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Shooting Menu

Lesson 8 from: Canon 5D Mark III, Including Canon 5DS/5DSR Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

8. Shooting Menu

Next Lesson: Autofocus Menu

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu

I think this has like the prettiest menu any care fits you the best it's gotten tons of colors and they've added a lot of colored tabs then than previous cameras and so I think it's a very aesthetically nice looking uh, menu system, so you're gonna get the menu button and go ahead and kind of follow along here. What we have in here are different tabs of information, so information is grouped according to what it works well, and it is color coded for your easy convenience now each of these air kind of master tabs and there will be kind of subcategories within each of these. Now one of the things you do need to be really careful about on your camera remember we talk to the very beginning of the day about the a plus with all the child safety locks if you want put your camera in the a plus mode and go to the menu and you will find that you have hardly any options to choose from and the camera is trying to protect you from yourself. All right? So you're not going to be able to go in and mak...

e those changes, and so for our class, you're definitely going to want to be in one of the more manual modes I'm gonna put my camera in full manual and that allows us access to all the options on changing the camera there is one other kind of secret menu in there that you need teo go into the video mode by flipping that collard switch in order to get to the special video tabs in there so we will go to that in a little bit but that's kind of one area that you're not going to see scrolling through in the standard menu system so beyond these colored tabs are sub tabs of information one of the things that I like about the cannon menu system is that whenever you're looking at the screen you know that you're looking at everything that's available in that town and so we have multiple tabs within the shooting mode the auto focus mode the playback mode and so forth so you have to be aware of are you on the first red tab or the second red tab the third one in the fourth one and there's a there's a wide variety to choose from and you're going to use the main dial on the top of your camera to make those changes you're going to use the dial on the back of the camera to select individual settings within that tap so they have up to I think seven or eight settings within each tap so let's dial our way to the first red tab which is for image quality and this is where we get to choose between raw or j peg images or we can do one of each and we can have these split all on on two different cards shooting him on the same cards were going to control the cards and a little bit differently, but we have raw images we have a large raw doesn't say large rods just plain old raw that's the best quality setting in the camera we have a medium in a small rock if you know you don't need a large file size, you could shoot a ten megapixel picture with a medium raw or you could shoot a five point, five megapixel picture with the small rock, and so that gives you all the other benefits of raw meaning like you can adjust white balance later on and so you're going to change the raw setting by turning the main dial the top one on the camera you're going to change the j peg by turning the back kyle and so j peg, you obviously have a lot of different settings I would highly recommend shooting this camera in large raw if you are going to shoot it in j peg, I would highly recommend shooting it in the largest, finest quality j peg, which is the farthest to the left in that siri's there may be some special situations where you want to shoot both raw and j peg at the same time be aware that you're going to get two pictures every time you take one picture and so you're gonna end up with a lot of files and later on when we get to the cards you can have those directed to the same card or you can have him split so rah goes toe one card j peg goes to the other card and so that could be handy for different types of situations all right next up image review so once you take a picture do you want to see the picture afterwards I generally like to see this and my recommendation is four seconds I'm not sure if the camera I think the camera comes with two seconds and that's just a little bit quick for me but said it to your liking this is where you get to set things up the way you want your camera but I'll give you some hints from me as to what I think is pretty good all right this is one of this is like the first thing that I do when I get a new cameras I turn off the beep this drives me nuts I just don't want everybody listening to me focusing because it beeps and I know when I'm in focus for about three different reasons number one the first and most important reason is it looks sharp in the viewfinder uh number two I get a little focus confirmation in the bottom right hand corner and number three if I'm using auto focus the light's blinking at you when they come in focus in under most situations and so there's a lot of ways that you can tell things are in focus without baby next up, chances are you're gonna want to turn this off and what this basically does is it allows you to not fire the shutter if you don't have a memory card in the camera, it prevents you from taking pictures when you think there's a memory card in there and so that could be a potential problem remember many, many years ago I was on assignment and I shot all these pictures and I'm like, wow, this is a really long roll of film yeah, this is kind of a similar philosophy of forgetting to put film in the camera and I was really cool about it. I did not say where it's like, you know what? I think I'd like to do some more shows just like that outside again, so I just invited my subject to go back out and reshoot it. They never knew that I didn't have a roll of film because I faked the whole thing let's not do that with the memory cards. All right, we're gonna have to get a little techie, okay? Let's, we'll just do the glasses here, we won't go, we won't go full geek on this one, all right, so your lenses have technical problems, okay? We have two problems that we can fix in camera. This is where your canon camera communicates with your cannon lands. We have peripheral illumination and chromatic aberration, and so I have visuals to explain this. All right. So, first problem, peripheral illumination. This is where we have been getting or a darkening of the corners. This happens with fast lenses, even l quality lenses. It happens on the darkening of the corners. And when we have a sky, we know the sky. Is it naturally, like, and so we can fix this by turning on peripheral illumination. And I will mention this works in jpeg does not work and wrong. Okay, raw images are always straight raw images. All right, so you might think, this's something good that I would like to have turned on. Well, not all pictures look good. Totally. Even I know when I should people pictures. Ah, lot of times I'm darkening the corners to draw people's eyes to the center of the frame where the people are, and so it's, something that could be totally fixed later on in good programs, like adobe light room, so I wouldn't bother turning this one on. I leave this one on disabled. Next up is chromatic aberration, and this happens when you have often very bright backgrounds, and so if we can see in close here that top photograph on the right shows a red and kind of a blue green line on the bottom side of that girder and this is where light is not quite hitting sense of the sensor in the correct way different lenses have different chromatic aberration problems and you can tell the camera to fix this problem now so far I haven't found any photographers that like this as a visual effect in their photograph so it's not something people are adding in this is a lens defect that is probably good to fix so I would probably turn this on enable so when it comes to peripheral illumination I like to leave it turned off because it looks good and some not not so another's chromatic aberration I would typically leave this turned on now this is if you shoot raw it's still not going to fix the problem because you're gonna have to fix it later but at least if you do shoot j pegs it will fix the problem okay external speed like control this is only going to matter if you have a speed light attached to your camera obviously so it's not really going to do anything right now if you don't have a flash on your camera but if you want to you can get in and start making controls we're not going to spend a lot of time here but let's see we can tell the flash to not fire why would we add a flash on the camera, turn it on and then tell it not to fire? I don't know, but I'm sure somebody will come up with a reason we can change the type of misery and we can change some of the parameters about the shutter speed in there, so if you use your flash on camera, you'll be able to access it right here, which might be easier to get teo like if you're using a flash bracket uh, for a wedding or corporate photography or event photography below that is something called mir lockup, and you'll have the option of either enabling or disabling this normally it's going to be disabled. But here is why you want to use it when you look really closely got carefully shot tripod shots at around one eighth of a second, your camera is very prone to vibration because of the mere coming up and causing vibration as it comes up and hits the top deck of the camera and you'll notice that in the image on the left were mere lockup was not used there's a little bit of softness to it, the image on the right is where mere lockup was used and it's a sharper image now another shortcut way to get to me, meera lockup is live view on your camera so that works as just the same as mere lock up. The only thing is is that you get to see what's going on through the camera, which I actually think works pretty good for a lot of different types of photography, and so normally mere lockup is left in the off position, but you may need to go to it from time to time. Next up, we're going to the second red tabs you're going to use the main dial on the top of the camera to move over to that little second red dot, and here we have exposure compensation, and you know what? This is the same thing that the back dial on the camera was doing. You couldn't do it by diving into the menu system it's a long cut way of doing it, but you could do it here, but the main reason people would go to this is for the auto exposure bracketing this is where you'll have the camera shoot. Three, two, three, five, seven pictures in a siri's where they're either brighter or darker and so where you might want to use this is in a situation where you have a wide range of tonality, from darks to brights, so here you see a one stop bracketed siri's here we have a to stop bracketed siri's. Meaning each picture is two stops apart from each other, and if you want to buy us the whole thing to the minus side for dark pictures or to the plus side for bright pictures, you can do that as well. And so it's, a very versatile system, it's a combination of turning the top dial and the back dial in the camera. You can see there's some little helpful visuals in there on which dial to turn to change it. Normally, you would leave it in the center with the bracketing turned off. Next up I s o speed settings. And so when you get in here, not only can you set the esso speeds, you know, one hundred through twenty five thousand, you khun set the auto settings, whether you're using auto or not, you can also set the range of auto settings or manual settings, and this is where I like to go in to the esso speed rage and expand that from fifty to one hundred and two thousand. I don't plan to use fifty and a hundred thousand very often, but it's nice that I can get there if I need to get there and so set that up according to your own needs in their next up is thie auto lightning optimizer, if you remember, in the viewfinder, there was a d plus that I brushed off and said I would explain it later. Well, that's what? This is the auto lightning optimizer what it is basically does in many situation is it tries to lighten the shadows and for some situations like this lighter shadows, I think make for a better picture. You can see what's going on in those shadows a little bit more clearly so you may want to feel like you turn this want to turn this on all the time once again, this is something that I think is better controlled in post processing not all pictures look better with a lightening of the shadows. Some pictures look better with dark, deep shadows. And so this is something that could be totally fixed later. I recommend leaving this off. We see white melons for the second if not third time here and it's the same settings that we make anywhere else on the camera. And like everything else, the setting is wherever you last left it last, so if you want to change it to sunny in here you go up to the top, your camera it's going to be sunny there? Next stop is custom white balance. This is where if you didn't know the color balance of the arena that you were working in, you would photograph a white sheet of paper, you would then come to custom white balance and you would register this picture of this white sheet as proper white balance and then the resulting pictures? Well, technically you need to go backto white balance and select custom white balance so you have a couple steps what is you gotta take a picture of something white, you've got to goto custom white balance and tell the camera to add that in it's the custom white balance, then you have to go set in white balance, the custom white balance so there's kind of three steps that you have to go through to set that all right, this one I'm not gonna pull out the g classes, but I probably probably should pull out the glasses for this one. You're probably not gonna want to make a change in here if you are unsatisfied with the standard white balance settings let's say you have tungsten light in your house that just doesn't match up with their tungsten setting. You could go in here and adjust it so that it is closer to that city. You could also do a bracket siri's if you wanted to shoot eh siri's of pictures at different color tones if you shoot raw doesn't matter, he can fix it later if you shoot j peg a little bit more important color space once again for jay pig shooters mostly doesn't really matter with rob, but I would set it to adobe rgb it's a larger color gamut it's used for commercial printing and uses a wider range of colors then the rgb that the camera comes set to alright working our wave through this twenty one tabs of information all right we got our picture styles we talked about this there's a direct button on the back I would leave it it probably standard um but this is only important if you're shooting in j peg you can go in and you can control you can make your own custom settings you can take say the portrait setting you god's got too much contrast you can reduce the contrast or you could increase it by going into changing the sharpness contrast saturation and color tone of any of those frankly that's what light room is for? Okay, next up we have long exposure noise reduction and highest high s o speed noise reduction these are both very similar they're both kind of doing the same thing but for different types of pictures in general it goes back to the iso settings when you shoot it hi I I s o s you're going to get noise the camera has a built in program for reducing noise well isn't that nice? Well, it does a pretty good job the problem is is that it slows the camera down in its processing of images and so it's going to slow the shooting down if you are shooting under those sorts of all sorts of conditions and this is the type of thing that can be done later as well and so I typically recommend leaving this turned off unless there are specific reasons that you want to use it and you have a question about that yeah are are those changes happening to our raw files when we're shooting? No they're not okay, so once again it's it's kind of weird that there's all these changes to adjust our photographs but if we shoot rob we're not doing any of that and that's how a lot of us are shooting with the cameras is in straight rogers to get the best cleanest best image out of the camera but there's some other people who want to shoot j pigs and they wantto adjust that as we go along next up is highlight tone priority this is another image adjustment feature and you'll notice in the image on the left where this feature is disabled we've lost some detail in the highlight and if we enable this the camorra protects the highlights by the way it exposes the picture so that's nice I like to have detail in my highlights the downside to this is that you can no longer use s o one hundred which I think is somewhat major disadvantage once again this is not going to work in riots only something that's working in j peg and so uh, I'm gonna leave this. Turned off on my camera. Dust delete data. All right, if you have dust on the sensor. Well, first off, we talked about the camera cleaning, the sense or whatever you turn it on and off. We're going to talk about manually cleaning the center a little bit later on, but if you are, say you're on vacation there's no camera stores around and you got dust a big dust particle up in your skies, you shoot all your pictures? Well, rather than having to clean it all up later what you could do go back to shooting that white piece of paper and the camera. Well, then look at the picture. Once you go to this feature in the milieu and it's going to look for dust and then it's going to clone it out on future pictures. So it's kind of an active clone, and I'm not a big fan of cloning stuff on my pictures before I know exactly what's being cloned. I don't know how big of spot is going to change. And so it's something I would do with only the greatest care and the biggest emergencies of not being able to clean the sensor next up is multiple exposure and multiple exposures is something that I did a little bit when I was in photo one o one class back and back in college, and it was kind of interesting for a little bit, and then I kind of got tired of it because I could just shoot two pictures and development in the dark room or with photo shop. I can take two pictures in, combine them and condemn him and control in amazing ways in photo shop, whenever I want to take two pictures and then there's some cameras that came out that had multiple exposures in, and I'm like, this is the stupidest thing ever, because you could do it afterwards, so much better, so much more easy, but they've added it into this camera, and I had to go out and give it a try, and what I found is, I kind of liked it, and here is the difference, and this is the big difference is that when I was out shooting hears, I went down the gasworks park to do some shooting, and so I just I tried shooting this shot, and then when I went to go shoot this shot, it's over, laid the first shots, so I could see exactly the composition that I was getting. And so this is my cluttered pipe shot from gasworks park, and the thing is, is that it helps you visualize things out in the field as to what a final double exposure is going to look like now you could probably do this very easily and post but if your visual like I am and you like seeing that information out in the field it is handy because you get to see it right on the back of your camera now there are a bunch of different functions in hair not only can you do one picture but I took this one and I think I made four pictures out of it and so there are some kind of fun things that you can do with this and we're not going go through all the multiple exposure settings because there's different ways you khun bias the camera too averaging the two images whether it's looking for the bright one or emphasizing the dark one you can shoot anywhere from two to nine different pictures on this and so there's a little bit of fun that you could have been there if you want great control photo shop is probably still the way to do it because this doesn't work in light room in a lot of other basic photo editing but more advanced photo editing programs it does work but it does allow you some nice visual ability in the camera in the field next up another new feature for this camera is the hdr mode high dynamic range so this is when you are shooting in a situation that has extreme tonal values very bright and very dark. And so I decided to try this again down at our gasworks park, and I chose one of the most contrast he scenes I could find. So I have some areas in very dark shadows and I have some areas in pretty bright, light out ana bright day. And this is just what a raw photo looks like. Untouched now. One of the things that I noticed that I'm not a big fan of in the hdr mode is that it's slightly cropped in on the images because it's taking a a group of images, it's taking usually three shots, combining them into one and aligning them, it'll often trim off the edge, and so you may be losing a little bit around the edge. Now there are different set ups for the hdr. This is what's natural. Then we have art standard and you can see it's really brought up the shadows and dark darkened down the highlights. We have art vivid and if you are a very bold artist, we have art bold where it's getting very intense, the saturation is really getting pumped up on that. And then we also have a strange one called art m bossed and so there are a lot of photo shop type filters where you can do this stuff later on, but that's what the camera is doing and so what I decided to do is, well, how would I normally do this? I would just shoot it raw, take the raw and adjust the photo in light room and so I'm not happy with the final result of this picture here, but I basically was trying to pull up his many shadows as possible and pulled down the highlights as much as possible so you can take a raw image. The camera has pretty good dynamic rage and you can pull those back in and see a lot of those when you shoot with a raw image and so, uh, whether it shoots great in camera hdr, I don't really know I'm not the biggest arch hdr fan, but I'm not a huge fan of what it shoots in camera I think you're still gonna be able to do better on your own, but one of the great things about this camera is that when you shoot these images, you have two different options in the menu. You can have the camera simply keep a final j peg version of everything or you can have it keep raw images of all the steps along the way so you would end up with I'm forgetting something for this you're gonna get all three raw images and I'm trying to remember if the last one is j peg or rye believe it's a jpeg image, the final composite of the three, but you still have the original three images to stay stay wet, and so it's it's a nice program because you get to keep all the original data on it, and so some other things that we can do in here, you can adjust for how far the exposures are apart one, two, three stops on there and so yes, when you do shoot in the three step mode worth saving three raw images, you do get one j p you can't get a raw, combined hdr image. You get a j peg image from that, you can turn it on to shoot this shoot in hdr siri's once or I've seen some nature photographers who only shoot hdr, and you could have it turned on into a continuous mode. So every time it's doing in hdr siri's and so it's set up to handle a lot of different types of hdr needs, so quite nice if you're into that sort of thing, that's the hdr mode all right, so we're moving over to that third, fourth damn excuse me live view shooting remember how we talked about live you shooting and movie their work very similar, but, well, the camera allows us to set the camera up differently for those two different modes, and so first off, if you want to and work with y view I would probably leave this enabled next up we have the auto focus system now remember you could always manually focus and in this I would probably choose the life mode that's my choice it's not a great mode but it's the best of the three in my opinion we have a grid. This is what shows up in the back lcd of camera not in the viewfinder but on the back of the camera I just generally don't like the grid I don't I want to keep the screen as clean as possible. The aspect ratio the normal aspect ratio for this camera is three by two. Sometimes it'll be called one by one and a half and so one of the options we have our is shooting at different aspect ratios and so normal three by two we do have a kind of shorter version I called four by three which cuts off a bit of the edges which is quite nice if you do a lot of people vertical pictures uh vertical on this camera is on most three by two cameras on all three by two cameras tends to be a little bit long and narrow and so you can shorten that up to it's just most valuable area we also have a sixteen by nine aspect ratio, so if you want to match movie stills with that aspect ratio you can and if you like good old hasselblad cameras and square formats, uh, you could do that in camera. Of course, you are losing a lot of pixels when you crop in potentially. So, uh, be careful about doing that. Normally I'm gonna leave that in three by two because I want the full image area I'll crop later. Next up is exposure simulation. This is something that I would turn on on the camera. What happens is that when you look at this, a screen in the back of the camera it's gonna mimic the exposure you're going to get, which is a really handy feature. If you're going to set your camera to manual and you want to see whether your image is going to be too bright or too dark, the back screen is pretty darn accurate for doing manual exposure just looking at the screen. Next up is live view shooting, so when you get into a live view that the shutter, we have three options in the shutter, the shortened quick of it is I recommend mode one in mode one uses an elektronik curtain to start the exposure. The problem with this for some people, is if you are working in a studio, you won't be able to shoot with studio strobes and live view setting. Mode two is a very strange one where the second curtain returns when you take your finger off the shutter release and so you could potentially take a very quiet picture and before the camera made the noise of resetting from the next picture you would hide the camera in some other place to get it nice and quiet if you are in a studio and you are working with live you and you're working with strobes, you could set this to disable and that means that you're going to use a mechanical curtain to start with, which means it's going to trigger the flash firing in mode one into you won't get any flash firing from the pc socket or from the or from the hot chili on top metering timer normally I just leave this at sixteen seconds but you can customize it to your own needs. Okay, now we're going to flip over to the video side of things so you need to flip your cameras dial in the back over to the video setting and then you need to hit the menu button so that you can dive into the video menu and there's some of the exact same things we just talked about, but now they on ly effect features when you are in excuse may when you are in the movie mode so we have our f mode I'm going to leave it in live live mode the grid display I'm gonna probably leave it off here as well. Next up is the movie recording sighs all right, this is the pretty important one this is where we got a little nerdy earlier on setting the all I or the I p b this is where you can choose what file size compression rate that you're shooting your videos at if you want the highest quality, you're going to take that top setting on the left nineteen twenty, thirty frames a second all I and I only recommend that if you're really going to be doing some pretty serious video editing with it if not you could go down to the I p b it's still going to be fantastic quality video at that point next up is our sound recording we can go in and control features of our sound recording where is our sound recording there's our sound riccardi all right, so you get in here, you can have it set to automatic or manual you can go in and you can adjust the levels from here or this is where we'll be able to get to controlling it silently on the camera here in just a moment silent live you shooting this is the same thing that we just talked about but you're in the movie mode and I would leave this set at mode one meter timer I would leave this at sixteen seconds as well moving on to the fifth tab but this is just the video section we have time code and depends on if you're working with other video videographer shooting a video you're gonna want to probably sink up how your cameras are set here I'm not gonna leave go into this very far, but this is basically the timecode counting frames and time of the recording of the video silent control mode. This is that feature on the back of the camorra member how he said we had the silent control on the back of the camera with the touch settings if you want to enable that so that you can manually control the sound and this is only going to do something in the video mode when you are manually controlling sound, you could do it by tapping the side of this button very lightly and it won't make a sound so I would generally leave that enabled the movie shooting button can be adjusted. Check my notes here you can use either the button on the back of the camera to start the movie recording or you could use your shutter release think about it if you change your shutter release to starting movies, you can no longer take still pictures while you shoot video so I would probably leave it on the back but some people our only shooting this camera and video and you could change it to the front

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Fast Start - Canon® 5DMIII
Canon® 5DSR Menu Settings

Ratings and Reviews

Tami Miller
 

I really enjoy any John Greengo class - beside being an incredible photographer, he has the true nature of a teacher. What a combo: a fantastic photographer with a great sense of humor who can really explain complex concepts and take the fear out of all of those buttons and dials! I LOVE his 'tests' and visual challenges: the immediate results help to cement the information. I have had my Canon Mark D III for almost a year now. The time I spent experimenting with it and reading most of the manual (ok, maybe I am a nerd!) was great preparation for this class as I knew exactly the things that were confusing me. And, as usual, Mr. Greengo delivered. So glad I purchased the course so I can review it many times. Only two disappointments: unless I missed it, it wasn't made clear how to switch from one card to the other. I was in Scotland and my screen kept flashing, "card is full" - and I couldn't figure out how to switch to the other one; and I did want to fill in the copyright/name information but can't figure out how to 'type' in anything. Class is a must for a new owner of this camera.

Steve61861
 

Wonderful, wonderful instruction! I wish every instructor could be as point-on as John Greengo. I had my money's worth about a quarter of the way through the class. At the end, I called it priceless. I have had my 5D Mark iii for almost 2 years, and John taught me some extremely useful things about the camera I did not know. Even if you are an advanced shooter with considerable 5DMiii experience, you are likely to get something valuable from this course - otherwise, you are CERTAIN to get really valuable knowledge about your camera. Strongly recommended for Canon 5D Mark iii owners.

Liesa Wayson
 

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE John's classes. Bought the 70D class for my first camera, now the 5D Mark III class, so worth it. Awesome investment!

Student Work

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