Lessons

Lesson Info

Display & Menu System

We're going to move on to next is the display system so this is what you see either through the viewfinder or in the back of the camera so let's talk about the viewfinder display first so when you hold the camera up to your eye and you look in the viewfinder first off the frame that you you're looking at is one hundred percent accurate so if you're going to put something on the very edge of the frame that's exactly where it's going to be in the final frame very few cameras have hundred percent viewfinders and so it's got a very good coverage area you might say next up the auto focus points we've talked a little bit about these focus points and hopefully you've gone in to change the focusing points and there are nineteen focusing points and there are all of these are what are called cross type focussing points which means that they are sensitive to both vertical and horizontal lines now the one in the middle is also sensitive in an x pattern as well so it has horizontal vertical as well...

as forty five degrees to both of those so it is the most sensitive point of all of them and so if you're going to leave it on one that's a good place to leave it on now within the standard focusing points we also have spot focusing points and we talked a little bit about those when we talked about the focusing system, and so if you wanted very, very pinpoint focusing and I would kind of recommend staying away from it for the average user for the average use, you'll find some situations where they might be helpful way talked about f point expansion, where it's one point and the surrounding nearest four points, and then we go into the zone system, where we have multiple areas where we can choose a group of images either towards the middle, the top, the bottom, the left or the right, and you'll be able to select and move those around using the joystick on the back of the camera, and then in the timely middle of the area, you'll see a tiny circle around the center focusing point, and that is your spot metering area. So if you want to do a spot me torri, you'd put your camera in the spot metering mode, you would point that circle at something and press halfway down on the shutter release, and you would read the light from basically what's just coming in that center point. It technically it's about eighty percent of the information within that specific area, and then we have an electronic grid, and I'm going to show you how to turn this on and a little bit. But some people like a grid just as a way to level the horizon or to compose their pictures. Some people don't like all the extra fluff in there, they just don't want to see all that stuff, so it's something that you're going to think about turning on or off, we'll be able to set that up in the menu system in a minute and then down below all of that, we have our led information. Now you're never going to see it like this, you don't see it with everything turned on, but this is kind of the complete compilation of what might be available here. So just as we kind of run through this, we'll go through it really quickly. We have your battery indicator over on the left, we have your auto exposure lock indicator, letting you know that the auto exposure has been pressed, then we have a number of different issues dealing with the flash, whether the flash is turned on and it's ready. I talked about using some of the high end cannon flashing it's where you could use high speed, saying, you can actually shoot at five hundred one thousand two thousandth of a second with this camera, but that is, as I say, mauritz more of a function of the flash itself. We have flash exposure lock which allows you to lock and exposure in you could do a test picture and locked the flash exposure in in a particular area we can do flash exposure compensation and one of the things that I recommended is leaving your camera at a minus one flash exposure compensation which means this would be turned on on a regular basis well then have our shutter speed information and for all you newbies out there your shutter speed is actually one over this number so it's a fraction so if you see sixty it's one sixteenth of a second not sixty seconds if it's in the set in the full seconds it'll have a couple hash marks next to it next to that we have our aperture which is also a fraction then we have our exposure level and this is how we're going to manually meter our scene and we who practiced this a little bit when we had our cameras in manual indicator goes to the left to the minus side for things that are dark and to the plus side for things that are bright there's something called highlight tone priority and I'm going to show you some visual examples but it's something that you may or may not want to have on and so they give you a warning toe let you know that it's turned on but I'll tell you more about that in a little bit the s o setting on your camera is right there so that if you're really good on the camera, you'll be able to just feel for that button and change it with the camera right up to your eye level. After that, we have our white balance correction. I'm going to talk more about this when we get into the menu, it's something that you probably don't want to change but is a warning if you have changed it the same thing with the black and white, you can set your camera to shoot in black and white and boy, wouldn't it be a terrible mistake to leave your camera and black and white when you didn't want it there? Because there's no way to get that color back other than some very laborious photo shop working toe hand paint that back in now, what is kind of important? And I encourage everyone, including the students here in the class to take a look in there camera at the maximum burst number, which is the number on the right hand side of your camera within little brackets. As I look in my camera, I have fifteen and go ahead. You don't have to pick up the microphone, call out any number, I'll just kind of repeated fifteen fifteen these people have their cameras set to raw, what numbers do we have over here? Everybody's at fifteen okay, we'll tell you what I'm gonna go change my camera really quickly t j peg just to see what it says in here now it says ninety four all right? This is how many pictures I can shoot in a row right now if I wanted teo, I could let this go for ninety four size if it was it in raw, I wouldn't go up to fifteen and then it would start slowing down as its processing that information. So if you shoot sports, you want to kind of keep a little bit of an eye on that number and you don't want to let it run down to two or three when you think you might need a big burst of shot and so if you're shooting sports a good technique is to shoot for a serious of shots maybe three to six and then let the camera rest for a moment and process those and then shoot another siri's and so you have to be a little bit careful about how quickly you let it shoot and this is one reason and I typically want to steer people more towards shooting rahm itches, but if you shoot j peg and you shoot a lot of sports, it can be a little bit of an advantage because you can shoot for a longer continuous period of time and then over on the right hand side the far right hand side is a green dot, which basically means your cameras in focus is just elektronik focus confirmation dot that comes on and which you may not know is that this comes on in manual focus as well. And so if you want to manually focus, you can just turn the focusing ring until you get the green dot. Now it is going to be looking at whatever is in the active auto focus points, even though you have auto focus turned off, those focusing point points are still looking for contrast and sharpness, so you can use that for manual focus confirmation. All right, next section let's move to the back of the camera and the big old screen on the back, the lcd, and so what we're going to be getting into in a moment, here is the menu, and so to turn this on, you would just simply hit the menu button, but you can also hit the information button as well, and the information pulls up the different screens that we had talked about before and this basic shooting screen that you see here, you'll notice that little q down in the bottom left hand corner well, that and is trying to tell you to hit the cue button for the quick menu. And up in the top left of the back side of the camera is your cue button. By hitting that, you go to the quick menu, which is a short cut to some of the most popular changes you need to make to your camera. And so in order to make these changes, you're going to use a variety of controls from the main dial to the quick control dial. You could use a little joystick, and then when you want to intern, make a change in a particular area, you'll use the set button so let's, take a look at this quick control screen because there's some things in here that this is just the best place to make these changes, all right, to start with. All right? So the top row of information is going to show you the most important shooting information your shutter speed, your aperture, your s o what shooting mode you're in now you can't make any changes in the screen, you're going to make changes actually on the camera from here. The next little group of features down below this, they're gonna have things like your exposure level. This is basically your light meter, we're gonna have your flash exposure compensation. Now there was a button on the top of your camera to do it, but if you want to do it in the back of the screen, you can do that as well by navigating pressing the set going in there and making an adjustment the auto lightning optimizer is something I will tell you about in a little bit army during system once again there's a button on the top of the camera for doing it but it's done here as well as a second second place to do it white balance can be done here a swell picture stiles has a button on the back of the camera, but it could be done here is, well, focus points can be done here is well and so you see there's a lot of things that are duplicated, some people who like one stop shopping, we'll just go to the quick menu to make all their changes because they don't have to remember where that button this but if you know where the director button is, it'll be just quicker to go directly to that button down towards the bottom of this. We're gonna have things like your image quality and you're focusing mode our dr mode, which was once again another button on the top, the custom controls which we're going to have some fun with when we get into the menu system because you can start customizing tons of buttons on the camera that you could specify the way you want them to work our remaining shots, which sometimes will be limited to nine hundred ninety nine. But we know how to figure that out, right? With that information button, our maximum burst. There is the same thing that we saw in the viewfinder little battery indicator again for the third time, and then just the cue to let us know that this is all activated by going the human. And so if you don't want to use the screen for information, you don't have to, because everything is duplicated on that screen someplace else, so let's, get in to the menu proper. When you press the menu button, you are going to get a screen that looks a little something like this, and there are different tabs or pages of information the red one is for shooting. The blue is for playback. The yellow is for set up the oranges for some custom functions, and then the green one is one that you can customize, uh, with all your own setting. So as we go through the menu setting kind of keep note of anything that you think that you want to change on a regular basis, because as we go through the menu system settings, I think there's kind of two different types of things in the menu there's things that you're going to set once and completely forget about and that's fine because you just want to get this camera set up for the way you want to work and then there's things that you want to come back to to change on a regular basis and anything that you want to change on a regular basis you can program into my menu so that you can find it really easily because every once in a while there's something that I kind of get lost in here myself because there's so many things in the menu system but before we dive into the menu system we do have to be aware of where our mode dialled is if you are in the green zone or the cia remember the ones that I had told you has child safety locks will they don't let you get into all the menus and so you don't want to be in that mode when you want to go into the menu system you want to be in one of the more manual mode so I have my camera in m for manual that gives me access to all the tabs of information but if you're in the video you're gonna want to put your camera into the video mode and then press the menu button because then you have access to one special set of features that are controlling the video features and we'll talk about that in a moment so once you are in these tabs, what you're going to be doing is you're going to be using the main control dial to go between the tabs. And then you'll be using the dial on the back of the camera to go up and down the selection within each tap. Here we go, moving that dial up and down so you can select different features in there. From there, you'll press the set button. And then it varies a little bit according to what you're doing inside that mountain.