Listen to this, twice bake lavostock pot, buffalo mozerella
basil and pine nuts souffle a terin of duck hand
ham, hock and rabbit with cranberries, with spiced pear
fueling smoke salmon with suede goats cheese ice cream and a seeded tweel
sounds pretty interesting doesn't it
but you don't need it all, and just like a menu in this fantatsic
restaurant DSLR camera menu is a very similar thing
you don't need all of it, infact i urge you to leave most of it well alone
but there are one or two things which can come in very useful
let's take a very quick speedy guided tour
in the playback menu with the little
playback sign there's one or two things basically it tells you whether you can
turn your pictures up the other way in the camera or not I leave mine
left on their side, whetehr you wanna do a slide show, whether you want to
show people your pictures for for longer or less time on the LCD
they're all personal choices. The shooting menu has
got one or two quite handy things in it,
for example your image quality settings
I suggest you use the biggest and best in the shop
now you've got Raw, Tiffs, and Jpegs, suppose whatever you're shooting, shoot the
best quality
that your camera can do. Jpeg compression, I would do the same thing.
Make sure they're the biggest
you could always make an image file a bit smaller and then email it but
but if you've already got a small one and you want to print it, you're stuffed.
Your white balance control is very handy
this is where you set the colour temperature of your camera according to
the light around you, some cloudy exctra.
you can usually access that from a button on the top though. Picture control,
can be very useful
in here you've got a whole little nest of
different settings, some of which the manufacturers have already made for you,
so in standard you got a very flat
neutral looking image neutral is very similar but in my case on this camera
it's a bit less contrasty.
Vivid, that's very vivid. It's got more contrast and more colour,
quite handy on a very dull cloudy day when you want to brighten things up a
bit.
there's also monochrome if you wanna shoot black-on-white
in the camera color spaces there's an awful lot of gossip and black art
mumbo-jumbo talked about them but they're really very simple there are two
color spaces
Adobe RGB an SRGB some things work in Adobe
some things work in SRGB it's one of those things that on its own
won't make any difference to your photography but if you stack them up
altogether
with lots of other little tiny details they will start to give you an edge
right now in just going through the menu I don't want to discuss them
all you need to know is that they're not gonna make a big difference to you right
now.
delighting is something I always leave alone because I find that
on this camera at least it just kinda messes things up beyond that
in the shooting menu there is really very little else you need to look at
if anything. In the custom settings menu
this is where you can change things that your camera does such as auto white
balance bracketing
again I would urge you to leave it alone I never touch these things you don't
need them
they will not improve your photography they offer convenience in how you set up
your camera
and if you really want to dig into it take a look at your instruction book and
you'll find out what those things do.
in your setup menu there's just a couple of things that are handy
one being formatting your memory card, it's well worth doing this
when you've been on a shoot and you've got a bunch of pictures go home
download them into the computer back them up and then it should have just
deleting them off your card
going to the menu and format the card it keeps the card healthy.
LCD brightness here you can adjust how bright or dark
your monitor is, in the back of the camera, i would urge you to leave that well and
truly alone too,
because supposing you brighten it up a bit and and you forget
and then you're working on a really dull day the monitor will seem very bright in
comparison to your surroundings
it could lead you to completely messing up your exposures and thinking you've
got it wrong when you haven't
leave your LCD brightness well and truly alone there a sense a cleaning settings
in here
and again I just leave on the factory defaults because
they'll do the job beautifully for you.
Auto image rotation is a personal choice, if you wanna turn your picture up the
other way in the camera
or in the computer as I said I like mine laying on this side so i can see them bigger
when i look back instead of having a little up and down strip like
that,
so despite the fact there's all sorts of exciting goodies hiding away in your
menus
unfortunately they won't make you a better photographer
the handful of things we've spoken about are useful and i'd urge you to
have a look at those
but beyond that just leave it alone the things that will impact your photography
are understanding depth of field, lighting shutter speed, apertures.
So, i'm gonna put this menu down,
and think about my lunch.