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Backside: Function Button Part 2

Alright, next up is dealing with exposure, Exposure Compensation. And so, if you are in Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, or Program, and you want to vary the exposure a little bit, you can dial it down to a minus exposure to reduce the exposure or you can go to the plus side to get a brighter exposure and this is gonna be a great way if you take a photograph in one of those modes and you're thinking, that just doesn't look quite right like reality, the camera is designed to photograph things that are 18% gray, which is kind of the average of everything, you might say. But not everything is 18% gray, so if you have something that's very dark, you're gonna go to the minus side. If it's very bright, you're gonna probably have to dial it to the plus side. Most important thing on this particular feature in my mind is resetting it to zero, 'cause you do not want to leave it at minus three as you continue taking photos for the rest of your vacation. Be a very bad idea. Okay, continuing ou...

r way around, next up, not really something that we can change, it's just a little indicator to let you know what mode you are in and this is very helpful when the camera's on a tripod and it might be up kind of high, you can't see the top of the camera. Turn the dial, just look at the back of the camera. You'll see where you are in what mode. Okay, next up we have, come on, key note, there we go. Creative Style. And so when you are shooting JPEG's on this camera and we'll talk more about JPEG's in raw, but if you are shooting in JPEG, the camera is controlling the colors and the processing of your particular image and you can go in and tell it to do one style or another. For the most part, I would leave it in the Standard, which is gonna be good, basic, natural basic look to your photographs, but if you're shooting landscapes, you might want to put it in the Vivid. If you are shooting people, you might want to put it a little bit more Neutral so that the colors aren't too saturated. And so, there's a lot of little tweaks you can do in here, so I want to show you a quick little demo on this, so let's go ahead and get my camera set up. I'm gonna hit the Function button and I'm gonna come on down to the Creative Style. I'm gonna hit the Set button in here and over here on the left, you can see that I can choose any of the different modes. Let me straighten that up for you, guys. Alright, so we can see all these different modes in here. It's telling you what we're gonna do. But we can take one of them, let's go to Landscape mode, and I can go to the right and now I can come down here and I can change the contrast levels. If I want it even more contrasty or a little less contrasty, I can do as many different tweaks on the, what do we have, we have contrast, saturation, and the sharpness of that particular photograph and you might want to play around. If you're not getting the exact quality look to your images that you would like, you can go in and change this. Now, once again, this is only impacting JPEG's. It is not impacting RAW images. But if you've ever not been satisfied with the way that all of your photos kind of come out on a regular basis, you can do this in here. Now, I think this is a little bit of fiddly work to try to adjust this on every single photograph and so I'm not suggesting that you go in and change it on every photograph but you're welcome to if you want to. And another way around this whole scenario is to shoot RAW and then tweak images later on. But if you shoot JPEG's on a regular basis and you want to tweak them in a consistent way, that's how you do it. Okay, next up is DRR, DRO/Auto HDR. So this stands for Dynamic Range Optimizer and High Dynamic Range. This is dealing with a common problem in photography of exposure latitude and exposure contrast, where you might have a subject that is in the shadows or parts that are very, very bright. So I wanted to run through a quick little test of what this camera can do and so I just wanted to set a little something up in the studio. And so I have my little miniature camera in a very shadowed area. Now, in the DRO option, the Dynamic Range Optimizer, what it's doing is it's shooting a single shot and it then is trying to brighten the shadows to various levels. And so, as you increase the levels up to Level 5, you can see those pictures are becoming brighter and brighter and you can see the object in the shadow more clearly. And what it's doing is it's shooting a JPEG image and it's just adjusting the levels of the shadow areas and making them brighter. Now, a similar one is the High Dynamic Range option, but in this case, it's actually shooting multiple exposures to increase the lightness of the shadows. So you do need to have your camera on a tripod or at least held very, very still in order for this to work. And it can tend to do a little bit better job if that's the goal of lightening the shadows. But these again, are working in JPEG only options. This is not in RAW and to be honest with you, if you shoot RAW, you'll be able to do this because you'll inherently be getting this information from the photo itself. And so the question is, do you want the camera to do it for you at that time, or do you want to do it later? And there's good reasons for both. I mean, if you want to do it later, you're gonna have more specific control and you'll be able to tailor your adjustment exactly to the needs of that photograph and ultimately, you'll end up with a better result. If you want to let the camera do it, well then you don't need to worry about it later. You don't have another project to work on once you download it to your computer. So, that's what it does, and once again, the big difference between the two is the DRO does it in one shot, the HDR uses multiple shots in order to accomplish the same or similar type effect. Normally, that's gonna be left in the Off mode. Next up is our White Balance. This is our color control of the camera because the camera doesn't always know what type of light that you are shooting under. There are a lot of different options and different types of light sources that might be illuminating your subject. And so, light can be based on many different colors and it ranges on this Kelvin Scale from red to blue at different Kelvin temperatures. So we have a lot of natural situations, like our Daylight, Cloudy, and Shade that are pretty close but are slightly different from each other. We have a lot of different types of light bulbs that we work with. The incandescent or Tungsten lights are those really orange ones and you're gonna end up with some very orange look to your subjects if you're using your camera in that situation but you don't have your camera at the Incandescent setting. The fluorescent light bulbs have changed quite a bit in recent years and there are as many different types of light bulbs that you can buy that have different colors to them. And you'll see this when you buy these fluorescent bulbs and you can correct for any and just about all of them here in the camera 'cause it has so many different options between the Warm, the Cool, the Day, and the Daylight Fluorescent ones. Now there are still more options. There's another one for Underwater if you're gonna put your camera in a waterproof housing. There is a Color Temperature Filter, which basically means you can dial in the Kelvin temperature. If you knew specifically, you're in a studio or an office space that had a very specific light source to it, you could dial in 6300 and that's gonna be the color temperature in the camera. That can be also helpful if you are shooting with multiple cameras and you want all of them to have exactly the same color reading on it. Another option is the Custom mode. And what's happening here is that you would need to photograph a white sheet of paper. The camera would then look at the color on that white sheet of paper, determine what is reflecting off of it and then correct for it. So this might be a good way to get the right color when you don't know what the right color is supposed to be. And finally, Auto White Balance. And this is where the camera will look at the information coming in on the sensor. It's gonna look most closely at the highlight information. And it's gonna try to determine if that highlight information is more to the yellow side or more to the blue side and then it's gonna adjust the white balance accordingly. And as many of you know by this point, I like to manually control things in my camera, but I'll be honest with you, this is one of the things that I leave on Automatic virtually all the time. And that's partially because I shoot RAW and I can fix it later if I need to. But my default system is to leave it in Auto because it does a pretty good job. And if I notice something just seems amiss and the colors are awkward and I'm having a hard time reading the images off the back of my camera, I will then switch it to the appropriate setting that I think is best for that situation according to the light. And so this is something, I think it's best just to leave it at Auto and adjust as necessary. If you are a JPEG shooter, you do need to be a little bit more up on your game, you might say, when it comes to changing this. You need to be a little bit more conscious of that. Alright, next up is our metering system. And so this is how your camera is reading light as far as the brightness values of light to dark. We have three different systems that we can choose from. The Multi-Pattern Metering system breaks the scene up into lots of little boxes and compares and contrasts them and runs it through an algorithm and comes with a magical good exposure for that. Center-weighted is a more traditional system where it just looks in the middle of the frame and looks at the outer part of the frame less and less and less and just kind of fades out. The Spot Metering is dedicated to a very small area directly in the middle. Now, the Multi-Frame is using 1200 zones for its focusing system and it does an amazingly good job and so like the Auto White Balance before, the Multi-Pattern Metering system will in general give you a very, very good exposure and is what I think most photographers leave their cameras set at a good portion of the time. And so that is definitely the recommended place to be leaving the camera most of the time. I think if I was gonna switch modes, I would occasionally go to a Spot mode, but that would be one of those very particular cases where I just needed it for a few readings and then I would put it back into the Multi mode. The final option here is the ISO and this is the sensitivity of the sensor. So the natural, normal, native sensitivity of this sensor is ISO 100, which means that is where you're gonna get the cleanest, best information off the sensor and you will adjust it to a higher number if you need a faster shutter speed for the most part. So let's take a look at how good the ISO is in this camera. So I ran it through my standard test just to take a close look at what it looks like and obviously, it's very clean at 1, 2, 400, and then it starts getting a little bit worse as we get into the higher numbers. And if you don't have a good eye on your screen right now, I'll just give you my verbal analysis of this. 51 thousand is very noisy, as is 25 thousand and I would really try to avoid those at all costs. The 12,800 is not bad for a camera of this sensor but it's clearly not real good. I think everything from 800 and down below is like perfectly clean. Everything up to 3,200 is still very, very acceptable for a lot of situations and I think that falling off the edge happens somewhere between the 3,200, 6,400, and 12,800. And you'll wanna do maybe a little test with your camera to see how it does in a matter of your own opinion. And you'll kinda see where the upper limit that you're comfortable shooting. But 3,200 is pretty darn clean, especially for this medium-sized sensor in this camera. And that is our final item in the Function menu. Now, as I mentioned before, these 12 items are items that you get to choose in here. If you have found that you don't really like the positioning or you want to put two items that you think work better side by side, you can change the order, or you can dive into the menu and find out a whole bunch of new things that you would rather have in here because this is gonna be a shortcut and it's a very good shortcut for diving into the menu for any type of feature that you want to change. And so, I highly recommend customizing this into a way that really works for you and your camera. And that is all. The Function button, which I consider the shortcut to some of the most important features in the menu system.