Lessons

Lesson Info

12:45 pm - Menu

So we're going to talk about the menu settings in image size so once again hit the menu button and tap your way over to image size and press the center button and we're going to dive in talk about getting your camera set for taking the best quality photos now as you will see there is a section for still and a section for video we're going to talk about still images first the image still we have large medium and small size it is basically sixteen million pixels eight point four million and four million small size and so chances are you want to get the most out of this camera so you're going to want to set it at the sixteen million a large mark moving onward you can also choose the aspect ratio now the sensor in your camera has a three by two aspect ratio and if you want to capture as much information as that sensor has that's where he would leave it the only really good reason to shoot sixteen by nine is if you know you're going to crop your images later. For instance, if you were going...

to do a slide show using an hd tv and you knew that you had to crop it out well, you could crop it out as you shot it so that you could frame up your subject and know what your final image was going to be like but most people would prefer to shoot on the maximum size and crop later. Next up is the quality setting and this is where we get to set the all important raw or j peg that we have talked about before but once again I will recommend raw to anyone who wants to get the most image quality out of their camera but j peg fine would be a pretty good choice for a lot of people who want to deal with the files directly and not have to go through any special programs and they want to be able to email and send him off very, very quickly with the raw images you do need to kind of go through a little software conversion. I will admit, though, that if you have the right software it's very quick and easy to do that with the raw system. So if you do want to get the most out of your pictures, I definitely recommend looking into shooting raw if you're not doing it already below that we get into the panorama in size and quality settings in here. And so with that image size in panorama direction, we talked about this a little bit before let's talk about it again when you do put it into the panorama mode, what you will do is you'll press down on the shutter release the camera will take repeated pictures as you pan typically from left to right now you can turn the camera vertically, and you can cover more ground from top to bottom. So which way should you frame your subject up? Depends on the size and shape of your subject, of course, so standard is one option will also have wide as another option, because sometimes white is just too wide, so they do have a number of options in here, you can see on screen the number of pixel dimensions and the size in megapixels, and so we're just going to get wider. I do like this wide down because you're able to get quite a bit of information from top to bottom, as well as from side to side you can get these long panorama is by keeping the camera in the horizontal format, and this is just a standard panorama, which is pretty good for most situations, but if you really want to get extreme, you'll notice that you can get very, very wide with this wide right now, a couple of notes, take a look at that picture on the bottom and the flight, pull over on the right hand side, and you'll notice it looks a little funny, and that is because the camera is taking multiple pictures and stitching him together, and it didn't do a very good job stitching that part of the flagpole together, so you are likely to get these types of artifacts from time to time in this type of stitching, you can try to do it again, and maybe if you pan a little bit more smoothly, it'll do a better job. The camera also seems to be a little bit fussy on the exact speed of swiveling and turning from side to side. The camera doesn't like it when you go too fast or too slow, so you're going to have to find that happy medium speed as far as where I would leave these, I think image, size, standard and panning direction to the right is a pretty good choice, there's a lot of different options, a lot of good reasons why you might change in those settings in there as you move down a little bit, scrolling down and you get to the movie settings, and we've talked a little bit about the different file formats that are available in the camera. We had the chd, which is designed to look really good on tvs, and so if you know that you're going to be doing something on tv, this is the format that you would probably want to use if you're going to be going on to a computer if you just want to upload a youtube video mp for is probably an easier format to work with in that regard. Now, once you choose the format, you can choose the size of the file recording. In most cases, you're probably going to want to record the largest size possible, so you're going to be choosing the top and settings with mp for you only have two settings. The fourteen forty by ten eighty will translate into a final image that is nineteen twenty by ten eighty we talked a little bit earlier about that's, just the way it kind of raises things up a little bit it's still going to look very, very good with the hd. It depends on what your final uses, how you are editing and many other factors. It's hard for me to recommend a setting here, but sending it at the highest quality. The largest file size is one option. The sixty p option would be of interest for a number of people because sixty frames per second allows you to slow it down to half speed at thirty frames per second, which is how we see most tv and then so that might be a nice option for anyone who knows they want to slow down their video later on and you can go in here and make those changes and let's see if there's anything else particularly I want to bring up in there and so sixty I the one that I have recommended basically comes out looking like thirty p and so that would be kind of the standard video if you just want a high quality video the sixty p would be a second choice once again for shooting action where you're slowing it down and the twenty four p is what they do with hollywood movies there's a slightly different look I don't have time to go in to explain it it's how it is and if you want that hollywood look that is one little aspect on how to get that hollywood look ok, so we're gonna be dealing with issues dealing with the brightness and the color first up is exposure compensation and if you recall the back wheel of the camera if you pressed on the down side of it you will get exposure compensation well it is also buried in the menu system where if you want to go through a lot of hassle and change, you could change it here or on the back side of the camera same feature s so that has a button on the back of the camera as well, but you can go in here in a gesture settings I like to leave my camera set at I s a one hundred as often as possible as light levels get low and I need faster shutter speeds I use hirai esos if you really don't know about I sos and you just need to get the camera out shooting pictures probably miss be simplest to leave it in auto, I so, but you're losing control of the camera, and I don't like that at all. Next up is white balance. We've talked about this before, but we can set it again in here, set it for the most appropriate light that you are in a time to get the best color auto white balance is a pretty good, safe choice if you're not sure what your next picture is going to be once again, we're seeing a lot of things for the second time around, so we're not going to spend a lot of time on these. The meter in mode multimedia ring works very good for a wide variety of scenarios I do like using spot meter for when you want to be very exact about some very small areas. Flash exposure, compensation. We talked about wanting to power down the flash on the camera because it often fires with a little bit too much power. If you are shooting people type shots so highly recommend minus point seven. Some people like it at minus point three, some liken it minus point one, but something in the slightly under category is probably going to look pretty good. Next up is the d r o dynamic range optimizer option, and I generally like to leave that. Turned off there is an hdr mode which stands for high dynamic range it's where the camera will shoot a series of pictures and combine them into one picture and I'm not a big fan of that you can try around and play around with it see if it works for you it can work quite well for a certain type of landscapes and architectural shots in general you're going to need to be on a tripod and shooting a subject that does not move and so for the most part I'm just gonna leave this turned off picture effect we did mention this before and this is the fun area of your camera for shooting goofy and weird looking photos that have popped color or a retro photo a look it's kind of instagram in a nice camera effect and so play around here but be careful about shooting important pictures here because once they're shot like this that's how they are it's very hard to change them from that mode keep scrolling down and you will get to creative style and this is something that you will get with jpeg images not raw images for the most part I would just recommend standard if you want tio there is another little secret and I am going to recommend for the advanced users portrait and the reason for this is not what you might think it's not that I think you're shooting portrait it's that this also affects the viewfinder, the color, the contrast, the saturation of what your viewfinder looks like and there's a lot of people with a camera have a slut a ll complaint that the in camera view finder is a little contrast e when they're viewing their images and it's hard to just focus unsee their image and so by putting it in the portrait mode, you're going to change the dynamics of the color in the viewfinder now for an advance from photographer who was shooting raw, the fact that your cameras and portrait has no impact on the final picture it just simply has an impact on the way it looks in the viewfinder and so that I have found actually makes the viewfinder much easier to work with it's just a better view in there, so try putting it in the portrait mode simply for the viewfinder aspect. But if you're shooting j pegs, be aware that it's going to tone down the colors in all of your images okay, we're going to move on to the playback menu and jim, since you said we're doing good, I'm going to continue on through this and check back at the end of play back and I'll pop in john if something really powerful comes up all right, thanks all right so getting into the playback so this is a short list of features that are involved specifically in the playback mode the camera has a delete button on the back of the camera, usually it's, thie soft key be this the button down towards the bottom corner of the screen, but you can dive into the menu and select images to delete. You can delete all the images in a folder or you can kind of select from a large group of images to delete still movie select. This is where you can go in and select which you want to look at the still images or the movie images. Remember, in this camera it files still pictures and video images in different files. I don't know why it just does. This is how you go in and switch and select between which group you want to look at. You could take the camera, you can hook it up to an hd tv so that you could do a slide show on it, and in the slide show mode you will go in and set up it's the specifics on how that show is going to look, are you going to repeat pictures? How long is the interval between shots? What type of images it's going to look for in the t show you in the slide show? You can take a look in there, we're not going to go into that one to me edginess class. All right viewing on the smartphone what you can do is you if you want this camera does have wifi and weaken view images and we're gonna go for a live demo here creative live and I'm gonna pull out my phone here you know let me turn on my camera and what I was going to do is I am going to find an image that I want to playback and here's a nice one of jim I'm going to hit the go back over here so you guys can see what I'm doing I don't want to just look at me playing with my camera right all right hit the playback so this is the image I want and I'm gonna hit the menu button and I'm going to go into the playback mode and I'm going to go view on smartphone this image ok so now it's looking for wifi and I'm going to come over to my phone and I'm gonna pull up my settings and I'm going to open up my wife I and I'm going to look for something over here in the camera direct be a blood letting up any x six and here it is direct blah blah blah any x six are going to select that is my wifi system and now I get the joy of entering in a password so pardon me while I typed in this password john we had this great quote from swinger who said and this is about the fundamentals class wow, this class is a plus amazing not only teaching me everything I need to know about how digital photography works, but also to get me out of the green autozone on my new dslr but everything that I will need to do and no down the road, I'm learning it in advance in john's class so that's great! Just a great quote about somebody who who really dug in and you guys dot class for ninety nine dollars is five full days of instruction, so if you are a newbie out there to photography, I would highly recommend that class actual that was a great time tore, yeah, all right, and it actually worked. I finally got it and there's a lot of capitals and chips and all that sort of stuff, but now if you can see on the camera, I have my little check mark by the wifi system. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna close out of my settings. I'm going to go into my wife, I camera applications into what can we have here? We have the sony play memories app, I'm going to open this up and look at this low and behold, we have our image, jim, and what we're gonna do is we're going to take a look at it and we're gonna copy it in come on there we go copy it it's downloading it to the camera and it has been copied now if I want I can go into my photos let's see where my photos here my photos yeah let's take a look and if I'm going to go horizontal there we are we can zoom in it's put it in pretty high resolution and this would be a very good image if we wanted tio facebook and send this out right now not going to do it right now but that's how you connect up your camera as faras downloading images for shooting we're going to do another demo in a little bit but that's just getting an image from the camera to the phone requires a little bit of work but once you have that wifi system set up this was the first time connection once it's set up is going to be much quicker and easier to set all right let's go back to the class all right so we went through those little steps choosing an image we went on the phone we put in the password and we opened the play memories mobile app which you can download at whatever app store that you go to okay next we could send it to a computer so if we do have a computer with wifi system we're not going to go through that right now but that could be done if you want to go through and read that instructions? If you're just going to connect your camera up vienna any hdmi cable you can view images on the tv, not a big feature you can hook your camera to a print, and once again, this is one of those things that I'm not going to spend a lot of time on, but you can print directly from the camera. I think you're better much better off getting your images into photo shop or something where you khun color, correct a little bit, adjust the size crop a little bit, but you can print directly from the camera and going to specify what size prince and how many copies and so forth keep scrolling on down, and one of the things you can see is in large image. This is the very long way of pressing that center button on the back of the camera. They do the exact same thing, it's just a magnified button, and I'm not sure why they put it in the menu system. You can rotate your images if you want this would be helpful if you are doing a slide show and you shot vertical images that are showing sideways on your camera, you could rotate them most of the time he will never need to use this. You could protect your images you khun select individual or groups of images so that you can't delete them, but be aware that you can still reform at your memory card and delete the images. So, uh, I would download your images as soon as possible when you play back movies. How loud is the speaker on the camera setting? Level number three is kind of middle of the road, not apply not a bad place to leave it display contents. And so this is what is this going on here? Okay, so after you have taken a picture, what shows up on the screen and display info is a good option on dh. So it's kind of doing the same thing is the display button on the back of the camera and so no display option is a good one to choose their okay, next is application, and this is where this camera is way different than any other camera that I've had to deal with before. So when you dive in here, even the menu looks very, very different. And so what you can do with this camera and we're not going to go through every single step because I actually did this last night, ran through the steps. What I wanted to do is I wanted to download an app from my home computer directly to my camera wirelessly and what I did is I had to hook my camera up to my wife I system at home and what you can do is you can go into application management and you can go through the various steps, but what you can do is then you could hook your camera up, veer your wifi system at home and you can go up to panasonic's website and you can download an app directly to your camera. And so last night I went in and I downloaded the smart remote control, and I'm going to see if I can do a live demo of remote control work so let's, take our camera here and let's turn on the menu and go over to applications, and as you can see, I have this smart, remote control that I have downloaded took me just a couple of minutes, two minutes to download it and what's weird about this is that a lot of the aps that are available cost money, and so they could have made the camera with these additional features, but they're making them for extra money and you, maya. And for those of you who don't know the history, this totally is in sync with this line of cameras because back, okay, I'm gonna date myself back in the what early nineties, minolta had a camera that had something that looks very eerily like a card door that you would slip memory cards in but it wasn't a memory card it was a card, it was a program where you could shoot portrait mode landscape mode and you would buy a card so that you could shoot sports in your camera and it would adjust shutter speeds and apertures and the features of the camera and you'd buy these all these different modes of the close up mode and travel mode and all of these cards and you'd have this card holder that had twenty different cards that you paid twenty, thirty, forty bucks apiece so that you could plug him into your camera. All right? And so now you can buy all these aps and you can put him on your camera. Now the first one is free and I think that it's free well so that you get to know their website and you can go in and she was it nice and easily and they get you hook that way. All right? So let's, go in here and I'm going to choose the smart, remote control and now I'm going to go over to my phone turned my phone on and language go back out of this and I'm going to open up my play memories and we're going to see what we get here reconnect no shooting device connected that's not what I was hoping for boy jamie if you get I know you've got a question you get another go for throw a question from judith yeah I'm just having the wife I sitting on on affect the battery time do you know absolutely yes ok both my phone and the camera and it is deadly okay, thank you very much for that question because now we've been able to hook up s oh yes it's deadly on the battery. Okay, so last thing you want, tio battery life is important and do you mind reiterating our favorite thing about this battery? The fact that that it takes five hours are unless you buy the extra charger ok, so I'm going to go back to play memories and cross your fingers everybody not got nearby would I think it's working folks bingo! Come on, come on, come on! There we go. Okay, so let's do something weird here let's leave the phone here and I'm going to move the camera and point the camera back at the audience which is really just a camera and so it seems a little dark I'm going to change it to program just to make things simple and we can kind of see where the cameras pointed at all though it does seem quite dark let's see if we can go into live you quality image quality priority we don't have too many options in here I'm going toe change the s o coming over here on the camera I didn't do it looks like you're at two hundred now is that right? Yeah well you can see that over there why is it so dark? That's just seems though there we go it's nice and right now so folks you can see yourself on camera back there and if we want to shoot a picture notice the delay let's let's try this again no it's fetching it it's now delivered it back to the phone let's go back to a live view and so here we are wave, wave wave and we're going to take a picture one that was pretty quick that was just on second and so a little bit quicker I didn't look too good in that one let me try to look a little bit better on this one you should have the audience smile to oh yes and so we could go in and hit the share button on this and we could send this up we could air drop it we could mail it we could message it if we want tio and we can go in here and see audience there you are there's your camera wave to yourself okay so remote app works that's a little bit on how to do it there's a lots of other things we don't have kind of the time and resource is to go through connecting it up to a computer and so forth, but it's one of the few cameras that does wifi, one of the many things that's being done on a lot of the newer cameras today, and john one of the questions we had earlier from yesterday and so we just mentioned again, is sending sub to facebook doesn't do it directly, but in sort of around about sort of a way you can well in this way, you can shoot on the camera, it sends it to your phone, and then you can upload it to facebook at that point. But it's not going to go directly from the camera. It's going because the camera has wifi, which is only good for what, fifty feet and so it's got to go to a cellular device or phone or computer in order to get their right. And so it's, not a direct one step facebook addition. Ok, good, you think, you know all right. So what you can do is you can go to play memories camera aps dot com and you can go and you can buy all these remote, but the one that we just used right here, which was the smart, remote control that one is free. And so that's. A good one to spend a few minutes and go in and download. And you will be able to access and keep all those and organize those and work with those here within the application. Settee.