Lessons

Lesson Info

3:00 pm - Set Up and Custom Menus

We are in the setup menu getting towards the end of it thankfully alright we talked about cleaning the censor the camera automatically cleans the sensor all the time but if you want to go in and tell it hey do it now you can do this but the fastest way to do that is just turn the camera on and off but in here is also a manual cleaning option and what manually is involved is there are two stages I think everyone's cleared for stage one not everyone feels comfortable with stage to stage one is getting an air blower taking the lens off putting it in mere lockup and blowing air inside hopefully knocking off the dust in the sensor the second stage if there is something still kind of stuck on that sensor is using a swab and liquid there are a couple of other types of devices but this is what I'm familiar with and you put a couple of drops of alcohol on the swab and you take the swab and you stick it into your camera very carefully and as you can see on screen you will wipe across the sensor ...

hopefully bringing up all the dust inspects with it and this is what happens when you turn the camera into a repair shop to have the sensor clean some people don't feel comfortable with it they'll pay upwards of one hundred dollars to have their sensor cleaned in a repair shop you could do it yourself by buying your own supplies, but you don't need to do need to have a careful hand and just need thio follow all the precautions about doing it right you need to have a well charged battery in order to do this you want a really good lighting system I often will wear a campaign headlamps so that I can see straight down into the sensor and see what's going on. So do be careful if you do decide to go to step two on manual cleaning, but everyone could do step one I think that's quite easy next up is the battery information. This is kind of cool because you could dive in and see exactly how good your battery is, not only in percentage of life left on its current charge as well as its overall recharge performance as well as how many pictures you've taken on that particular shutter charge. Next up what we have, we have the dumbest thing in the entire camera I think a cannon executive went out to lunch. We have somebody who was working with canon ae said tell you what if you give us that little product years, we're going to put your logo inside the menu system of our camera and so if you want to go see some of the logos of companies that can and works with, you can see that in the certification logo display next up custom shooting moz okay, this one has some real practicality needs remember the sea mode on the top here camera, which stands for custom? What you do is if you want your camera set up in a very particular way is to set your camera up in that exact particular way and then come to this setting in the menu and what you would have is you would have a register so that you register all those camera settings into the custom out so anytime you switch it into the custom mode it automatically goes into those features you can also clear the settings if you had something in there you don't you forgot what it was you want to change it, you can just clear the settings. You can also have it set to auto updating others a limited number of features that as you're in the custom mode and you make changes, it'll automatically update the the features that you were changing into that customer would. But for the most part, register is what most people would do after they've set their camera and then they would go reset it back up into a standard system so it could be very good if you do something on a regular basis that requires a lot of button changes next up we have clear all camera setting, so if you have not been paying attention for the last ninety minutes in this class and you have totally messed your camera then you could clear all the camera settings and get everything set back to the factory default, which is actually what I did with this camera before I started class because I wanted it kind of a fresh slate to start with next up we have copyright information and this is surprisingly kind of cool. You can go in and add your name like I did and you can have something you want to say in there you know like don't steal my photos you could put in your website you could put in your contact information and this might be just that little helpful information when your camera stolen that you could go in and say yes it is my camera my name is inside of it but it also actually adds that information to the metadata of your photograph and sew it it's not going to completely prevent people from stealing your camera or your images but it provides another layer of identification which for many people is a very good thing to do finally is the firmware version firm where is the software designed to run the camera? The current firm where as of the taping of this show is one point one point one if you check your camera and it has a number lower than this, you should probably go to cannon's website and download the new firmware for you camera you go teo cannon dot com cannon use a dot com and you look for your camera and there's going to be a firmware option and from where listing in a download it's going you're going to download it to your computer you're going to transfer it onto your memory card to put the memory card in the camera you goto firmware version and it recognizes that there's new firmware on that memory card you then upload the firm where it takes about five minutes or so in order to do that and I know on previous candid cameras they have added features from when the camera originally came out they fixed bugs on the system. And so, like any other computer that has software updates it's always good to keep your camera as up to date as possible partially because it's free and we'll offer you a slightly better product even though it may be in a very, very small matter. And so typically when the camera gets released its one point oh point oh, and so they've obviously had a couple of little incremental changes in what's going on, so go in and get your new firm where if you need it okay, this last tab is a little deceptive it's another rabbit hole not only does it have one listing of features it actually has three tabs of information within it, you might say custom functions are little painting features and it's going to seem like some people are getting really nit picky on these things, and they're grouped into three areas exposure, auto focus, and then general operations, everything else, and so we're going to go into group one, and as you dive in here, you'll see that there's kind of a list down at the bottom of six different items that we're going to look at, and you can keep kind of keep track down there, of which ones you have changed. The first item we're talking about is the exposure level increments, apertures and shutter speeds. Whether you change them in half, stop or third stop, most people are going to leave him in half stops. Excuse me, one third stops that's the normal. Some people might want to match up with light meters or other types of device lighting equipment that works in half stops, and so there are a few people that might want to switch it over to have stops just because that's what they prefer, but most cameras are in third stop increments. Next up is the s o speed settings can also be done in third stops or full stops. Most people prefer to have the option of being very subtle adjustments at third stop so I would keep that here most of these custom functions as we go through we're not changing there will be a few key ones in here that I do like to change bracketing auto cancel what this means is that when you put your camera in the bracketing mode after it shoots the bracketed siri's of photographs it's going to turn off and that's it it's done for somebody who shoots hdr photography this drives them nuts because they have to go back in and turn it on every time they shoot a series of pictures it's in a case like that you would turn this off so that you could just keep continually shooting bracketed siri's of photographs and this is one of those things. If I was shooting hdr photography a lot I would set this as one of my favorites in the final my menu section so keep track of this one hdr shooters next up dealing also with the bracketing is the sequence the normal sequence is to shoot the normal picture first then a dark one and then a light went that way when you set up your shutter speeds and apertures the first one that your kind of setting all that out that looks normal but some people don't like that they would prefer to shoot the dark one first the middle one and then the light one or they might want to do the light in the middle in the dark, and so you could get very picky about how you set your bracketing and I can understand wanting to get it set exactly so, so I'm liking the fact that it has all the options still dealing with bracketing? How many pictures do you want to take when you bracket? The traditional standard number is three, one over exposed one under, and you're trying to shoot the one in the middle, and you also have the option of just too if you pretty close to knowing what you need all the time, and then for people who do pretty serious hdr work, they're going to be more interested in five or more likely seven shots and so three shots of standard adjust is necessary. Next up is the safety shift, and if you were to use the camera in a shutter priority mode or an aperture priority mode and there was not, and there wasn't an acceptable shutter speed er aperture to set to get a proper exposure. Do you want the camera to kind of break the setting that you set to go find something that works? And most people don't want the camera to do this to change settings automatically on them? That's why this is on disable. There are some people who like this safety shift and they would want to turn it on one or they might turn it on to with the esso automatically jumping in and changing on them and so for your serious manual shooters you want to leave this on disable next up we're going to be moving to custom function group number two you may need to hit the menu button to back out tab down to group number two we're dealing with all things auto focus in this category the first thing is the tracking sensitivity we have a slider scale where we can change between locked on and responsive and what this is determining is how quickly your camera will change to a new focusing and you may think well I want it very responsive so if a subject moves it quickly changes well how about the scenario of a football match where the referee crosses briefly in front of you? Do you want your camera to refocus on the referee and then have to refocus on the athletes if you're shooting sports where there's a lot of interference basketball soccer for instance you might want to leave this on the zero setting or more towards the locked on setting if you're shooting the sport that doesn't have a lot of interference maybe you're shooting track and field in the hundred meter sprint coming straight at you there you could leave it on it's responsive as possibles long's there's not gonna be anything crossing in front of you, so if you shoot a lot of sports, you're gonna want to get in and maybe tweak with this. I think to start with, you probably want to leave it at zero, but with different lenses depending on your angle of you is going to determine where you want to have this put so most of the time, as I say, zero is a good, safe place to have it set up next up. Also dealing with the fine tune mechanics of focusing is acceleration and deceleration of tracking. How quickly does it adjust as your subject is adjusting? And I guess another way of asking this question is, is how consistently fast is your subject's moving let's say you photograph indycar racing where cars they're doing, I don't know two hundred miles an hour on a pretty regular basis, and they're not changing down to ten miles an hour and up to two hundred on a regular basis. You would leave this at zero if you're shooting a subject like I'll go back to football, where subjects are starting and stopping very quickly, you may want to move this up to a setting of one or two, depending on the types of subjects type the lenses that you are getting, so keep a close eye on the results from your show sports photography for information on how you might want to adjust these features when your camera is in that aye aye servo mode which is thie continuous focusing mode for sports there is a balance of power between getting it in focus and having the shutter fire and for most people there's kind of unequal priority where they're both equally important for some people they need tohave sharper focus and they don't care so much about the timing of it. Other photographers need the timing more than they need the focusing and so if you feel like your camera's not performing the way that you like, you can adjust it it does come set in the middle and I highly recommend keeping it there until there's a justifiable reason to change it and that same information can be, uh put towards the second image in the frame of a syriza's. Well, I would lead this in the middle as well halfway between speed and focus. Next up is the auto focus beam firing. And so I told you how I'm not a big fan of the camera firing flashes or bursts of light in order to focus. I like to be more discreet when I'm shooting and so I like to disable it or you can also use the infrared one if you plan on using an external flash there's an emperor and one that's not quite as obvious, but it can still be very disarming. Trust me, if you're going to photograph the president of the united states, you don't want to be the person putting a laser pointer on them on that's kind of what this looks like when you are firing off. So any time you're photographing a speaker for any back to the matter up at a podium, it doesn't look good having this red light on them, and you would want to disable this, and so I highly recommend disabling it. It means your camera may not focus quite as well, but if you know how to manually focus or really what to focus those or what to point the focusing brackets on, you don't actually need this because it is very limited distance that it works with. All right. Next item, we're going to number six in the auto focus menu. What happens when your camera focuses and can't finish focusing can't find it out. Normally, you want it to just continue to keep working in finding focus, and that works perfectly fine for most lenses. However, if you're one of the people that has bought the really big telephoto lens is something like a three hundred to eight all the way up to the eight hundred five six the camera has such a long throw and focusing. That if it doesn't find it out at infinity it brings about close up and tries to look down here and it takes a long time to do that focusing so if you have a really big lens, I would recommend changing this to number one, but for most users I would leave it on zero where it would continue searching for focus next up number seven which one of the focusing modes do you want to have available or which one of the three do you want to have available? And I think there's reasons for having all three so I would highly recommend checking off all these boxes, but if you find that you just don't use one of him and you one eliminated from the selection process, you could take a check mark off one of these boxes number eight on the list is the selection method now normally we talked about this earlier you press the thumb button on the back of the camera and then you tap down on that front focusing button in order to change the focusing mountains. Now the other option is you can use the main dial on the camera to rotate through them and some people like that system that you can change it to number one and it's perfectly acceptable I've gotten kind of used to the button on the front of the camera, so I just keep it at zero number nine lots of stuff in auto focus orientation link for auto focus point now this one's kind of interesting so watched this visual this is the way the camera comes when you select the right hand focusing point that is the one that's activated even if you turn the camera vertically it doesn't change it stays locked in with that point. One of the things is that the camera understands when you were holding the camera vertically and horizontally so for horizontal you could select the right hand focusing point and when you turn the camera vertically you can now select this other point which is on the right hand side and so it switches focusing points whether you're holding the camera vertically or horizontally which I found very helpful in sports photography and so I highly recommend changing that to number one all right, next one manual f point selection pattern I think this should be called the wormhole effect. Okay, so imagine you have selected the far right focusing point and you want to get over to the far left what would you do? You would press left several times, but with this turned on, you press it right and it kind of wraps around and ends up on the left hand side and so I like the continuous option in this just so a little bit easier faster getting from one side to the other next up, some people are very particular about when they see their focusing points, and so how are the points displayed? And there are four different times when we can see the focusing points when we're selecting them, and we pretty much always want to see what we're selecting when the camera is ready to shoot during the auto focus and after the autofocus is achieved and you can see by the numbers on the options here that you could turn the camera off during the focusing or when it's achieved. There are a variety of options in there now the first option constant or excuse me that the number one option is where all the focusing points are displayed all the time and that's just too much clutter. And so I think there are some good reasons for number two. Number three and number four depends on what your preferences are on. When you're looking at the focusing points, I'm perfectly fine with zero it doesn't really bother me seeing the focusing points that I am actively using number twelve viewfinder illumination. So take a look at this visual when it's bright out it shows you focusing points in black when it gets dark out, it shows you those focusing points in red, so they're easier to see, and this is anne automatically switching device. If you want, you can disable it so it never shows up in red or you can enable it so it always shows up in red depending on what your preferences are I think auto works pretty good for most situations all right? We're going to full geeky this here alright full geekdom somebody had a question about micro adjustment micro adjustment is to adjust for focuses that air not working perfectly and we can adjust individual lenses we can adjust a camera body and all the lenses that fit on it ideally, we want to adjust the particular lens to get it set with the camera body and here is the problem what's going on is that your camera wants to focus on a subject but sometimes due to slight variables in the manufacturer of the body and the lands the camera might front focus or back focus which means focus in front of the subject or focus in back of the subject and this is something that you will find is more critical with very fast lenses and eighty five one point to a one thirty five two, three hundred millimeter two point eight anything with a very shallow depth of field like those lenses are things that you're going to want a micro just if you have the eighteen one thirty five three, five two five six there's a good chance you don't need to worry about this at all now the way that you actually do this is you're going to need a focusing target and you will need some sort of measuring device to see if you are actually focusing on that target or are you focusing on in front or behind this target? If you really want to do this well, you can pick up one of these devices this is called a lens align mark too it's available for about eighty dollars, and you would focus on the left hand force and you would look on the right hand portion to see how in or out of focus your subject is, I don't have the budget for that, so I decided to use a yardstick and a ruler, which works basically the same way I'm going to focus on the ruler, and I'm going to measure on the yardstick whether I'm focusing in front or in back of the plane of focus that I had intended, and when I did that, here are some results that I got from my test and as you get in here to adjust the lens is you'll be able to make adjustments of minus twenty two plus twenty and as you can see, these yellow indicators indicate that when I was at zero, I was front focusing by about a sixteenth of an inch or maybe three millimeters and I made an adjustment with this lands of about plus five to correct for the focusing so that when I focused on a subject it was exactly in focus and so if you do want to do this, it requires a bit of time you're going to need your camera, your lenses, your tripods, cable release and then something to focus on and a way to measure it the way that you're going to want to set your camera up is you're gonna wanna look at your camera is in the shallow a step the field possible so aperture priority or manual should do maximum aperture you want to look at low aya so because you want to have it nice clean images you want to make sure it's perfectly sharp so you turn off the stabilization, put your camera into mere lock up and what you want to do is manually unfocused the lands and then let the camera focus on the target take the picture with all those right precautions playback the image and really compare the different results and sometimes you got to go in there and play around with it a little bit. And so when you do this you got to do it for each lens if you really want to do it right if you have a fast lens and you want to adjust it by the lens and you'll have settings for instance, if you have a twenty four to seventy zoom lens you can is set it to plus five at the wide end and minus five at the telephoto and it will adjust in between them so it's just a really geeky way of customizing the focus to make sure it's perfect in the days before this was available you had to send the camera back to cannon to have them calibrated for you and it may be more trouble to do it yourself but at least you don't have to pay two hundred dollars to have someone else do it if you're willing to do it yourself okay backing back out into the custom up operations the general operations we have a small list of four here and this is another kind of funny one here. All right, take a look at this dial and you'll notice the light meter down below it is off to the left which way do you think is the normal way to turn the dial in order to get that indicator right under the center section of that meter? If you are with cannon you would think about turning the bottom side of the dial in that direction and that's the normal way that your camera is set up. If you think that you would normally associate the top of the dial with turning that indicator over you want the reverse direction and so I have my camera changed to the reverse direction because it just makes more logical sense to me however, I have found the good exception to this rule and that is if you use the vertical grip to the camera, you are often changing it with the bottom side of the dial and not the top side of the dial. So if you have the grip, you probably want to leave it normal if you don't have the grip, my bet is that you would be happier with reverse direction. All right, multifunction lock. Okay, you remember the lock on the back of the camera. So when you flip that in the upward position, what all does it lock? And most people are going to want to lock the quick control dial because that controls the aperture on the camera's. Pretty control. Pretty easy. Control the bump. You can also lock the main dial and the multi controller. If you really want to lock a lot of stuff down, most people just leave the quick control dial locked. All right, next up. If you remember when we were talking about the viewfinder, there is a warning in the bottom right hand corner that you find her. When would you like to see that warning come up? Personally, I would probably check all of these boxes off. I would like to be warned if I have made any of these changes because these could severely impact images that they were not intended for but if you use one of them on a regular basis and you're tired of the warning in the window, you can turn it off. And the final item in the custom functions is where you get to go in and customize the different buttons of your camera. This is where you can put your camera in tow back button, focusing by turning off the auto focus on the shutter release. You can re program and change the programming of many of these different features. I'm not going to go through each one of them individually, but it should be fairly clear issue get in there as to how you can change it around and so feel free to customize and really make your camera truly your personal camera, and that has left us down to the very final and my favorite my menu, and this is where you get to go in and you get to choose what you want in your camera. So what you would do in here is you would need to first go down to display from my menu, and you would want to enable that, and then you would come up, register to my menu and you would go find common settings that you like, I think formatting your memory card, changing the image quality potentially and maybe adding the battery info. These things that you would want to do and just for fun let's do a live demo with my camera right here so let me get this position we're going to go into the menu setting and I'm gonna program in the three that I have here so I'm gonna go to the menu setting I'm going to hit set I'm going to display from my menu in able which means any time I press menu this is where it's gonna come I'm gonna come up here to register to my menu and now I have a long list and I'm gonna look for format, image, quality and battery info now image quality is the very first one so I'm gonna get set register in my menu image quality okay, cancel that one okay, so we got image quality which means it's great out in their next I'm going to look for format and battery info and since this is in the order it is in the menu I know those items air towards the bottom so let's see getting further and further in here and we're going to play back stuff now should be getting close format card that's when we want to have in there we're goingto okay for that one and we're going to find one more the battery info did I already pass that I might have? I hope maybe I didn't go far enough somebody sees it there and goes down it's there it's right there there it is there we go okay and we're going to set that out okay and now we're just going to set no I don't want that okay so now I'm gonna hit menu to back out of this and display from my menu menu again and so now when I hit the menu button image quality I daren't touch screen okay? So image quality format card and battery info and if I want to go in I can re order these by going into my menu settings and I can where is it sort if I said I want format card on the bottom set it there I'm gonna go up to battery info and I'm going to put that up top I can set that there so it's just a matter of moving and using the set button and then I'm going to hit the menu to back out of this and now I have battery info image quality format card and you get to go into your camera now and choose whatever settings that you use on a regular basis I think you have about six maybe seven choices in there that you khun constantly change but that's going to save you time from going into the menu and diving in for those things is that you just don't want to go hunting for all the time how about a quick question yeah, I think we'll take one. So rats would like to know a cz you matter of fact you were just in battery info when you press when battery info is being displayed when you press the info button. What? What information are you getting? Okay, yeah. I didn't mention that when it's not the most helpful information what's going on is let's say, I put a battery in this camera on and I register one of the things you can register a battery to a camera and it would go okay, this battery has fifty three percent life, and I take that battery out, and I took in another battery that put that one in its still remembers what? That first battery was out, at least the last time it was in my camera. And so you could potentially have several different batteries registered with your camera, and your camera would tell you the battery charge of not where they're at, but where they were when they were last in the camera, and so it's a limited use at least it is for me because I have multiple candid cameras and a battery that is in not in this camera might be in another camera getting drained down, so when it says it's one hundred percent, it could be over there and be completely dead, right? And so that's one of the things that you will see when you go into register information, but you can see all the batteries that you have working in that camera. Yeah, kind of cool on dh when you update your firm, where do you like to do it via the flash disk or connecting your camera directly to the computer? By the way that I have done it in virtually all the cases is I've taken a memory card out of the camera after formatting I formatted in the camera, I take it out and I plug it into my computer where my little slot is, and I transfer the software to the memory card. And so the on ly thing on this memory card is the software, the firmware for the camera. I then plug it into the camera go into the menu for firmware, and the option that it automatically sees when you go check firmware is to update the firm where now there is a chance that it's going to say unavailable, which probably means that your battery is below a certain percentage, maybe sixty percent and it doesn't want to update the firmware unless it can guarantee power that it it's gonna have, because the last thing you'd want to do is to have the power run out in the middle of a firmware. Great, because that could totally screw the camera. And so you generally want have a charge, a fully charged battery. When you're starting a firm where?