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Lesson Info

Quick Menu

The quick menu. This is a shortcut menu. And the way that I think about a camera as far as the options is that the really important options have a button or dial right on the outside of the camera. The camera will then have a menu which is a long listing of everything that it can do. And the quick menu is the highlight of the menu system. It's the most important items that you're gonna want to change on a regular basis. So let's take a look at the quick menu and what it offers and how to change it. The top row is gonna give us our basic exposure information. Exposure mode simply tells us where our mode dial is set on the camera. We then have our shutter speeds, apertures, and ISO information. If we had the camera mounted on a high tripod, or in an unusual position, this would give us the opportunity to change shutter speeds and apertures and see what we're setting right there on the back of the camera quite easily. Next up is exposure compensation and auto exposure bracketing. And so o...

n this one, we can adjust the exposure a little bit brighter, a little bit darker. But we can also do bracketing on this. And so let me show you real quickly on the bracketing because it is a slightly different operation on the buttons on this. And so I'm just gonna leave the camera in the program mode. Put the camera in the quick mode. Or excuse me, the quick menu. And I will navigate up to our control here. Now, I can control the overall brightness of the image with this back dial. And if I turn the front dial, I can shoot three images that are bracketed at a stop apart or a third of a stop or two stops. So let's do a three shot series where they are one stop apart. So I will shoot one, (camera beeping) two, (camera beeping) three images. And let's play back these images and see what's going on. Let's go back to the first image. The first image is the normal image here. The second image is at minus one. And the third image is at plus one. And so, it is still set so it's ready to shoot another bracketed three series. So one of the important things you want to know is that you wanna turn this off. And this is controlled by the dial on the top of the camera. If you want to just make everything lighter or darker, you can do it on the back. And just in case you're wondering, yes, you can do both at the same time. And so if you want to have all your exposures over on the minus side, you can do that as well. And so those three dots are for bracketing. It's not where you want to be during normal photography. So be forewarned. You don't normally want to do that. All right, so let's take a look at what bracketing is gonna look like on your camera. And so once again, you can shoot all the way down to minus three stops. And so under tricky lighting situations where you don't know what the best exposure's gonna be, this is a good time where you may want to bracket. There's also people who do something called HDR photography where they're combining multiple different exposures for one combined photograph. And so this is gonna work really well in program, time value, and aperture value. Now there are a few more fine tune controls to bracketing that you'll have access to when you dive into the menu system in the custom functions. You can shoot two, three, five or seven frames in a bracket series. They can be anywhere from 1/3 to three stops as you saw me setting on the back of the camera. And as you saw there, I can use that with the exposure compensation as well. So there's a lot of good options. Makes it very, very easy for anybody who wants to use bracketing. It's one of the better systems I've seen out there on many of the different cameras. And so you can also control the bracketing sequence, which can be really nice. I like the way that I have it displayed up here where it goes from dark on the left to brighter. And if you wanted to shoot like that, you can go into custom functions. The exposure number four. Bracketing sequence. And you can change the order that your camera shoots the bracket series. So, exposure compensation and auto exposure bracketing. Next up is flash exposure compensation. Now the camera does not have a built in flash. So unless you have an add-on flash, this feature is gonna do nothing. No matter how much you do with it. But, if you do have a flash, and you are using it for people photography, one of the things you'll find is that the standard automated TTL flash is sometimes a little overpowering on your subject. And you want to dial things down a little bit. Well if you want to dial things back one stop or two stops, you're gonna get a little bit more natural lighting. And this has great dependence on the colors and the range of brightness other places in the shot. So the background, what the subject is wearing, might throw off the metering system of the flash. And if you want to dial it down to get more natural skin tones, it's something that a lot of people do. And so a lot of people are dialing their flash back and powering it down one to two stops of light. Depends on exactly the situation. So if you do have a flash added on to the camera, most flashes will allow you to make those controls right on the flash, but this way you can use the controls of the camera to set that and see it right there with all of the other features that you're setting on the camera. We're gonna talk a lot more about Wi-Fi in the fourth section of this class. But if you do want to have a quick shortcut, you've already established a Wi-Fi connection with your phone, you can quickly set it up here so that you can transfer images from the camera to your phone so you can upload 'em to anyplace that you want on the web. Next line of information is your picture styles. And this is the development process for the JPEG images. And anytime you shoot a JPEG image, the camera is control of exactly the colors and contrast and saturation of that particular image. There's a number of presets in here that you can set according to what you like. And if you want to get into the finer details, you can get in and control the exact look of your images. So let me go ahead and take a little demo here and show you what this is gonna look like. So, we're gonna go ahead and press the quick button to get into our quick menu. We're gonna navigate down. Come on. I can use a variety of oops. Come on. I gotta make sure I press the right area. This is a small control. Sometimes a little hard to get to. So we wanted to get to these effects right here. So we're gonna press the set button to get in. And you'll see that there are subtle differences in some of the numbers up here. And these have to do with the sharpness, contrast, color and so forth. And so normally I would leave my camera in the standard. Actually, let's go back to standard. Right here. This is gonna be good for most things. I prefer standard over auto because auto will change it according to what it thinks you need. Portrait is gonna dial back the saturation a little bit. Cause we don't like too much saturation in the skin. It doesn't look real good. Landscape has a bit more saturation. And so we have a number of other ones in here. But one of the key things down here is always look for helpful information down at the bottom of the screen. And so if you want to set the details, you would press the info button, which is up here on top. Now I think it's timed out on me. So let me go back in here. And so if I want to go in, I can press the info button in here. And I currently set it to monochrome, all right? I like to shoot black and white from time to time. And how much sharpness do I want? Well you know what? I may want to dial up the sharpness a couple of notches when I shoot black and white. There's a couple of other fine tune controls in the fineness and the threshold. I'm not going to worry about that right now. Maybe I want to shoot with a little bit more contrast. I usually do when I shoot black and white. We could have a filter effect. Let's set this, let's see, we've got some yellow flowers out here so I'm gonna set it to yellow, see if that has a kind of a funny effect on that. We could have a toning effect if you want to have things sepia toned. I'm not a big fan of that so I'm gonna leave that on none. And that's gonna be our options in monochrome. Now when you go to the color settings, it's gonna be slightly different. I'll put this in live view, so you can actually see my subject here. Little on the overexposed side, so let me dial this back just a little bit with my exposure compensation. And if I take a photo here, we can play this back. We can zoom in. And let's zoom in a little bit, let's see. Zoom in a little bit more. And you can see our flowers look completely different in black and white as opposed to color. And so I can just change that by going into the quick. Let's get out of live view. Quick menu. Go in here. You can see the little exclamation mark. Do you see that little exclamation mark right there? Let's you know, hey look out, you're shooting black and white. Let's go back to standard. Right there. That's a good one but if you find that it's not quite right, you hit the info button and you can go in and you can change the sharpness. You don't want to over sharpen. Because what that's gonna do is it's going to create halos around your images there. And so at first if you don't know much about the way processing and photography works like, I want the sharpest photos possible. Well there is something that's too sharp as far as the way the camera sharpens artificially after the fact. And so now we are back to color photographs compared to our black and white. So if you want to have a different look, and this is great for black and white. Cause then you can see with the screen on the back of the camera what black and white's gonna look like. Normally, as I say, I think standard is gonna be fine for most people. But if you find the JPEGs aren't quite to your needs or whoever is using them, feel free to go in and adjust 'em. Next up is white balance. This controls the color of light that the camera is recording under and how it's gonna be perceived by the sensor on the camera. So this is a very important setting. Especially for JPEG shooters because this is something that gets baked in to each of the JPEG images. So color ranges from 2,000 degrees to 10,000 degrees as far as photographically concerned. We have different settings for sunlight, cloudy and shade. And then for artificial light, which tends to be a bit more on the different side, especially Tungsten light, which is very orange in color. If you are recording inside under Tungsten lights in your home for instance, you'd probably want to set your white balance at Tungsten to correct for that light. So that things that are white will appear white. A white sheet of paper will then appear white. We do have a few other options available. One is a Kelvin temperature setting where you can manually set it to any of the Kelvin temperatures available. And so if you have something that's kind of unusual, yes you can manually set that. We have a preset manual where you can go in to shooting menu number three and you can select a picture of a white photograph that you've taken perhaps of a gray card or just a white piece of paper, and you can calibrate that under the lighting that you are currently shooting. We'll do a little demo of that when we get there. And finally we have the option of auto white balance. And this is where the camera chooses for you what your white balance should be. Now, I'm not a huge fan of auto in some cases. But in this case, auto white balance tends to do a very good job. If you do shoot in raw, white balance is something that you can go in and change later after the fact without any harm to the original image. If you shoot it in JPEG, there's gonna be a limited range and you are really pushing the pixels around that you are playing with. So it is damaging the image to a small degree. So if you are shooting JPEGs, this is something that you really want to get right. But as I say, auto white balance tends to do a very good job. It looks at the scene. It looks at the highlight information and tries to see if its particular one color or the other and so for most people I recommend leaving it in auto white balance until they see a specific problem that they know how to fix. And so auto white balance is a good choice here. If you want to hit the info button, you can select between two different auto white balance options. One is where it really tries to get everything pure white. And another one where the standard one, where it allows in a little bit of those warm colors. We often like those warm colors aesthetically in the photograph, but technically they are inaccurate. So it depends on how accurate you want to be on those colors. And so you can hit the info button when you're in auto white balance to switch between a pure white and one that gets things mostly white but still has that nice warm feeling to it. Next up is a feature that I've never had to use. And I hope you never do as well. If you want to tweak all of your white balances, you can go in here and you can make everything a little bit more green, magenta, amber or blue. Now hopefully you don't need to do this. Hopefully the other white balances will take care of things. But if they don't, you do have a resource to go to to make additional changes in the color of your photographs. You can also do a white balance bracketing if you want to shoot a series of photos shot at different white balances. Not needed by most people. But it's there if you do need it. Auto lightening optimizer. So once in a while you'll see me pop up with this JPEG only sign. And what that means is that it's not gonna affect the raw image, makes no real difference how you have this set if you were shooting in raw. For those of you shooting in JPEG, what this is gonna do, it's gonna go in and play around with your image cur. And what it's trying to do, is it's trying to hold back highlights from getting over exposed and it's trying to boost the brightness of the shadows so that you can see into the shadow area with a little bit more brightness. So here's an example of what it would do is you'll notice under the high setting on the far right we can see the building on the left and right much more clearly here cause it's brightening up those shadows. And so it can be very handy I think with people photography because a lot of times people's faces are sometimes in the shadows under hats or just natural shading on the face, and so it tends to make things look a little bit better in maybe a crowded people situation. It may not look so good in a landscape situation where you do want that contrast. You can take a look at the histograms here from these images. You can see what it's done with the black areas. It's kind of raised those black areas as we move from left to right. And it's held back those white areas as we've gone from left to right so it's kind of reducing the range of tonalities in that particular scene. Next up is a shortcut to the custom controls on the camera. This camera has a lot of different buttons and controls that you can go in and customize. The shutter release. Depth of field button on the front of the camera. The dials of the camera. A lot of the buttons on the camera can be pre-programmed to do what you want to do. There's even buttons on certain lenses that you can go in to control, to activate, or hold focusing on the camera. So I'm not gonna go through all the options and all the different settings of this particular category. But this is something I encourage you to dive through and see if you can customize the buttons on the camera. Take anything that you don't use on a regular basis and turn it into something that you find very very valuable. And so I know I like to do that on my camera to get it set just the way that I like it to work. So this is gonna be a shortcut. We'll see it again when we get into the menu system. The AF operation is something we talked about before. There is a shorter, easier button on the top of the camera. It's the first top left button. The AF button on the camera. But if we want to use and access this information on the back of the camera, we can do that here in the quick menu. Same thing goes with the focus area. We can see this back here. Choosing a single or a group of points. Metering on the camera. Also has another button on the top of the camera so we can choose the different metering modes in here. Drive mode. Also on the top of the camera. But on the back of the camera as well. So we have two different places we can access this information. Very important one here. Image quality. When you record a picture, it needs to be stored on a memory card in a file of some sort. And there's two basic files. JPEG files and raw files. If you want the best information off this camera, you'll want to get a raw image off of it. It's a CR2 file. That's what Canon calls their raw files. It's going to be a 26 megapixel file. 32 megabytes in size, roughly in size. And you're gonna need Canon's software in order to read that or other software that knows how to read Canon's software. So for instance, Adobe makes software that reads the Canon software. But you are gonna need special software. There's a lot of computers that don't have the right software for reading the raw image. But it is the original information off the sensor. It's gonna give you the most detailed information, the most color information, and it's gonna give you the most leeway going forward in what you do with the camera. What you do with the images. Sometimes though we don't need 26 megapixels, which is a lot of megapixels, for every image that we take. And so if you do want all the color information and good detailed information, but you only need 15 megapixels, there is a medium raw. And if you want a small raw, you will get a 6.5 megapixel file. Most of the time as I say, we want the full, large raw. If you want to shoot JPEG, there are different versions of JPEG. Large, medium, small. And within each of those, there's going to be a high compression and a low compression version, which is gonna change your file size. And so if you do need JPEG images, you can be very specific about what type of JPEG image that you're shooting. Most photographers are not gonna use these medium and smaller size JPEGs. This is partially designed for people who do not have access to computers. And what they shoot in camera is exactly what they need on their computer or whatever their final sources are. Now, you can also shoot raw plus JPEG as well by turning the dials in the correct way. So let me give you a little demo here on my camera. Go ahead and get this camera into the quick mode. Let's navigate to the image quality section right here. Press set. And you'll notice there's a little indicator with a dial here. We have arrow indicators here and so if we turn the top dial, we're choosing which type of raw. Or whether we don't shoot a raw at all. We can turn the back dial. Let's see what happens if we use the, we can use the multi controller or we can just use the back dial, which I think is a little bit easier. And if you said I want to shoot raw and JPEG, well fine. You can shoot a full size raw and a large JPEG right there. You can shoot any combination that you want here. Maybe you want to shoot full size raw, but you just need some quick thumbnails to look at images. You can shoot a small JPEG in that case. I recommend for most serious photographers to shoot raw, without a JPEG. Because if you have a raw on your computer, you can make a JPEG anytime you want. The only time to shoot JPEG is if you know that you need a JPEG right away. And so let's say at a wedding, you're shooting raw images because you want nice, good quality pictures but you want to do a slideshow at the reception, and you don't have time to download all of your photos and turn them into JPEGs and put them into a slideshow. You just want to export some images and let's see, you could probably go with even a small size because that's more than enough resolution for most projectors, TVs and things like that that you would want to have. And so, feel free to adjust as necessary. I think a lot of people will start off in photography shooting like a large JPEG and then they'll start shooting raw. And then from time to time, you'll shoot raw plus JPEG for special assignments. And then you can press the quick button or actually hit the shutter release and kick you back out of that. And that is locked in and ready to go moving forward. Finally, for those of you who are using this as a touchscreen, you can hit the Q button down on the bottom left. You remember that we can use the entire screen as a touchscreen, so we could be using that. I was not using it so that you could see the screen and I was adjusting it with the dials that weren't blocking it. And so, either way, there is nothing that you have to use the touchscreen for, so if you prefer to use the physical controls, you can use that as well.