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The Custom Menu

Lesson 11 from: Panasonic GH-3 Fast Start

John Greengo

The Custom Menu

Lesson 11 from: Panasonic GH-3 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

11. The Custom Menu

Lesson Info

The Custom Menu

Custom menu said all right so you're going to see how picky and many key people can get by all the settings in this mode here this is where you get to really customize your camera there's a lot of things in here that you might customize once and never come back so get ready with your cameras let's get it customized so I talked about earlier the custom one two three and three one three two three three settings on the camera which enable you to set up to five different custom modes what you do in the camera is just go set the camera the way that you would like it to work for a particular scenario and then come in here to custom set memory and you'll be able to memorize those settings in any one of those five different modes so great for people who are switching between different styles of photography and have lots of changes that they want to make on their camera the silent mode on the camera is a quick way to turn your camera into the elektronik shutter and shut up everything else and s...

o we could call this the private I'm owed so if you're sitting in a car trying to get a sneaky shot of somebody across the street you want to turn off your flash you want to turn off the auto focus illuminator the red eye reduction the shutter sound all of that noise and you can put your camera into perfectly silent vote also works, right? Well, if you're working on a movie set or in a courtroom, or any place where you want to make sure that there is no sound or disturbance from your camera. Next up, the auto focus auto exposure lock. So this is the button in the middle of the focusing lever on the back of the camera, and a lock is a good standard place to put it, but I know there's a lot of photographers who like back button, focusing that way, they can focus with their thumb and get focused set in and then at their choosing, they'll press down on the shutter release, and the camera will not re focus, even though they may have re of position, reposition their camera to a new place with whatever is in the focusing brackett out of focus, but something else in focus, and so it just allows you a little bit more precise control it's not something everyone feels comfortable knowing. It's something I only recommend for more immediate, intermediate or advanced users, because you do have to remember, each time you want to take a picture, you should focus first with the back button and then take the picture with the front buttons so it's a two button affair rather than one that same button can be controlled as to whether it is a lock or a hold button and in this case I would normally turn this off but some people like to have it locked where by pressing down on the button it locks that mode on and then you press it again to turn it off it's more of a toggle types which some people prefer that system and it can quite work quite well so use it if necessary or you just like it if you are going to use the on button on the back of the camera for back button focusing in order for it to really work you have to turn off the shutter a f system and that is the autofocus system when you press down halfway on the shed a release I know probably beginners and newcomers to the camera like the auto focus all built in there because it's kind of a one stop does everything once again the more experienced photographers like to separate that out and this is how you turn off the a t f on the shutters you have to do both to really make that back button focusing work scrolling down to page two there is a slightly unusual setting I think is that is where the camera will actually take a picture by pressing halfway down on the shutter release I guess it just makes the shutter release even more sensitive and so most people are going to want to leave this turn off I think we looked at this one a little earlier in the focused lever the f s switch can be switched two f f if you prefer the flexible focusing and so if you do a lot of focusing with continual moving subjects who would want to have it on f f but I think most still photographers wouldn't want to leave this on f s a the focus on a subject and it stays locked in there and does not change on you quick a f is where the camera will be focusing one hundred percent of the time and so it's always trying to focus which is going to have a little bit of negative effect on the battery drain of your camera and is probably something you don't want to leave turn on I could imagine a few scenarios where it might be helpful normally we're going to want to press halfway down on one of the shadow releases or one of the other buttons in order to focus the ice sensor controls what's going on with that little sensor below the viewfinder and in this case you're probably going to want to leave it actually let me double check here okay so what happens if you turn this on it's kind of interesting what it does is when you hold the camera up to your eye it will focus on a subject and then stop so it's just the initial holding the camera tear, I automatically activates focus, but once it's been held up to your eye, you would have to press down on one of the other buttons for focusing the more advanced users are probably not going to want to do this, they're going to want to do it with their own triggering of the camera. That way, it won't trigger when they don't want it to the pin point halftime. If you remember the pinpoint a f option, what it does is it magnifies the image for a short period of time. The question here is how short is that short period of time? It'll be ranged from point five to one point five seconds middle is going to be about one second, which is a reasonable amount of time trudging forward. Remember the auto focus light in the front? Well, if you don't want that being a beacon that you're shooting pictures, you can turn it off right here. If you focus a lot under very low light conditions and subjects are very close and you don't mind that light coming on, you can leave it turned on the direct focusing area allows you to use the back control wheel to simply tab and move your focusing point around I think this is very, very handy. If you are not very careful with where you're putting your thumbs and you're constantly bumping it you might want to turn it off but I think it's very very handy because it allows you to adjust where your cameras going focus quickly and easily focus and release priority determines what is more important focusing or taking the picture and for most people in most situations you're going to want to make sure that the picture is in focus before it actually fires and so in this mode what's going to happen is that if you press down on the shutter release really quickly the camera's not going to fire until the picture is in focus and one of the things that you want to keep aware of is by pressing halfway down getting your subject and focus you'll be able to press even more quickly down on the shutter release and have it take a picture because it's already in focus but if you wanted to you could change this to release priority where the camera will fire a picture at any time whether it is in focus or not but this is generally or definitely the safer of the two options autofocus plus manual focus allows you to let the camera auto focus and then grab the manual focus style and just focus from there this one that might be kind of a funding to allay a live demo on so let me get my camera powered up and I'm going to need to jump in and make sure that I have this set of my camera so let me get over to the custom with the page away on three of eight so down here a f plus imf I'm going to turn that on on my camera and so let's focus in and that didn't do a very good let me change my focusing mo just to the one area right here in the middle so I focus in and if I want I can turn the manual focusing ring now and I confined tune the adjustment actually for better example let me set this up just a little differently give us some depth to work with and so I'm gonna let the camera focus question is did it focus on the front or the back into this device? So what? Aiken d'oh my and the key thing here is I'm leaving my finger on the shutter release halfway I'm focusing and leaving it down halfway I can now zoom in and I can see is the name in back and focus or is the lens in front in focus I confined tune and then press all the way down to take the picture and so if you're the type of person who likes to fine tune that manual control, it just gives you a nice way to jump in after the camera has focused and make that fine tune adjustment now, normally that fine tune adjustment will pop up in its magnification window as soon as you start turning lens, you also have the option of using the focus point, but button on the back to activate that magnified view. Or you could have both said, I kind of like having both options that I can use to magnify as my emf assist moving forward, we have page four of eight and we have a manual focus guide. You know, I think this is kind of cool because I love graphics. It shows you where you are focused in accordance with close up or distance, and as much as I like this, I don't like clutter on the screen, and so I tend to want to have that turned off, but it might be helpful in certain situations where you're doing a lot of manual focusing. Similarly, the history graham is a great way for judging exposure, and I think it's a great tool for judging exposure. I just I wish they would have figured out a way not to have it overlap on the image itself, and so under critical situations for exposure, you might want to leave it turned on, but I'm going to recommend leaving it clutter free guidelines these are great ways of confirming that. Items are level or vertical there's a couple of different grids that you can use in here and one that's quite unusual first time I've seen it in the camera is one that you get to set yourself so on this third option you can go in and control where the horizontal and vertical lines are so for instance if you were trying to shoot a syriza pictures where the person's face was exactly in the same spot in every single photograph normally what you would do is you would just shoot it a little wide so that you could crop it later but in this case you could put the cross marks exactly where their noses for instance and have that set in camera and pop that up every time you're shooting a picture of that siri's on I imagine there's hundreds of other good examples as to why you would want to use a custom grid but a neat option that I haven't seen on other cameras normally though once again like the clutter free leaving it turned off next up is the highlight and that's what this is going to do is it's going to show you over exposed pixels and it's a nice tool toe have not everyone likes it so I'm gonna leave it turned off for now constant preview is where the camera will show you really time really effects of what you are doing so if you change shutter speeds to a darker shutter or to a darker image it's going to show you that your image gets darker and so it's going to basically give you a real view? A preview of what your final picture is going to look like I find this very helpful because the lcd screen on this is pretty accurate and you can judge exposure quite well by the way it looks on the back of the camera if it's not too bright out going forward, one of the other options of things that we can have on the screen is our exposure meter and once again I love graphics, but I hate clutter and so in this case, you're going to see your shutter speeds and apertures over laid right on top of your subjects so that you can very easily see those settings, but once again it's a lot of clutter on there, so make your own choices. We've talked about this next one before the live you display style and the monitor displays style question here is do you like your information on top of your subject or outside of a smaller version of your subject? And so that I'm in conflict here and in my camera I have gone with the smaller image with the information outside of the frame, just as I said before because I've been losing track of what's on the edges of my frame and you can choose different styles for the built in viewfinder or the lcd on the back of the camera next up is monitor info display, which is this information display option and I would highly recommend leaving it on just so that you can leave that on it's a little bit lower battery consumption when you haven't turned on and it allows you to get into it and use the quick menu to make all those changes as well. Next up is the recording area and so what's going on here if you've noticed when the cameras in the normal camera mode and you start recording video it jumps a little bit and is a little bit awkward and so when you go into the video mode and you take a still picture it actually takes a picture of a different area and so this is where you need to make a determination are you primarily shooting still pictures or video? And I would set it to whatever that mode happens to be because if you're shooting motion pictures most of the time I would turn it to the motion picture camera s so that you get a better accurate framing of your subject before you start shooting on the page six of eight remaining display are you a primarily a video or still shooter tells you how many still images you have left or how much time you have left in your camera when you shoot a still picture, how long does it come up on the screen for seconds? Is the standard I'm fine with it, but you could make it shorter. You can make it longer if you want if you are shooting time lapse photography, what I do is I recommend turning this off so that it saves a bit on battery power because time lapse could be very battery. Losing my words here can use a lot of batteries function button set, okay, so this is where you get to go in and you can customize the different seven different function buttons on the camera. We did see a shortcut of this back in the quick menu as well, and so go into customize as many buttons that aren't programmed to your liking right now. The cumin you this allows you to go in and customize your quick menu, and I think for general users, the preset quick menu is perfectly fine. But if you find that you're going back to the same things and needing to make those same changes over and over, you're going to want to spend the time to go in there and customized the menu so that it's on lee the options that you use on a regular basis. The dial settings can be customized on the camera, on the top of the camera and on the back of the camera. Your two main dials are going to control, for instance, your f stops and your shutter speeds, and you can switch that around. You could switch which direction they turn, and as I mentioned at the very beginning of the class you normally use let's say you're in aperture priority, you're going to use one of the dials to change the aperture, and the other dialled turns the apertura as well. But what you can do is you can turn one of the dials into exposure compensation so that you can quickly make lighting adjustments by making it lighter or darker. For this to be something I would only recommend for the more advanced users with the camera. But this is something that you can definitely get in and have some fun with and get it just right for what you d'oh all right, page seven of eight are you a still photographer that doesn't care about video? Will you can turn off the video function and turn off the video button if you just don't want to use it s o this just simply disables the video function on the camera. Next up power zoom lens what this is going to do is this going is going to display the focal length or the step zoom of a power zoom lens I don't have a power zoom lens here too to demo it with you it's not a super common issue that people going to go in this is only gonna work with a few lenses that are made out there the eye sensor on the camera do you want to turn this on? Do you want to turn it off? I think for most general shooting it's convenient that it automatically switches back and forth between the dvf and the lcd but I would recommend turning the sensitivity on low it means that the sensory they will only switch when you get up very close to the camera rather than any time in the general proximity of it touch settings allow you to use the touch settings on the screen on the back of the camera so for instance touch focus touch shudder for taking pictures and focusing touch scroll ok this is one of those things that took me about a half an hour to figure out so let me do a live demo and show you what it does what we need to do here is we need to play back an image and if we want to go from one image to the next we can swipe across the screen let's get to some come on, larry. We got a lot of dark pictures in here. There we go. Okay, so one of the things we can do is if we just simply mover get out of there. How? It's in the magnified moat. Get out of there. Okay, so if we move our finger off to the side, it will simply start scrolling images. And how fast will this scrolling happen? Come on. Just keeps growing. And so right now I can tell my cameras in the low mode and aiken, speed it up, which I'll do here just for kicks. Page seven of eight and we're going to go down to touch scroll. We're going to turn it on high. Go back into play, play just a dark image. What's going on. Okay. When in doubt, turn the camera off, turn it back on. Hit play. There we go. Now, when I bring it over here to the side clips, you can see how much faster it zooms or scrolls past. Wow, exciting. Most important feature in the camera. Right. Okay, onwards to our last page in the custom menu. At least. Menu guide. Ok, so the menu guide is a guy that comes up when you have the camera in the eye, a the scene mode or the creative mode, which just gives you a little bit of helpful information. And since people rarely use that mode, that's, a helpful guide to leave on, and it doesn't really get in the way of anything else. So it's. Fine. If you want to use one of the lens adapter so that you can use manual focus, older lenses, you would want to turn this on. But for the most part, you leave. It turned off so that your shutter is not firing when your lens is not mounted onto the camera.

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Ratings and Reviews

Birkeytique
 

For the time being, this may be the best way to learn more about other Panasonic models. There is very little good material on the FZ1000. This shows much of the dial and other functions. It is out of date as the current model is a DMC-GH4. I reviewed all the material available free; there are many features on my camera that are different. Johne Greengo is a phenomenal teacher! The best, clearest, most thorough and most motivating I have ever experienced. I am currently taking the Fundamentals of Photography, learned so much so far; bought the course. These "Fast Starts" are great and were mentioned in the class. Hope your camera is covered here.

Edris
 

waw, I could not ask for better explanation, nor better teacher in my hole life. Thank you john for your great class. I 'll say no more!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Joanne Catapano
 

John is a great ! I learn so much from his classes, he has away of communicating that makes you feel like you're sitting in class live with him. The classes are so informative that each time I review them I keep learning more. I have the Lumix FZ1000, there is little out there. I found this class very helpful. John you are the best, keep the classes coming.

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