Lessons

Lesson Info

1:00 pm - Shooting Menu Tabs 1 and 2

All right, so for those of you with the pdf, you'll want teo well that I haven't physical layout here, so I'm going to page. Did it do that seven where we have the entire menu on one page which I find very easy for scanning and finding all sorts of stuff? So as we get into the menu, what I have found is that there's like a hundred items in here and there are three types of things that were going to find in there. Number one, you're going to find something that you are never going to touch it's, like I have no interest in that, I'm never going to change that and that's probably going to be half the menu items depending on what you do there's going to be another group of menu items that are things that you go, okay, I need to set it here now I'm done and it's over with you will never come back to it. It's, no big deal, it's said, and then the third type are ones that you go, oh, I want to turn this on and off when I do this or when I do that, and those are the ones that you might want to...

take a highlighter or put a red star by as the things that you want to come back, too, because one of the last items in the menu study and let's jump to the next slide so we could take a look at what's going on here because in the menu said he it has all these different tabs and they're grouped into different areas in the very last one that we're going to talk about. There it is, my menu is where you get to save a few of your favorite settings, there's about six different menu items that you can save there so that you can find him and get to him on a quicker basis. But within all these other tabs there pretty well, logically play, and so having worked with a number pretty much all the major manufacturers, this is one of I would have to say it's arguably the best menu system out there, as complicated as it is and as much stuff that is, as in there, it's pretty logically put in there, but keep an eye on about six different items that you will save and go back into my menu and put in there and I'll talk more about that when we get there, but we're just going to start on the left. And we're going to kind of work our way through the menu system, so if you have your camera there in front of you have a nice powered up battery, hit the menu button, and we're going to start going through this before we actually jump into the menu. I do need to go back and mention that remember those basic modes on the mod I'll well, these are the ones that have the child safety locks, and part of those safety locks are you're not allowed into all the tabs on the menu system, so for the remainder of this class, and if you want to get in and really use your menu system, what you're going to want to do is you're gonna wanna have your camera in one of the full on manual modes bulb a v, t v p for program any of those is gonna be fine, because then you could get into all the options in the menu system. Now, finally, there are a couple of kind of hidden menus, and you have to have your camera put into the video mode, and then you press the menu button, and suddenly you'll have access to those video modes in the camera. Now you don't normally see these when the camera is in its normal mode, and so for some people, they have remained hidden. We will get to those in due course, but for now we're going to start off with just your basic camera menu so hit the menu button and you're going to use either the top dial or the back dial to kind of move your way around the top dial will go from tab to tab the back dial will take you up and down the menu listings in here. One of the nice things about the cannon system of menus is that as you scroll across the top dial all the different tabs there is no scrolling down to hidden items that are below the screen in this case, you could literally see everything in the menu by just dialling across and if you can read it fast enough, you could do the whole thing pretty quickly, which is one of the best options on menus out their butt. Dial your way over to the left hand side. The top camera menu item is image quality, so in here you're going to have the option of selecting to shoot either j peg or raw images. A lot of you already know what this is, but for those who don't raw records thie original raw information off the sensor, if you want to get as much information at the true source of it without any manipulation and all you want to shoot raw, you do need to have the right software the camera comes with software to read it, but a lot of people like using other programs like photoshopped or light room and there's many others out there. My preference is with adobe light room the jpeg images are how we actually use a lot of our photographs these days, so when you post a picture up on facebook when you put an image up on your website, chances are it's a jpeg image and so while this is an issue, we're going to get too much more into it's more of a general photography issue, but if you know exactly what you're doing, you have your software and you want to get the highest quality images I recommend the raw setting. Now we do have the addition as you can see on screen oven em raw for medium sized raw and an s rock for a small rock and there are some some situations where you don't need a twenty mega pixel image, but you do want to capture all the color information, all the tonal information and so there's been some cases where I wasn't too sure about the exposure and I knew the picture was going to be used very small, so I used small, raw but most all my good things that I'm going to shoot are going to be in large raw the camera has many different j peg settees and you will turn go back up here for a second for changing the raw, you turn the top dial on the camera, you see a little indicator, they're up by the raw, the top tile, or you could use the back dial for going in and changing the j peg settings so excited, and I just confirm that. So, yes, you use the back dial for changing the different j peg cities. In most cases, I think you're going to want to have your camera in large j pick you bought it twenty megapixel camera. Chances are you want to use all twenty megapixels, and so that's where you want to leave the camera is partially designed for people who don't have access to computers, and they want to shoot the exact size image, even though it's much smaller, right in camera. And so, if you have a computer, this is much easier to do, and with much more control on your computer. Some cases, some people want to shoot raw, plus j peg it's. Not something I recommend for most people, because you end up with duplicate files that clutter up your hard drive system. In most cases, you can just shoot raw and create your own j pegs, winning where you need them, though, although it is handy in some situations where you need immediate j pegs so either a large raw excuse me a large rock or a large peg is how most people are going to have it set out and as you can see on screen here and in the handout in the pdf I have to recommendations in some cases in general the black will be my general recommendation for the average user sometimes for the more advanced user I will have the recommendations in red and what I mean by advanced well, it can vary from anyone who just wants to have a slightly higher and settings to top of the line prose so you get to make the choice on these these this is your camera you get to choose how you want to have it set up. Okay, next up let's go to the viewfinder grid display so when you look through the viewfinder the camera not the back screen the viewfinder on the camera do you want to look at a grid pattern? My general recommendation is to leave it as uncluttered as possible, but this could be a very handy tool once again for anyone who wants to make sure there is a level horizon or they have building lines straightened up so architectural photographers, landscape photographers some people like it just simply for compositional reasons so you're choice on that one but I like to leave it disabled. Next up is the viewfinder level see if our screen will actually slip over there we g o all right so we talked about the level little warning before a break and this is something that some people like to know if they've turned their camera correctly for some people it's just clutter in the viewfinder my tendency is to kind of hide it until I need it next up is the beep okay if you want your camera to scream amateur amateur amateur leave the beeban I think for some newcomers to photography it is kind of helpful to understand how the camera is focusing and when it has achieved focus but once you get used to the camera I'd turn this off it's just good to be a little bit discreet in some situations and there's some places where you definitely want it turned off but once you get used to your camera I would shut this one down next up release shutter without car this one is worded very strange I recommend either disabling or turning this off depending on how you see it in your menu. What this does is it prevents this shutter beat from being fired. If there is no memory card in the camera and that's just kind of a good safety protocol for anyone who takes the memory card out and forgets to put it back in they won't start taking pictures or at least what they think to be pictures image review. So when you take a picture with a digital camera, it immediately shows you on the back of the camera. In this case, it shows it to you for four seconds. You could either set this for a longer period of time or a shorter period of time. I'm pretty much okay with four seconds, but you can decide for yourself. All right, next up, we're moving to our second tab. So you turn the top dial on the camera over to shooting menu number two and we have something called lens aberration correction. So I got a little visual here to show you what's going on here. There are a couple of things involved in here. The first is called peripheral illumination correction and what this is is darkening of the corners, also known as vignette. And in this picture, you can see it suffers from the netting. It's got darkening of the corners. If we turn on this automatic correction control, it will lighten up the corners. So here you can see the difference side by side. This is something that happens frequently with lenses that are very fast in aperture, like an f one point four lands, but it's also something that we sometimes like and we sometimes don't like in a case where we have a sky skyline like this I would want to leave it on unable to correct for it, but this is something that can be done later on as well. The reason I'm going to recommend disabling it is that it sometimes looks good and I am adding it into photographs, especially photographs of people to darken the corners down to draw your eyes more towards the faces and the people on the inside. And so this is something that like a lot of the other controls that were going to be going through if it affects the image quality and this affects the image quality, it is not being done. If you choose raw, it is on ly being done if you chose j peg and so if you choose raw, this doesn't even matter it's not even going to be done next up within there is something called a chromatic aberration when you suit a subject that has a very bright background various sometimes a color ghosting which is thie chromatic aberration and it creates a line around the solid subject that is colored and appears like a little bit like a ghost. And this often appears in a magenta in a scion color and this is basically from the fact that not all lenses are perfect and you can enable it where the camera will figure out what lenses on the camera and how much correction and how to correct for it and the fact of the matter is is nobody likes chromatic aberration nobody's ever said I need mork chromatic aberration in my photographs maybe you can choose that as your new style of photography but most of us don't like it and so it's something that we would enable in there in our cameras and even though I should draw in case I shoot jay paid which I do from time to time I want to have that turned on and so within that menu setting there's actually two sub menus I prefer to disable peripheral illumination and I enable chromatic aberration so bit of a mix there next up is flash control. Okay, so we're walking along through the menu system and suddenly we get to this and this is what is known as a rabbit hole. All right? We're gonna go in here and it's gonna lead to another menu it's gonna lead to another man you need to another menu and there's all these things in here and it's all buried within flash control so we need to dive into the flash control system and when you get in here the first thing you see is the option whether the flash will fire or not you could permanently disable the flash from ever firing on the camera. Most people like to have the option of using it if they pop it up so I would leave it enabled next up you get to control the type of meat a ring system that the camera uses you could use average or evaluative and having played around with it for quite a bit I could tell you evaluative is probably what you're going to want for general purpose work next up flash sink speed in the aperture value mode and so as you get in here you can go in and you can adjust how your camera selects the shutter speed to use when you're using flash and what I would recommend is for a basic photographer to choose a number around one sixtieth toe one two hundredth of a second it depends on what's the slowest shutter speed that you feel comfortable hand holding the camera for the more advanced users I would say just set it at auto and the camera will use a much slower shutter speed if it feels necessary like one fifteenth of a second but if you're more experience you can probably hold that camera at a slower shutter speed like one fifteenth of a second so you can go in here and you can kind of tailor where this is put next up we've come to our second layer of the rabbit hole this is the built in flash setting so we're going to go in and control some of the very specifics about the flash on the camera and so we're gonna have to dive into a deeper sub menu and the first one is the flash mode that is being used here. There's a couple of options we have e t t l too, which stands for elektronik t ell through the lands flash technology version, too, which means kanan is figuring out how much flash to power out of the flash unit. In order for the proper light to hit your subject. And it does a pretty good job. You can change it to manual flash, which is something that professional or someone who knows what they're doing with flash would use. You also have the option of multi flash, where the camera would fire multiple flashes doing during a relatively long shutter speed. Let's say a one second shutter. We have the flash firing ten times within that one second. So it's a special effects mode, we're not going to spend too much time on it. For general photography, you probably want to have it at e t t l next up is the synchronization of the shutter, and here we have two options. First curtain, which is the standard way the camera is set up, and we also have an option of a second curtain. So here's a couple of visual examples of a bicyclist writing by the front of the camera, the camera is not panning with the subject is just staying still and you can see on the top the flashed fired with the first curtain and as the cyclist went through the shot let's left ghosting of that image because that was the exposure is about probably a quarter second exposure in the second image on the bottom it's a second curtain synchronization the flash was synchronized to fire right when the second curtain was closing so for objects that are moving we're slow shutter speeds I prefer a second curtain curtain synchronization uh it's slightly more sophisticated setting but you do kind of have to be aware of this when you are firing slow shutter speeds because the flash will not fire at the beginning it fires at the end of the shutter all right next up exposure compensation we actually saw this before in the quick menu so it's the second time we've seen this I like leaving my camera I don't use built in flash very often but when I do I definitely like the power it down about two thirds of asad stop so anywhere from minus two thirds of a stop to minus one stop would be a good setting if you do a lot of people photography to take the edge off of that overpowering flash from time to time next up is wireless functions and there are a lot of options in here and unfortunately this class does not have the time to go into all of these options normally you would leave this disabled, but after that, if you have an external flash, it can in six hundred or for thirty or one of the other numbers that can handle wireless off camera flash, you can get the built in flash to trigger this off camera flash and let me give you some visual examples as to why you might want to do this. The built in flash has kind of a harsh in your face look that has very distinct shadows on walls behind the subject. By getting the camera off the flash, you're going to improve the quality of lighting on your subject. If you can include multiple flashes, then you can include herr lights and fill lights and a bunch of other stuff that we don't have time to get into. But this example on the right was shot with three lights, the main light, which is over to camera, right, a fill light camera left and then a hair light behind the subject. And so having those multiple lights on the subject can definitely bring out some depth and dimension and a much better look. And so you can use this camera with a variety of these wireless flash controllers and you get to control and hear the relationship between the two do you want him firing equally? Do you want a ratio? Let's say a one to two ratio so that the built in flash is always half the power of the main flash, or you could have it so that while this is triggering the flashes, it has no light on the subject during the actual exposure and so it's a fun place to get into if you have one or more of the extra cannon flashes now, if you were to go back up, and I'm not recommending it right now, but if you were to go back up to the flash mode setting, you could set it to manual, and if you do that, it changes the settings below it. The first option is controlling exactly how powerful is the flash. You can set it anywhere from full power down to one hundred twenty eight power, so you could incrementally control how much light is coming out of that, so that it is very, very consistent with e t, t l it's, nice and it's automatic, but it's constantly changing as you point the camera at different subjects. If you do have it in manual, you'll see the same options for shutter sink, which we've already talked about, and you'll see some of the same options for the wireless function. There will be a slightly different grouping just because it is different the way it relates with the external flashes, but if you didn't want to set up this with cannon remote flashes, I highly recommend the manual setting. If you're going to be in a fixed environment where things are not changing that way, you contest your exposures, you can get him right and then they don't change on you that's the thing we hate in photography's, things changing without our approval. Okay, so we're going back up a menu you could hit the menu button, usually to back out of it, and the next item is the external flash function setting. So if you hook up an external flash and it's plugged in and it's turned on, you can control the features of this external flash by just working the dials on the camera. That way you don't have to go up and grab the flash unit itself. You're not doing anything different than you would on the flash just might be more convenient to press the buttons, and so we're not going to get into all those, because that depends on the exact flash unit that you have attached. Now, those flash unit's also have custom functions, and you can get in and you can change those via the menu on the back of the camera. We're not going to do that as well, so we're going to hit menu we're gonna back out of this. And get back to the regular shooting menu number two moving down a notch red eye reduction so on the front of the camera there is a bright light that will turn on when you enable red eye reduction and if you shoot a lot of pictures of people with red eye, this will reduce your need for going in and fixing eyes later in photo shop light room. But the problem is, is that it delays the taking of the picture by about one to two seconds, which means you're going to miss miss critical moments when you thought the shutter was going to fire and this to me is unacceptable. I would rather have a little bit of red eye or even full on red eye because it khun easily be fixed later on in the computer, and so I prefer to turn this off. I do doesn't mean I need to fix red eye from time to time, but it means that I can shoot pictures when I press down on the shutter release. Next up is mere lockup now this is a more advanced feature often used by landscape photographers, product photographers so far, so let me explain what it is and why it is a help. So in this visual we have our profile of the slr camera, and when you press down on the shutter release here's, what happens the mere goes up, and it goes up very quickly so quickly. In fact, it causes a vibration throughout the camera as the shutter is opening and your camera is actually very suddenly moving during the exposure. And this is mohr evident at some shutter speeds and other center speeds. But even though a camera's on a tripod, you can still get shake simply from the internal mechanisms bouncing around on the camera. So we have the option of mere lockup. So what mere lockup does is it changes the nature of the shutter release. What happens now is when you press the shutter release it's going to bring the mirror up, but it's not actually firing the shutter. So here comes up there's a vibration. It settles out after a couple of seconds, and then you would press the shutter release a second time, and that would fire the shutter without any camera movement at all. And so this is something that seems like it's, not that important. But let me give you another visual example. I was down earlier this year in yosemite national park, and I was taking a picture of a group of trees, and I was magnifying playing back the image, looking at it closely, and I'm like, oh it's not very sharp and I do this every once in a while just to make sure everything's working alright and luckily I did it in this case and then I remembered oh I probably should have put the camera in your lockup I put it in here lock up and you can clearly see the difference between mere lockup and no vibration throughout the camera as well it's just kind of forgetting to turn mere lock up and getting those slightly fuzzy results and what I have found by experimenting with different shutter speeds is that there's a zone of area where you have to be very concerned about vibration from the mere moving up and down and it basically hovers around one eighth of a second. Once you get above a sixtieth of a second, you're not going to see an issue with it because the shutter speed is so fast and once you get below a second that vibration typically settles out and is not an issue under slower shutter speeds but definitely in that zone around an eighth of a second you should be using near lock up if you are using a tripod and as an additional unrelated note you should also have the vibration reduction or image stabilization in your lands turned off because that could also cause subtle blur from using a tri pi in these shutter speeds so your lockup is not something anyone uses early I don't know of anyone that uses mere lock up all the time. It's, one of those features that you may want to come back to. You may want to put it in your shortcut menu when we get to the end of the menu cities.