these secrets are so secret that they don't even want you to know them now
that I think about it that's kind of what a secret is what is up people
Dunna here and today we're talking about my favorite Sony a6500 hacks or tips
or features that I think you can really benefit from and make sure to stay right
to the end because the bonus tip is a special one let's hop right into it tip
number one has to do with manual focus everyone kind of beat up on the a6500
for its touchscreen capabilities or lack thereof they wish that they could get
around the menus and that kind of stuff using the touchscreen but when they
couldn't they were a little disappointed by that however the touchscreen can
actually still be quite powerful one thing that a lot of people don't seem to
know is that when you're in manual focus mode if you double tap on the screen
it'll actually zoom in and do the focus assist function so that you can grab
your focus even better this is a function that you can program to start
immediately when you try to manual focus or you can have it set to a button so
it'll zoom in when you press that button but it's pretty cool to be able to
double tap anywhere on the screen and it'll zoom in to that point if you want
to zoom back out to your regular one you just double tap again and it'll come
back out to normal and as an added bonus if you double tap and you're zoomed in
and you want to move to another part of your frame you can actually swipe just
like you would on your phone to move the frame around pretty cool right tip
number two is Clear Image Zoom. Clear Image Zoom is something that's really
handy for people who either shoot JPEGs or they shoot video if you have it
turned on you have to go into a menu and turn on Clear Image Zoom and it allows
you to zoom in up to two times with very little loss in your quality so when
you're taking video let's say you have a prime lens on let's say you're using the
30mm Sigma you can actually zoom in and make that look like a 60mm
all within that one lens and as an added little bonus if you want to
do a smooth zoom while you're recording video you can actually hold the right
side of the little spinning circle and it'll zoom in smoothly
so you can turn your prime lens into a zoom lens just like that tip number
three is one of my favorites and it's geared towards hybrid shooters so people
who shoot both photos and video like myself I'm sure you've been in lots of
situations where you're flipping back and forth between using the movie mode
and the photo mode now what I find easiest is if I just keep it in manual
mode I can still shoot video it doesn't work the other way around so if you're
in movie mode you can't take photos so I leave mine in manual mode a lot but I
also like to use picture profiles when I'm shooting video I don't want to see
those same picture profiles applied when I'm shooting photos so I have to keep
switching back and forth on the picture profile from the one that I want to
nothing for example if you're shooting s log in video and then you flip over you
want to do some photos you're gonna see s log and you don't want to see that you
want to expose properly for your raw image now one way that I found you can
get around this is if you choose your picture profile that you want to shoot
your videos in and then afterwards turn on silent shooting now on the a 6500
they don't allow picture profiles at the same time as silent shooting so what
happens is if you're in manual mode it turns off the picture profile but as
soon as you hit the record button to start shooting a video it will re-enable
the picture profile because there's no longer a need for the silent shooting so
when you're taking videos the picture profiles applied and when you're taking
stills the picture profile is not there now as long as you're okay with silent
shooting which I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't be then you're good to
go tip number four is something that people
don't seem to know you can do is to actually run your camera with a portable
charger so for example something like this guy if you can strap this onto your
tripod and plug a USB cable into the USB on your a 6500 you can actually run your
camera using the power of this instead of the internal battery so if you're
worried about the battery's running out while you're let's say filming yourself
like this you can just plug it right in and you'll have lots of battery power
where I find this particularly helpful is when I'm live-streaming when I'm live
streaming I plug my camera into my computer and I stream using it but I'm
not actually recording it so I'm not limited by the 30-minute recording limit
but the battery will run out pretty quick if I was actually to just let it
run so I turn it into video mode I plug it into external power and then it'll
let me run for a long time with one of those kind of batteries that'll let me
run for hours tip number five is actually something that I found out from
another youtuber named Gerald Undone he was doing a video on his a7iii I think
it was on the a7iii about how he uses the autofocus / manual focus hold button
to grab focus and then set it in manual so if you don't want it accidentally
hunting and you want to just set your focus and then leave it what you can
actually do is set a custom button one of the custom buttons on your camera to
AF / MF hold I use it on the AEL button or auto exposure lock button set your
camera into manual focus mode and then as long as you are holding down that
button it will temporarily go into autofocus mode so if you press the
shutter halfway down it will find focus then when you let go of the button it
will snap back into manual focus holding the place of the focus that you chose so
if you don't trust yourself when it comes to manual focusing your camera and
you trust the autofocus of the camera you can temporarily grab autofocus and
then let go and go back into manual focus and then you can make fine
adjustments if you want to from there it's quite handy if you're shooting like
an interview style thing you can get your subject to sit down grab autofocus
let go let it go into manual focus and then just leave it provided that they're
not moving around too much you should be good to go
number six is actually maybe a well-known feature but not enough people
are using it and it's something called eye autofocus now any time you talk to
someone who shoots portraits they'll tell you that the most important thing
that you want to focus on is the I that is what will engage people with the
subject on screen is you want them looking at their eyes so you want to
make sure that the eye is in focus now what you can do is map this to a custom
button I like to use the center button which is the button in the middle of the
spinning wheel on the back and then when you hold that down it'll search for an
eye and if it can't find an eye it'll go to a face then while you're holding that
button you want to snap your pictures pretty awesome right you don't even have
to worry about manual focus or any of that kind of stuff it's gonna
automatically lock on to an I number 7 is something that a lot of people
complain about and they don't know that there's a fix for it and that is high
heat Auto turn off or what people most commonly refer to as overheating the
Sony cameras are built in such a way that they get really hot inside and they
have to shut down before they damage the camera now that being said on the older
Sony cameras the problem was that they would shut down really early now how
they addressed this problem is they actually made a new function called auto
power off temp and you can toggle this function so what you want to do is in
your menu you go to tab 6 go to page 2 you want to find the function that says
auto power off temp and you're gonna choose high now what this basically does
is it tells your camera not to turn off when it starts to think it's overheating
and let it get to a way higher temperature before it turns off now with
this function on I've had the little high temperature symbol come up on me a
number of times but it's never turned off the camera on me and usually when I
do these kind of sit down things I'm running for 20-30 minutes at a time and
never had a problem with high temperature I've done long days lots of
shooting in high heat situations and never had a problem the eighth tip were
feature or hack or whatever you want to call it is something that I just found
out about or I just started using anyway and it's called S&Q or slow and
quick essentially what this allows you to do is record at one frame rate and
play it back at another one right inside the camera so for those of you who know
that's how we do slow motion or time lapses I think this is a great function
mostly for time lapses if you just need to get a quick and dirty time lapse and
you don't need to have any kind of fancy color grading or anything like that
and you don't need to get raw images this is a great way to do it so to start
with you're gonna go into your menu you're gonna go to tab two page one
you're gonna choose movie slash S&Q motion then change it from whatever
movie mode you're on and go down to the S and Q option so often I'll
choose S and Q manual it gives you all the same things as you have when you're
a manual mode but now we're in S&Q then go back to that same page and we're
gonna go to s and Q settings now there are two settings on this page there's
the record setting and the frame rate the record setting is telling you how
it's going to play back so what the final speed is going to be and the frame
rate is telling you how it's going to record so when we shoot slow motion we
shoot at let's say a hundred and twenty frames per second and then in the
software afterwards we slow it down so it's only playing at 24 frames per
second that's how we get slow motion and then the opposite when we do time lapses
we shoot photos let's say one every second and then we play that back 24
frames per second so it's 24 times as fast as we shot it now if you're doing
let's say a time lapse in side s and Q what you do is you choose a frame rate
of one frame per second so it's gonna take one photo per second it's actually
shooting a video at one frame per second but and then we're gonna choose the
record setting of 24 frames per second so you set up your shot you hit record
it's recording out one frame per second you can see that it looks all choppy but
then when you play it back in the camera it's a time lapse it's already sped up
24 times couple of downsides to this is that it's only shooting at 1080p so
you're only getting 50 megabits per second which is the same as the normal
1080p but you're not getting the 4k that you might want to record and you're not
getting the raw quality if you were to record a time-lapse the more traditional
way also there's no sound which you wouldn't have in the traditional way of
doing a time-lapse either and I can't think of why you would want the sound of
a time-lapse anyway it sounds terrible now one little bonus tip that I think
everyone should be using and you can use with a lot of the things that I've been
talking about today is the memory recall so on the top of the camera on the modes
dial there are two settings that our memory recalls memory recall one and
memory recall two so once you get all your settings and whatever mode you're
in all set and I like to use this with the s and Q options so that I have quick
access to it you set all those settings and then you're going to
into your menu you're gonna go to tab 1 page 4 choose the option that says
camera 1 camera 2 memory it doesn't actually say camera but it's got a
little symbol of a camera choose which memory slot you want to save those
settings in and now when you change the dial to that setting it'll automatically
remember all sorts of things what kind of mode you're in what white
balance what focus mode you chose a whole bunch of stuff almost everything
that you can possibly choose get saved into that setting so if you're using s
and Q every once in a while like I do you can choose let's say number 2 to be
your s and Q and then it's a quick flip into that mode and you're good to go
ready to shoot a time-lapse or let's say you have a certain mode that you like
for videos and a certain mode that you like for photos you can set one of those
on the memory modes and then it's a quick switch just to get right to it
now I want to turn it over to you guys do you have any hacks or tips or
anything for the Sony a6500 or whatever camera you're using drop a
comment down below and let us all know because we got a we got a share of these
kinds of things we need to help each other out all these little hacks and
tips they make life a lot easier so share it around show some love if you
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Sony A6500 Hacks, Tips, & Features [Get more out of your Camera!]