Lessons

Lesson Info

Custom Menu Overview & AF/MF Menu

Okay, so we're moving along pretty quickly along the menu system, and now we get to a thing called the Custom menu. And I've always wondered what it was like in the Olympus board room when they were deciding what things go where in the menu system, because it seemed like they just dumped everything into the custom menu, because this is bigger than the rest of the menu system on its own. And this, this is the heart and soul off the menu system. Now it is broken up into lettered sections, a through K, and at first I gotta admit, this just made no sense to me. But I think I have made some sense of this. And so if you want to remember where things are in the menu, here's how I recommended a. What is a for is for auto focus, and so there's all sorts of things dealing with autofocus. B is for buttons and dials in there, of course. See, release this one's a little bit harder. Work release. There's lots of sea sound in there. DS for displays. That's pretty easy. He's for exposures. That's easy...

. F for flash, of course. G for quality color White balance. Giant Prince means you gotta have really high quality. So that's all the stuff under G H Under for recording the race, and I think of here today. Gone tomorrow. What's how you deleting photographs? I movie Will. My movie is an Apple program, so that's kind of easy to remember. J for Built in DVF makes no sense, so it's John likes. And even if I really like an E V f on a camera, and so you can think of that and the best one is K Que utility. So I thought Utility Belt, who has a utility belt? The Dark Knight has a utility belt, so think of Batman has a utility belt, and that's how you remember where all those other utility features are. So let's get into the custom menu. We're going to start with Letter a subject's dealing with auto focus and manual focus. So the auto focus mode on this camera, this is where we get to choose single or continuous or some other form of focusing and so single autofocus is how we're going to use our camera most of the time. But I think a lot of photographers are gonna like to use this camera in the quote unquote manual focus mode because when you put it in the manual focus mode, the function one button on the back of the camera can then become your back button focusing. So if anyone is interested in enjoys back button focusing, put your camera in the manual focus mode and then we're gonna tweak this as we go forward so that this back button will control the focusing on the camera. All right, so the second half of this is you can control how the camera works separately. Verse in still pictures versus the movie mode. So if you have one preference for stills and one preference for movies, you can separate those two. So the camera isn't just doing the same thing all the time. All right, next up is full time auto focus, and what the camera is going to do here is it's gonna focus all the time, even when the shutter is not released and the camera may focus a little bit quicker, but you're gonna go through batteries much more quickly, and so I recommend turning this off the auto exposure and autofocus lock button. And so that is the function one button on the back of the camera. And so you'll be able to control what this camera does in the different focusing modes. And so the third option, which is the manual focus option when the camera is in manual focus. What do you want that back button to do? And so if you put it in Mode three, it will put that button into an auto focus state so that even though the camera is in manual focus, you can override by pressing that button. And so this becomes a really easy way for back button focusing. I'm not going to get into the whole benefits and drawbacks of it here, but I know there's many of you who have tried it and use back button focusing, and this is the best way to do it on this camera. In fact, I think it may be the only way of doing it on this camera, but it's how I leave my camera set up most of the time because I like to be able to shoot and recompose without leaving my finger halfway down on the shutter and doing that with the back button focusing makes that whole process a lot easier. And so put the MF in mode three. If you like that back button focusing option, do you want your lens to reset back to the infinity setting when you turn the camera on and off? And for most people, I think this would be a good idea just cause that's a good, normal state for the lens to be in. But if you're doing, I don't know nighttime focusing and you're doing manual focusing, and you really want specific control of the Cameron. You might be turning it on and off, but you don't want the features in the focusing to change. Then you could possibly leave it off. And that way it doesn't change any focus settings that you might have had. If you're doing nighttime exposures, probably be the best time that I think of that. Next up is bulb timer focusing, and so this is kind of interesting on this one. It allows well what it allows you to do. It allows you to focus while the camera is in the bulb mode. Now your average person isn't gonna want to touch the camera when it's in the ball boat as faras focusing, but somebody who's trying to do something creative. Maybe you're shooting fireworks, and you want to change the focus as you're shooting the exposure. You might want to be able to leave that turned on. If you're coming from Nikon or Canon or some other brand, you might have a preference in the way that the lens focuses, as far as which direction you turn it in order to get infinity versus close up focusing. And so the clockwise option is for the Nikon users because they focus backwards compared to everybody else. And the counterclockwise is how most everyone else is gonna prefer. They're focusing system. The manual focus assist is something that you can turn on and off, and let's go ahead and take a look at a video example of what this means. And so when you manually focus, it zooms in five times magnification, and you could go further if you want, and then you can move it around so that you can manually focus very, very clearly. And so for manual focusing, getting the sharpest focus that is the best system for focusing another system that some people like is what's called focus peaky, and what this does is it takes areas that are in focus, and it highlights them with a particular color. In this case, that color just happens to be white. But you can see as we focus, you can actually see the depth of field that you get in any one of those particular places. And so if you're somebody who likes to manual focus, there's a good chance that you're going toe like to have this magnifying or peeking turned on. And if you want, you can leave them both turned on so that you see both of them at the same time. It gets to be a little distracting. It can be kind of hard for composition, so you'll need to play around to see what works for your type of photography. So going on to the next page of auto focus feature settings, you can program one of the buttons, for instance. For instance, function one or two to reset your focusing point to a particular place. You can choose a single point, and you can choose which button you want to have it, and this allows you to either choose a single point all points and which button you're going to use to program that and so simple option. If you want to reset the focusing on a regular basis, the A F illuminator will help focus. Help the autofocus system in low light by shining out this fairly bright orange light and from a technical, a technical, techno hot technological point of view. It is very interesting, but from a subject point of view and a another photographer point of view, it's really annoying having this light committee or camera turn on. And so it's something I recommend turning off if you're good with the focusing system and you know where to point your camera. You don't really need this light because it's not that powerful to begin with. And so I recommend turning it off to be unobtrusive to other photographers and other people around you. Face priority. We've seen this a couple of times in the focusing system, and we can do it on or off and focusing on different eyes. The air F area pointer will simply let you know where you are focused at, and so what happens is it flashes in green when you have locked in focused on a particular area. Some people don't like that because it covers up a bit of the frame lines, and I generally like it cause you can really see what the camera has chosen to focus on. So I think it's a very helpful Pete piece of information. The F targeting pad is kind of cool because you can use the back of the camera to determine where you are focused at. And so it's just a touch pad. And as you move your finger left, your focus point moves to the left side. And so I think this is something anybody who enjoys touch screens is definitely gonna want to leave. Turned on if you find that your nose is bumping onto the screen or that you just yep, thumbs that move over there that start changing the focus point that you didn't want. You may want to turn this off the manual focus clutch on some cameras. There is a clutch option on the lenses is in fact, let's get a close up shot of my lands here because this lands has that option on it. And so on this lens. If I want to go to manual focus. I can pull the lens backwards or I can push it forwards. And so this is the manual focus option. And this is the autofocus option. And this is kind of a new feature on Olympus cameras. Some people accidentally will do this and they go into auto focus in their camera doesn't work. And so if you're thinking that, you know, I always want autofocus, and I never used this particular feature in my camera. You can turn this inoperative so the clutch doesn't do anything on your lens at all. I like it because I like to be able to go into manual focus very easily. But if you don't like this option, you can choose in operative, and that way, that clutch has no effect on your photography. All right, we've made it on to a letter B. So we have a lot of customization with buttons and levers and dials in here. And so here on screen are all the different buttons that we can go in and program and change. And so you would simply select which function you want. Go to the right and select which feature you would like to use for that particular function. And so this is something that I have found. It's good to go in and adjust, but be a little flexible because you're gonna find as you use the camera, how you use it changes and you're gonna go in and you're gonna want to come back and check out these things and adjust them according to your needs and so fully go in there and make your camera your very own.