Lessons

Lesson Info

Custom Settings: Pages 5-8

All right folks, well, we're midway through the menu section, so it is time to continue our way through this. So we are on page five in our custom settings. And here we have one of our focus priority settings, and this is focus set in AF-S, so obviously deals with the auto-focus single focusing option. And we have the option of either biasing the camera to auto-focus and get that absolutely perfect, or we can have it just shoot the picture whenever we press down on it. Right now it is on balanced emphasis, which means the camera is trying to get very sharp focus, but with letting it get its actual shot, and so balanced emphasis seems to be pretty good for most people. I would be very wary about putting it in the release mode, and this is where it will shoot a picture any time you press down on the button. The AF mode could be good for some people if they're not getting sharp photos, as many sharp photos as they think they should be. This will give the camera a little bit more time to f...

ocus before it shoots the photo. The down side to being in AF is the camera will be a little less responsive to you pressing down on the button and actually getting photographs. And so, balance emphasis is an in-between setting, which I think is probably fine for most people. Next up is the same concept but in the continuous focusing option here. Do you want to have the camera auto-focus and get that absolutely perfect before you shoot, or do you want to have the camera just be able to release? And so I would say the best place to be is at the balanced emphasis to start with, and if the camera is not responsive enough for you, to go to the release option. If you're not getting enough pictures in quality focus, go to the auto-focus setting on it. And so, it's gonna be a little bit of experimentation to see if you need to tweak with that. All right, auto-focus with shutter, and so this, for the most part, is back button focusing, so we're talking about the back button focusing right now. When you press down on the shutter release, do you want the camera to focus? That's essentially the question. For those of you who want back button focusing, you need to turn this off. And this is something that a lot of our intermediate and more advanced users are gonna want to do. For someone new to the camera, that might be a little bit awkward using two buttons for focus. Now, the second half of back button focusing is that on the back of the camera, you're probably gonna want to assign the AF/MF button to focus, and we're gonna still get to that button. We haven't got yet to the custom function buttons yet. But you're gonna need to assign a second button to focus. It could be whatever button you want. You could do the C1 button up on the top of the camera. And so you've got a separate button for focusing that's different than your shutter release. All right, when you press down on the shutter release halfway, do you want it to lock the exposure? And for many of the more advanced photographers, they're gonna do their own manual exposure and they're not gonna need this. Some people like to have the exposure locked. Some people don't. This is your choice of doing it. Now there is an auto option, and it will lock the exposure when you are in the AF-S single focusing system. It will not lock it if you are in the continuous focusing 'cause it's likely that you're focusing on a moving subject that's moving all around and you want your exposure to adjust as your focusing is adjusting as well. And so myself, I don't use this very much, and so I would turn it off, but some more basic user, entry level user on this, the auto setting is gonna be a nice simple way of locking in the exposure for moving the composition around but locking in the light levels. Next up is silent shooting, and so there's gonna be an on/off option on this, and before we give you a recommendation on what to do here, we need to talk a little bit about what silent shooting is, and what's going on. So let's take a look at our image sensor. Now, under normal shutter operation, we have our four shutter blades on the top and our four shutter blades on the bottom, which is our first curtain and our second curtain. And so when we take a photo, the first one closes and then opens, and as it opens, there's gonna be a little bit of vibration because it's opening very, very quickly and there could be a little bit of movement right during the exposure, and then the second curtain will come in and close, there we go, and finish the exposure, and so if we don't want that vibration in the camera, we can turn on this electronic shutter. And so there is something called e-front curtain shutter. It's an electronic front curtain shutter. So now as you look through the camera, the sensor is exposed to light and when it's time to take a photo, what it does is it electronically turns on those pixels, starts recording the light, and then the second curtain closes the shutter. And so it's part electronic, part mechanical in the fact that the one shutter is electronic and the second one is mechanical. Now the next option is a silent shutter and this is where it is all electronic, electronic first curtain, electronic second curtain, and what that really means is that the pixels scan their way on and off, and because of the type of sensor, it's a CMOS sensor, and it's not able to turn all of the pixels on and all of the pixels off at the same time. It goes through this scanning process where it does one row at a time. And as you might imagine, if anything moves while we're scanning, something funny is going to happen. And so I wanted to do a test, and so I just photographed a test chart, and I used a normal mechanical shutter and then I used an electronic front curtain shutter, and I was panning right to left while I took this photo, which is why they are somewhat out of focus. And they look what I would call out of focus, but they're normal, and here's what happens when I shot with a silent shutter, and it's because I was moving the camera. These lines were in slightly different areas, and I said well, that's at 2/50th of a second. What about a faster shutter speed, would that do a better job at stopping the motion? Well, it is sharper but we still get this, what we call a Jello effect. For anyone that shoots video, with the modern cameras this is a big problem is that moving the camera causes vertical lines to move. Now what does it look like out in the real world? Well, if I am panning with a car down the street, you'll notice that the lines of the building behind the car are no longer looking straight, and very much mimic that grid pattern to the left. The other option is to leave the camera perfectly still and let something go right in front of it, and so in this case I have a bicyclist riding down the bike path, and you can see those wheels are not exactly circular. They're a little bit oval, and that's because the camera is going through a scanning process, and anything that moves will be distorted. So when it comes to silent shooting, which is no shutter action at all, it's all electronic, we're not gonna be able to use this with a multitude of different features in the camera, so there's a whole lot of parameters where things are not going to work out, and there's some other problems that we have when we have the silent shooting, mostly that rolling shutter and the Jello effect that we get when we're shooting video, but anything that's moving may have problems. We may get more noise, we may get some banding. Now the reason that we would want to use silent shutter is because it's very, very quiet, as I will demonstrate here in just a moment. And so we actually have two options on our camera. One is silent shooting and I would normally leave this turned off because of all those problems that we just talked about. And then there is the, let's go to the next one. The next one is electronic front curtain shutter, and that does not have the same problems as the silent mode. So I want to do a little audio check with you here, and we're gonna be putting our camera, if we want to show the back of the camera here, you can see what modes we're in. So let's go down here and make sure both of these are turned off right now, so silent shutter is turned off. Electronic front curtain shutter is turned off, and for right now what I'm gonna do is I am gonna turn on the motor drive to a low so that we can hear several shots being taken. So this is normal shutter, I'm gonna hold up the microphone sorta close to this, and here we go. (shutter clicking) So the shutter's closing and opening with every single one of those. Next up what I'm gonna do is I am gonna change it to an electronic front curtain shutter, and I guess before I do that, I am gonna change my testing, 'cause I want you to hear this a little differently. I want to do just a single shot so that they're not confused by so many shots, so here's single. (shutter clicking) And you can kinda hear, it sounds like almost two, and that's because it needs to close and then it needs to open again. And so now I'm gonna change it to an electronic front curtain shutter. (camera clicking) And now you don't hear that double sound because we have an electronic shutter on the first part of it. Now I'm gonna go ahead and change it to silent shutter. And you're gonna have to listen really carefully because there is no sound, it's silent. I am honestly taking photos here. In fact, I will prove it, so I'm gonna hold this up in front and so, those pictures are being taken. And so if you wanted to be extremely quiet, like if you were on a movie set, or you were in a courtroom that allowed photography, you could have absolutely no noise at all when you take those photos. However, there is a lot of those potential problems in a lot of modes that it wouldn't work in, and so it's not something that I would recommend on a regular basis. It's just kinda one of those secret modes that you can get into that will potentially save the day and make a photo possible that was not photo in some other way. So I am gonna turn this off, and I am gonna turn on the electronic front curtain shutter because that makes a little less shutter vibration, a little less noise, and there does seem to be no detriment to using the electronic front curtain on the shutter. So we're gonna leave that one on, we're gonna leave silent off, but we're gonna come back to it as one of our items that we might come back to from time to time. All right, where are we at? Page six, custom settings, S. Auto Image Extract. Okay, so you remember in the Superior Auto mode, I told you that the camera used a multi-shot technique to take photos? Well, if you do choose that mode and you do shoot in the auto mode, this will save each of the individual photos that it shot, rather than just the composite photo at the end, and so if you want to pull that out of there, you can. It's not a very big issue, and so that's why I have it just recommended turning off. 'Cause you probably don't need all of those images if you're using that mode. Exposure compensation setting. When you are setting exposure compensation, do you want it to apply to shutter speeds and apertures or shutter speeds, apertures and the flash? For somebody who's new to photography and working with flash, which can be one of the most complicated areas of photography, you would set this on ambient and flash, and it would just make everything lighter and everything darker, but for the more skilled photographer who wants to have very specific control of the flash versus the exposure in the camera, you're gonna want the exposure compensation to only affect the camera and not the flash itself. Face registration, and so in here is where you can register different faces, and so let me just show you on the back of the camera real quickly, so let's get our camera on, get into the menu, over to the next tab, facial registration on this. And so here, you could go in and you could do new registration, and what you would need to do is you would need to photograph the faces that you want. Now I don't have any faces here in front of me, but we would just simply put our face in front and we would shoot a photo of that. I don't know what's gonna happen with this. It probably won't recognize it. Ah, can't register it, and then what we would do is once we take several faces, we would have up to six of 'em, and we can order them. If I go back to the menu system, I can't do it right now 'cause I don't have any in there, but we can order exchange, we can delete, we can delete all of them, and the camera will choose to focus on one person over the other by facial recognition, not by distance. And so if you were photographing somebody in a stage play, for instance, and there were several people on stage, and people, the actors, were moving forward and backwards, it would track that one person that you want without you having to do anything other than to photograph them ahead of time. And so for instance, a wedding photographer could use this at a wedding, and of course they're gonna put the bride in the number one position, and then the groom in number two, and then maybe the mother-in-law and the father-in-law, and all the other people in there, the best man and the bridesgroom, all that down the list according to who's most important that they want to focus on. And so, interesting feature for anyone who does a lot of people photography. Okay, that's facial registration. AF micro adjust is something that most of you aren't gonna have to worry about unless you're using one of these two adapters, and this is for using some of the older A-mount lenses, and this will insure that you are getting proper focus, and what it does is it allows you to go in and tweak the focus in case your camera is not getting sharp focus because you are front focusing or back focusing. Now, this does require a little bit of testing, and a little bit of work to go in and make these adjustments, but this is something that is very common on a lot of the SLRs today. But it is not a problem when you are using the standard E-mount lenses on this camera. Next up is lens compensation. There are a number of lens problems that the camera wants to automatically fix. We talked about the distortion problem of this particular retractible lens, but pretty much all lenses suffer from a certain number of problems, and so the little sub-menu will allow us to go in here and adjust for these. So first off is lens compensation: shading. And so what happens with some lenses is that they have a darkening of the corners, and if you want to go in and correct for this, you can. And it works in some photos like where you have a lot of sky, you want to have a nice even sky tone. But in other photographs of people, it's kinda nice to have a little bit of vignetting in the corners to keep your eye drawn to the middle. And so this is really up in the air as to whether you want to fix this or not, just letting it be. Another problem is lens compensation for chromatic aberration. When you have a very bright background, as the light coming around that solid object, it might have a color ghosting of blue or red colors, and by turning this on, this will fix the problem, at least in jpeg images. And so in this one, the previous one in the shading composition, it can fix it in both jpeg and in RAW, and in this one it is just in jpeg. And so the final little area where it can fix is the distortion, so let me go forward. Let me go back and forth between two photos. And so do you notice the horizon bending here slightly? All right, so many lenses, especially wide angle lenses, will have a bit of distortion, and this camera can go in and automatically correct for that. And so for many users, just turning on all of these onto auto is gonna be fine, but I'm gonna perfectly understand if there is some more advanced photographers that don't mind the natural shading that you get through some of those faster lenses, like a 51-4 or a 51-8, or a 31-4, things like that. All right, next up we have our AF system, and if you are using one of the adapters in here, you can choose to use the camera's built-in face detection system or the contrast detection system, and so this is only if you are gonna be using these adapters, so it's not going to apply to most of you. For most of them I would say that the face detection system will be a little bit faster, but the contrast detection system will be a little bit more accurate, so there is a bit of a trade-off between those two. Page seven, custom settings. Okay, so this is where we get to start customizing things, so on the function button, we have access to 12 shortcuts to different menu items. We have six on the first page, we have six on the second page, and this is where you get to decide what items you'll have access to when you press the function button, and so this is something that I think you're definitely gonna be able to easily customize to the way that you want to work, because I bet you there's some things in there right now that you don't normally use. And I bet you that there's some things that are not there that you could really find helfpul using that as a shortcut button. And so, if we wanted to do back button focusing, let me show you how I would adjust my camera. So let's get my camera turned on, get into the menu system, so I would go back, and I talked about this just a little bit earlier, about taking off the auto-focus from the shutter release button on the top of the camera. And then I would come in to the custom, let's see, function. Well, we're at function menu setting, actually I would not change anything in here. So let me just move ahead right here on the back of the camera. I would go into custom key settings. And this is where I can change the various buttons on the camera. And the button that I want to change is the AF/MF button, which is this button right here, and I don't see it, so I'm gonna go down to page two, which is to the right, and I would change this and I would look for focusing. And I don't want eye, auto-focus on, right here, so there it is. And so now, I can focus by pressing that back button on the camera. So it's looking at that, my little tiny focusing point, need something to focus on. And so anyways, that would be the setting on it, and so going into custom key setting, and then changing the AF/MF button to AF on. Now you could change the AEL button right here so that you have to have this in the downward position. And so that AEL button is right there. It's currently on AEL hold, and so you could change the button on the top of the camera, which is the C1 button up here. You could change the C2 button. There's a variety of buttons that you can have, do auto-focus on, but that seems to be the most natural one as to where your finger would normally lay on the camera. So that's how you would do back button focusing. But change the modes in there on the function menu setting, and then as we just saw here, the custom key setting will allow us to change all these different buttons to do something that we want to do. Now on these buttons, I don't change the ones on the dial on the back of the camera, 'cause I fine those pretty useful and they're already labeled, so they make it very easy to find. But C1 and C2, that deserves probably some customization, as well as the AF/MF button and the AEL button, and so feel free to customize away and make your camera impossible for somebody else to use. (laughter) All righty, what do we got next? Come on, Keynote, let's go. Keynote's getting very tired, there we go. So we can go through and change all those buttons, which we already looked at, in real time. All right, so some of those buttons can actually be customized when you are specifically in the playback mode. So you can customize the C1 and the Fn button for just use in the playback, and so take a look in there and see if there's a shortcut. One of those shortcuts is to send images to your Smartphone, and so that's a good one for some people, but find out which ones work for you, and program those in. Next up we can program the dial or wheel setup, and so if you notice that the shutter speeds are set with the back dial and the apertures on the top and you really didn't like that for whatever reason, maybe that was the type of camera you came from or it's just not how your hand fits on the camera well, then you can switch the purposes of those two dials, and so they can become whatever you want them to be. And so on this, what are we doing here? Oh, the exposure compensation, so exposure value. So one of the things here is that if you do want to use exposure compensation, the wheel isn't doing anything in the aperture priority, and program, and shutter priority mode. So if you change this to wheel, it'll allow you to change the exposure very, very quickly and easily. Now, if you don't want to change the exposure quickly and easily, leave this turned off. But for anyone who finds that very helpful, this is gonna be an easy way to make your pictures brighter or darker in the program mode, aperture priority and the shutter priority mode. So for the zoom ring rotate, you can change the direction that you turn the lens, clockwise or counter-clockwise, to achieve a telephoto or a wide angle setting. So if you're used to a system and you don't like the way a certain lens works, you can reverse that if you want to. All right, final page in custom settings. So the movie button on the back of the camera. Do you want it to always start movie recording, or only when you are in the movie mode? So if you're a still photographer, and you don't shoot movies very often, you may be afraid of hitting that button for accidental reasons, 'cause it's right on the grip side, and so it's a little bit awkward position, and if you bump it and you accidentally recode, and I think I did that once in this class, and you just don't want that to happen at all, you can basically shut down that button so it only works when you are in the movie mode. So on the back of the camera, the dial and the wheel can be locked by pressing in the function button and holding it in for four seconds. That's kind of a little secret mode here, and so if you were setting manual shutter speeds, let's say you were gonna shoot a basketball game, and you had very specific shutter speeds and apertures that you wanted set exactly the same for the entire game, and then you pick the camera up and you put it down, and you bump the dials, and you don't want things to change. You set 'em up as you want, hold down on the function button and it locks 'em in until you press it and unlock it in the same manner, so it's just kind of a neat way to automatically lock and it's only gonna work when you press in on the function button and hold it for four seconds. And so I say leave it turned on. It's a nice little lock option for special situations.