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Canon 7D Mark II Menus: Custom Functions

We're going to be going into the last big menu section, which is the custom functions thes air minor little tweaks most of which you're probably not going to want to change but if you want to they are in here exposure early level increments is at one third this is where most people leave him in. You can adjust himto have stop if you wanted the same thing goes with s o speed increments there are some people that prefer to have the set one stop that way it's faster to change from one hundred two, sixteen hundred there's fewer clicks in which to turn the dial so there is an argument for that bracketing auto cancel normally, the bracketing mode on this camera is automatically canceled after you have finished a serious have bracketed shot. Some people shoot lots of bracketed shots, maybe somebody who's shooting a lot of hdr and it's inconvenient to go turn it on for every time you want to get a shot and so most people are gonna want to leave this turn on. But if you do a lot of hd are a lot...

of bracketing shots turned this off so it stays in the mode once you leave it there more to do with bracketing the sequence. Normally the camera puts the normal exposure first and then the dark one and then the light one and I've changed my opinion on this over the years I now prefer it to shoot dark, normal light so that you end up with a series of photos that makes sense as faras lightness to darkness and so different people are going to have different preferences on this, but my preferences now lighter to darker looks better when you're playing it back in light room. Now the number of shots that you shoot also has an option three is kind of the standard traditional number sometimes you only need to one at exposure one a little over one a little under, and so if you're trying to do a really small bracket siri's, that would be two shots right now I don't you bracketing very much, but if I do, I prefer five stops because it really reaches pretty far in each direction seven is a little bit more than I need, but you'll probably find your own sweet spot with what you do in your own types of shooting safety shift. So if you are shooting in the time value mode and you select a shutter speed that is to fast for shooting, do you want the camera to jump in and change the aperture on you or change the so on you? Most serious photographers don't want the camera to ever jump in and change one of the settings that they have manually set on the camera which is why I have off recommended in red for somebody who wanted to have the camera kind of watching their back in case they made a mistake. You could set this to esso where it would come in and change the so in order to make that picture come out but realized if you set s o one hundred and you do something crazy in time value selecting a thousandth of a second, your camera's going to go in and jump and changed your s o on you. So you need to really think carefully about making this setting this to whether you want the camera to change something that you have manually set yourself. If you switch lenses let's say you add a tele converter or you add on an extender or something and your exposure is no longer able to be the same as it was. Do you want the camera to go in and change your exposure settings or change your settings in order to keep that the same? The serious photographer does not want the camera changing any manual settings for any reason they il adjusted themselves so that's why I have off and read the more amateur photographer might like to have that camera watching out for their mistakes and fixing it with an s o adjustment so a little bit of a personal choice and experience level on that choice there second page of custom functions the range of shutter speeds goes from a thousandth of a second down to thirty seconds if for some reason you didn't want to have access to all of them, you could limit them. I don't have a real good reason why you would do that or adjust the range of the apertures I guess if you were trying to restrict I don't want you ever shooting it f sixty four that you could prevent them from shooting at f sixty four on the camera so most people are going to be doing that the continuous shooting speed we talked about this earlier in the drive mode on the camera. If you want to change the speed, the exact number of shots per second the camera can adjust, increase or decrease the number of shots depending on the different modes that are available and so most of them are set at their highest setting. The lowest low speed one can be adjusted quite a bit high speed and silent continuous shooting they could be slowed down if you prefer him a little bit slower. Next page deals with the focusing screen displays and operation, so the focusing screen, as I mentioned and demonstrated earlier, can be replaced in the camera. Most people are going to be perfectly fine with the standard screen. You may want to check out the precision mats screen if you have faster lenses can you do a lot of manual focusing if you have faster lenses and do a lot of auto focusing, you probably don't need it, but if you are doing that manual focusing, it will help you be more precise if you are using those manual focus lenses or auto focus lenses in manual talked about the warnings in the viewfinder comes up with an exclamation mark means something is off kilter here is where you get to select what you want the camera to warn you about for instance, maybe you shoot in monochrome all the time and you don't want that warning to come up you could just unchecked that box and when your camera is shooting black and white monochrome, you don't see that symbol it all in there it's not irritating to you in any way so just I would say keep him all checked off until you're sure that you don't need that as a reminder one of the options was shooting in live you and shooting a crop frame or a master frame and this allows you to determine what that mask looks like is it see through or it's a completely blocked off but I slightly prefer the mast version so I can see a little bit more clearly with final image is going to look like although I don't shoot with that mode very much at all if you want to change the dial direction in time value our aperture value you can do this and before you two quickly say well that's too needy creedy I don't need to do that let me ask you a question look on screen you see that indicator down there at the bottom which way would you turn the dial to fix that issue? If you're trying to get that indicator to the middle of the zoom would you turn the top of the dial or the bottom of the dial if you said I would turn the bottom of the dial well that's how the canon camera is inherently set up if you said I would turn the top of the dial, then what you want to do is you want to change this inherent setting and this has been reversed for years in both cannons in icons as well as other brands of cameras and I don't know can't confirm but I think it has something to do with the way that the japanese reed versus the way we read left to right right to left and so which way are you going to correct for minus two plus, for instance so that's a good one to change? I think for a lot of people next multifunction lock remember that lock on the back of the camera here is where you get to choose what is it actually lock does it just locked the dial or does it look front dial and the back tile or the lever or the little joystick so you can have it lock everything or just one or any combination thereof custom controls this is where you get to die bed and customized many of the individual controls in the camera and I was going to go in and try to figure out how many combinations that you could create and I think the numbers in the hundreds of thousands because there are so many controls on so many buttons of the camera I'm going to dive in and I'm going to show you about I don't know half dozen ways of customizing the camera that should set you on a course for new excitement okay let's start simple the set button in the back of the camera normally in the shooting mode does nothing so here is a perfectly good button that you khun re purpose to do something more valuable maybe you could have it turn the menu on so you don't have to use your left hand or you could have it be the magnified buttons so you don't have to use your left hand to magnify you can see down there on the bottom left there is a whole bunch of different options you could have a change the quality of the images that you're shooting so science find something valuable for that button to dio and put it to good use another option is the direct a f area selection, but I call it the little joystick normally you have to press the focusing point selection before you press that and change where your camera is focusing but you can have it directly change focusing points without any other button being pressed ahead of time and so it's just a little bit easier and faster to change focusing points when you put that into that on position the a f selection lever when you are in your normal shooting mode does nothing on its own you have to press the point selection area in order to activate it but if you want, you can have it turn on all the time so that you can switch your f area any time you want and that's a pretty hard button to bump. So I think this is a pretty easy selection that I would highly recommend, but you can have it do something else as well all right, the multi function which is the button out in the front of the camera by the shutter release. Normally it does flash exposure lock, but not very many people use flash with this camera so that button can be repurposed if you want to do something else, one of my favorite controls for that one is cycle the main controls. What this does is it allows you to cycle through the white balance meet oring drive auto focus flash exposure compensation and s o in the viewfinder said that you don't have to take your eye away from the viewfinder and so as I hold the camera to my eye I think I have my camera set up like this. I could just press the button and I see my auto white balance and me terrain my drive and my one shot focusing my white balance in my meeting. And if I want to make a change, I could just simply come in the back or on the top of the camera and make that change and I see it right in the viewfinder and I don't have to take my eyes out of the viewfinder, which is very much the way a muralist camera works and one of the advantages of them of having an intelligent viewfinder. And this is this camera has the most intelligent you find her, I have seen to date on it so great advantage right there. Okay, so if you are in the one shot mode and you want to switch between one shot and a I servo where the camera is continuously focusing usually that's a couple of buttons, I would have to press one of the buttons on the top and turned the dial, and then I could switch back and forth. But here is just a hint at some of the options that you can make the star button in the back of the camera is normally used for auto exposure bracketing actually the auto exposure lock excuse me it can be reprogrammed normally when you press the front front shutter release button let's say that does the one shot mode you can re program the a l button on the back of the camera to switch between one shot and a I servo focusing so what this means is that when you press the star button and the shutter release button your camera is in continuous focusing but if you just press on the shutter release button it is doing one shot so this gives you an immediate access to doing continuous focusing or jump back and do one shot focusing so it's a way to jump back and forth between two different focusing system's virtually instantly very, very easy to do and there's a lot of options that that can open up. So from there we get into something called recall shooting function and I guess when I first learned about this I actually had had these cameras for a while and I was I hadn't really investigated this mode and this is a pretty powerful function and we could probably do two or three hours right here on this one little thing right here but let me just give you a little hint of what it's doing one of the things you could do is you can instantly with one button, not even a dial turn but just one button. You could instantly have your camera switched to a specific shutter. Speed aperture, s o meter reading, exposure, compensation focusing set up on and on and on. You can see there's a fairly long list. I'm only scrolled part way through this list. So with one press of a single button changing everything over to a particular type of shooting system and this is the recall register, recall shooting function. And then what you would do is you'd program that into one of the buttons. Perhaps the a l button on the back of the camera that would be the most likely one. And when you press that button, everything switches over into that type of hope. Asimo, one of the more popular systems is back button, focusing as it is commonly known. This is where you were using the auto focus button on the back of the camera, and this is how you would set it up. The problem with doing that with the camera straight out of the box is the camera's shutter release wants to auto focus every time you press down on it. So what you need to do is go into the custom functions for the shutter release. And turn off the auto focusing option. Nothing really needs to be done with the on button on the back of the camera, but if we go up to the shutter button half press, having it on ly meter means that we will focus with the back of the camera and the front of the camera. That shutter release will only meet her, so we're going to focus with the back and meet her with the front, which means back button focusing it's a great system. A lot of intermediate and advanced photographers have kind of worked themselves into that, and it has given them just a little bit more control over what's happening because it's separating these two different events focusing and exposure there, now separate and you can control them individually. Alright, the final little customization that I want to talk about his register, register and a f point now this this changes everything, folks, this is really interesting for those of you shooting sports. Have you ever been shooting sports? And you have one focusing point selected and you thought we'll be really nice to have this other focusing points selected, but I'm gonna have to press a whole bunch of buttons to make that happen, and I'll just not bother doing that well, this solves that problem, so imagine that you have selected a point in the upper right of the frame. Alright, what you khun dio is if you press the point selection button and hold down the lamp for two seconds. If the beep is turned on, the people fire, if you don't have the heat turned on, you won't hear indication you won't say anything, but you will register that as a position that you like the auto focus point sensor to b a. You can then change which focusing point you have selected, and in the a f start position, you can choose where you want your focusing point to start is at a selected position or a home position. So, for instance, when you press the shutter release it's going to select the center, but when you select the on button, it may be one of those other points that you have registered, so what you would have to do is go to the phone button, for instance, go to the info detail set, and within their which position do you want the focusing point to be in the selected position or the home position? So the selected position, and this is not easy terminology to understand, in my opinion, the selected position, is the position that you have manually selected outside of the normal position, the home position is from what I understand, always the center of the frame, so you could have the ass trick buttons set up for one focusing point, the f on for a different focusing point. So, depending on which button you press, you would focus in a different area on the screen. You could also have it set up for different types of autofocus operation. You could have one shot with one button and a servo with the other button. So if you've ever been caught wanting to switch back and forth between single and continuous, focusing, there are a number of ways that you can set your camera were different buttons. Sequences will instantly take you from one to the other. And so it's, just a matter of playing around a little bit with them to see which works for the way you hold the camera and the type of sports that you shoot. But there is a lot a lot of powerful control in here, and I encourage you to get in there, play around with it, see what works for you, and come up with a custom I system that really works for your type of photography, because there's a lot of ways that it can help you out, so a lot of very powerful controls in the custom controls next half over on the custom functions you can add some cropping information this is for use with cannon software on lee so for most people it's not going to do much in the way of anything default erase option let me ask you a question when you delete a photograph how many buttons or dial clicks would you like there to be before that picture is permanently deleted and my response is well once if I see it deleted I wanted related wait a minute I might make a mistake to would be a nice confirmation the default system on the camera is that you press the garbage can button it assumes you hit it by mistake so you have to approve the cancel and then you have to set it in there so there are three clicks in orderto delete every photograph if you have erase selected as an option you press the garbage can button it assumes you meant to hit the garbage can button you simply hit the set button and you can delete it so it will save one a button press but it still leaves you a safety button press in case you accidentally pressed the garbage and so I think that is a better option a little bit faster use on the camera and finally if you want to clear all the custom functions not the regular functions but just the custom functions you can come here and clear all of them out all those little custom button settings that you might have set on the camera and that brings us to our favorite menu, which is my menu that you get to customize now it's been quite a while with canon cameras that you have been able to customize my menu, you've been ableto add items you have about six or seven items that you can add in here and then you could set the camera up so that it starts at my menu, so when you press the menu button, it immediately starts here you see the few items that you normally use adjust him and you don't have to dig in the menu system for him, but we've added a new wrinkle to this option. What we can do in here is we can now add up my tabs, which allow us to have several tabs of information so you want to go down to configure admit at a menu tab, configure the menu tab, you can give it a name and then you can add items to that tab. So let me show you what I've done with my camera and this isn't one hundred percent finalized, but it's a good indication so you'll notice that when I hit the menu button on my camera, it immediately starts with my menu and in fact when I say it's my menu, I'm serious it's my menu, it says john's menu, because I've been able to add that in there as my menu, so john's menu is just basic things that I do all the time I do near lock up occasionally changed my image quality. I checked my battery info, I'm checking which card I'm record we're going to and I'm formatting my memory cards if I turn the top dial, I have a landscape menu of things that I might use when I am shooting landscapes that I most likely to go for. I have one for action, photography, things that I might change when I am doing action photography, and then I have another one if I'm shooting video now, most of this is great out because I'm not in the video mode let me switch, switch and turn the camera on the video mode, put it in the playback, and now you can see here in the video mode these are things that I might change while I'm shooting videos. And so you really get to customize the camera mohr than really any other camera that I've ever seen, so you can have up to four tabs of information. The fifth tab is still kind of the control and operation of the menu setting of the my menu setting itself, and so in order to do this, what you want to do is you want to add my menu tab and oh I can have another one so I could go at another one in here and I could register items select items to register and then I go find items that I want in here let's just pick an item at random then our random item is set aperture range okay that's what we're going to set to this final tab in here and then I could hit the menu to back out of this I could then come in here and rename this tab and I'm not going to bother going in a minute but you could come in and name it as well and that's okay back out of this and so we have another tab in here and I thought for but I think maybe fives the limit let's see if I can add even another tabouk I'm out of tabs now no more taps could be added so there's our limit so we have one, two, three, four five tabs of all your own information and you can add one two, three, four five six items per cab so not bad twenty four items that you can customize add to your camera to make things faster to navigate so nothing like having I always love customizing that I built specialized hand grips and all sorts of things for my cameras and this is being able to get in and control the elektronik seven which is great so get into the my menu, get it, set up, get it figured out and make the camera your own.