Lessons

Lesson Info

12:15 pm - Menu Systems: Shooting and Movies

All right, so let's dive into the menu system by hitting the menu button and there's gonna be a lot of different tabs of information. Cannon has put different groups of information on these different tabs or pages you can see everything on the page there's nothing you have to scroll down and see it's just kind of paging back and forth from tab tab and they've group things up into fairly logical sections and they're getting better and better all the time about where they group stuff so it's getting easier and easier to find now the first thing to mention is that if you do have your camera in any of these three most simplistic modes the basic modes you're not gonna have full access to the menu you need to have the camera in one of the more manual modes and so that will give you full access to all the tabs and all the pages of information. So with your camera ready let's get into the menu system and start diving through this thing all right so here we go image quality when you get in here...

you have the option of turning the top dial to select raw or the back dial to select a j peg option. My preference for high quality photographs is to shoot raw I then downloaded into adobe light room and I worked with the images there and if I need to put a image on my website I'll exported j peg or if I need to email a picture I will export a small j pegs so that it's appropriate for e mailing to somebody this is where you'd make that setting adjustment so for anyone who's pretty serious and I think anyone who has bought this camera anyone who's watching this class you're probably pretty serious whether you admit it or not you're probably either going to be wanting to shoot raw or start making plans to shoot ron the future the only caveat with roz you need to have software in your computer in orderto work with it because it just doesn't work on everyone's computer unless they have the right software. And so if you are going to shoot j peg I would recommend shooting the highest quality j peg which is going to be to the left setting the large fine quality setting you can also shoot raw and jay pig at the same time which will use up more space now as you can see on this screen shot here of the camera there is a large raw medium raw and a small rock and that's roughly a twenty mega pixel image in eleven and a five megapixel image and so as we go through these you're going to see my recommendations on the right hand side of the screen and a great something in gray is a general recommendation for most people if it's in red it's intended for a higher end user and for those of you who by the class all of this is duplicated somewhere in here third page from the end on the entire menu cities so all the recommendations are in here as well on the little fast start guide that comes with the class all right moving on next up is something that I definitely like to disable or turn off is the little beeping in the camera when it wants to auto focus this is nice for beginners because they can no let's see if I can do this nothing screams amateur more than a little baby and so I turned that off on my cameras I'd like to be a little bit more stealthy in my actions. Next up, we talked about locking your camera up when there's no memory card in the camera. This prevents you from taking pictures when you think or when you don't if you don't have a memory card in there so this is something good I would turn it off that way you don't accidentally take pictures without a card in there image review you can select with your camera reviews or not for images after you have taken them, I tend to like to leave it on for seconds, but to each their own that's it for tab one we're onto tab to lens aberration correction okay, and so this is problems the lens has the camera wants to fix for you and in this case, there's a couple of options in here. The first is what's called peripheral illumination correction. You might also call this dark corners, and so all lenses and especially very fast, wide aperture lenses tend to be darker in the corners, and kanan knows how much vignette ing darkened into the corners there lenses have and can automatically fix it if you want to turn this on now, in some ways, it sounds like this would be a great idea to have on all the time. But the fact of the matter is, is that in a lot of people photographs, at least those are the ones that I have found I liked it add vignette ng after the fact, and so I don't mind been getting in a lot of photographs, and so I typically don't do anything with it. The other thing to keep in mind is if you shoot j peg, this is where it affects your images. If you shoot raw, it has no effect on your final image. It may change the preview that you see, but it doesn't change the actual image. Another little feature that we can change about lenses is chromatic aberration, chromatic aberration, which is another way of saying color ghosting is a problem when you have a brightly backlit subject as you can see these rails here there's a little bit of a reddish and a bluish green aberration that's kind of coming around and the light is not hitting the censor quite the right way in this case and so you can fix chromatic aberration and the camera could do it automatically in camera, which I think is a very nice thing now unfortunately it doesn't take place with raw images, but if you do shoot j pay what you might from sometime from time to time I tend to want to leave chromatic aberration turned on and so my preference here is turning the illumination the perforation elimination disabled and the chromatic aberration shin enable on a complicated words their external speed like control if you have an external speed light connected up hard wired to the camera either mounted to it or with e offshoot court from canada you can go in and control features of the camera basic features of the camera even custom functions of the camera you can turn it on you could turn it off you could do your flash exposure compensation there's a lot of things that you can get in and do unfortunately we don't have time in the class and it's not a flash class there's a whole separate cannon flash cast that can get in there and do that but just to give you a hint of some of the things that it could do when you dive into that menu. It's. A little bit of what I call a rabbit hole, it just keeps going and going and going there's all sorts of things in there, and so controlling the flash, controlling the way the flash meters light would leave that in evaluative, controlling what shutter speeds are available and will be used when you use the aperture value mode. And then if you want to get in and control the functions of the flash unit that you would normally do right on the camera or on the flash itself, sometimes it's easier to hold the camera and do it, which is why they've put it in here. You can clear all the custom functions or set custom functions within the flash as well. And you can clear all the settings, if necessary. And so whole extra controls kind of mirrors everything that you see on the back of your flash. Right in camera. Next up, near lock up. So let me explain why this is on your camera. So remember the little diagram of the camera. Okay, well, here's win. The camera is in normal operation, mere lockup is disabled, and when you press the shutter, release that mere comes up and out of the way very very quickly and as it hits the top of that mere box housing it causes a minor vibration in the camera and at certain shutter speeds it will cause blurriness in the final image because the camera is moving while the picture is being recorded so if you were to put your camera in the mirror lock up mode now it's enabled here's the difference when you press the shutter release the mere goes up there's a bit of vibration but the shutter is not activated it's waiting for a second press of the shutter release and this is where having a cable release connected up to your camera is very, very beneficial so after you wait for the vibrations to sell you press the shutter release again the shutter opens up and closes and you don't have any vibration on your image and then your camera is set to do it again in the mere lockup moment and so it stays in the mere lockup mode until you turn it off and how big a difference can it make? Well here's a little test example and I shot this at one eighth of a second this first shot is without near lock up so it's turned off and it's not really sharp when we turn off mir law or we turn on mere lockup excuse me we lock the mirror up we'll get a much sharper image and what I have found from my own testing is that there is what I call a vibration zone of where you were likely to have problems and there at the peek at one eighth of a second so anything from a thirtieth of a second down to a half a second it's very possible if you camera is on a tripod that you're gonna have some minor vibration by that mere going up and hitting the top so that's when I would recommend using mere lockup is in those shutter speeds with a tripod. If you're doing a handheld shot, you're probably gonna have blurriness issues because your hand holding it but if you're doing a panning shot, you're not going to see that so something landscape photographers, product photographers, anyone who's going for critical sharpness will want to use at those particular shutter speeds. Normally, though, you're going to leave it turned off exposure compensation. This is the dial on the back of the camera, but you can dive in here and do it as well, but the other thing that we can do is auto exposure bracketing and so let's talk a little bit about auto exposure bracket e this is where the camera will automatically shoot a siri's of shots and adjust the exposure very, very quickly for you so that you can do and lighter version and a darker version of the same image very handy in lots of different photography, where the subject is not moving, also used in hd, our photography, where they're often recording three, five or seven shots, and then compiling all the data for use later in another picture. And so, in this case here, normally, you would shoot three pictures, but you can go into custom function group one, number five, and you can change the number of pictures that you shoot when you are bracketing. You can also adjust the exposure as you're doing the bracketing, so you can shoot all your pictures over exposed, or all of them under exposed, and these are things that you're going to use in the aperture value, time, value and program. So where the camera has some control over these shutter speeds and apertures. Next up, we have our s o speed settings. I talked about a short cut to this earlier on. This is where you can go in, and first off, you can set yourself your s o speed, I s a one hundred being the best image quality and the just as necessary from there, but you can adjust the range that you can select on the camera, and I don't see any problems selecting the maximum range in there, you can choose a minimum excuse me, the, uh, auto s a range this is where when you have the camera in auto is so you can put limiters on not going up to a certain number that you find unacceptable and if you are shooting in a mode like aperture priority what sort of shutter speed will the camera go down too before it starts jumping up in s o and so the minimum shutter speed should be a shutter speed that you feel safe shooting at possibly handheld and so for many people that might be one sixty eighth of a second for more advanced users it might be a lower number so there's a number of things that you can go through there and take control of auto lightning optimizer now we actually spoke about this briefly earlier when we were in the viewfinder that little d plus in the frame and so here's what's going on with the d plus or the auto lightning optimizer this photograph well it could it could be lightened up in the shadows a little bit to improve the picture and so you could turn on this lightning optimizer and the software in the camera will magically go in and look at your photographs and decide what should be lighter and what should be darker and well sometimes it's doing the right thing but other times you don't want it to go in and lighten up the shadows or do something else into your photograph you want that contrast and so sometimes it's good sometimes not you're going to be the best judge when you see the image on a computer screen that's much larger and easier to see what so in this case I'm going to recommend leaving this turned off now if you work with raw images it's not going to have any effect on your image is in all this is only going to have an impact on j peg and that can be said of everything else in the menu that we talk about that adjust your image is in some way they're only going to affect the j pegs and not the ross when you shoot raw you get the straight true original white balance is something that we saw before but they included here so that if you want to make the adjustment you can do it from here the quick menu or the quick menu next up we have our custom white balance here we go. All right, so here's how custom white balances I talked about shooting that white piece of paper. So I threw a white sheet of paper out of my desk and I photographed it and then the next step that you want to go through is you want to go into custom white balance, which is right here in the menu system and you want to select to that photograph and the camera will see at how much color is on that white piece of paper and it will correct it in the upcoming photographs. Once you've selected the photograph entered that in custom white balance and then gone and selected custom white balance in the white balance setting, which is just one step up from this and so that's that's kind of the procedure not a lot of people use it, but it is available and can be handy for certain people next up white balance shift. So if you found that the fluorescent or the tungsten or for that fact any of the other settings were not quite color correct for the lights that you work with, you could go in here and you could customize any one of them and make him more blue make amore amber more green, more magenta and so you can really customize any of the white balance settings in the camera next up the color space in the camera and so this is recording the range of colors that you get when you take a picture. If you shoot raw, you are getting adobe rgb. If you shoot j peg you get to choose between which ones you want. Adobe rgb is a larger color gamut and it's what I would recommend for most serious photographers if you plan on no image manipulation and you're just going to send your images straight to the web without working in a computer at all that's when srg might be better because that's the colors that are being used on the web as we mostly know it today moving over to our fourth tab slowly making her way through this so picture stiles okay this is where the camera gets to go in and plays photo shop with you now this is maybe more akin to the days of film when we chose different types of film according to what type of subject we were going to shoot so for the more serious photographer I would leave this on standard that way shoots a very clean, simple straight j peg this has no effect in roth's only j peg for the more basic user you could leave it in auto and the camera will adjust it a little bit the more advanced user probably doesn't want it adjusting between shot two shot and that's why they would leave it on standard and if you want to you can go around and play the on ly one that I find useful in here is monochrome if you do like to shoot black and white putting your camera in monochrome even if you are in raw images is kind of nice because when you shoot with the camera the back of the camera shows you a black and white image and that can be really handy out in the field for judging how tones look you can also go into user defined and you can create your own settings in here, so if you want to create your own unique sharpness, contrast and saturation you can go in and play with those all you want. However, if you just simply want to get the best quality images I would just shoot in raw, but you could do that with all the j pegs. The next one is long exposure noise reduction and the one after that is high eso speed noise reduction and they both deal with the same basic issue and that is's with long exposures meaning longer than one second and hi ay esos which would probably mean things like esso sixty, four hundred and up the camera is gonna have noise when you shoot at those highest or long exposures, the camera will go in and try to fix the problem in camera and that's always a nice thing getting the problem fixed as soon as possible with software that knows how bad the problem is. The thing about it is that you can do better than this with after market software the one that I used his adobe light room. They have some noise reduction sliders in there that you can use and I have much more control over how much noise reduction gets done on each image than I do in camera. And so the other issue is is that for long exposure noise reduction if you were to shoot a picture that is, say, thirty seconds in length, so a nighttime pics or thirty seconds the camera would add on another thirty seconds of processing time to kind of use as a gauge for how bad noises, which means that you're out of luck for thirty seconds. You can't do anything until your camera processes that image and under kind of critical twilight low light settings that's a lot of useful shooting time that I can't shoot, and I could do a better job fixing that later and so you can turn it on. It'll fix the j pegs not the raws, but it's limited in how good it is, and so I tend to leave all of that turned off. Next up is something called highlight tone priority, and this is another way the camera is kind of butting in and trying to control how bright and dark your images is, and what it's doing here is it's trying to protect the highlights. The image on the left has some blown out highlights in the doorway. On the right, we can see that the highlights are still there, they're enough to work with in theory, I love the thought of never losing my highlights. The problem is with turning highlight tone priority on is that we can no longer use eso. One hundred we can only use s o two hundred up, so I tend to want to leave that off in all cases. Next up, dust dust early data is in the camera to help as an emergency solution for dealing with lots of dust on it. So if you see an image like this, you've got a really dirty sensor, and the idea for fixing this is to photograph a white cheetah paper f twenty two so that you can see all the dust on your image, the camera when you go to dust, elite data will then map out figure out where all the dust is and clone over it so that you get nice, clean images. And so in order to do this, you need to I have a white sheet of paper you need to fill it with pure white set your camera, probably aperture value f twenty two you could do this in manual if you want, and then you're going to manually focus on infinity and shoot a picture of that piece of paper, and then you go to dust elite data where it can kind of map out all these problems on your sensor and so that's something that you would manually go in and do hopefully, not very often there was going to be other ways I'll show you in a moment about cleaning the sensor physically one of the new features on this camera saw it on the five day mark three, but it was not on the five demark too is you can now do multiple exposures in camera and when I first heard about this, I said that this is one of the stupidest things ever to be put in a camera because we have photo shop and we have layers and we can shoot multiple images and we can shoot layers in in photos off essentially and what I didn't anticipate about this is the feedback you get in the field being able to do it in the field and see exactly what's going on can be an advantage and so there's a couple of different setting adjustments we're not going to go through absolutely everything here, but one of the main things that you could do is you can set it to average or additive average is where the camera kind of cuts in and adjust the exposure according to the number of frames that you're going to shoot so that you end up with an even exposure additive as you can see, it tends to want to get brighter some more examples here space needle is such a popular icon how can we make seattle better? Let's have more space neil's alright so shooting average you can see that the sky in the background maintains the same darkness it continually adjust the exposure where as an additive, it just keeps on adding one exposure on top of the other. And so it's. Not something that I personally using the camera a lot, but if you do want to give it a try, it is a fun play, a fun way to goof around with your camera. Now when you get in here, there's going to be a number of ways that you can adjust it as far as the number of pictures doing the additive section that we just talked about so you can play around with it a little bit in there. Next up is another highly divisive feature in cameras and in photography. Hdr stands for high dynamic rage it's, where you shoot more than one photograph and then combine it later to grab tonal values from the dark areas in the bright areas to have one image that does more than you could do with one image. And traditionally, people have shot a bracketed siri's of three to nine pictures and combine them in photo matics or other software type program to get an hd our image. And now you can do it in camera. Everyone has a different level of enthusiasm with raw and will say that my enthusiasm will level with raw is pretty low to the ground. What I did just to do a test shot I went out to a highly contrast area so it's got a lot of darks and some bright areas and I just shot a straight raw image to start with. Then I took it into hdr and the first thing you'll notice and let me go back a picture as we go to the hdr it crops into the frame a little bit so we lose a little bit of wide angle and it does this because it's anticipating that your handheld and it's just kind of it's going to combine a number of images that are not perfectly aligned up and so you immediately lose a little bit of wide angle which is reason one way I don't like this moat number two you were only shooting in j peg you cannot shoot this in raw the five d mark three yes, you can shoot it in raw it's a feature they just took out of the six d camera you can change the exposure range and this is a this is the hdr composite with a one stop exposure value change a to stop and a three stop exposure rage and it doesn't really look all that great in my mind now maybe it needs to be taken into light rumor photo shop and tweaked even further but the straight out of camera hd ours are not really impressive to me so what I did is I just went back to my raw photograph and I said, well, what if I was just to lighten up the shadows and adjust the exposure for the highlights? Well, I could do pretty much the same thing just by shooting a straight raw image and so I'm not a big fan of the hdr mode maybe you'll be able to find a certain number of settings that work for you but play around at your own free will on this one so far, though, I'm not too impressed with the setting okay moving on to the live view shooting here and so these air going toby features that deal with shooting in live you first off if you don't like live you and you don't ever want to use it you accidentally bump that button you could turn it off if you want to I'd like to use it from time to time the autofocus method what if you recall I was a biggest? I was the biggest fan of manual focusing I'm not a big fan of any of the auto focusing systems but I would probably go with the flexi zone f which gives you a box that you can move around and navigate on the screen we have a grid display now this is not in the viewfinder this is on the back of the camera and we have a rule of thirds spread we've got kind of a box grid and then we have diagonal lines and whatever you need to help compose your images you can turn on I tend to leave this off just because I don't like to have a lot of clutter in there, but sometimes I'll turn it on if I'm trying to line up straight lines next up the aspect ratio and this is dealing with the height versus whip of what we're shooting. Now the sensor on this camera is three by two and so that's where I would leave it all the time if you were constantly cropping your images for, say, an eight by ten size or you wanted to match, eh hdtv at sixteen by nine you could crop the image, but you're you're just throwing pixels away. You're not reshaping the image it's just who pre cropping the image so that you don't even shoot the image to start with. Next up is exposure simulation and this I would leave enabled on what this will do is this will simulate the exposure on the back of the camera. So if it's really dark, you need to just your shutter speeds apertures r s o so that it looks good and the screen on the back the camera is so good in my mind with exposure that I will sometimes adjust exposure till it looks good. Depending on my lighting levels doesn't work so well under bright lighting conditions, I'll use the light meter for that, but you khun judge things just by leaving that turned on enable makes setting manual exposure a lot easier and that's it for that tab, so we're onto the second tab dealing with live you shooting and this is called silent live you shooting, which is a very deceptive term because it is not silent, okay, this has to do with when you're in live you are you using an electron ic first curtain or a mechanical first curtain? For most people, I'm going to recommend mode one it's very quiet there's no vibration, no big deal. The problem is, is that if you're in a studio hooked up to studio strobes, which in this case the camera doesn't have a sink port on it, so it's not real likely, but if you had a flash firing off the top of it, the camera needs a mechanical shutter, so if you're going to use flash photography, I would leave it in disabled mode to is kind of an unusual mode where it won't return the mere to its starting position until after you leave your finger coming up so there's a certain place where it would be a little bit extra quiet when doing that mode but most likely mode one from for most people, when you press down on the shutter release, how long does the camera stay active and me during the scene in front of it? Sixteen seconds is the normal one normal setting on that one. All right, we need to make a big change in the camera. Now, you need to flip the camera over into the movie mode so that you can get access to the movie menus. They are normally hidden. Unless you get your camera into the movie. Moz, you gotta flip that switch on the back of the camera so that you can get in to control these extra movie features. The first one is the autofocus system. This seems like deja vu because we just talked about focusing in live you will. This is separate from live you. This is when you're shooting movies. When you put it in the movie mode, you can choose a different system than you had in the live you system, which is really nice live you shooting is the same as we just talked about. I would leave it in mode one and the same is previously teetering timer. So there's a lot of things that you get to independently control, depending on whether you're in live you or movie mode, which are related but slightly different. This is where we get to the good stuff for movie shooting. Well, we do have the grid display that we could turn on and off and here's where we can finally select the recording size so the first thing you want to look at is how big a file size you want to record and nineteen twenty by ten eighty is what's known as full hd and that's what most of us want record is the highest quality video that we can get thirty frames a second is standard video some people like the hollywood look of twenty four frames a second that's a personal choice you could decide on that you can shoot at sixty frames a second, but you are not shooting full hd you're shooting hd, which is twelve eighty by seven twenty I believe now that you also had the difference between all I and I p b all I if you're really serious about editing and getting the highest quality video footage possible, I personally just use ibp just because I often shoot just short little ten second clips for a little something here, a little something there throw something on the web on youtube if you're really getting into editing and higher performance, then you want the all I setting so it depends on your usage of how you're going to use the video footage for sound recording normally you would leave this in auto but you could go in and you could manually control sound if you want to at different levels there is also a wind filter if you're in a very windy environment turns the mic down a little bit to adjust for the wind and then attenuate er which adjust sound kind of just for very bright or not bright but loud sounds getsem deck down into the normal recording range and sew it for anyone who shoots a lot of movies they want to get good sound that's a big part about having a good video and then finally for those that are really into video is the time code and so timecode it's a little different then the standard video where you press the record button and it starts saying one second two seconds three seconds it has a continuous run time on it and you can match him up if your having multiple cameras running you're probably going to be in two time code and you probably know more about time code that I know about it but if you're into syria shooting with multiple cameras on a professional set you're going probably wanted teo to get in here and turn on um to go into the time to go to take it to do something other than the standard record time okay video snapshot this one I don't get I think there's something that's lost in translation from the japanese engineers and designers on this one it's, where it shoots two, four or eight second videos and won't let you shoot longer than it. And so it's designed to shoot a short diary. So maybe with the new advent of vine and sharing, I believe that's, a six second video. So either vine needs to change, or cannon needs to change their time limits so that you could have that pre selected a vine video snapshot might work. I don't get it disabled.