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My Menu

I think that gets us through the main menu and finally takes us to my menu. And so my menu is the menu that you get to customize. And so as I mentioned before, lots of different customization on the camera. To start with we have a lot of buttons. If there's something you use a lot program one of the buttons to it. If there's something you use occasionally try using the function button because that holds 12 different quick access features that you can get to. If there are other items in the menu system you can come in here and you can add them. So let's go ahead and do a little bit of this because it has expanded from past Sony cameras and it does give us a few more options. So I'm gonna navigate all the way over to my menu. And I've got nothing in there right now, so the only option is to add an item. And so now we can go through and we can choose different items. I'll choose file format and I'm just gonna add it right there, that's fine. And I'm gonna go through, let's just go through...

, let's go to the right. So you can see we have 32 pages of information and I am just gonna randomly grab stuff along the way here. And so these three have been added. Now one of the things you'll notice, I'm gonna grab one more here, so we're on page one of five of my menu and if I want I can choose to have this be the first item in the list. And so I'm just gonna go grab something else and we can see now registered custom shooting is number one, but this next item it wants to put it where that orange line is, but I can go to the right and I can put this on page two. And so I've added that to page two. Let's just go grab something else, the AF illuminator. And so we have page one here, page two here. Let's go put this on page four. And so you can populate up to five different pages of menus, and I forget how many lines, we got six items on each one. And so 30 different items you can have in here and what I've done is I've tried to organize them in a way that I think is logical. And so here are the ones that I use for landscape photography, here's what I use for people photography, here's what I do with video, these are the features that I wanna have access to. And so now when you hit the menu button you're gonna come back to my menu. So normally the menu would go back to wherever it last was, but once you've activated my menu it's gonna start right here and we'll have page, let's see, whoops, let's go in, and so we have page one, two, three and four. So we have the four items we added to the first page and then we have our second page, third page and our fourth page is organizational. And so if we wanna come in here and we wanna delete a page we could delete one of our pages. Let's go ahead and just delete that entire page of items and then we can have a whole slew of new spaces available for us to go ahead and program in new spaces. And so I can't imagine it how many different ways that this camera could be added up. Because there's something like 25, different things that you could do on each and every button. And so I encourage you, program your camera in a way that nobody else can work with your camera. And so every one of these cameras out on the field is gonna be completely different until you do that initial reset. So kinda a good time to check in with you, see if there's any final questions that we can clean up. Great, I had a question come in from Steve Miller earlier and the question was, if you simply hit record while shooting manual still images, when you're talking about the movie button, what video settings will it automatically go to? Right, and so let me recall because the first item in camera settings two, which is page one of nine in the movie, is the exposure mode. And so when you record movies what's it going to do? And so right now, let's take a look on my camera. And I'm gonna try to do the opposite of what it has. And so let's go up to page two. It's not even on, I can't change it because I'm in the program mode. And so if I'm in the program mode and I start recording I am in the program mode. So I'm gonna stop recording. I'm gonna put it in the movie mode, I'm gonna go back into the menu and I'm gonna change this to manual. So I wanna manually set my stuff. But on the top of my camera I'm setting my camera to manual, excuse me program, let's do program. So now when I press record in theory it should be going to manual, but that's mainly if you turn it to manual up here. In the program mode it stays in program. Okay, let me try this once again. I'll put it in aperture priority and here it stays in aperture priority. So if you just start recording in the mode that you're in it stays in that one. And it stays at the settings as if you're in still. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. The main reason not to do that is that it doesn't give you the crop frames, it doesn't show you the audio levels, it doesn't show you any of the other video settings that you might wanna have activated. So it's possible to do, but I always recommend going to the video mode if you plan on shooting video. Great. Did we talk about, this is a question from Atelier, did we talk about the difference between phase detect versus contrast detect? A little bit, there is a slide on that. It's one of those topics we could spend an hour on and so we have to be careful about how far into it we wanna get. And so the mirrorless cameras originally used contrast detect which was light coming onto the sensor and it just judged it by contrast level. And the higher contrast meant it was sharper. And they were very, very accurate, but it was very slow in focusing. And so they started adding in phase detection sensors built in, embedded onto the sensor and those were much better at figuring out how out of focus it was so the cameras could focus very quickly and then the contrast detection would finalize and get it perfectly set. And so this camera is using both, you cannot select one or the other unless you are using one of the adapters with the adapted Sony lenses, then you could choose between contrast or phase detection when doing that. But for standard use on a standard FE mount lens, for instance, E mount lens you can't make that call. Great, we have a question here. I have a question, you mentioned before the creative styles, I think. Yes. You mentioned that they work well with DPX files. If you have the camera in raw you can't use those? They won't do you any good in raw, or at least they won't do you much good. Because when you get raw you just get the original information off the sensor and anything that the camera tweaks with, adjusting the shadows and the brightness and the saturation has no effect on the final raw image. However, it does effect the viewfinder and the image on the camera. And so some people don't like the way the viewfinder looks and so there is some controls over the brightness and there was the color, but there wasn't a saturation adjustment for the viewfinder. So what some people would do is they would go in and they would adjust that to lower saturation or lower contrast so they could see things in the viewfinder a little bit more easily. And so that is one work around if you don't like the viewfinder. But if you're shooting raw images you're gonna get the full raw when you're done. Yeah, go ahead. One more thing, at the very beginning you mentioned that don't put the camera into too hot or too cold situations so it don't get bad. How much is too cold? I think you should test this out. (laughter) I have taken cameras into, the coldest I've been I think is minus 35 degrees, which is pretty down there and I was out shooting for hours with that camera. It was a different camera than this one. And so the biggest thing in cold weather is that you're gonna get a short battery life and so the best tip is to have spare batteries and if you store them in a shirt pocket close to your body where you have nice body heat. And so I don't know at what point this camera would truly shut down and so I would say just go out there until it stops working. One thing I will mention and it was something I was reading about rather recently, is about the weatherproofing, some other information is that the camera is pretty well weatherproof on top, but not below. And so a light rain, not a problem, a little, tiny puddle, don't set it in it. And so the battery compartment is not good there. And so any place where you're gonna get splashed or there's gonna be water on the bottom side you should be a little bit more protective than on top of it. And so that would be a snowy environment, little bit of snow on it generally not a problem. We have more questions coming in, that's great, thank you. So this is a question from R. Adler who said, earlier John said that he didn't recommend connecting a computer when shooting, why not? I think what I said or what I meant if I didn't say it is for downloading your images. If you're gonna be shooting tethered to the computer that's it's own specialized thing. For those of you who do shoot tethered I apologize, I go through that rather quickly, it's a small group of people and if you really want a tethered shooting class write a hand written letter to Creative Live and we'll collect them up until they stack this high and then I'll do a class on it. It's not my specialty. But for downloading, even with the faster USB ports it's just easier to use a card reader in most cases. Tethering is perfectly fine and it's a great way of doing a lot of different types of shooting. Thank you for clarifying that. Another question from Flyer, when using my Sony 7R does the camera still auto focus if you're using something like an ND filter attached, he says, or is it the same as a DSLR? Well if there is an ND filter on the front of it it's just like it's darker out. And so the camera will try to focus and so, I don't know if it will, but it will try. Great, and then one from Saiid who says, can we control the minimum speed in aperture mode and if it goes lower than a certain number like 1/60th increase the ISO? Can you set something like a low? Yes, yes. And so that is the minimum shutter speed, I'm trying to remember where that is, let me take a quick look. So I know we went through it in the menu system. It's just me remembering it right now. Okay, if you covered it then that's fine. Yeah, it is in the class and you can choose it, you can choose it so that it automatically looks at your lens and where you are on the lens focal length wise and chooses a reciprocal of that. So if you're at a 50 millimeter lens it's gonna choose about 1/60th of a second and then you can dial it down to do something slower or something faster depending on the types of subject that you're shooting at that time.