which it works like and the interval timer, but I generally would like to I want to turn that off in most cases because you want to be able to manually shoot your pictures you can set the timing if you do want to do this and so here is my stop motion animation little movie are you ready? Let's watch this thing so what do you think they're doing? Canada I think they're doing a dance. They're going to take a photo oh, look at that. You think that's a big enough lens for their photo? Oh that's awesome, john okay, so that was all created a stop motion and I was in the way I did. It is I had to set these little figurines up and I moved them one at a time. And the great thing about the stop motion animation is it shows you a little image overlay of where the image was in the previous shot so you can see how much to move your subject. You know a little bit more a little bit less and so it makes doing something like this very, very precise and once you're done shooting the whole animation, you can create a video of it right in the camera and so you can do this right at the time you shot the the time lapse or excuse me, the stop motion or you can go back later you, khun set up the record quality of the video that you're going to create you, khun adjust the frame rates thirty frames per second is pretty normal for video. You could do the whole thing in reverse or normally for some reason you had to film your whole time lapse or your stop motion in reverse. You could put it together as a reverse video and so that's all built into the stop motion animation options. So there's definitely a lot of fun that you could have in there making very interesting little videos. So those two things alone, the time lapse shots on the stop motion animation like you just said super super fun are those found in many comparable cameras right now with the time lapse is in a lot of nikon cameras and trying to think, if it's it's not in the food. Jeez, I think it's in the olympus, the stop motion I've not seen in any other camera. And so the first time I've been able to go out like, what can I do with this?