Lessons

Lesson Info

Shooting & Playback Menus

All right, first off is quality this is the file type that your cameras recording to the basic options here are raw or j peg now within raw you have a large size raw, a medium and a small my bet is that if you paid good money for an eighteen megapixel camera, you don't want to shoot it at ten megapixels but that's where the medium raya some people have a need for a smaller raw from sight from time to time but if you're going to shoot raw probably you want the largest raw, which is just plain wrong. If you do want to shoot in j peg and you don't have the right software, for instance I would shoot in the largest quality j peg, which is thie option furthest to the left uh, the camera, as I say, is designed partially for people who don't own computers and they want to send a basic email photograph so they can shoot a very small raw when they do that. But I would recommend shooting large, raw or large j pick now one of the things is that you can shoot both at the same time you can shoot raw...

plus j, so you're going to use the different dials to die elin, what settings you want so you can choose one the other or both next up red eye reduction on or off personally and as you can see here, I'm going to give you some recommendations and this, to be honest with you, he's, not the exact way that I have my camera set up because I don't recommend the way I have my camera set up for you because you have your own thing going on, but what I decided to do is to give you some general change is that I think would be good from the average user using this camera. Now, I don't like the red eye reduction because it delays the time from when I press the shutter to the time when the picture is taken, so if I'm trying to take someone's picture it's not delayed by a second or two, get instantaneous picture, I might get red eye, but I can fix it later if you don't like fixing red eye and you don't mind the wait, you can leave that one on. This is really annoying to me, but it's sometimes helpful for beginners, the little beep. What happens is that when your camera is in focus, see if this one has it. It gives you a little church. It also beeps at you in the self timer mount, so if you said a self timer, it's going to be be it's going to sound like a garbage truck backing up and so I like to be a little bit more stealthy in my photography and so I'm going to turn the beep off release shutter without a card you want to have this disabled that way if there is no card in the camera you can't take pictures and so we used to sometimes take pictures without filming our camera we don't want to do the same thing with with the memory card not being in the camera and this will just prevent you from taking pictures without a memory card the review time it comes set at four seconds and I think this is a perfectly fine setting but if you want it longer or shorter you can adjust it peripheral illumination correction what is that? All right, so let me show you a photograph and this photograph suffers from vignette e and so with peripheral illumination it's illuminating the periphery or the corners of the image you could have this feature turned on and what it would do we changed this year uh is it would lighten up the corners so that it's nice even exposure across the entire frame and you might be going uh I would like this on all my photographs because I don't want corners to be dark some lenses kind of have dark corners when you shoot him wide open and so I kind of want to say turn this on and enable it but the problem is is that there are certain types of photographs and this is a good example here where for shooting people photographs I like a little of it getting going on I like a little darkening of the corners it draws your eyes more towards the center of the photograph and this is simply something that you could do in software later on and so my hesitation is to leave this turned off our I would leave it on disabled now this is something that only works in j pegs it doesn't work in the raw system so it's just for j picks so if you shoot raw it's not a big deal next up flash control alright so as we as were quickly skimming our way across this menu system this is where we slip into the rabbit hole and once you go into this menu it opens up into another menu. It opens up into another menu and there's a lot of things going on here so in the flash control menu one of the first options is flash firing if you want to be able to use the flash you're going to keep this on enable there would only be some very special circumstances where you want to disable the flash all right? So this is the setting that we go into the deeper rabbit hole built in flash function settings. Actually, do I have that? I think I have that wrong. I think there's one more that we're gonna be going into on dso. In this case here, we're going to be doing up. There we go, we're down the rabbit hole now. Okay. So built in flash function settings. So it's, like three layers deep and there's, a ton of stuff in here and it's going toe dictate how the camera works when you are using flash. And on lee flash. First off option is what type of meeting system, flash mode. I would leave it at e t t l two. For most everything that you're going to dio, there is the option of manual flash, which some professional and people who know what they're doing to get in and manually control of flash. You can also do a multi flash talk about those in a moment. Shutter sync for most people. I would just leave it at first curtain. You can synchronize it with the second curtain if you wish, but I would probably leave it at the first curtain. The exposure compensation is something that there was a button right on the top of the camera. There was another one in the quick menu, but if you wanted to handle it from here, you could e t t l two is the type of media ring system that it's using the evaluative meter and system is a good general purpose meeting system that I wanted change wireless function okay we're three levels deep into the rabbit hole this is where we go in for a fourth layer alright so once you get into here it starts opening up all sorts of options and what's going on here is that you were going to be using the built in flash to trigger another kanan flash wind of fire and howto fire and how to balance the light between the built in flash versus the external flash and so this is really kind of going beyond the scope of what we khun fully teaching this class I'm not sure if our new speed like one on one class coming up you know in a week or so might address this further but we're just going to kind of get just started so why would you want to use anything other than this perfectly good working flash right it's right there it's just so easy shouldn't you just shoot all your pictures with this built in flash well for all you newbies there's a bit of a problem with that you get very awkward shadows and you get a very harsh light in your subjects eyes if you can shoot with a flash off camera in a different location you're going to have more interesting shadows you're going to have better quality light you're going to be able to illuminate your subject and were flattering way and so using the built in flash is an amateur cheap tool it's an emergency backup the built in flash is the equivalent of the spare tyre on modern cars do not drive over sixty miles an hour on that car is just not the best tool for lighting your subject and so getting the flash off the camera is going to help out your photographs tremendously and there's a number of different ways that you can balance the light because you're gonna have a whole bunch of options once you get in there balancing the ratio for instance you can have this flash trigger the external flash and this one has no part in the final picture and what's really going on is that this light sends a little strobe over to the off camera light and then it sends a little signal back and they're having a little conversation back and forth but they're doing this at the speed of light and the fire this much power how does this look? This looks good okay do it again and it fires the flash and it's all happening very very quickly and one of the results is that there's the's very brief flashes when you take a picture and I found some problems if you're taking pictures of people especially people who are blank hers and how some people just blink at the trigger of light and I've had a situation where these lights I could not get a picture of somebody with their eyes open because they were blinking. And so for professional work, you might want to look into a more sophisticated radio trigger, but for some other fun stuff, there's a lot of great things that you can get in here and control, and this is all within the wireless function. Now, one of the options that you can also do in here is you can go change the flash motor manual flash if you just manually want to kick the flash out and have a very particular power set to it. You can do that by going up to the flash mode in selecting manual power on it manual flash, and then you can go in through the sub menu that it pops up in there and you can select the power of the flash, and you're gonna have additional functions in here, so somebody who really wants to get in and manually control their camera can get in here. And so, once again, we're kind of tucked down in this rabbit hole four layers deep, looking through all these different flash functions and for anyone who's into flash photography there's a lot of fun stuff. That you can do it here because once you get in here with these external flashes, you khun group them into different a b and c groups and you can fire him in different ratios and you can do all sorts of cool things in there. But for most people, I would probably start by just disabling the wireless flash function until you get into that and have all the right equipment. Now one of the other options that you can get in here and do what the flash mode is due a multi strobe flash. Now this generally is going to require external flash units, but here's a picture where I used multiple flashes in just one picture. This is one single picture it's, not a double exposure it's one shot that the shutter was open for about eight seconds. I had somebody run in front of the camera and I was using some external lights to actually do this but it's a good example of what multi flashes, so you generally need a pretty dark environment where your light your flash is illuminating your subject as it moves or changes in some way. Now, once you get into this mode, you can start changing the frequency of the flash. How often does it fire per second? How many shots is it going to fire and so forth? You flash count and so there's a lot of different options that you can get into once you get into this setting so this is all within the built in flash function settings have a lot of fun if you get one of those external flash units and so if you do have an external flash unit these menus then suddenly become active where you can go in and you can start controlling the custom functions and the features of your external flash unit generally they're gonna be great out and disabled unless you have a flash unit attached to your camera and so all of that is buried in that one little area called flash control under the first half and I wasn't normal gonna break for questions here but I've been talking non stop for ten fifteen minutes and I need a drink of water so we'll take a couple of questions all right that sounds good john enjoy that cold wait is there a question or two yeah it just seems to be popping up that seems a really good one a question from bob in the uk was can you explain how to update the firm where I have a slide for that of course you do this you know my name everywhere there's a slide for that one for sure that's way too important uh if I select m r r s raw dough I get lots more pictures and burst drive mode you do you do in fact let me just do that right now so I'm going to change to weigh already know that we get fifteen shots in full wrong I'm gonna go to medium raw and I get twenty four shots if I go too small rock I get thirty eight shots and so if you don't absolutely need eighteen megapixels for the shot you could reduce the raw file size and get more in the bird yes and then uh did you have a question I recognize that going too deep into the flash is beyond scope could you just really quick go over the three different symbols under the wildest function that air like it shows an external and a pop up with a colon and plus and just you know an overview of what those mean okay, so yeah there's three basic symbols that you're going to see there's going to be an external flash unit with a colon and then the built in flash unit and that is a got to get this straight extra that is a ratio between the two and so you might have a two to one ratio where the external flash unit is firing at twice the power or twice the significance of the built in flash you could have him if you had chosen plus they're just gonna work together the one with just the external flash unit the built in flash does not have any effect on the final picture it will fire because it has to signal the other camera in the way it's signaling is by light so that's basically the commander mode right? Okay, beautiful that's what I was looking for and so oftentimes if I'm using external flash I will just have the other flash firing I do think it's kind of funny that you know it's the new millennium you know and we have all this fancy technology but they're communicating the same way sailor's dead back on them in world war two with lights that are turning on and off only they're doing it much quicker uh question was asked by two different people shutterfly seventy seven and pt um if you're taking pictures and a quiet atmosphere is there a way to make the camera more silent so that make the shutters a little bit more quiet? Yes there's a slide for it had to think for a moment because there's not like a direct mode it's if you go into the live view mode the mere is already in the upward position and that's what's causing a lot of the noise and so if you were to just activate the live you so actually let me just do a regular picture and I'll hold it pretty close to my microphone okay khun fire pretty quickly if I go into the live nu what's going on I hate that focus it's a little quieter if you really want a quiet camera go by a five mark three really quiet yeah if you work on a hollywood studio in a hollywood studio, there has to be really quiet on set and people have to put their cameras in blimps, which is basically a hard case with all this foam in there and it's really awkward to use the camera so it's a little tough cool I think um from a question from try made about image quality and I think you mentioned this but what is the different image quality between the l with the sharp edge and the l with the blockage didn't specifically address it, but generally when you look at that screen the sharpest best ones or to the left and the lower quality ones there to the right the little staircase means it's not as detailed it's, not us fine of detail and so I tend to want to stay to the left of the highest quality images. After all, I paid a lot of money for good quality I want to get it out of it so we're on the second red tab now which we're still in the shooting mode and what we have here are two different things exposure, compensation and auto exposure bracketing now exposure compensation was done a whole lot easier by just turning the the wheel on the back of the camera but if you want to dive into the menu system and do it, you can go through all the trouble and do it there the main reason that this feature is here is just so that you could get in and change it but it's auto exposure bracketing so let's talk about bracketing for a little bit this used to be a big deal with slide film shooters where you really had to kneel the exposure spot on and a lot of times what they would do is they would bracket there exposures they would shoot one at what they think it's supposed to be one underexposed in one over exposed and you can do this on this camera very quickly and automatically with exposure bracketing now you can do this in one stop increments to stop three stop whatever increments and then you could take the whole group and you can shift him more towards the minus side or the plus side however you want to group them in here and so what you're going to do is you would just simply go into that mode and start using those dials to move the exposure, compensation or the bracketing around. Now if you're in the manual mode bracketing doesn't work if you're gonna bracket in the manual mode, you just manually adjust your shutter speeds and apertures if you're in an aperture shutter priority programme mode, then you could do your uh bracketing but if you want to do it manually it's just very easy take a couple of pictures that different shutter speeds or apertures and so using the appropriate dials to change either the bracketing or the exposure compensation and you can go up to five stops on the the bracketing and I don't know that my life I've ever gone more than two stops two stops is really extreme they just two five stops tohave a added sales thing we go five stops all right. Next up is something that we talked about that I would been deferring till now and I had a visual example is thie auto lightning optimizer and you will see this in your camera with a d plus that comes on if you decide to turn this on but what it does is this is gonna work in jpeg images only not in raw images is that under certain types of lighting conditions it's gonna want to fix problems that it thinks you're happy so in this case the shadows are a little dark. What we can do is we can lighten up the shadows. Now this is something that you could do later in photoshopped light room or any other photo program but the camera is going to think for you and do this for you and you could choose to disable this or you could choose to have it on its standard setting and in this particular photograph, I prefer the standard setting rather than the disabled. But before I put it into that mode, I realized that not all photographs are going to be helped out by having this turn on. This is something that can be done later. A lot of good photographs look good with lots of contrast. And so this is something that I would personally recommend leaving at disabled. Uh, this is something that you can fix later in a computer, and you can do it with much finer control than with what your camera's going to do it. Next up is white balance. We've already seen to other places where we could do this. We could do it with a button on the top of the camera, or we could do it in the quick menu. If you wanted to do it here, you can do it. But it's a little buried in the menu for my taste custom white balance. This is where you would take a photograph of a white sheet of paper under whatever light source you're going to shoot. You would then go into custom white balance right here and you would register that image as being white, your camera would then set your white balance. Toe whatever type of light is hitting that piece of paper, and so if you're in an unusual lighting situation that you haven't been before and you're not sure what it is, you could calibrate your life by simply photographing a pure white object or an object a gray one would work is fine, just as long as it doesn't have a color tent to it. White balance shift in bracketing this is something that most people are not going to want to go into. You can manually adjust the white balance. For instance, if you don't like the color temperature that the fluorescent bulbs are shooting under, you think it's a little warmer, a little cooler, a little different, you could go in and make your own custom white balance basically and set it in there. Most people are gonna want to do this. You can also shoot bracketing we talked about exposure bracketing you can shoot white balance bracketing if you wanted to shoot and adjust all the colors. I think a lot simpler system would be to shoot in raw where you have access to all the color information and you can fix it later. And so for most people stay away from this one next up its color space, and this is one of those little minor issues that will cause a flare up on the internet about where it should be set and I'm just going to simply say I prefer adobe rgb it's a larger color gamut it's more and better suited towards printing because it has a larger gamut of colors so and this is one that does need changing it comes standard in srg b which is a smaller color gamut is that affected by setting it to raw or do aka goes past all that shoots it in full so it's just so happens if you happen to set your camera to j peg and every once in a while I'll shoot j pegs so I leave mine in adobe rgb picture styles now there was a button on the back of the camera for this you could do this in the quick menu once again it's triplicate id here already next off look there's our picture styles sorry sometimes jump ahead of myself now we're moving over to the third red tab and this is where we have a few things in here we have dust delete data if you are in africa and you are not near a camera store that can clean your sensor off we talked about dust on the sensor and you need to fix it now one of the things that your camera could do is it can figure out where there is dust and it will clone over those areas in subsequent photos, what you would need to do is you need to shoot a white piece of paper again so that the camera can figure out where the dust is and then it would clone over those areas. Now this is a last ditch effort to avoid getting dust on the sensor you're not really getting the dust off the sensor at all your cloning over pixels and that's not something most people want to do because if you have something that might clone it into an area that doesn't look right. And so this is an emergency rescue method if you have a really, really bad sensor and you want to fix it out in the field, I would try to manually clean the sensor first, and that is something I'll talk about in a little bit the operations of that raw j peg button that we talked about can be customized here you can set what size of j pegs that you're going to shoot. Let me see what else can we do here? You can also have it set to shoot simon, so you're going to be sitting it shoot simultaneous raw or large j pegs and then you can go in and customize the size of them as well how that button works that's all for tab too, so we're gonna move over to tab three, which is our live view shooting if you recall, you press the button on the back of the camera to go in to live. You shooting. Some people don't ever want to go into live you or movie mode. You could disable it if you really don't want to use it now. We had a question and we were talking about the auto focus system when you are in live view, this is where you make the change. Now we have three bad options. Ok. In my opinion, the least bad in my opinion is live mode. At least you can kind of see what the camera is focusing on. There is the face mode. Then there is the quick mode which is quick but it's kind of ungainly in the way that it works. And so I would probably leave it in live you and just think about focusing before you actually start shooting it's. A bit slow to focus. And the other option that's not listed here, of course is manual focus next up, grid display. Remember the grid in the viewfinder? Now is the time to choose. Do you want that on? Do you want it off? Sometimes I like it. But most of the time I would turn it off exposure simulation. This is one that I would leave on enable and what happened what's happening there is that when you look on the back of the camera when the cameras in live you it's simulating what the exposure's going to be so if you're going to get a very dark picture it's going to be black on the back of the camera and I would say that it is accurate enough that you khun base some of your exposures on it if you have a good view of the screen and it's not too bright out so you don't want to do this under bright sunlight but under certain lighting situations I'll just look at the back screen and look at it it looks too light or too dark I'll also use the hist a gram and also used to the exposure indicator or the light meat teo check the exposure next up we have silent shooting and so this is a mode that we can kind of do some silent shooting actually I'm gonna dial over here myself make sure yes I'm in mode one and what's happening here is that you are using an electron ic first shuter curtain which makes it a little bit quieter the people that this is fantastic four is anyone who is into really high magnification macro photography the great thing about this is that there is no vibration before the pictures taken because the mirrors up the shutter is open and it just starts the exposure problem that macro photographers have had is that the mere bounces up and there's a thing called mir lock up that we'll talk about and that was causing vibrations but in live you you don't have that but even the shutter moving caused the camera to vibrate just a little bit and so mode one would probably be good for most people in that situation there are there is a mode to that is kind of unusual let me see if I can change this cameron to mode too throw my cameron to live you and what happens here listen carefully that's the picture the picture is done now the shutter curtain hasn't closed and if for some point I was trying to take a very sneaky quiet picture I could then hide the camera as it resets to the next picture and so listen again that's it so mode to would be very quiet for taking very, very quiet pictures. One of the problems with both mode one and mo to is if you were working in a studio and you have lights hooked up to your pc connection that's not p c is in computer that's it is in the flash connection on it in mode one and mow too it won't trigger the flash you have to have it in the disabled mode if you're going to use it in the studio with life of you and so that'll actually trigger the flash so for most people, I think mode one would be the place to leave it out if you're in the studio, you could put it at disable how long the meter stays on sixteen seconds fifteen seconds is a fine length of time that would be a good basic place to have it all right, so what we're going to do next is we're going to flip over into the video, moz you gotta flip the switch on your camera and then go back and hit the menu and you'll see that that fourth tab has changed in its graphic now we had just talked about focusing, but we can also change the focusing have it set one way for live you but said it differently for when we're actually recording movies once again I'm gonna go with live you it's the least bad of the three bad options we have a grid display for shooting video turned it on or off at your discretion and then the third one in this where we get to something more important, which is the recording size of the video we have a number of options from full hd hd to come or youtube style sized video we also have frame rates between twenty four and sixty frames a second various ones are at various levels and so if you're going to shoot the camera probably going to want to shoot it at the full hd resolution if you want to get the sharpest picture out of it normal video is going to be a thirty frames a second some people who like to shoot a cinema cinema graphic style is going to be a twenty four frames a second so it's personal style issue you might have there but for most people nineteen twenty by ten eighty at thirty frames a second and that will be slightly different if you are working with a pal system which will talk about here in a minute sound recording you can turn it off if you want to most people want to record some sound silent shooting this is actually referring back to the most that we were just talking about that really don't have anything to do with the video function but they happen to be in that tabas well, so we're gonna work our way over to the first blue tab we're not going to spend much time in the playback menu there's not too many things we need to worry about in here if you're gonna be downloading images and working card, you can protect your images and here which maybe if you got a young child who likes to play with your camera they won't accidentally delete your pictures but if you reformat your card it does delete your pictures and so it's not truly protecting them you can rotate your images if need be for playback issues you khun use the arrest erase button, which is the exact same thing as the garbage can button on the back of the camera, which is a lot easier to get to. So I probably used that one. There are several pages in the instruction manual on how to print from this camera. I'm not going to talk about it. Sorry. Find another class for that one. I just don't want to spend a half an hour on how to print from this camera. Next half the highlight alert button. This is a button for people who want to be aware of highlight areas that are getting blown out. And so what happens when you turn this on is that any pixel that is totally blown out is gonna blanket you. And this might be very helpful for a wedding photographer. You photograph a bride in a white dress and the dress is blinking at you. You better change your exposure because she's going to want see some detail in that dress. And so it doesn't mean that it's a bad picture. It just means that those pixels have no detailed information because it's very, very bright. It's something that I find a little annoying and nerve racking to have that blinking at me so I typically will leave it disabled auto focus display. I would generally leave this on disable what happens when you play back an image if you put it on, enable it's going to show you the focusing points where the camera was focusing, which is kind of nice extra information, but it kind of ruins the photograph when you're looking at it, trying to judge it for its compositional value, so I personally leave it disabled the history ramming your camera is a nice, graphic way to check your exposure, and the camera has two options that has a brightness hissed a gram in an rgb hissed a gram and I like colors, so I like the rgb hissed a gram it's just a little bit easier to see, and so I changed that overto rgb, another area we're not going to spend much time in is you can go set the camera up to do a slide show, take a bunch of pictures you could do a slide show straight from your camera. Using the hd mic cable to an hd tv, you can read four five pages in the instruction manual on how to set up that slide show image jump with the main dial so when you play back an image on this camera turning the back dial goes from one image to the next. If you turn the top, dial the main dial, it jumps ten images, or one hundred images, or whatever number you set or category you set within this. Within this grouping, you could have it jump between stills or movies. Different pictures taken on different dates. In general, I think ten pictures is a nice, basic setting for that, so I probably wouldn't make a change.