Lessons

Lesson Info

Custom Functions

Now we're going to be getting into the custom functions which are additional ways for us to customize our camera and this is grouped up into four major areas the first area that we're going to look at is exposure I will once again be giving you some recommendations of to how I have my camera set up on what I was recommend for most people actually to start with the exposure level increments we can do this in third of a stop accuracy you could do half stop if you want to but I think third stop is gonna be good for most people it's a little little bit more precise same thing with the so we can do it in half stops or third stops most people leave this at third stops I s so expansion I would recommend turning this on I by no means am endorsing shooting at twelve thousand eight hundred but if you ever do want to go there at least you don't have to dive into your menu system to turn it on so long as you understand what's gonna happen when you go there it's gonna be very noisy but at least you...

can use it bracketing auto cancel I would leave this on when you go into bracketing this will automatically cancel it as soon as you've shot a siri's now there are some landscape photographers or people who doing hdr photography who do bracketing all the time and they don't want their camera turning off and so they would go in and keep and turn this off so that it stays in a bracketing mode until they turn it off so for most people would leave that on now the bracketing sequence is normally done with the normal exposure first and then an under exposure and then an overexposure and that's a fine system for most people but if you don't like the order you can dive in there and you can change it safety shift this is when you are using shutter priority and aperture priority if you are if you have chosen a number from which there is not a proper exposure do you want the camera to change your chosen number and for most people I would leave this and disable it's generally not going to be an issue but if you said a thousandth of a sec in shutter priority and your camera couldn't do a thousandth of a second it might revert down to say a sixteenth of a second and there are some people that that might work for but for most people I would leave it at disabled and soon the only change I recommended in there was number three was thie so expansion and you can see those little numbers down along the bottom as well as to what has changed in what hasn't and the final one in here is the flash sink speed I would leave this at auto, but you could customise it a little bit leave, fixed it to fiftieth or make sure it doesn't go below a sixteenth of a second, but I think auto was fined for most people, all right, so you need to hit the menu button to kind of back out of there and dial down to the image parameters, which is custom function group number two in here we'll be dealing with the long exposure noise reduction and hi s o noise reduction, and since both of these are very similar, let me talk about him both simultaneously at the same time when you shoot at high esos or you leave the shutter open for a long period of time, you get noise and your pictures. Now you can reduce noise with software in your computer or you can have your camera do it. And so there is noise reduction that your camera can add two images and do it now. This is going to be for j peg images it's, not for rai images, and it will make the pictures look better. The downside is that let's say you take a ten second exposure, the camera will need to stay on for another ten seconds while it is processing that picture, so if you're shooting pictures at that time, you can't do anything during that second ten seconds so it does delay your shooting quite a bit, and this is something that can be done later in the computer and probably be done better in software like light room from adobe, so I would probably turn that off and I would actually disabled the hi I igh s o speed noise reduction, highlight tone priority this one, I'm turned remember, actually, I may have misspoke earlier, and this is the d plus I think I was talking about the optimized I can't remember the name now lighting optimized auto lighting optimizer that one was something this is the d plus that you will see warned in your lcd or in your view finder the idea on this sounds fantastic, so here's the issue? Sometimes when you shoot a picture, there's some over exposed areas so you can see in the archway, we've lost detail in the picture on the left. But the picture on the right when we enable this feature holds back some of the exposure so that it can get detail in those highlights. And so you might think you want to enable this, but my actual recommendation is to disable it. The problem with enabling this is that you can't shoot it s o two hundred, excuse me, you can't shoot, it s a one hundred, you were forced to shoot it s o two hundred all the time or two hundred or higher and so you can't get down the I s o one hundred and this is basically a fixed that you could make if you shoot raw so it's not really going to help out most people who are shooting wrong hit men you back out of that dial down going to look at the auto focus and drive modes here we're gonna have a lot of choices. Take a big breath get a drink of water we go in, go in deep now, guys, get this all figured out. Okay? Aye, aye. Servo. Tracking sensitivity. What? We're determining here first off probably leave it it zero. But if you get into shooting sports, you may need to change the sensitivity of how fast your camera switches to something that is new in the focusing bracket. So if you're focusing on a basketball player coming down the court and somebody steps in front of him to guard him, do you want the camera to switch to that new player or do you want to stay on the other player and how fast he wanted to switch? And it depends on the type of sports you were doing. I was shooting auto racing the other day and the cars are going around the track and the track is such that there are trees in the middle and I didn't want the camera to refocus on the trees as I'm panning by the cars, and so here I would tend to want to have it either normal or a little bit slower in its refocusing, I think a good place to start is zero, but if you shoot a lot of sports, you may want to have this change faster depending on the type of sport that you're shooting. So zero is a good place to start for now, but that's what it's doing a servo first and second image priority. So when you are in the aye aye servo mode so that's the follow focusing mode what's the priority and importance of getting the first shot, making sure the autofocus is correct or making sure that you can take a picture. There are certain photojournalists that want to get the shot, even if it's a little out of focus. And so for a photo journalist, they would go for release priority. For someone who wants to make sure it's in focus, it would be more focused priority. And then the same thing goes with the second image. Do you want to make sure that you're tracking it or that you want to be able to fire the shutter release? In general, I'm not going to recommend any changes from the default system, but if you are into sports, you're gonna want to look more closely into these modes and how they match up with your particular sports. Aye, aye servo auto focus tracking method in this method um I would leave this on one which is continuous autofocus track priority what's happening here. Make sure I get this straight is that if you are focusing let's, say on the center point and you've actually chosen a bunch of points to focus let's say you've chosen nine you started on the circle centerpoint your subject has drifted off to one of the other points and now a new subject has come in the middle. Where do you want the focus to go to stay on the old one or go to the new one depends on the sports you're on for most people, you're gonna probably want to stay on the original subject to refocus on, which is going to be the number one setting here so I would leave it at one len's drive when auto focus is impossible. If your camera can't focus, your lens can't focus what do you want the lens to do? I would lead this at zero focus on the exception to the rule is for people with really big lenses like three hundred, four hundred five hundred six hundred millimeter lenses occasionally that could be a bit of a problem because the camera starts searching in areas where the subject is not anywhere near that and so I would leave this zero for most people unless you have a super telephoto lens a f micro adjustment one of the problems that we've had with auto focus is that it's not one hundred percent accurate all the time with every lens there's a slight variance from lens copied a lens copy and camera to camera and they have found that sometimes it needs to be tweaked a little bit this used to be something that you would have to send your camera back to canan canan technician to have them fix now if you know what you're doing if you know what you're doing, you can do it yourself and so this is something that I recommend to advanced users on lee is going in and checking their lenses and we're not going to get into how to do that there's a whole little mini class in how to micro a gesture lenses but basically you're going to shoot an object you're going to see if it's focusing properly and you can adjust the focus forward or you can adjust the focus backwards your camera can then memorize many different lenses that you put on the camera and adjust for those and so if you want the absolute pinpoint sharpest focus, you would go through this somewhat laborious method. You'd might take you an hour or so to test, you know, a few different lenses to get this set, right? But I do recommend this, but only for advanced level users. Select auto focus area selection. No, dude, I would definitely go check off all of those modes there because especially early on, just so that you have all the options available to you as you get into it. You like? I never use that one. You can turn it off so you don't even have to bother with it. Manual auto focus, point selection pattern. I would also choose continuous here. This allows you to go from the far right hand edge to the left hand by just going to the right again. Kind of wrap around. And so it's, very easy to go from one section to the next. As I said, there's a lot in here and so number eight viewfinder display illumination I would leave this on auto what's gonna happen here is that when you focus on something, those focus brackets are going to turn red for just a moment. It's just a nice little visual confirmation. I don't much like the beat because other people can tell what's going on, I don't mind the red because it's just me knowing what's going on display all the autofocus points a bit of a personal preference here personally, I don't like looking at focusing points that I'm not using and don't care about, and so I like to keep the screen as clean as possible. And so, um, I generally and did I actually think I may have this wrong? Let me check in here now I wouldn't know disabled that's, right? I don't want to show all of them. Thank you, uh, but if you did want to see where all the possible focus points where you could enable that focus point display in a I servo or manual focus what's going on here s o if you are in the zone focusing, which is the nine points or the nineteen point focusing, which is everything little black boxes will show up when the focus is achieved and some people like this, some people don't like it, I think it's fine, I'd leave it turned on, which is enable auto focus assist beam firing this is something that I like to disable. I don't like a beam of light coming out from my camera or flash to help focus under low light conditions, I will just manually focus some people completely disagree with me and they want the little flashlight help I more subdued, I don't want to be a big flashlight in someone's face trying to focus the camera I'll manually go through the effort of focusing if I need to under really low light situations the problem with little flashlight scenario is it only works for about five or eight feet doesn't work over very big distance orientation linked a f point this is where I would select number one select different a f points what's cool about this is that let's say you're shooting in a situation where you always wanna have the subject over on the right hand side of the frame you could select a right hand point for the horizontal format and then when you go to vertical rather than that point now being up on the top you could select a separate point for vertical over on the right hand side and so you could select different points in your camera would automatically switch back and forth as you switch from vertical horizontal I find that very handy mere lockup we talked a moment ago about mir the mere coming up causing vibrations in the camera for people doing macro photography still life photography this could be a bit of a problem it's the biggest problem I found at around one eighth of a second with that near coming up even your camera on a tripod cable really self timer it's gonna cause a little vibration to your camera which is gonna cause a little bit of blurriness by using near lock up and waiting a couple of seconds to fire the camera using either the self timer or the cable release, you can ensure that you're going to get the sharpest pictures possible and so that's the group of auto focus and drive a lot of stuff in there controlling that. All right, we're getting near the end. Hang in there, folks. We're almost through the setting up your camera perfectly, so you don't have to worry about it again. All right? The final grouping in here is operations and others, which is etcetera, variety of stuff. Okay, so the first thing that we have in here is our custom controls. Now we're not gonna have time to go in and change all of these, but if you want to dive in there, you can see it all the different little buttons in fact, lycan, pull this up right here on you can see and hear all the different buttons that you can go in and customize and control and there's a number of settings that I've gone in and I've changed on my camera the way I like it to work. And if you want to change the buttons and things in here, you can make a lot of customized changes, so spend a little time with this tonight and go in and customize your camera the way you like it to work but we're going to move on because we need to keep moving in this class next up is the dial direction all right? Maybe I am odd no I know I am odd the laughter in the class that was a little too quick a laughter as far as I'm concerned yes I'm odd but here's I'm logical okay? So it's in the camera you have this light meter when it's over on the left and you wanted to go to the right which direction should you turn the dial we'll kanan believes that you should turn the bottom of the dial in the direction that you're going and I don't like that I would prefer if I'm going to go from left to right to turn the top of the dial which makes a lot more sense to me and so in order to do this I need to reverse the dial direction on my camera which is one of the reasons why when I pick up somebody else's camera I'm constantly dialing it in the wrong direction is because I have reversed the dials on my camera I'm fine on my camera but on everyone else's I'm back and so in this case I'm recommending reverse direction here I like going the other direction all right next up ok, so add image verification so if you are in a law enforcement agency police military and you need to somehow verify to authorities is that your picture has not been manipulated. You can get this software data pack from canon sells for that's just cheap it's like seven hundred fifteen dollars, and you can verify that your raw images have not been altered in anyway and so that's something that you can get for police facilities and so forth like that ad aspect ratio information. So one of the things is you can set your camera to shoot up, shoot six by six or three by four six by seven ten by twelve five by seven things like that, and what happens is that it doesn't actually crop the image, but it adds that information which you would then use with the cannon software so that you could crop it later it's not really necessary for most people, but it's there if you happen to need it, and then if you have not been paying attention for the last half hour and screwed up all of these functions, you could clear all these things that you had just randomly changed in there and take him back to the factory defaults, but hopefully kind of kept notes of some things that you might want to change on a regular basis, because these are the ones that you can program into my menu settings. And to set this up, what you need to do is you need to go into the my menu settings, and you need to go down to register, and you will register all the different features that you want to show up. Now you are limited to about six items, so you got to choose the six most popular things that you're gonna want to go to. And then you're going to go down to display from my menu and enable that aspect of it and what's gonna happen, then is when you press the menu button it's going to go straight to the green, my menu rather than normally it's, just going to go to the last place that you were. And so this play in this case it's going to go back to exactly your menu and the features that you change most of the time. And for most people, you'll never need to dive into the menu again. Once you have it set up big sigh. Ah, we're through the menu system now and that's basically the camera.