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Set Up Menu Page 4-5

On to page four, we have our sensor cleaning. Now remember the camera automatically goes through its own sensor cleaning whenever you turn the camera on or off. If you wanted to manually clean right now, you could do it here, but you could also clean manually. If you want to clean manually, you're gonna need some tools. The first tool that everyone should have who owns a interchangeable lens camera is an air blower of some sort. These are also known as rocket blowers and they're gonna be able to... get air blowing dust off the sensor, 'cause sometimes dust has just a little bit of moisture to it and it's gonna stick on the sensor. A little bit of compressed directed air will knock that dust off and clear the problem. In some cases it's more serious and you need some sort of sweeping system. The swab and liquid is a popular system that some people will use. Put a couple of drops of alcohol on this clean swab and then swipe across to clean off any dust that might be on the sensor. Some p...

eople don't feel comfortable with that. They turn their cameras in for an official repair facility to do that sort of cleaning. You can be the judge whether you want to do that or not. On the back of the camera we have our lock button. When you throw that lock button on, what do you want it to lock? The top dial, the back dial, the entire LCD screen from touch operation? You get to choose which operations you're gonna lock with that dial. So for instance, if you occasionally like the touch option but not always, you might activate the touch check mark there and then you can simply flip on and flip off the touch option on the screen. Custom functions, all right. Another little rabbit hole here, folks. This is where we're gonna dive in and really get into some nitty gritty details that are gonna seem like photographers are very picky, and you're right. We are very picky. So there are certain ways that we like the camera to work. The exposure increments for shutter speeds. We can set it third stops or half stops. Now most devices out there on the market work in third stops but there are some devices that work in half stops, so you can switch it to half stops if you want. Third stops is kind of normal, so I'd say keep it there. If you want access to 51,200 ISO setting, you would need to turn the ISO expansion on. Now I don't recommend shooting at 51, but I certainly don't like devices that restrict me from doing something I want to do. So I simply turn this off just 'cause I don't like rules on where I can go and what I can and cannot set on the camera. Exposure compensation auto cancel. All right, so earlier in the class we talked about exposure compensation, and one of the things that I said at the end, and it's the most important thing about exposure compensation, is to reset it back to zero because the camera wants to keep it wherever you set it. But this is a little safety system they have set up here where it will automatically reset it to zero when the camera is turned off. Now if you set it to plus four, everything's gonna be four stops brighter than normal until you turn the camera off and turn it back on. So maybe for a new photographer, it might be good to enable this so that it automatically cancels itself. But for the more knowing photographer who's sure about what they're doing, they may want to turn their camera off and back on and have everything exactly where they set it, which is why they might want to have it on disable. Highlight tone priority. If you remember back in the view finder, there was a D+ that I talked about that I said I would talk about later. This is where we're gonna talk about it. The D stands for dynamic range. So what the camera is doing here as you'll note in JPEG only, this does not affect RAS, is that it tries to protect the highlights. You'll see on the bottom image, the roof portion there of that arch is blown out. There's no detail in it. If we enable that highlight protection, it's gonna protect those highlights from getting too bright, and I kind of like that. The problem is that what the camera is doing is it no longer allows you to use ISO 100. It forces you to use something 200 or higher. What the camera's doing kind of behind the scenes is it's underexposing everything by a stop of light and then it brightens everything except for the highlights to get it back to normal. That's just a little too much playing around with my photos that might cause some image degradation in an average photo. It might help out in an extreme case, and so I would say only use this with very careful choice. It's not something I would use in most cases. The AF-assist beam firing. This is a little light, basically a little flashlight that will turn on and fire when you are under low light conditions. Now if you have an external flash on your camera, the camera will either fire its own built in light or the infrared light it may or may not have with it, if it has it. All of this from a techy point of view is very cool. My camera's gonna emit a light source so it can focus on itself with its own ability. The problem is that if you've ever had one of these lights shone at you, it's really annoying and it's only good for a very short distance, a few meters at best. Anything over three meters is gonna be too far away. It's not gonna be able to help you focus on anything 100 feet away, for instance. So if you know how to focus, if you know where to point your focusing points, if you know how to manually focus, you're not gonna need any of this. If you are a private detective sitting in a darkened car on a street, observing people walking down the street, you definitely want to have this turned off 'cause this is just a huge tell tale sign that somebody is taking photos. So I say turn it off for discretion. AF area selection method. Now if you recall, there's the button on the top of the camera, the AF area selection mode, where we can select which mode we're using. Well, if you would prefer to use the dial, you can use the dial and in which case you would press the AF point selection on the back of the camera and then just turn the dial to select one of the four different focusing options. Not a big deal, but some people prefer working one way or the other. All right, here's something we haven't talked about. Auto AF point selection color tracking. So in the tracking modes on this camera, you can turn this on or you can turn it off. If you turn it on, what it's gonna use is it's gonna use color tracking information, and a lot of times it's gonna be looking for bold colors or notable colors or skin tones to use that as additional information when tracking subjects so that you can get more pictures in focus of a subject that is moving. Now you'll never see anything like this, but I just wanted to give you an indication of what sort of areas that it's looking for when it's tracking the subject. Now this is adding a bit of computer magic mojo into the focusing scenario. It's not fully refined from what we've seen so far in the current technology. For somebody who has not shot sports and is an amateur at shooting sports and action photography and just not used to working with cameras, I would say it would probably be better to turn this on. Any little bit of help is probably fine, but I think once you reach kind of an intermediate level of knowing what focusing points to use, maybe using a block of nine rather than all of them, where to position those nine on the frame, you're gonna probably be able to do a better job with that system with this turned off. It really depends a little bit on your skill level as to whether this is best turned on or turned off. The focusing points in the view finder are gonna be very helpful for determining where the camera is focusing. I'm not gonna go through the nitty gritty details of one, two, three, and four, but I will basically say that if you set it to one, you're gonna see those focusing points more often than not. If you set it to four, it's gonna show them to you less often. There are different points in the focusing cycle when you're looking through the camera, when you're pressing halfway down, when you're shooting photos, when focus has been achieved. It depends on whether these focusing points are turned on or off. So I think the selected constant is pretty good 'cause that's showing you which ones you have currently selected. But if you don't like what you're seeing in the view finder, come here, play around with some of the options, see if something is preferable to you. View finder display illumination. If it's bright out, it's gonna show you focusing points in black over a light colored background. When it's dark out, it'll show them to you in red, and it will automatically switch over from black to red whenever it wants to. Now if you want, you can disable this so that it's always showing to you in black or enable it so it's always showing to you in red. In the auto, which is where I'm fine with it myself, it automatically changes depending on the lighting conditions. Another new item for us, mirror lockup. This once again is another feature that used to be a hallmark of professional SLR cameras. SLR cameras are great in many, many ways, but they have a fault to the system that they work with. It is the mirror that is at the fault. Under normal shooting conditions, when you take a photo the mirror needs to get up and out of the way very quickly. When it does so, it causes a small vibration at the exact same that the shutter is opening up and exposing your image, which means there might be some slight vibration in the camera, thus to your image, ending up in a picture that is slightly out of focus because of the mirror movement. This is typically gonna happen when you're on a tripod at relatively slow shutter speeds. It's not all the time. So if you turn on mirror lockup, let's turn on mirror lockup, okay. Now when you press down on the shutter release, the mirror goes up. It goes up fast like it always does, it causes vibration like it always does. That does not change, but what happens is that the shutter does not open. The shutter opens on the second press of the shutter release, ideally done from a remote shutter release, and then there is zero vibration in the movement of your camera when you're shooting. Now how much of a difference does this make? Well, here's an example. I'm shooting a tree and I look in at the details 'cause I wanted to see if it was sharp and it did not look very sharp. I remembered I forgot to turn mirror lockup on. So I turned on mirror lockup and you can see the difference between having it turned off and turned on. Now this was at 1/8th of a second, which is about the peak shutter speed you're gonna have this lockup or this mirror vibration problem because there is this what I would call vibration zone, anywhere from 1/30th of a second down to about one full second. So if you were shooting in that range, you are likely to get some mirror vibration if you are shooting from a tripod. Be careful and use it when necessary. It's great for landscape, architectural, static photography 'cause you do need to be on a tripod of subjects not moving too quickly. Next up, number 11, the exclamation mark right in the view finder. When do you want that to turn on? You know, I would probably want it turned on if I was shooting black and white monochrome images. I don't know about white balance corrected. Maybe if noise reduction is turned on, but if you really want that big warning turned on, you can check these boxes to give you a clear warning that you have your camera set up in an unusual different manner. LCD display power when on, and so when you have this display on, how do you want to have it turned on? When you're powering it on, do you want it to go where it was in its last setting or do you want it to reset to its basic setting all the time? It depends on how you like to use this. Display on is probably fine for most people. There is a few lenses, not too many, that have an electronic extension to them. When you turn the camera off, it'll electronically retract that lens back into the camera. We dove in here quickly earlier on in the class. This is where you get to customize the buttons of your camera. That shutter release button is where we went in and we customized it to turn off the auto focus so that we could activate back button focusing. So if you want to go in and change the actions of the AF-on button or that auto exposure lock button, which I said that I didn't use very much, there are different options that you can go in there. The set button can also be reprogrammed. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it or what to do. This is your choice. It's you're camera, you get to customize it. So I encourage you to go look through those options and see if there's a better setup that makes the camera more easy for you to work with. Those are our custom functions within the camera. If you've not been paying attention in class and you would like to reset your camera, you can clear all the settings. So you can clear all the custom functions. You can clear all the camera settings here. But if you have been paying attention, you probably don't want to do that at this point 'cause then you would have to go back and redo all these settings on here, but just a quick way of clearing all those things in your menu system. This is great, copyright information. You can add your name into your camera which automatically gets added to the metadata of your photographs. So when you send a photograph out, it's got your name in the metadata of the photographs. Now maybe you don't want that and you don't want to put anything in here, but you can also put your name in here for a light level of security. Let's just say somebody picked up your camera and walked off with it and you said, "Hey, stop thief," because that's exactly how you would say it. You said, "That's my camera." "No, it's not your camera, prove it." You can say, "Okay, let me go right to the menu system." "My name is in the menu system." So it's a low level of protection, but I can very easily see putting in under the copyright details your email address. If somebody found your camera, they could email you and say, "Hey, I found your camera and it's working great." "Thank you very much." Next up, there is a QR code and you can get a QR reader in your phone, and if you scan the code, you'll get a PDF version of the instruction manual. I hope you don't need that. I hope this class has explained how everything works, but if you needed it, you can just scan the little QR code right there in the back of the camera and have your instruction manual sent straight to your phone. Final page in the setup menu, some logos. Camera met some certain certifications, yippee, yay. (laughs) Firmware, so your camera has software that runs all the operation on the camera and from time to time, Canon finds bugs, mistakes, or feature upgrades that they want to upgrade. So what you need to do is you need to look up the new firmware at Canon's website, load it onto a memory card, put it in the camera, and then follow the prompts on the camera on pressing the okay and it loads up the new software. So far as of the recording of this class, they haven't had any changes. It got shipped with 1.02 software and obviously that changed 'cause I'm sure it started at 1.00. So there will be firmware for the camera and for the lens as well. You can update various lens software, which isn't too common but can happen. Just go to Canon's website, see if they have new firmware. Maybe once a year see if something's changed. On this level of camera, they don't usually make a lot of changes very frequently.