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Custom Functions Menu

The bracketing sequence can be changed, and I know a lot of photographers prefer the darker, normal, lighter, so minus zero plus. It's just a little bit easier to see once you download them onto your computer they show up a little bit more in a normal order, you might say. But that's a little bit different than the way it starts off. You can choose the number of shots that you like to shoot with. Three shots is kind of the standard. I kind of like five shots, I figure, if it's got a wide exposure range, I might need five exposures in order to capture it all, but it really depends on how you shoot and what you shoot in there, but that's the number of shots in a bracket series. Safety shift. All right, in the mode of time value, you've chosen the shutter speed and the camera is gonna choose the aperture for you. What happens if you go up to a fast shutter speed? Well, it's gonna have to let in more light with the aperture. Well, what if in this case you choose four thousandth of a second...

? Well, you don't have a one point oh lens, and so what does your camera do, is it says, you can want four thousandth all you want but you're shooting at two thousandth. Now, the problem is, is that it still says, four thousandth of a second. You're selecting four thousandth, but you're actually getting two thousandth of a second. And I don't like that, I like it to show me exactly what I'm getting. Now, it does blink over and show you two thousandth of a second, but it's going behind my back and making changes, trying to save me. Maybe I do want to shoot it at four thousandth of a second. And so it kind of depends on if you want the camera to compensate for mistakes you might make. And we're all gonna have different answers to that question. In general, I'm recommending you leave this turned off. One option is what we just saw right there, is the camera would compensate by adjusting the shutter speed or aperture if we go out of range and automatically fix things for you, by changing the Tv and Av and I'm not a big fan of that. I don't like the camera changing things that I am not totally clear on. However, there is another setting that's not too bad and that's the ISO speed. Imagine the same scenario. We go up to two thousandth of a second. We want to go up to four thousandth of a second. It jumps over to the ISO, bumps the ISO up a little bit so that you're still getting the right exposure. And so this would prevent that problem that I talked about at the beginning of the class, of shooting in the time value mode and going out of range of something that you didn't have available to you. And so this would be just kind of, the camera having your back, protecting you by getting the right exposure. Same exposure for new aperture, and so if you are working with a lens change of an extender, a zoom lens, or maybe a variable aperture, or some other device where you're changing lenses and you put on the new system, and your camera isn't gonna get the right exposure, do you want the camera to jump in and change the exposure for you? For an average photographer, they might want to set this to ISO, the camera automatically changes the ISO so that they're getting the same exposure. For the more serious photographer, you probably don't want the camera changing anything on you unless you tell it to change, which is why I recommend turning that off for the more advanced photographers. All right, page two. If you want to limit the shutter speed range, you can. Most people are not gonna want to do this. You can limit the aperture range. Most people are not gonna want to do this. Third page. Display, it's the little exclamation point. Why do you want to see this in the viewfinder? Well, when your camera is in black and white, I think that makes pretty good sense. And you can go in here and choose, hey, you know, when I'm shooting HDR, I kind of want to know that something unusual is going on in the camera. So it's a generic warning, but you get to choose what it's telling you it's warning you about. So I think that one needs to be go in, and customized at least once. When you are shooting in the Live View option and it is masked out, you can either choose lines or completely blackening out, so that you don't see it at all. Personal preference on how you like to compose your images, whether you want to see what is outside the frame lines or not. All right, little nitpicky here. So if your exposure is over to the left hand side and you want to get that indicator to the right, how would you turn the dial? Which direction would you turn the dial? If you said 'I would turn the dial this direction,' then you're perfectly good with the way your camera is. That seems illogical to me, because I want to use the top of the dial and maybe that's just me. And so if you want to use the top of the dial to correct for that and move in the same direction as the arrow, you want to reverse the plus and minus. And I have found a lot of people on their cameras who when using manual exposure turn the dial the wrong direction because for some reason, and I don't understand it totally, in the Japanese culture, they associate the bottom of the dial and not the top of the dial with the movements that are taking place graphically. And so I think most people are gonna want to change this, with one exception. Those of you who have the vertical grip are often grabbing it from the bottom of the dial on that grip. And so if you have the grip, don't change it. If you do have the grip, don't change it. I think I said that right. All right, Custom Controls. And this is where we get into a whole nother big section. Don't have a lot of time, so we're gonna try to keep going through here relatively rapidly. So this is where we get to customize various different buttons on the camera. We could spend ... Two days, going through all the options. We're gonna spend like five or ten minutes here, okay? And I'm gonna show you a few of my favorite settings. So first off, in the normal operation of the camera, the set button doesn't do nothing. It doesn't do anything when you're shooting. It's only when you're in the menu and selecting things. So if you press this, you go in, you set that button, scroll through, look at all of the different options. That'll go to magnify, it'll turn the menu on. Find something useful for that button to do if you want to activate it under normal shooting operations. The multi-function up on the top of the camera. Under normal shooting conditions, it doesn't do anything. You can go in and you can select something for it to work with. The one that I like is called Cycle and it cycles through all of the important settings on the camera. Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out which one of the three buttons that I'm trying to press. That one's a lot closer to the shutter and it's a little bit easier to get to so I've found that that one's one that worked for me but find something that works for you. Some people want to change between raw and JPEG, very very quickly. A cool option is turning the auto exposure lock button so that it toggles your camera between one shot and the continuous which is the AI Servo focusing. For somebody who is shooting standard photography but then wants to go into continuous shooting, have this selected for that button. When you press down on the shutter release, that's the one shot mode. Press down with the thumb on that back button and it switches it into AI Servo, and so it's a one button override so that you could do continuous focusing if you occasionally but not all the time are photographing action that's moving around. Okay, this is the ever popular back button focusing. A lot of serious photographers really really like this and the key here is taking the shutter release and turning off the auto focus on it. So normally it meters and it auto focuses and what you're gonna do here is focus with the back button and then when you press the shutter release, it meters and it takes the photo but it doesn't refocus the camera. And so there's a lot of good reasons why this works out very well for most people. And this is how you do it, you just dive in and you switch it instead of metering and AF to simply metering, and you've got your camera in back button focusing. And it's now a two finger operation, back button for focus, trigger finger for taking the picture. Two button focus, now this is one of my favorite ways. And so in this case, I've put the camera into back button focusing, and the AF on button is controlling, that's my basic auto focus mode. But I can go into the asterisk button, the auto exposure lock button, and I can have that auto focus. And so at this point, they're just doing exactly the same thing, but by pressing the info detail set, you can dive in and change four different parameters about how that focusing works. You can change which focusing point you use. You can choose which AF characteristics are being used. You know, let's just say for instance, you're shooting a basketball team and you have two favorite players that you shoot and they move in different manners. One's a point guard, moves really quickly, one's a center, moves a little bit more slowly. You could have focusing totally keyed in to those two players, one button for each player. So you can also change the AF operation, so one is one shot, and this is the way that I find it most valuable, is the button on the left is one shot and the button on the right is servo or continuous focusing. And so this is what I call two button focusing and it's just very simple because those buttons are right next to each other, and they're very easy to figure out which one you have. You can also have one selecting a single point or one selecting a group of points, and so there's a lot of customization and definitely worth some investigation in here. Now, one of the things that is interesting is that you can register a favorite focusing point to go to. And so if you want, by pressing that second button, you can choose a different focusing point that says hey, when I press this button, do this things differently but also, focus over in this different area so that I don't have to manually move it over there. Now, the way that you need to do this is that you need to register a home point, and I'm gonna show you how to do that on the next slide and so the options are selected and home point, which gets me confused all the time, but the home point is a registered saved point that you set something different for when you press that particular button. So what you would do to register an auto focus point is first off, choose one of the things like has a single or a particular area that you're focusing, you can't do it with all areas. Move the focusing point to where you want it to be. Press and hold the AF Point Selection while you are pressing the Lamp button. If your camera's beep is turned on, it will beep. Now, if you want to clear it, you can press that same button with the flash exposure plus minus button and it will reset it back to nothing. And so, that's how you could register a point if you instantly want to move it to one of those other areas. You would then have to tell that one to go to the registered point. Recall shooting functions. So once again using the asterisk button which is probably the most programmable button on this camera, they do more with that than anything else. You can choose recall shooting functions. Now, in the previous slide, we were talking about changing the auto focus characteristics of it. Okay, what if you want to change things like your shutter speed and your aperture? Yeah, you can do that as well. If you want to completely change the shooting mode, you can go in and change. Here is a list of all the different things that you can do. You can change your ISO, metering, exposure mode, shutter speed, aperture if you want to, so that it's instantly set with the press of a button to go to this different mode. And so, obviously, we're pretty deep in the woods at this point right here, but this is a great great tool for anybody who needs to instantly change their camera from one setting to the next. AF, registered ... Registered AF function, so this is very closely related to what we just talked about, but this is solely for the depth of field button which is the button on the front of the camera. And what it does is it switches the auto focus functions to a different type of focusing system, and so you can add this on top of everything else that we talked about, is that, okay, normally I want to go into a continuous mode but I would like some different parameters in this extra case, and so, as you can see, we're building multiple layers here and you don't have to choose all of them. I don't expect anybody to do that. But it is probably the most sophisticated auto focusing and customization I have seen on any camera to date. This is another very cool feature and I see some very good uses for this. The depth of field button can be registered to unlock the camera. So if, remember, there is a lock button on the back of the camera, and so, back in my days when I was shooting some professional sports, I would get into an arena and I know that I need 500 at F two eight at a particular ISO and I don't ever want that to change because that is the lighting of the arena, all right? And when I take my camera down and I pick up another camera, I'm bumping dials. I could lock all that stuff in. But on the off chance that there's somebody up in the stands under completely different lighting, and I want to unlock the camera, momentarily, to shoot a photo, I could just press in on the depth of field preview. It unlocks all the dials and settings so I can make those changes. And so it's a temporary override on anything that you have locked up on the camera. Direct AF Point Control, we'll end up here, I think we just have this last one, and it's pretty easy. So that little joystick on the back of the camera, normally turned off. You can turn it on so that you don't have to press that thumb button to activate it. Now, there are two different ways to turn it on and the button, it's also a button. Not only is it a joystick, it's also a button you can press. It either goes to the center point or it goes to a home point that you have registered someplace else in the frame. But at the very least, just get that automatically turned on so you can adjust that at any time and place you want. So obviously tons of controls in there. All right, you can add cropping information later on to your images, you do need the Canon software in order to do that. All right, another nitpicky thing here. One of the things I hate about most cameras is that when I tell it to delete an image, it assumes that I have hit the delete button by mistake, and I have to confirm that I want it erased and then I have to press it, set again, so I have to hit three things every time I want to press Delete. If you have Erase selected, that means when you press the erase button, you just have to press one more button to confirm the deletion of that image. If you want to be really cautious, you can leave it on Cancel selected. If you want to be a little bit quicker about getting things deleted, select Erase selected is a better choice. There are a few lenses that will extend out with motors when they focus, and when the camera is turned off, it'll automatically retract those back to its normal storage position, which makes perfect good sense. Using the Eos Utility, you can add a bunch of caption and text information to photographs even before you've taken them. And so this is kind of an expanded version of the copyright information, but you need the Canon software to go ahead and do this, and so, there's a number of news photographers that will add in their news agencies and events that they're shooting ahead of time so that it's on the photographs in the metadata so that they can upload those images as quickly as possible with all the appropriate information. And finally, the last page is where we get to clear all the custom functions and so if you have made a mess of things and you want to start from scratch, go ahead and clear them out and start them from scratch. All right, our final menu is the My Menu and this is of course my favorite menu because you get to customize it the way you want to. So I'm gonna do a quick little demo here to show you what you can do and this is expanded in previous cameras and so it's a little bit different and I'm going to hit the Q button so I can quickly get over to my menu and I'm gonna add my menu tab. All right, so I now have two tabs. The last tab, tab number two, is kind of my organization tab, right there, and tab one is my real tab. Now I'm gonna go in and configure. I am gonna select items to register. Image quality seems pretty good, I'll hit set on that and give that an OK. I'm gonna come down and I'm just gonna select some things. I really don't care, I just want to select about three different things in here. And ... Those are things that maybe I want to get to on a regular basis, so I'm gonna hit menu to back out of this, and now I'm gonna come down to sort registered items. Okay, I use the interval timer quite a bit so I want to have that bumped up here. And I'm gonna actually take image quality and I'm gonna bring that down here and so this is the order that I want things. And so now, when I dive into the menu, it goes to my menu right here. Now the beauty is, is that I can come over to two and I can add my menu tab, I can add another tab. And I can come over and I can add another tab of information, each one of these holds, I think six items in it, and so what I've done on my cameras, and I'm maxed out here because it's grayed out, I can have five pages of six items. You do the math, all right? How many items can you have? Now, you can also go in and you can title these and so what I've done is I have, like, my initials and my basic stuff, things that I do all the time, formatting memory cards, looking at the battery information. And then I have a tab for landscape photography, and then portrait photography and then movie shooting, items that I go to in the movie. And if you do this right, you will never need to go in ... to all of this again. It'll all be in those two, three, four, five pages that you have right there in the green menu. So you don't ever need to search for something in the menu. If you're getting lost in the menu, you are not doing something correctly. And so, have some fun, get in there, it's gonna take you a little bit of time. Search things out, organize it, label it, and you're gonna get yourself totally customized so that you can work through your camera, super super quickly.