Lessons

Lesson Info

Shooting & Playback Menus

Our way into the full menu setting on the camera, and you'll notice that when you hit the menu button, you're gonna have a siri's of tabs or pages of information that you can go to, and the red one indicates everything that deals with shooting. We're goingto have blue controls, all the things with playback yellow is the general set up of the camera. Orange is things that you will be able to customize, too, the way you like cameron work and then the green one, which is my favorite one because I can take bits and pieces from all the other ones and adam to my menu so that when I go to the camera, there's just the menu of things that I want to choose from that I do on a regular basis. Now, before we dive into the menu system, one of the things that you need check is your mod dial on the top your camera, because that if that soothing, if that is in the green zone or the cia zone creative autozone, you are only going to have access to some of the menus. Remember how at the beginning, I said ...

there's child safety locks, the child safety locks air on when you're in that mode. And so you want to make sure that you are in one of the more manual modes, whether it's, aperture, priority or program or manual something like that so that you have access to the full menu system. Now, when you are in the full menu system, you're going to be using the main dial on the top of the camera to navigate from tab, tab or page to page. And then you will be using the quick control dial on the back of the camera to go up and down, selecting the different line items that you can access in each of the different tabs. And so, at any time you were at it in a tab, you can see all the options that are available. Nothing is hidden from view that you have to scroll down below to another screen, so go ahead and hit menu and navigate your way over to the first red tab on the left, which deals with shooting, and this is your choice between shooting raw or j peg or both. And so if you turn the main dial on the top of the camera, that's going to select either a full size raw or two different smaller size rods, which are less pixels. My guess is that you bought a twenty one megapixel camera so that you could shoot it at twenty one mega pixels. If you want, you can also shoot it at ten or five megapixels and still shoot a raw image, but for most people, you're going to want to leave it in the standard full raw. The one on the far left down on the bottom are the j peg options, and you can use the back dial to dial through the different j picks. If you are going to shoot j pegs there's a good chance that you're going to want to shoot in the best quality mode possible, which is going to be the j peg, the large l on the left, they have different sizes, which is different numbers of pixels, and then if you see the little stair stepping in there, those are ones that are recorded at slightly higher compression rates, which means lower quality and so generally you could just look at the back of the screen and things to the left or higher quality things to the right are lower quality, and so I would recommend either raw or j peg and there's a few special situations where you might want to shoot raw plus j peg, but I don't recommend it. For most people, it clutters up hard drives with duplicate files. Most of the time, I'm just going to shoot raw images if I needed j peg to put it on my website or to put it up on facebook or something like that, I'm gonna take the raw image, I'm going to make a j peg out of it, post it and then throw the j peg away, and I'll always keep the raw, which will be unaltered data from the camera, which is great to have next up the beep. This is something that kind of annoys me after a number of years they use for beginning photographer it might be kind of helpful to let you know that you're picture is in focus, but once you've been shooting for a while and you know if you're gonna shoot wedding, you don't want your camera beeping all the time, so I would recommend turning this off, and I will mention as we go through the menu system here I am putting up my recommendation. This isn't where you have to put your camera, but I think it's a good starting position for a lot of people on a lot of these options, that was as we go through the menu system, all right, next up, shoot without the car, have this turned off, basically, what this means is that if you don't have a memory card in your camera, you can't pick it up and start pretending to take pictures ah, your camera just won't fire and let you know that there's no card in the camera review time little bit personal here I think four seconds is an appropriate amount of time if you were running low on battery power and you're on vacation, you could turn this off so that you're not reviewing images peripheral illumination correction. Now let me show you what this is going to be doing if we have an image that has vignette ing or darkening of the corners to it, which is something that happens with lenses that have very wide apertures or pretty much any lens that shot wide open the corners are a little darker than the middle of the picture kanan knows about this and the camera will communicate with lens to know which lends it is and it will fix the problem with lenses that it knows about. And so for a lot of people, this seems like a pretty good idea and in many instances I do think it's a good idea the problem is is that there are certain types of pictures we're a little vignette ng is a nice thing and so typically I found with people pictures it's nice to darken the corners up a little bit, it draws your eye, keep your keeps your eye towards the center of the frame now this is something that could be done in software later on and so if I had to have a recommendation is I would say disable this I think this is something that could be fixed later on and it's not really doing anything that you can't do later yourself and possibly have even better control over it then what the cameras doing and that's it for tab number one so now we can move over to tab number two and here's where we have two different items we have exposure compensation which is something that we were already dealing with that there was a dial right on the back of the camera for that so why would you dive into the menu to do it it's a little extra place you could go if you wanted to but the main reason it is here is for auto exposure bracketing if you want to shoot a siri's of pictures very quickly that are automatically bracketed which means over exposed and under exposed you khun set the camera to do a variety of bracketing so if you want to do a one stop brackett it's going to shoot one over one under and one correctly exposed you could do a to stop racket you could take the whole bracket siri's and biases towards the minus side or the plus side this this used to be a really big deal we have landscape photographers where they didn't know the exact exposure and when they were shooting with slide film they had to really nail the exposure properly and if you missed it by a half stop you missed the shot. And so with digital cameras it's not nearly as important because we can check the history graham and we can check the screen on the back of the camera and so there we don't have as many people shooting bracketing for that reason, but we still have people shooting bracketing for using a technique called hdr high dynamic range and it allows you to shoot a series of pictures very quickly at a variety of apertures and or shutter speeds and so some people use it some people don't next up we have white balance and we already did white balance on the top of the camera but it is also in here if you would like to dive in here and make the setting change as well. Now one of the problems that you might have it's pretty rare but uh with custom white balance actually this is the one if you remember we talking about shooting a white piece of paper and so if you what you would do is he would photograph a white piece of paper and then you would come to this spot in the menu and you would register that image and then it would make a white bala according to the light that was receiving on that piece of paper now the white balance shift him bracketing is if the white balance that cannon has pre programmed in the camera isn't quite right so for instance, the tungsten light is just a little too orange you wanted to make a change you could adjust what they're setting is for tungsten light you could also do a bracket siri's which means shooting a siri's of shots that are shot different white balance settings if you shoot in raw this is not a big deal there's only a few people out there that are going to need to really go in and customize this so I would not make any changes in here for the average user color space. This will flare up the internets a little bit on choosing the color space, but adobe rgb is a larger color gamut than s rgb and that's what you would want to use for printing purposes the internet more or less runs on s r g b as well as a lot of electronic devices but I would recommend shooting in the larger color gamut now I will mention if you are shooting raw, this doesn't matter okay because with raw you get all the raw information from the camera it only happens if you happen to be shooting j pegs, but if I'm shooting j pegs, I'd like the largest color gamut possible picture stars well, there's a button on the back of the camera to do this we can also do this in the quick menu, but this is where we can go in and select what I like to say is the flavoring of the jpeg image dust delete data so this is if you have dust on the sensor and you cannot manually clean it off, what you would do is you would once again you would take a photograph of my white sheet of paper and you would need thio pretty much fill the frame with the white sheet of paper and then you would register that what would happen is that your camera would shoot this and it we could then see where these suspects are on the sensor and it would then clone them out out on future images. Now, it's not something I have done with my camera because I don't want my camera cloning over pixels without my understanding of exactly what's going on, but if you were stuck, say, in africa on safari and you're sensor got really dirty because it's dusty and you're changing lenses and you had dust on all over your photographs and you wanted to fix that, but you couldn't clean it because you don't have the right tools and you couldn't get to a camera store that would be an emergency way of kind of rescuing that you might say all right, so we're gonna be moving over to the playback menu next gonna kind of move through these pretty quickly, protect him it protect images, puts a little lock on your images so you can't delete him. Uh give you a little tip here, though if you reformat the memory card, it deletes the images anyway and so images can get deleted. But if you have fumbling fingers and you were worried about deleting an image you could potentially locket somewhat temporarily. You can rotate images and this is simply for playback in the back of the camera you can erase images, but that's the same thing is the garbage button on the back of the camera print order there several pages in the instruction manual on how to print directly from this camera to a printer. Enjoy reading that in the instruction manual because I am not going to talk about it. Transfer order you can play around with transferring your images when you connect your camera up to the computer, I would highly recommend getting a card reader and just pop the card out of the camera. Next blue tab. First thing in here is the highlight alert so let me show you what the highlight alert does in a camera is it turns on a special review of your image that blinks any pixel that is over exposed if you were a wedding photographer this might be a nice thing to have with a bride with a white dress if the white dresses blinking in its entirety at you, you better change the exposure there's going to be something wrong with that picture because it's showing you pixels that you're not gonna have any detail now, it doesn't mean the pictures a bad picture because maybe you have a very high key image or there's some things that are very, very bright in there, but it is a warning that you are losing some information and you may I need to make a change in your camera on that one. It kind of bothers me makes me nervous having this light blinking at me, and so I'm pretty good looking at the history ram, which is what we're going to talk about next, so I leave that one disabled the a f point display when you play back an image, do you want your camera to show you the focus points that you were using and it's sometimes helpful to see where the camera focused but for most people it just clutters up the image and so I would leave that on disabled with the history ram there are two different history rams that you can view in your camera the brightness hissed aground, which is the standard one and then there's the rgb hissed a gram where breaks the scene out into red, green and blue and I prefer the colors it's, a little bit more graphic and easy to see, so I would change this to rgb. We have a slide show mode, so if you're gonna hook your camera to a tv, you can perform a slide show and you can set the interval and what shots you're looking at. Image jump with the main dial. Normally, when you play back an image, you'll use thie, the big dial on the back of the camera for changing from one image to the next. If you use the top dial, you khun jump ten images. So if you've shot a lot of images, you can move much more quickly to find that image. Now you can reset this to jump one hundred images at a time or a number of other different ways, for instance, by date, folder movies or still images. So whatever system works for you, for me, ten images is fine. I'm just not jumping around in the playback mode that much, so that's a fine setting for most people.