Lessons

Lesson Info

Custom Functions Menu Part 1

Alright, next up is the custom functions menu and this is where you get to see how nitpicky some people can be about how they like their camera set up. There's also a few items in here that are actually pretty important that we're gonna spend a little bit of time going in and customizing on the camera. So some of these are really small nitpicks and some of them are really important. First one's kind of a small nitpick. The exposure level increments. Most of us prefer to work in third stops because it's the smallest amount of light that you are easily gonna be able to notice between one photo and the next. And, if you want to adjust it to half stops, you can, but most of us leave it in third stops. The ISO speed settings have that same third stop increment, or in this case, full stop increments and so most of us like to leave it in third stops so that we have as many options. It can be as precise as possible. Some people just don't use those in-between settings, 'cause they're not reall...

y completely necessary for most people and they just wanna be able to change more quickly. So, if you wanna be able to change from 100 to 3200 in less clicks, you could set this to the one stop option. Bracketing auto cancel. And so the question here is, how often do you shoot bracketing? And when you shoot it, do you shoot it repeatedly from shot to shot? So myself, I use bracketing once in a while, but I just don't go out and shoot tons of bracketing stuff. If I did, I would turn this off so that my camera stays in the bracketing mode. With this turned on, the bracketing is automatically canceled after you have selected it and used it for that one time. More bracketing stuff. We can choose the sequence. Normally, the camera wants to shoot the normal picture first, and then it will shoot the darker one and the lighter one, and you can change that up. A lot of people prefer lighter, normal, darker. So, zero... Or excuse me, plus zero minus. And so that way, when you look at it, or actually, no, I think it's a lot of people prefer the zero, let me get this right, minus, zero, plus. So it goes from darker to lighter. And so, when it loads the images up in your photo programs left to right, darker to lighter just seems very natural. Then, you get to choose the number of bracketed shots. We did a test earlier in the class and I had it set to three shots but you can set it to two, five, or seven. I do a bit of nature photography and in those cases, I often prefer five. It seems like it's the right balance for what I'm doing in my work. And you can customize it to your own. If you want, you can have the spot meter linked to the auto focus points. If you do wanna do that, you have to come here, and do it. It's something that not everyone likes to have but it is something that some people very much like to have so that when you move that focusing point around, the spot metering will follow that focusing point. But you do have to be aware that that is where that focusing or that metering point has been moved to 'cause normally it's in the middle of the frame. Alright, more items dealing with exposure. Safety shift. So if you are working with your camera in let's say, a shutter priority mode, in this case, you could go up to 2000th of a second which we'd be using 1.4. Well what happens when you go up to 4000th of a second? Well, your camera doesn't have an aperture that's fast enough to work with it, and in a shutter priority mode, you'd be able to take a picture and it would be one stop underexposed. If you turned on safety shift, it would correct for this and either not allow you to get to 1/4000th of a second or it would change some other parameter on the camera. And most photographers don't like it when the camera changes something that they specifically set on the camera. And so that's why I am saying to leave this turned off for most people. So, same exposure for new aperture deals with changes that you might have made perhaps when changing lenses or adding teleconverters or other things. If, for instance, you have the correct exposure set and then you add an extension tube or a teleconverter which causes less light to get to the sensor, do you want the camera to make up for that by changing the ISO or the shutter speed or a combination of the two? And this is gonna depend a little bit on how you work. I prefer to leave this disabled because I like to make my own changes. And if you want to have the camera kind of watch out for you and make those changes behind your back, you might wanna choose one of the other options. I thinks there's gonna be definitely different needs here which is why we have the options in here. If you wanna restrict the shooting modes, for instance, if you're a sports photographer and you know you are not gonna use the bulb mode on this camera, you can uncheck that box and you don't have to worry about accidentally setting that and inadvertently choosing that when you weren't expecting it. You can restrict the metering modes, for instance, if you know that you're never gonna use the spot metering mode and you know that's a dangerous mode to use especially if you're not sure about either how to use it or knowing that you are in that mode, you can uncheck the box so that you don't even have a chance to make that mistake. And so, metering used in manual exposure. And so, in this case, you could have the camera, make sure I get this right, you could have the camera choose... Let's say you are in aperture priority and you have center-weighted metering, when you switch over to manual, you can either have it stick with that center-weighted metering or you could have a metering system that you always use in manual. So for instance, there are some photographers that prefer to use manual exposure and spot metering but when they use aperture priority, shutter priority, or program, they prefer to use evaluative metering. And this way, they can specify when they are using manual exposure, the camera specifically uses spot meter. That they get changed together at the same time. And so, not a lot of people are gonna make this change but I know some people are really gonna like this customizing option. I have a hard time giving you a good example as to why you would want to deselect certain shutter speeds so that you couldn't use them but it is an option in here. if you did not want to have your camera shoot at an 8000th of a second, you can essentially block it out and say I only want the camera to go up to 4000th of a second. So if you wanna restrict the shutter speed range, you could do it. Most people aren't gonna want to adjust this one at all. Same thing goes with the aperture range. Never set an aperture of f but if you don't wanna have access to it, you could block it out here. Autoexposure microadjustment. Okay, so this is kind o' like a fine tune way of doing exposure compensation. Exposure compensations works in third stops. If you found that your camera was consistently like a sixth of a stop over or underexposed, you could come here to autoexposure microadjustment and you could have your camera adjusted by just a little tweek or fair bit so that it reads back at zero again. Hopefully, you will not need to do this in any case. But this is if your camera starting to drift a little bit from where it's normal middle exposure was set. Flash exposure microadjustment is the same thing I talked about but this is with the flash exposure. And so if you wanted to readjust the way it reads the light a little bit, you could come in here and adjust it up to one stop over or one stop underexposed. The continuous shooting speed. Little sub menu in here. And we can control the exact frames per second that we are shooting at the high, the low, as well as the silent high and low. And so most people are gonna want to try to max this camera out with the 14 frames a second. The low speed is gonna be something that you might wanna set that works best for the types of sports or action photography that you're shooting. You might find that a certain number of frames really gets you a good mix of different motions and gestures with your subject and so that would be a good time to kind o' dial that in to fit, fit your needs the best it can. If you want, you can limit the shot count on the camera, anywhere between two and 99 shots. And there could be a number of reasons. Just a governor, your gonna hand the camera to your kid and you just don't want them to go that nuts with the camera. This could also be if you leave your camera turned on and you stuff it in your camera bag and you don't want it to just start firing the shutter continuously because something bumped up against the shutter. You could set it on 99 shots and so that, once you reach 99 shots, you gotta let your finger off and put it back on on the camera. Restricting the drive modes. We've seen a lot of this before. If you know that you're not gonna be using the self-timer or the silent modes, you can uncheck those boxes and just completely remove 'em from the options that are available to you. Things dealing with display and operation. I mentioned before that you can switch the focusing screens. If you do switch the focusing screens, you need to come in here and tell the camera which screen you put in there. There is just no electronic connection that tells that information and it does change the way the camera meters and works a little bit so you do need to provide that information to the camera if you make that change. So, viewfinder information during the exposure. If you want to, you can disable this. And this is something that normally.. You would normally disable that you wouldn't be able to see this during the exposure itself. There is a slight chance that during a long exposure that could leak light into the exposure during a long exposure. And so that's probably one reason why I'm recommending disable it, but it's just not something that's normally turned on during the actual exposure time. But if you are shooting at faster shutter speeds, that shouldn't be a problem and if you wanna keep a continuous look of that, you could leave that turned on while the mirror's going up and down. LCD panel illumination during bulb. Do you want that turned on during bulb? You might need it because it's really dark out. Because that's when you would normally use bulb but then that could also cause light reflection onto your subject depending on where it is and how close it is and other things around it. So normally, that's something that you would probably want to leave turned off. Recording card, image size setting's gonna take us into a sub menu. And this is where we are making our image size adjustments with our recording card on the back. When we press that button, we would look in the little LCD panel at jpeg raw settings that we are setting on the camera. You could have it set to the monitor so that you see it on the bigger monitor so that you get bigger easier view of it, or if you want, you can completely disable that button all together so that it doesn't do anything. And so, personal choice on that one. I think that little LCD in the back works just fine for it. But, your choice. Alright, we're almost through folks. Just a couple more tabs to go. Next up is the warnings in the viewfinder. I told you about the exclamation mark and here's where you get to decide what causes that exclamation mark to come up. So for instance, if you really liked using the spot meter and you used it quite frequently, you probably don't want a warning that says oh, you have the spot meter. You would be confident that you know what you're doing and you might wanna uncheck that box. For most people, I would say you'd probably wanna leave all of those boxes check off because those are things that we would not normally do with our camera and if we are doing that, we'd probably wanna be aware that something different than normal is going on. So if you turn the dials and they don't seem like they are turning in the right direction as far as the way the exposure indicator is going, you can reverse this. Now, if you've watched some of my other Canon classes, and even my Nikon classes for that matter, I have recommended reversing the dials. Well, because this camera uses a meter over on the right-hand side, I have noticed that the dial is in sync with that meter over on the right-hand side and so I am not recommending reversing this but if you do wanna reverse it for some reason, you're perfectly welcome to of course, but it doesn't quite have the need to do it as it did on the 5D series of cameras. Do you wanna be able to change the aperture value when there is no lens attached? You might be asking, well why would you wanna do this? Well, it's not so much when there's no lens attached but when there's no lens detected attached to the camera. So, with a particular type of extension tube or a telescope, do you wanna be able to change that aperture value setting on there? Now, if there's no lens attached, it's not doing a lot of good but it is the reading that you're gonna be getting out of the camera. So, most people are never gonna encounter this. The multi function lock on the back of the camera, is that lock switch. How many things do you wanna it to lock up on the camera? You can have it lock the main dial, the quick control dial, the little multi controller joysticks. So you can choose as much or as little as you want to lock when having that in the middle position.