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Camera Controls: Quick Control

all right. Next up is the cue button, and this is the quick menu. As I said before, the actual menu in the camera is very long. There's dozens and dozens of pages of options in there, but the quick menu is just a single page, with all the most important critical items that you are likely to want to go to in a hurry. So when you hit the cue button, you're going to get this screen on the back of the camera, and we're gonna go through these options here. Top Row is dealing with exposure mode information. Now these air controls that you do have direct control on the top or on the back of the camera of. But if you are looking at just the back of the camera, you could make these controls very easily, just using the back screen of the camera exposure compensation as well as auto exposure bracketing. So if you want to make your picture a little bit lighter or darker, you can adjust it here. But if you want to do a whole series of bracketed shots, you can also do that here. And so in this case,...

the camera can shoot through a series of bracketed shots, and you can choose the number of bracketed shots and how far apart they are. And this is great for HDR photography. High dynamic range. Your gonna take multiple pictures at different exposures and combine them later. Or if you're just a little bit unsure as to what the correct exposure is, you can select a variety of number of frames. You'll be able to select these when you jump into the custom exposure menu Custom function menu. You can change the increment between these and if you want to use exposure, compensation on top of these as well, you can do that also. All right, so let's give this a try and see if we can make this work. We're gonna go ahead and leave our camera in the aperture priority mode and we're gonna hit the cue button and we don't get the screen that we saw on the keynote. So I'm gonna hit the info button until we get to this screen here and now I'm gonna hit the cue button. And so now I'm gonna navigate through here. And if I come in here and I suppress the set button and I turn this top dial. I'm gonna be setting my bracketing mode if I turn the back dial. I am just changing my exposure brighter and darker. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set this in the middle and I'm going to do a pretty wide exposure bracket. This is going to be two stops. I'm gonna shoot under two stops normal and then two stops overexposed. And so now I'm going to hit the set button, and now it's locked in and you can see the three points there. So I have set exposure bracketing. Now I'm gonna come back and press down on the shutter, release lightly, and I'm just gonna hold it down, and it should take three photos very quickly. That depends on the exposure time, actually. And let's see if we've got our three exposures. So I'm gonna hit the playback button. And so we have our normal exposure. See if I can pull up some information. We have ar minus two exposure and we have our plus two exposure. So that was our bracket. Siri's exactly as we wanted to do it. Now, very important. Let's go back in and reset this back down to zero, cause we don't want to be shooting bracketed exposures on everything we do. So that's how you would set up a bracket exposure. If you want to set a different number of images, you'll need to go into the custom menu to set those up. You can also change the bracketing sequence if you don't like the order of the images, for instance, we shot the normal exposure, and then it was the dark. And then it was the light. You can shoot it from dark to light or from light to dark, and so that will be one of the other options will take a look at next up is flash exposure compensation. This is something that we already talked about earlier on. This suggests the power of the flash, and so if you want to power down the flash, you can do that here and oftentimes, for good portrait photography, I'd recommend powering flash down anywhere from 2/3 of a stop to maybe one and 1/3 depending on skin tones, background color of clothing and other things. All right, next up is picture styles, and so in picture styles This is for J. Peg shooters who are shooting JPEG files and want to adjust the look in style of their images. And so, if you want, you can select one of the many different presets that they have, or you can go in and you can customize thes. And so, if you want to have a little bit more saturation mawr or less contrast, you can select any one of these. Hit the info form or detail settings, and you can go down and you could control these. This is not gonna have any impact on raw images, but it will impact the JPEG images. Next up is white balance. This is something we talked about before because it was a feature on the multi function button on the top of the camera. But this allows you to go in and adjust the lighting so that you get the correct color under different types of lighting sources. Now one of the options here is the info button will allow you to switch between two different auto white balance options on one of them, the auto white balance white. Really, it makes your whites very white with e standard one it. Let's a little bit of the natural lighting kind of seep through in there. And so it depends on how much you are trying to correct for the light source, because a lot of times with tungsten lights, we want to correct it for the most part. But we want to leave. A little bit of that warmth in there depends on the look that you are wanting to have. If you weren't happy with the white balance, you could do some bracketing with the white balance. You could shift the colors of the J pegs that you shoot. It's not something most people do. I recommend not doing this in most cases, but it is there if you do need to do it. The Auto Lightning optimizer is something that will work with JPEG images, and what it does is it goes in and it tries to play a little bit with the highlights in the shadows to make sure that everything was that is within a nice, visible rage. And the idea is is that it's going to take the shadows and it's going to raise the brightness of the shadows so that you can see things more easily, and it's gonna hold back the highlights, so they're not as overexposed. So you can see the subtle differences here in these examples of how it would work. And if we look at the history Graham, you can see what it's doing is it's Raising. The shadows of the dark area is not a stark, and the highlights are not as close to the right edge of the hissed a gram, and that's going to potentially allow you a little bit more space to work with your subject. Exposure wise in post production. Normally, this is the type of thing that you could leave off but adjust as necessary if you are shooting with JPEG images. Next up is WiFi function. You can connect up your camera to a smartphone and control it remotely seen what the camera sees, and this is something that will be playing with and looking more closely at when we get to the menu section later in this class. Next up is we have a shortcut to the custom controls, as I've been mentioning many times so far in this class, the camera has a lot of buttons and dials that you can customize according to what you want that button to do. And so we have a lot of different options in here. And so if you want toe access them quickly, you can do that through the quick menu. Right here. The autofocus operation is controlled in here. We were just talking about this on the back of the camera. There's a button on the back, over on the right hand side that controls this button, but if you want to access it here, it is also here, selecting between the area that you are focusing, we have our focus area. This was seen before when we were in the multi function, setting up on the top of the camera. But this is controlling how the camera focuses, and so the main options are one shot where it focuses on a subject and stops focusing and servo, which is a continuous focusing for tracking action in moving subjects. The metering mode in controls the way that the camera reads light as it's coming in for the exposure, so there's a couple of different options. One of the most popular is the evaluative metering system, uses 384 zones It's essentially a whole bunch of spot meters that is evaluating the different light. And it's balancing out the highlights in the shadows so that you get an even exposure in the widest variety of scenarios. It tends to do the best job. We then have a partial meter, which is kind of a fat spot area. If you want to concentrate most of the light pretty near the middle of frame, you can use the partial meter or the spot meter with just just a little bit tighter oven area. So if you want to read the light in a very constrained area, you could do that with a spot meter. The more traditional center weighted meter is kind of this big fat area looking at the center of the frame and could be good with general purpose subjects. But I think for most people, the evaluative metering, the multi segment metering system, is going to be the most versatile and accurate in the whitest range of situations. Next up is the drive mode. We talked about this before, back up with the multi function button on the top of the camera, controlling what happens when you press all the way down on the shutter release Single mode is gonna be fine for most situations and then moving over to continuous for those faster action situations. Then we get to our image quality. This is a very important setting here. This is controlling the type of files that you are recording, and the basic options are either J peg or raw, and there is a combination of doing both. So let's look at what happens with these different options in here. To start with, we have raw. If you want to get the best image quality and have the most versatility after the fact, you'd wanna shoot raw, you're going to get 30 megapixels of information. It's gonna be about a 31 megabyte file, and it's gonna give you a lot of great information. And this camera is the first of the cannon full frame cameras to offer a compressed raw and so this is still 30 megapixels of information. So you're still getting all the information off the entire sensor. You're having full control over exposure and white balance like you would over a raw image, but it is about half the size of the regular raw And so this is a very curious thing that makes a lot of photographers a little suspicious. So it's just a good but half is expensive. Half it has half the size that sounds too good to be true. Well, I read it through some tests, and I'll be showing you those tests in just a moment. It actually works out quite well. Is the short the short answer? And so it's a really good system for reducing file size but still retaining all the good information of a raw file. Next up, we have our J peg settings. We have large, medium and small, which is different resolutions. If you are shooting JPEG for most things, I would recommend shooting in the highest quality large setting that gives you the most resolution in the most detail for your photographs. If you do know that you are on Lee needing a smaller or medium size amount of information, you can shoot those smaller and medium sized J pegs in the camera and reduce your file. Size is increasing the number of photos that you can store in a memory card or a hard drive, but for most people, I'm gonna recommend the compressed raw or, at the very least, a large J peg. And I'll be showing you those compressed, raw example when we get into the menu section, where we can choose what type of compression were using on the raw. And that is our image quality settings, which ends up being our last item in the quick control other than the return button. And so the screen is touch sensitive. So you can either use the controller on the back of the camera to navigate your way around and select items, or you can actually be punching on the screen itself. And if you just kind of want to get out of it, you hit the return and the eagle back to the standard mode.