Lessons

Lesson Info

Quick Menu

The q button stands for quick menu. And you've seen us go in and change some various settings on this before. But kind of stepping back for a moment. The camera has, what I would consider three levels of controls. The buttons and dials on the outside of the camera. The most important controls. Because they're the ones that you're gonna use on a most regular basis. Then on the opposite end of the spectrum is the full menu system, where the full list of all the features are controlled. And in between the two is the quick menu. And this is a short cut to the most popular features that you're gonna likely wanna get into and change on some sort of regular basis. So let's take a quick look at this quick menu. Now there are gonna be a number of features in here that we have already talked about. And features that we are gonna talk about again. And that's because there's a lot of features that are duplicated and triplicated in their locations and where they're controlled. So the first top line...

is gonna tell us the critical information about our exposure. Where our mode dial is set. What our shutter speeds and apertures are set at. Now, if you have the camera set up on a very tall tripod or in an unusual position, you can change your shutter speeds on the back screen using the touch system. So you can just simply touch the shutter speed little box there. And it's gonna bring up the shutter speeds. And you can slide that back and forth. And choose different shutter speeds or apertures. And so all of these are touch controlled. Or you can use the crosshairs on the back of the camera to go up, down, left, right, and set button to select what you want. Sometimes you have the camera mounted in an unusual positions or they're in housings where you can't see the other buttons. And so it's good to be able to work with the back screen on the camera. Our exposure compensation we were playing around with earlier. For anybody who does a lot of flash photography, you're definitely gonna wanna experiment with flash exposure compensation. When the flash fires on the camera, it uses a system called TTL. It's through the lens technology. Where it's measuring and trying to get a computer algorithm is trying to figure out the correct amount of flash. Now, what is technically correct and what is aesthetically correct are two different things. And what many photographers have found is that they wanna power the flash down a little bit so it's not too heavy handed. And so a lot of people will have powered their flash down to minus one or minus two in the TTL scale. And it really depends on bright your subject's skin tones are. What color clothes they're wearing. How dark the background is. Sometimes minus one. Sometimes minus two. Would be good. And so if you do people photography with the built in flash I encourage you to play around powering that flash down a little bit. So it's not overpowering your subject. And so, give it a little bit more of an aesthetic pleasing look to it. And so, please experiment with that feature. Next up is the picture styles. And so another little warning sign that you will see is when you see this JPEG only sign come up it means this is a feature that will not affect RAW images. And so if you shoot only RAW, you really don't need to be too concerned about this. Only if you were gonna shoot JPEGs. But I think everybody is gonna be a little bit concerned 'cause this is kind of the way that your camera is gonna be displaying images to you on the back of the camera at the very least. And so if you recall back in the days of film, we had different film. We had Kodak and Agfa. And Fuji film. And different types of film within those different brands that had different looks to it. Well, you can control that here by having different looks to your image. And this is gonna control the contrast, color, saturation of your subject. And if you don't like the standards that they have. For instance, they have an automatic. A standard. A portrait. Landscape. Neutral. They have a monochrome black and white setting. You can go in and you can adjust these settings yourself. And so if you wanna make your own, there is custom one, two, and three. You can create your own. I know I like to shoot black and white every once in a while. And I like to see those results in the camera. Even though I'm shooting RAW, I wanna be able to see the results right after I've taken the photo. And so I might go in and control the contrast of a particular image. I might set it to monochrome. I might go in and control the contrast and the sharpness of it to getting a particular look that I want for my image. If you are shooting JPEGs and you need to use your JPEGs in a particular manner and you don't want to fuss with them later on the computer, well, go in here and tweak with them. If they're too contrasty you can pull that contrast back. And so there's a lot of different controls so that you get the exact results you want straight out of the camera. White balance controls the color that we are recording in. Now the camera doesn't know the type of light source that you are recording under. And so you need to give it a little bit of information in some cases to help let it know what it's doing. And this is all based on the Kelvin scale. Which goes from red to blue. And we have natural light situations like sunlight, cloudy, and shade. The ones that get a little bit wonky and a little bit weird are the artificial lights. Especially tungsten light. That is gonna be the most different. A lot of us have tungsten lights in our homes and it's a very orange look. And if you find that everyone, everything's got an orange tint to it when you shoot photos inside, you should perhaps try shooting with the camera set to tungsten. So beyond these settings here, there's a couple of more settings that we have. There is an auto white balance. And I'm actually a pretty big fan of auto white balance. It does a pretty good job most of the time. If you shoot RAW, one of the things that you don't need to worry too much about because you can fix it later, but this is how the RAW's at least initially get delivered you might say. There is also a preset manual option. I'm gonna show you later in this class, how to shoot a white piece of paper to calibrate the light source you're under. Let's say you're in an office that has a mixture of lights, and you're not sure what they are or exactly what color they're giving you, but it's not looking natural to you. You would shoot a white piece of paper and calibrate the camera to that sort of light source. And so these are all good options that you may need to get into. As a default I think auto white balance is a great place to start out. And if you're seeing colors that you're not happy with, you can then make a change. Now there is a little sub-category here. By hitting the info button you can change from AWB to AWB with a w by it. And this is an auto white balance. And this is kind of a new feature on cameras over the last couple years. And the question is is, when you want the camera to fix the color correction for, say tungsten lighting, do you want it to fully correct for every last bit of it? Or do you want to let a little bit of that warm light stay in there? And so if you want to really make it full white you could give it the AWB W so that white is absolutely pure white. If you were shooting some sort of commercial project that had color involved and you wanted to get the fabrics and the colors and the paint exactly the right color, that's what you would probably do with. If you just are taking family photographs and you wanna have kind of a nice warm feel to the photographs, which is often quite nice, then you might wanna leave it on the standard AWB. This next feature is one, I don't know why they put it in the quick menu here, because I really don't think that many people access it. I hope you never need to access this. But if you are unhappy with any of the preset colors that you have been given in the white balance you can go in here and you can tweak them. If you wanna make them more blue or amber or green or magenta, you can do that by going in here and shifting all of your white balances a little bit to one color direction. Good chance that you won't need this feature thankfully. The auto lighting optimizer is gonna work on JPEG images. And what it does is it looks at your images and it looks at the brightness and the dark areas and it tries to improve them. To make them a better photograph. Now how does it know what to do? Well, it doesn't know a lot. But it knows a few things. It knows that the highlights shouldn't be too bright. And the shadow areas shouldn't be too dark. And so in a situation like this, where there's a lot of shadow area, what would happen is this camera would turn on a little bit of brightness and raise those shadows up a little bit. And in this case, yeah, i think that's good. We wanna see what's going on in the shadows there. The problem is is that, sometimes we like a lot of contrast to our photographs. And so this is not a feature that you wanna have turned on all the time. It's something that is typically better controlled in some sort of program after you've shot the photographs where you can look at the photograph and really go, what do I wanna do with this image here? And so this is something I often recommend just turning off. I don't think it's completely necessary. But some people are gonna find it very helpful because it works with the type of images that they shoot on a regular basis. Next up is we can go into our flash settings and normally if you're just shooting basic flash you're not gonna need to make any changes here. Only if you're gonna go in and make a change and use the first curtain flash sync or if you wanna use the commander mode where you are hooking up with other additional flashes. All right. We're gonna be seeing a number of features here for the second and third time coming up. We have our AF operation mode. Now this is really important. This is for standard focusing. Big option here. And so let's talk about these. Number one is one shot. Single focus. This is great when you have a single subject that is not moving. Not moving towards you. Not moving away from you. It's a still subject. The opposite end of the spectrum is AI servo. This is for action and sports photography where a subject is moving towards you or away from you. Where the camera is focusing, and continually focusing, and readjusting for the subject. And so in most cases you can easily ask the question am I photographing something that is static of moving? And make a choice between one shot and AI servo. The camera does have a third option that I am not very fond of. Which is called AI focus, auto intelligent focus, and this is where the camera will choose which system it wants to use based on what it sees happening at a given moment in time. Now the problem is is that sometimes things change. And so the AI focus is a little unpredictable at what it will choose. And most serious photographers are not gonna use AI focus because of that unpredictability that it has. And so generally I'm gonna recommend leaving it in the one shot for basic photography and then when you get into action move it to AI servo. Next up is our focusing area. We saw this before. There's a button on the top of the camera that does it directly. But if you need to do it in the back of the camera you can do so as well here. The metering mode. This is determining how the camera is reading the light coming in the camera. So let's take a closer look at the four different options that we have. First up, most popular, is evaluative metering. This breaks the scene up into 63 zones. And is really good for mixed lighting scenarios. Because it can judge how much area of darkness versus how much area of brightness. And it can come up with a nice in between number as far as shutter speeds and apertures as to where your camera needs to be. And so this is what most Canon shoots use most of the time. Partial metering is a small center area where it's measuring a fairly tight circle towards the middle. If you wanted to be more exact about reading just a portion of the image you could use this. If you wanna be even more exact there is a spot meter area which is even smaller. Which could be very helpful with a photograph that has a very light or very dark background and you're photographing a subject in front of it. Traditionally cameras back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s had center weighted metering. And that's how they work. And so the camera still includes that kind of as a legacy device on there. But for the most part most people are using evaluative metering. And are getting good results from it. The vast majority of the time. But there are some other special scenarios where you may wanna dive into a different metering system. But I leave my camera on evaluative most all the time. Next up is the drive mode. So when you press down on the shutter release, what happens? And so obviously the standard mode in the camera is for you to get a single shot off when you shoot a picture. It shoots one picture at a time. We then have a couple of continuous options. The high speed will shoot at up to six frames per second. The low will shoot at three frames per second. And then we have a collection of either self-timers or remote options. And so if you want a standard 10 second self-timer or you wanna use the Canon RC six infrared remote you can get in the photo using that. There's a two second self timer which is really handy when you're on a tripod and you just wanna let vibrations settle out. And then there is a continuous self-timer that will take a series between two and 10 shots. And so a little photo tip for you here. If you're gonna be doing a group shot like your family group shot, and you're in control, you put the camera out on a tripod, don't shoot just one photo. Someone's gonna blink. Someone's gonna look away. One of those kids is gonna make a face. And so what you wanna shoot is three, four, five, six shots in a row. So you set the self-timer up so it gives you 10 seconds to get in the photo yourself, and then it's just gonna quickly fire over a number of different shots. And that way, if one person blinks, it's not gonna be a big deal. Because it'll probably be fine on the next, or the next photograph. So very useful little features here. But most of the time, leaving it in single shooting should be fine. Next up image quality. So this is how your camera is recording the information off the sensor to your memory card. We have a lot of options to choose from. Most of 'em are JPEG options. JPEGs are a very common, simple form of storing files. They're easy to email and post and so forth. So they're very, very useful. And this camera has a number of different options. Large, medium, and small. There is also different compression ratios. Low compression. Or high compression. What it's gonna do is it's gonna reduce the number of colors in the image so that you get a smaller file size. In most cases on the internet, you are not gonna notice any difference between a high compression and a low compression image at all. It's because everything on the internet is pretty well compressed to begin with. And so, most of the time, if you are shooting JPEG, you're gonna be wanting to be in the large, fine quality mode. That way if you wanna print or you wanna use your image in some unknown way in the future you have the largest file possible from it. But these are JPEG images, which means they are compressed. There might be, not much compressed. But they are still compressed. If you wanna get the full information from the camera you wanna be shooting in RAW. RAW gets you the original information off the sensor without any input from the camera in how to tweak it. You get the original information. So that's a 24 megapixel image. 6,000 by 4,000 in resolution. It is gonna be a relatively large file size. But memory is pretty cheap these days. You can buy a card for $20 or $ and get 1,000 images on that card without much of a problem. And so this is a CR two format. And this is gonna be a little bit of a challenge to work with because not everybody has the software to read these images and see these images. And so, if you are needing to send images to somebody else, you would shoot RAW, you would download to a computer, you would make it into a JPEG, and maybe size that JPEG appropriate to their needs, and then send 'em their JPEG. Now we do have a final option where you shoot RAW plus JPEG. And here is where you get two photos every time you press the shutter release one time. Now, I don't like RAW plus JPEG because it's gonna clutter up your card and your hard drive with extra files that you don't need. If you have a RAW, you can make a JPEG. The reason that RAW plus JPEG is here is for anyone who needs JPEGs straight out of the camera without any fussing with the computer at all. And so perhaps you're shooting an event, and you wanna collect the RAW so that you can make high quality photographs later on. But the event organizers want immediate JPEG images right away. This the way you can get both at the same time. So, I try not to shoot RAW plus JPEG but it is handy in some scenarios. Now the camera has a number of medium and smaller size JPEGs. Those can be handy if you know that your very specifically need a particular size image for a particular need. If you're unsure, it's safer and best to shoot large or RAW and then you can always size it down later. You can never increase the size. You're gonna lose quality when you do that. So RAW and large JPEG are my recommendations there. So that is the quick menu. And as I said, we will see a number of those features again. Either on controls on the back of the camera or in the menu system.