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Menu: Camera Setting 2 Page 7-9

Moving on to page 7 of 9 "Things dealing with wide view and display." So the wide view display option is, do you want to see the setting effect of various exposure modes on, or off? And it really depends on the type of shooting that you're doing. So, let's go ahead and take a little looky-loo at an example here. So, if you turn it on, the LCD is going to mirror the exposure, so you can see at the bottom I'm changing shutter speeds, and the brightness of the image is changing. If we turn this off, I'll be changing shutter speeds, but the image does not change in brightness at all, and that's because the camera is trying to give me the maximum, best image possible, despite the fact of whatever shutter speeds I'm using. For most general photography, I prefer the option on the left: "Setting effect on." If I'm working in the studio with strobe lights, then I prefer the setting "effect off." So, you may need to go back and forth, and it depends on if you want the LCD to mimic what you are d...

oing with the exposure or not. For most people, I think you're gonna probably be fine leaving it turned on. "Shoot, start, display." Okay, so on this one, the camera does a quick black-out when it shoots the first image. And I want to show you what this looks like, because I haven't figured out how to do this graphically in any other way. So, we're gonna shoot in a continuous mode, so I'm gonna put the camera in the hight-speed shooting up here on the top of the camera, and then, we're gonna go into the electronic shutter release, 'cause this where this effect only really happens. So, what's gonna happen ... Let's make sure I have this turned on. What page were we are on? We are on page 7 of 9. "Shoot, start, display." I'm gonna go ahead and turn this on. So, what's gonna happen is, when I shoot a series of photos, it's gonna black-out between the first and the second image, and then it's gonna be consistent. (shutter noise) So, it's just when I press down on the shutter, it's giving me a visual cue that I've started that series. So, if I want to jump into the menu, and turn this off, which is where I recommend leaving this, when you press down, you don't see any black-out on that. I don't know that that black-out is really necessary, but some of you may like that. It's there if you need it, but I have a feeling that most of you won't be needing it. I think there's other cues, whether they're audio or visual, that you can turn on, so stay tuned for the next couple of settings, because they're also involved in this concept of letting you know when you've taken the photo. So, the "shoot, timing display." Now on this, we have four different options. In type one, it blinks a gray box around your focusing area when you are shooting a photo. Type two is a bright blue box, if you need a little bit more notice. If you want it to be more subtle, there are some gray boxes in the corner that will fire every time you take a picture, or you can have some brighter blue boxes. With an electronic shutter, it's quite possible that you're gonna be in a silent shutter, that you've turned off any audio noise, and you'll probably want to be made aware of when your camera is shooting photos. Now you could turn this off if you want, but I have a good feeling that you're gonna want to leave this on. In my time with the camera, I found that type one is kind of nice, just so I know where my focusing frame is, and I can see that the camera is actually firing. Some nice custom functions here that ... It's the first I've ever seen this on any camera, because no camera has been able to fire like this before, so I think Sony's done a good job at giving us a number of good options when we have our camera set to the electronic shutter release, and there's no noise ... What triggers. What lets us know that we're shooting photos. "Continuous, shooting length." Over in the left is the buffer, and you can see as you are moving through the buffer, it's gonna deplete. So you have maximum capacity, and half full, and then as your buffer is getting empty... So if you shoot a lot of photos, the camera can only shoot so many, and still store them to the card, so if it goes all the way down to the bottom, you'll get a slow warning that your camera is slowing down in that regard. You could always have this on, but it's generally not necessary when you're shooting single shots, so you could have it shoot "only display" and it will only show it to you when you're in the continuous mode. Just in case you're wondering, if you have the camera set to raw, you can shoot 241 continuous images. If you have it set to JPEG, you can shoot through 362 images before the buffer fills. I haven't known anyone who's needed that many, but it's nice to know that it's there if you do need it. "Auto Review" So once you take a photograph, do you want to see it on the back of the camera? Back in the days of DSLR's, which is still around now, you're looking through an optical view finder and you kind of want to see what the digital version of that image is. It's much less necessary in a mirror-less camera like this. If you're kind of new to the mirror-less camera system, yeah, maybe you want to leave it on a two-second delay just so that you can check it, but for most photographers, you can just turn this off, because what you see when you're shooting, mimics very much what you're gonna be getting, so it's gonna save you just a little bit more battery power by leaving that turned off as well. Alright. Moving on to the next page. This is where we get to customize things. So we've obviously been visiting here quite a few times. This is our custom key shooting. This is where we get to go in and customize many of the different keys on the outside of the camera. Here's a little visual cue to all the different keys that we can have. We have three different pages of custom buttons that we can program to the way that we want to work on the camera. Now of course you can go in, and you can set custom mode 1, 2, and 3 on the top of the camera, and have the camera set up with different custom functions here. So you can actually access more of these if you are willing to use those 1, 2 and 3 for different types of shooting that you may be doing. So the "focus hold" button is exclusively for lenses that do have that focusing button. It's not so much a focusing button, but a function button on the side of the lens. We'll probably see that on more big lenses that Sony offers around. You've seen me going through and customizing a lot of different features. I encourage you to use every button that you can on your camera for something customized. Rarely should any button be left unset, 'cause it's just a good shortcut to make life easier for you. We can also do custom keys when it comes just to playback. When you playback an image, you can go through and customize these four buttons to do something helpful that you might like in the playback mode. It's a little harder to find really useful things for this, but if you do playback images and need to work with them, there's some nice shortcuts here to save you time. "Function Menu Set" We talked about this earlier. The function menu is the menu that comes up when you press the function button. There's 12 different items in here, and you can totally choose what you have in there and where it's in there. This is your short-cut menu. If you don't have a short-cut button to something, you're gonna want to put it into the function menu if it's at all important to you. There'll be a page 1 and page for changing all the upper functions, and then all the lower functions of that function menu. If you aren't using something and you just want to clear up the clutter, you can have nothing selected in there and just have a blank spot. That's perfectly fine. The dials on the camera can be customized. If you don't like setting shutter speeds or apertures where they happen to be currently set to, you could switch them around, forward and back. People coming to Sony from Cannon, Nikon, Pentax, Olympus, might be use to those buttons or those dials being in a different place, and if you want to switch them, you can do that. It just depends on if you want to kind of keep things the way that you've always had them coming from another system. The EV ... The "exposure compensation." You can do it with the dial on the top of the camera, or if you want to regulate it to the front dial, or the back dial, so that it's quicker and easier to work with, you could do that here. A lot of people like that physical, visual dial on the top of the camera, but if you want it to be quicker to work with, you could assign it to one of those buttons. The "movie button." Sometimes, there's photographers who don't shoot movies at all. They don't care about shooting movies, they don't want to shoot movies, they don't want to accidentally shoot movies. You can disable this button so that you never shoot movies with the camera, which is perfectly fine if you just don't like using that button. You can turn it off so that, unless you're in the movie mode, it doesn't do anything when you're in the regular camera shooting modes. Alright. Page 9 of 9. "Lock Operational Parts" If you want, you can lock a collection of features on the camera, so that they cannot be adjusted. This might be good if you were at a sporting event, and the camera was gonna be bumping around, and hitting other things, and you don't want your settings changing, because you have your shutter speed, your apertures, your ISO, all of that styled in, and you just don't want the front dial, the back dial, the wheel, any of that sort of stuff changing. Maybe you're mounting the camera in a remote location and somebody else might bump your camera, and you don't want something changed, you can lock all those in electronically by just going in here and turning this on. The audio signals are going to be signals from the camera that are gonna be like the self-timer, the focusing ... And things like that, usually you don't need. They might be nice in some cases, but you generally don't need, and they can be a little bit distracting. There's also the sound of the electronic shutter, which is a made up shutter sound from the camera. Now, I am a little addicted to that sound of the shutter firing. I do like that. I think I get a little bit of an adrenaline rush when I here that. It's just nice to here it when you're shooting. It's confirming that the camera is shooting. So, one of the things that you can do on this camera, is you can turn off all the other noises other than the electronic shutter. So if you just want the electronic shutter sound, you can continue to get that, and then you can go into the audio signals ... And see if I can remember where this is. I don't think we've seen this quite yet. The volume settings in set-up number one. See I'm using my own cheat here. "Volume settings number one." You can turn that down to a nice, low volume, so just you, the photographer, can hear that noise, or if for some reason you're trying to be a nuisance or trying to brag about how fast your camera shoots, you can turn it on real loud so everybody hears around you. Everybody shooting Nikons and Cannons can hear how fast your camera is shooting. But I think the "on e-shutter only" is a good option on this one.