Lessons

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu

All right, folks, it's time to get started on the menu functions and this is where you wanna have your little PDF handout that's got the entire menu listing, and we're just gonna rock through this thing, one item at a time, get you set up, and let you know what these different features are for. So let's dive on in to the menu functions of the Canon T6. All right, obviously, you're gonna hit the menu button and then you're gonna see all these different tabs and they're color-coded and they're pretty well organized. There's a lot of cameras out there that have pretty messed-up menu systems and this one is fairly well organized and it's not too overloaded. And so we're gonna work our way, left to right, top to bottom, through our menu system here. Now something to know is that we have kind of a full menu that is available in the manual modes, we have a basic menu which eliminates a lot of options and access to a number of features, and so you don't wanna have the camera in any of the basi...

c menu systems because you're just not gonna get access to the all the different increments. And then there is an additional set of menus in the video section, and you have to have the dial turned to the video camera section, and then hit the menu button in order to have access to that. I'll keep you apprised as we walk through the menu system here. But this is one of the reasons why I like using the program mode versus the scene intelligent automatic mode, because it gives you full access to the menu system, should you wanna get in there and make some sort of change. So, diving into the menu system, into our shooting menu, the first item on the left, starting at the top, arguably the most important setting in the menu settings, is your image quality. Do you wanna shoot with the RAW images that we talked about, all the information off the sensor? Or a large quality JPEG? Now there are two different large quality JPEGs, one that has a higher quality compression system, and one with a lower quality compression system, and of course you probably want to be shooting as large as possible as I have said a number of times, unless you know specifically that you don't need all that information. There is the option of shooting RAW plus a large quality JPEG, in which case you are gonna get two images for every image that you shoot. You'll get a RAW and a JPEG and I don't recommend that unless you have a very specific use for both of those images. Because if you have a RAW image, you can create a JPEG from that, given time and use of a computer software program. So, as we go through this, you're gonna notice gray recommendations for your general user and red recommendations for your more advanced users, and so somebody's who's a little bit more serious about photography, they want to develop their photographs in a nice software program, you're gonna wanna shoot with RAW so that you have access to all that data. JPEGs are fine for an average shooter who just wants decent quality images with a minimum amount of hassle and fuss later on afterwards. Next up, is the beep that our camera sends out when it achieves autofocus. This can be kinda handy when you first get the camera to kinda get a feel for how the camera focuses and how quick it is. It does get a little irritating to subjects and other people around you and other photographers, and so it's something I like to turn off. I like to be discreet and not be a nuisance when I'm shooting photographs, and so I'd recommend turning that off. If you have forgotten to put a memory card in the camera, do you wanna be able to fire the shutter? In most cases, I would say no, because you don't wanna be fooled into thinking you're actually shooting pictures when you're not, and so I would put this on disable so that your camera cannot fire unless you have a memory card in the camera. When you shoot a picture, do you wanna see it on the back of the camera? In most cases, we do wanna see it, and so a two second display is gonna work fine for that. You can adjust the time if you would like to. Peripheral illumination correction, OK, so this starts getting into a number of features that I generally call "image manipulation modes." And this is where the camera takes an image that you shot and starts tweaking with it. Now, if you shoot RAW images, it's never going to adjust them for your RAW images. And so this is really only to do when you are shooting JPEG images. So this first one, peripheral illumination, let's take a look at what the problem may be. Peripheral, around the edges, illumination, brightness around the edges. So, some lenses, especially fast, aperture lenses, have a darkening of the corners. And you can enable a correction where it automatically corrects for this and fixes that problem, and in this case, that makes sense, and it looks nice. But in other cases, I like to add some vignetting to my images to kinda keep the edges a little bit darker, and keep your eyes more towards the center, where my subjects are. And so this is a little bit of a toss-up as to what do you think looks good, and it really depends on the photograph. I think a basic user might wanna enable this, but the more advanced user might wanna take more direct control and make their own adjustments and shoot their lenses as they naturally let light into the camera. Red-eye reduction is something that you can turn on, and what it does is it turns on a bright light, which helps constrict the pupils of your subjects' eyes. It does work but it is incredibly annoying and distracting and it causes some kids or people to look away just because they don't really know what's going on. And, technically, it has some problems and as I say, it's a little distracting, so there's a lot of people who would disable this and they would fix red-eye reduction on their own, in a software program. But that does require more time, and effort, and software in order to do it. And so a basic user would just let the camera do it, more advanced user would wanna do it afterwards so they can be more discreet when shooting. Flash control is our first of many sub-menus, and so right here we're gonna dive into a flash control sub-menu. The camera has a built-in flash but there's also additional flash units that we can add onto it. First up, we could disable the flash. In my mind, we could just push the camera, push the flash down to turn it off, but if you wanted to electronically disable it, you could do so here in the menu. The built-in flash has a sub-menu that we're gonna dive another step deeper into. You can control the flash mode, there really is no other option than E-TTL II, which is the automatic mode that it uses for determining the correct exposure, it's just letting you know that that's the mode that it's set for. Higher end cameras will allow you different options. Shutter sync: you can choose first or second curtain, which can have a great impact with subjects that are moving, determining whether the flash is synchronized with the opening of the first shutter curtain or the closing of the second curtain. And so this is something, as you can see in those examples, has a very different look depending on how that subject is moving through the frame. First curtain is fine for normal work, for those getting into specialized work, the second curtain can be kinda fun to work with. Flash exposure compensation, we've talked about this before, great for people photography and dialing this down to about a minus one on that flash exposure compensation. The metering system that the flash uses to get the correct exposure, the evaluative metering system here is gonna be a good, general, average one that's gonna fit most situations the best, and so most people are just gonna leave it here. All right, back under regular flash controls. Now, if you wanna hook up an external flash, there is a lot of different controls that might be available depending on which flash unit you get. Rather than using the buttons on the flash, you can use your camera controls to go in and control all those settings on the flash. And so this is only gonna play an effect if you have one of those higher end flash units. There's also a number of custom function settings that you can get in and control as well. This will depend on what flash you have attached to the camera. And if you want, you can clear all of those custom function settings straight from the camera as well, and these are all kind of duplicate controls that you can do in the flash, but now you can also do in the camera because it has maybe a bigger, easier to see screen with better controls than the actual flash unit itself. So all of that is buried in the sub-menu under flash control. Moving our way over to the second tab on the camera, exposure compensation, Auto Exposure Bracketing. If this seems familiar, we were talking about this not that long ago in a previous section on the quick menu. You had the same control in there, and as I mentioned, we're gonna see a number of things duplicated or triplicated with controls in different areas. And so, this is where we would shoot a series of photos lighter or darker than normal exposure so that we could end up with three photos that are bracketed in their brightness. Auto Lighting Optimizer, we talked about this earlier, we saw it in the quick menu, we'll see it again here. Normally, I would like to leave this turned off, because these are the types of controls that you can do later on if you're willing to take the time and adjust a few little sliders and controls in your software program. And you'll be able to do it with much greater precision than the camera does on its own. The metering mode, once again, duplicate feature, we saw this in the quick menu, the evaluative metering system uses a multi-system metering system, which is gonna get you a good or very very close exposure 99.9% of the time, it's incredibly accurate, so I highly recommend evaluative. Beyond that, the spot metering can be very good or the semi-spot metering, the partial metering, because that's gonna be able to get the light reading off of a small area if you like to do that type of exposure reading. The Custom White Balance is a way for you to really dial in the perfect white balance for any particular color situation. So in this case, I'm photographing a white piece of paper which clearly doesn't look white because it is illuminated by tungsten light. And so I would photograph the subject, I would then come here to Custom White Balance, and I would select that photo, the camera would read that photo and realize what color the light source is that's illuminating the subject, and it would correct for it in upcoming photographs when you set your White balance to "Custom" so that you could continue shooting photos in that environment, getting a very clean, white light source, even though the colored lights have a very different color to them, you balance that with basically a different color setting on your sensor. And so that would be a way of getting a Custom White Balance to your camera. This is a feature that I hope you never need to use and I expect you will never need to use. If you wanted to shift the white balance, blue, green, amber, and magenta, in color, you could use this to kind of tweak the white balance one direction or the other. It's possible if you were to shoot under fluorescent lights, which can have a wide variance from cool to warm, and the setting in the camera wasn't exactly to your needs, you could just adjust the setting of that particular fluorescent setting in the camera so that it fit and matched the light source that you were working under. Once again, this is something that I pretty much never play with and most basic photographers with this camera will never need to touch. Color space. This controls the gamut or range of colors that we'll be able to record with the camera. If you shoot in RAW, you get something called Adobe RGB, it's a fairly large color gamut. If you shoot in JPEG, the standard is SRGB, that's what you're gonna see on a lot of computer screens on the internet, things like that. If you wanna print your images, you wanna get the largest range of colors to have the most accurate photograph possible. And so if you have any kind of higher aspirations beyond just putting them digitally on screens, you wanna print them out, you'd wanna set your camera to Adobe RGB. You get this inherently when you shoot in RAW, but if you shoot JPEG you can choose one or the other. It's a very minor difference between the two, so it's not the biggest change you're gonna see in the world, but I would choose Adobe RGB and get that larger color gamut if you have any hopes of printing in the future. Picture styles. All right, so in this one, we can go in and we can adjust our styles of shooting, which has to do with our color, our contrast, and saturation. And there's a number of predefined settings in here like standard, portrait, landscape, and so forth. And there's gonna be a slightly different look to each of those images, just in the color saturation, contrast, as I said. But if you wanna go in and press the display, you can go in and adjust and customize each of these the way that you want them. You'll notice, at the bottom of that top example, we have user defined one, two, and three, so you can have your own settings that you might use for portrait, or landscape photography, or food photography, or something else where you've adjusted the sharpness, contrast, saturation, and color tone, to something that's just your liking. If you download these pictures into your computer, and you're not totally happy with the way they look, this is where you can go in and customize those things. To be honest with you, most people who own this camera will never go in here and do this because the standard setting is close enough and does a pretty good job, but for those of you who are perfectionists and you want it exactly the way you want it, this is where you can get in and totally tweak the camera. Now once again, this is an image manipulation mode, which means it's not affecting your RAW images, it's only affecting your JPEG images. Working our way over to the third tab, Dust Delete Data. And so, using Canon software, you can shoot a photo, and see how much dust it has on it, and then using Canon software, you can clone out data that may have dust on it in other photographs. It's something that most people with this camera are not gonna bother doing, I'm gonna talk about manually cleaning the sensor a little bit later in this section. But it is technically possible to do it with software. But I'm gonna say most people are gonna avoid that. When you have the ISO set to the auto setting, one of the parameters that you can set is what is the maximum ISO that you want the camera to go to when setting auto ISO for you? And here is where you get to have a little bit of input about the quality level, you wanna make sure that your camera doesn't go to 6400, you can set it to 3200. And as I mentioned when we were looking at the ISO test from this camera, the camera starts to lose noticeable quality around 16, 3200, 6400, somewhere in there, you're gonna wanna do your own test and maybe draw a ceiling, a line in the ceiling, where you don't want to go beyond when the ISO is being set automatically. Moving over to the fourth tab, this deals with live view shooting. If you hit that button and you never like to use live viewing, you just wanna disable that button, you can disable it right here and there. Most of us like to use this from time to time, so we're gonna wanna leave it enabled. So the AF method is something we saw before, when we were in live view we were adjusting this by hitting the Q button to get into the quick menu, but we can come in here and adjust it as well. The FlexiZone AF gives us a little bracket point that we can move around and I think it's the simplest and the easiest. It may not be the fastest, I think the quick mode is a little bit faster, but I think it's a little bit harder for many people to use. The live mode is a face detection mode, and it does work pretty well, but it does depend on how often you have faces in the frame or not. The grid display allows a grid to be shown over your image for compositional reasons, or getting the horizon correct, or aligning things up. And so it's just a matter of whether you like to see that extra information in there or not. As we go through this, my recommendations are generally: I want the highest quality image and I want as clean of an image as possible with as little clutter in front of the frame. And so this is something I would generally leave off, but to be honest with you, I do turn it on from time to time as needs arise. Aspect ratio: the camera's sensor is a three by two aspect ratio. If you wanted to, you could shoot in a different aspect ratio. And so, this would be used if you know the final image you are trying to get out of your camera meets a different aspect ratio than three by two, you can see what it looks like right there on the back of the camera. Now this doesn't really happen all that often, but if you wanted to shoot an image that was square, you could put it in the one by one and you could see what the framing looks like rather than having to guess by looking through the viewfinder. So, rarely used, but it's an interesting option. How long does the camera stay on when it's metering? And this is a balance between convenience and battery life. Eight seconds is kinda the standard setting, so I'm fine with it there, but if you wanna save more battery power, you could put it on four seconds. If you need more time, well, then you can choose one of the longer times.