Lessons

Lesson Info

Set Up Menu

All right. Getting into the Set Up here. This is actually a very big section in here, and this is where you get to tweak a lot of little fine tune controls about the way your camera is set up for you. First up, dealing with image quality. You can format the memory card. You want to do this on a regular basis. Remember, it's here under User Settings. A lot of people forget about this one. You can set your date and time according to location you're at. When you fly to a new time zone, you don't have to change the clock, just change where your local time is. Language, for the many different languages. My Menu setting. This is pretty important. At the end of this, the next big setting is My Menu, where you get to choose what is in your menu, and here is where you get to make that choice about what is in My Menu. And so, all these different items that we've been talking about through the menu system, find half dozen or a dozen of these that are really important to you, come in here into My ...

Menu, add those items, and then rank them, you can move them up and down according to the importance. And then when you hit the menu, rather than getting lost in the big menu system that this camera has, it goes directly to My Menu, where it's got your favorites. And so these are just your favorite features that you need to use in there. If you need to do a sensor cleaning, the camera has an automatic sensor cleaning built into the system that tries to knock the dust off. If you do need to manually clean it yourself, step one is pretty easy, using one of those air blowers. If it gets pretty bad, and you're careful, you can use a swab and liquid system to go in and swipe the dust off of the sensor. If you don't feel comfortable doing this, you may want to turn the camera into a repair shop. Sound in flash. If you want to just turn off all of the stuff so that your camera doesn't make any announcements that you're there shooting photos, you might want to turn this off. If you want to reset the functions on the camera back to the factory default, you can do so here without having to go through and find every single item. So those are your user settings. Next major group is sound set up. And so there's a lot of individual things that you can have turned on or off. The beeping of the autofocus, turn that off, don't distract other people. And so there's a lot of individual things in here and pretty much all of them, I'm going to recommend turning off. I don't think cameras making noises is a necessary thing for the most part. That might be helpful in a few situations, so I'm not saying never use it. It's just, as a practice, it's probably best not to have these things on. And we can shoot with a completely silent shutter if we want. If you do want to have a sound, there's different sounds to the shutter that you can choose. One area where I don't mind hearing some sound is when I'm playing back a movie I recorded. Sometimes I want to hear the dialogue of what's going on in there and so you can control that with this setting. Next up, set up for the screens. Lot of different information screens that we can see. Some core things like the brightness of the screen, I would normally leave in manual, so that it doesn't adjust as you move your eye around. If the color's not right, you can adjust it. Hopefully, you won't need to change this, most likely you will not need to change this at all. The LCD brightness on the back of the camera, that normally I'd leave at zero, unless it's really bright out, and then you may need to brighten this up. If you're working out and it's dark, you may need to darken it a little bit. But in general, leaving it at zero should be fine most of the time. If the color is a little bit off on the LCD, you can adjust it on this yellow to blue scale as well. Hopefully, you won't, most likely you won't. Image Display. After you shoot a photograph, do you want to see an image on the back of the camera? Well, for a basic user getting started, it's kind of nice to see the results of what you've been doing, but with an electronic viewfinder, you get to see the color and what your image is really going to look like digitally before you shoot the photograph. And so, why waste the time after the photograph if you already know what it's going to look like? And so for a lot of more advanced photographers, they have turned this off and it has speeded up the shooting process, because they don't have to go back and review every image. EVF Autorotate Displays. I like this one. So when you rotate it, it's going to rotate the information so that it's easier for you to see. Preview Exposure and White Balance in the Manual Mode. And so when you're looking at the camera's viewfinder display, do you want the camera to show you what the picture is going to look like? In most cases, yes. There's a few exceptions where you may not want that. And so as an example, previewing the exposure and white balance, you can see as my exposure is changing, the picture is getting lighter and darker and it's very easy to see what's too bright and what's too dark. If you want, you can always get the perfect view on the screen and just have the image sensor moving up and down by choosing Preview White Balance. And so you have the white balance corrected for you, but you're using the exposure indicator on the left to judge the correct exposure. You can turn everything off so that you're getting the actual color of the lights and you're using the meter to judge whether you have the correct brightness. If you're doing flash photography, that's where you might want to choose Preview White Balance or having it turned off. For general photography, I think Preview Exposure and White Balance is the smart option. Somewhat similarly related to that is the Preview Picture Effect. And so if you're going to choose a Film Simulation, do you want to see that in the viewfinder? And most people would say, "Well yeah, that's the type of picture I'm trying to shoot." And that's what makes sense most of the time. The exception is when that preview is so heavily filtered you're having a hard time composing and focusing your shot. So most of the time, you're going to want to leave this on, but there may be a case where you want to turn it off so that you're getting just a good clean image out of the camera, not one that's filtered. We talked about the framing guidelines. This is where you get to choose whether it's the 9, the 24, or the HD framing. And so that's just choosing what frame you get, but we still haven't put it on yet. That's coming up in a moment. Autorotate Playback will automatically rotate images, and I would leave this turned off because if you just simply turn the camera, you will get a larger image on the back of your camera, which is all the easier to see it with. Inside the viewfinder, you can have this focusing scale in meters or feet, so choose according to your norms. Display Custom Setting. So all these little displays in the viewfinder, you can go in and check on and off everything that you want. And so the two different options here is uncheck everything, and then go check the few items you want or check everything, see how bad it looks, and then start taking off the things that you know you don't use on a regular basis. Button and Dial Setting. This is where we get to customize the buttons and dials on the camera. And so first up is the Quick Menu. And so in the Quick Menu, we talked about reprogramming this. If you recall, you could press the Q button for I think two or three seconds and it would allow you to get in here and change it, but this is where you do it in the menu system. Go through this, eliminate all the things that you don't use, find things that you do use, and organize it for what makes sense to you. The buttons on the camera. So we have the function button, we have the AEL, AFL button, the rear dial, which is also a button, functions two through five buttons, these can all be reprogrammed to what you find most necessary. And so you're going to see a little graphic that's going to show you where that button is, go to the right, and go through and choose which feature you want attributed to that button. At the back of the camera, the selector buttons can be used as function buttons, which I think is very valuable, but if you do a lot of focusing changes, you might want to change it to focusing area. The problem with changing it to focusing area is it just took away four shortcut buttons but there are lots of other shortcuts on this camera, so there's plenty of workarounds if you do want to use it for focus area. The Command Dial Setting. If you're not happy with the settings of the front and rear dial and would like to reverse them, you can do so here. If you want to disconnect the autofocus system that is connected to the shutter release, you can do so here. So if there are hardcore back button autofocusers out there, this is what you might want to turn off so that your camera is not focusing when you press down on the shutter release. The shortcut around this is manual focus, the back button is back button focus in that situation as well. But if you want to turn it off when it's in the focusing modes, you can turn it off here. The Shutter Autoexposure Lock. So normally when you press down on the shutter release, the camera is going to do a meter lock system when this is turned on. If this is turned off, the camera will meter and will actively remeter new areas as you move the camera around. And I've gone back and forth as to which one I think is best, but currently, I'm thinking it's best to leave the meter locked off when you press halfway down. If you're going to be mounting with lens adaptors or telescopes or something like that and you still want the camera to fire, you may need to turn this on because otherwise, the camera won't want to shoot unless there's an actual lens on the camera. If you want to change the way the lens focuses, you come from Nikon or Canon, there's different ways that the lens will focus towards infinity, you can switch it out here. So the autofocus and autoexposure lock buttons could either be pressing buttons where you're pressing and holding them down, or you just press it once and it kind of turns on, press it again, and it turns off. It depends on how you like it whether it's pressing or as a switch button. The aperture setting when you are using the lenses that do not have aperture controls on them will be controlled with the back dial on the camera. And as you go from the wide to the narrow aperture, do you want the automatic setting to be a part of that as well? And so it's only going to be of concern to a few people who have those lenses with no apertures. You can turn the touchscreen on or off. Depends on if you use that and like that feature. For power management, we have a whole bunch of different features in here for controlling how fast it uses power. How quickly does the camera power down? One minute seems pretty reasonable to me. The performance, we have standard and high performance. And that's going to affect the autofocus, the refresh rate in the viewfinder, and the battery life. And so if you want to get the most performance from it, it's going to cost you a little bit in battery life, but I tend to like to get the most performance from these cameras, and so I'm willing to have an extra battery around so that I can use...get the fastest autofocus and get the most comfortable viewfinder with the highest quality refresh rate. Saving data. So a lot of information about the cards in here. And so frame number is automatically set through numbers 1 through 10,000. It continues on itself. If you want to reset it to zero, you can redo it. Generally, it's not necessary. You do want to save the original image. This comes in from those red eye reduction options that the camera will fix for you. Normally, it'll fix the red eye, just save the new version and delete the old photograph. I kind of want to keep the old photograph around in case it didn't get it right and I want to go back to that original image and work with that. If you don't like the filename, you can put your initials in or your business initials or something like that in, and it's going to change the first three or four letter code on the filenames that you have of your images. And then you can go in and use a little keyboard to type in those letters. Great place to add in your contact information is in the copyright info area. You can have your author ID, you can have your copyright in here, you can put your e-mail address in case your camera gets lost, it's a low level of protection or putting your name on your camera for protection if it gets stolen and it gets found, you can say, "Hey, my name is right there. I'm the owner of that camera." It's also good because it'll add that information to the metadata of your photograph and so as your images are distributed and put different places of people trying to get a hold of you, they can find out who you are. Connection settings. And so here is going to deal with some of the wireless options. It's kind of the behind the scenes stuff that most of us aren't going to need to worry about, so getting into the wireless settings than the general settings. So menu within menu within menu, you can change the name of the camera, if you have multiple cameras of the same model. You could reset all the settings if you've been messing around and just want it to get back to the factory standards. Usually, the camera is going to want to resize the image so that it can quickly send it over WiFi signal to your phone, which makes sense for most online purposes. You can also have the camera hooked up to save directly to a PC computer. Not many people do this but it is possible to do that under the PC autosave settings. Most people are going to just take the memory card out of the camera to do that. Geotagging set up. And so if you want to add geotag information from your phone to your camera, you can have that information send across. Normally, I leave that turned off because it uses up a lot of battery power on your phone and your camera. You can add location information, and this is where you were last downloading images rather than where the actual images were shot. And then you can also hook up to a printer wirelessly and this will connect up with the appropriate printer with the filename.