Lessons

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu

All right, welcome back everybody. It is time for us to dive into the menu section on the EOS 1D X. And so, this is where you might want to have your PDF ready because we're gonna be going through the full list of items here, and as we go through these items, some of them are gonna be a little bit more important than others. So, let's dive into the menu of this camera. So, obviously you will be hitting the menu button to access all of the different tabs. Canon has done, I think, a pretty good job at organizing where all of this information goes in the camera. So, we should be able to find our stuff relatively easy, compared to some of the other cameras out on the market. We're going to be going through each of these tabs, going through of the the different options. Now, in order to jump from one area to the other, there's a lot of clicking to get from one area to the next, and so a little secret shortcut is by hitting the Q-button, and you can jump from tab to tab to tab. Otherwise, yo...

u would normally be using the top dial or the back dial to go across or up and down through the menu items but, the Q-button will quickly access the next tab in the sequence. So, we're gonna start in the shooting menu, so kind of in the top left and working our way down. First item in there is white balance. As we go through the items in the menu system, first off you're gonna notice a lot of items we've already talked about, so we're gonna kind of move past those pretty quickly. What you do want to pay attention to is I always think of three different types of items in the menu system. The first and most common is something that has no impact on your photography and really doesn't matter if you do anything, or not, with it. We're gonna see a lot of those. Next up are a number of things that you're going to adjust once and you're gonna leave it there for the entire time that you own the camera. And the third type is something that you're gonna come back to on a regular basis. White balance is something that you would come back to on a regular basis, and so these are ones that you kind of want to have a little bit more at the top of your mind because at the end of this menu section, there's something called my menu, and you get to choose a bunch of items, it used to be just six, now you can choose a whole bunch of items that go into my menu. Anything that's really important that you want to come back to and have access to quickly, on a regular basis, you may want to take and circle, or put a little star by it, because that's something that you can add to my menu at the end. And I forgot the total number of items, but it's upwards of around 30 items that you'll be able to put in there and have very quick access to. Alright, so white balance, it's the same options that we saw earlier. If you recall, there is a white balance button right on the top right of the camera, the top right of the camera. So these are the exact same settings that can set with that. Next up is setting the custom white balance. There's a number of options here as to whether you photograph a white object ahead of time, or right at the time but what this is designed for is for shooting a neutral object, gray or white, card is the most common, and figuring out what color the light source that you are working under. And, so one of the more common ways is that you just photograph a white piece of paper, like I did here. It doesn't look very white because it's illuminated with a tungsten lamp. Next thing that you would need to do is go to this set custom white balance, select the image on the card of that white object, and then you would set your camera to custom, and this is gonna then correct for the color lighting that you are shooting under, so that your white objects are white. Now you can actually go through and you can edit the names on this, so if you worked in a particular arena that had slightly off color lights, you could correct for that and have that as a place that you setup and you kind of come back to. If I recall correctly, I believe there are five different presets that you can set in there. So once again, if you were, let's say, a sports photographer, you're working for a school and the basketball gymnasium has one set of lights to it, the wrestling room has a different set of lights to it, the volleyball arena is a little bit different on the lights, you could have preset white balances for all those situations. Next up is the white balance shift and bracketing. The shift part about this is if you found that the tungsten, or the daylight, or the fluorescent light settings were not exactly spot on and you wanted to adjust them, you could go in here with this graph and you could adjust the color balance to exactly what you wanted. Now, you could also do white balance bracketing where you shoot a series of photographs at different white balances in the three different shots. I don't know too many people who do the white balance bracketing. If you shoot in RAW images, it's not a big deal because you can adjust white balance later on, but I do realize a lot of people are shooting JPEGs with this camera because they are wanting to shoot very, very quickly. So, the white balance shift and bracketing is probably a feature most people are not gonna make use of. Color space is the gamut, or range of colors that we record with our JPEG images. When we shoot RAW we get an Adobe RGB as part of that system but for the JPEG images we can use the standard sRGB which is mostly what we see on the internet, and so if you're only working with your images in a digital fashion on internet type basic screens sRGB would be fine, but if you want to get the full gamut of colors out of it, you want to change it to Adobe RGB and I'm always wanting to get the most out of my photos for their maximum control, so if you wanted to print those images, you have those extra colors to work with, so that's why I'm recommending Adobe RGB. So, the picture styles allow us to have slightly different looks to our photographs, and so this is gonna be one of many different features that we're gonna talk about that I generally call image manipulation modes where the camera is going in and adjusting the image in some ways. And so, in this case it's taking JPEG images and it's adjusting the contrast and color and the look of that particular image. With a RAW image, it is making that adjustment that you'll see in the back of the camera, but the final image is not messed with in any way. The RAW image is the original information that you get. But, if you're gonna shoot JPEGs, you can choose one of these options and if you don't particularly like one of these options, you can actually create your own. You can see the bottom of that list you have user defined one, two and three, and you can go in and you can create your own. You'll notice where it says info detail set right there, alright, so if you want, you can go in, and you can create your own style and look for an image. And so, I want to show you what that looks like on my camera, so let's go ahead and take a look and dive into the menu system. Alright, so I'm way off in the custom modes because I was playing around here, and I'm gonna hit the Q-button so I can quickly go from tab to tab. So now I'm back to the shooting menu. I'm gonna bring it down with the back dial. We're going to picture styles, hit set, enter this. And so you can see we can scroll through all the different options here. And if you want to choose something like standard, that would be a good place to be. If you don't like standard you can hit info detail set and you can dive in here and you can start making adjustments to that particular setting. And so I'm just gonna with default, I'm gonna hit menu to back up, but if you want, you can come down to user defined, it's at standard right now, actually let's hit the info detail set, often hitting the wrong buttons. And we're gonna have the sharpness settings that we can change and we have some very fine tuned settings going into strength, and fineness and threshold, and this all goes into exactly how you want your images to look in their sharpness. For somebody who's shooting JPEGs that's sending those JPEGs straight out to go to an agency or to get used in some way that you're not controlling them, this allows you to adjust the look of those without needing to go into a computer in any way. Contrast, saturation, color tone, and so you may need to do a little bit of testing with some different parameters on here to see what works best with the system that you're using. You may find that the standard system that Canon has, and you know most cases I would just use standard right here and see how that works and then work from there. They do have a bunch of other presets that can be fine to use, but I usually just work with the standards so that you get something very consistent and a good base to start with. One that I will mention that does have kind of have some unique characteristics is the monochrome setting. If you go into the monochrome setting, let's actually set that, hit info, go into here, we can go into the filter effect and you can add in color filter effect, and this is kind of like using colored filters back in the days of film where we would add filters onto the front of our camera. Now beyond this, so when you shoot a photograph, let me just go ahead shoot a photograph. See if I can see it here. On the back of the camera it's gonna show it to you in black and white. Now if you are shooting RAW images, you are actually gonna get a RAW image off the memory card, but it's gonna show it to you in black and white. And if you wanna go into live view, it's gonna show it to you in black and white as well, so you can see what the world looks like in black and white. So for anyone who's interested in doing black and white work, I highly recommend shooting in RAW, but setting this to black and white just so that you get a better preview of what you're doing while you're out shooting. You will eventually get color photos, they need to be flipped back into black and white, but at least you can see it here in the back of the camera and that is all under picture styles and I'm gonna reset it back to standard, which I think is a good general beginning place for a lot of people on this. So that is your picture styles.