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ISO Speed Menu

Lesson 19 from: Canon EOS M5 and M6 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

19. ISO Speed Menu

Lesson Info

ISO Speed Menu

On to page 5, the ISO speed, we talked about setting the ISO. There's a button on the back of the camera for changing it, but this allows us to go in and set it in a little bit greater detail, you might say. So first off you can make your basic ISO setting adjustment here. I recommend setting it at ISO as much of the time as you can. What you want to look for is an acceptable shutter speed. Do you have a shutter speed that acceptable for hand holding the camera or the action that's in front of you, if it's not a fast enough shutter speed, you may need to bump up the ISO. You do also have the auto ISO option where it will change for you, but it may not be doing it exactly the way that you want once you know how to set ISOs and how to set shutter speeds. IF you do have the auto ISO set, what is the maximum ISO you want the camera to go to? IF you found the camera unacceptable in image quality when it went to 12,800, you'd set the max one step below that at 6400 and so the ISO would go u...

p to but go no higher when needing to make a change. Highlight tone priority, this is for JPEG users, and what this does is on JPEG images, it restricts the brightness of the camera so that the brightest areas don't get too bright. Now general concept of this, I would agree with. I kind of like the concept of it. The problem is that you can no longer shoot at ISO 100. You have to shoot at ISO 200 and this is something that you don't even need to worry about if you shoot in RAW because you can recover a lot of those highlights shooting RAW that would normally be clipped in JPEGs. But if you do shoot JPEGS and you have a problem with highlights becoming too bright, that would be a reason for turning this on, but I would try to resist and work around this with other solutions like shooting in RAW. Auto Lighting Optimizer, this is for JPEG users. We talked about this before. This is where it goes in and tries to brighten up the shadows as well as control the highlights so they don't get too bright as well and so if you want to adjust your JPEGs because you're not happy with the way they're coming straight out of the camera and you don't do any work in post production programs, this would be a pretty simple way of doing it. The Metering Mode, we talked about this before in depth. We have the Evaluative Metering which is a good general metering mode that is going to be good for almost any situation that you have, but we do have other options should you want them. Flash Control will lead us into another little sub-menu with a number of options controlling the flash. First up, the firing of the flash, how is it controlled? Most of the time just turning it on is fine, but you could use the slow synchro for instance if you want slower shutter speeds to be used. The E-TTL meter is the way that it meters. It's a good general system. It's going to be good for a variety of different types of light. There's also an average system. I can't really give you a good reason why you would go to an average, but if evaluative was not working for some reason, and you were getting unusual exposures with your flash, this would be an option to change it to average. Red-eye reduction, if you recall on the front of the camera there's that little light that will turn on before you take a picture. Now, I recommend turning this off. Number one, it's kind of irritating to anybody that you're pointing the camera at. Number two, when you're shooting photos of kids, it delays the firing of the shutter. So when you press down on the shutter, it doesn't take a picture right away. It shines that light for a couple seconds, about a second and a half, and moments are delayed. So if you're really caught on capturing moments, it delays that moment, and so it's not good in that sense of the thing. I would recommend turning that off. Red-eye is very easily fixed in post production programs these days. Safety FE, so this one, the camera will automatically adjust the shutter speeds and/or the apertures to reduce washed out areas, when you're shooting with flash. Now the more advanced photographer doesn't want anything to do with the camera automatically changing shutting speeds and apertures which is why the more advanced photographer might want to have this disabled. If you're not as familiar with all those settings on your camera, then you might want to leave this on in Enabled. Flash is one of the most complicated areas in photography and getting the right exposure can be a little bit tricky. This might help you get a little bit better exposures at the expense of the camera going in and changing the settings that you may have set. Built-in Flash settings, this is another sub-menu for controlling the particular built-in flash on these cameras. So normally, the flash mode is set to an ETTL mode, which it's using various bits of information to get the correct exposure on it. It does a great job but you do have the option of doing it manually if you want to. Shutter synchonization can be synchronized to match up with the first shutter curtain or the second shutter curtain. Most times cameras are just synced to their first shutter curtain, but when you start having action happening with slow shutter speeds, you can do an interesting effect by syncing it with the second curtain. It's more of a special effects mode. Exposure compensation for the flash, so if you want to power up the flash or power down the flash, you can do so here. Oftentimes powering the flash down by about a second, or powering it down by one stop, excuse me, is often gonna look a little bit better in a lot of portrait photography. If you have an external flash, attached to the camera, and it uses all the same external flashes that the regular Canon EF lenses and cameras use, you can go in and you can control a lot of the settings from those flashes in the back of your camera. Now, it's just kind of a duplicate set of button controls, it's in the camera rather that on the flash itself but it's a good way of getting in there and controlling some of the features of the particular flash. The final item down in here is a lot of the flashes, some of the higher end flashes, have custom functions that you can go in and control and we're not going to get into those cause it really depends on which flash you have.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Canon EOS M5 and M6 Recommended Settings

Ratings and Reviews

Susan Clarke
 

John did an outstanding job explaining every part of this camera. As a newbie, this course is exactly what I needed to understand this camera. Thank you, John. Now, I'm going back to watch through 1 more time!

Michael Simpson
 

John Greengo is probably the best instructor I have come across in my short photography journey. I learned a lot about the camera, something that would have been difficult without the help of the M5 course. Thank you.

Annelie
 

This course is so well presented. Could not be more clear or better. It is extremely well done.

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