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Menu Systems - Setup

Lesson 8 from: Sony A99 - DSLR Fast Start

John Greengo

Menu Systems - Setup

Lesson 8 from: Sony A99 - DSLR Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

8. Menu Systems - Setup

Next Lesson: Camera Operation

Lesson Info

Menu Systems - Setup

All right, first camera I've ever dealt with that has a whole section dealing with time and date, so you could go in and set the time and date here. If you want, you can choose an area setting, and I think they could have stopped all of that in one of the other camera settings because that's all it's in the time of date setting. So we're in the final group, folks homestretch now the final set up section here and memory start ok, this is one that you're probably going to want to go and set this to previous what happens normally if you don't do this, if you leave it at top, it always goes back to the far left top item in the list and it's kind of hard to navigate there's a lot of things in this menu and it's very convenient just to go back to the last thing that you were accessing, so I think most people would prefer to have it on previous all right, another gripe that I have on cameras and this camera addresses the great the great, but that I have and that isthe when I pressed delete wh...

at do you think I want to d'oh anyone guess, yell out what you think I want to dio I want to delete an image, well, most cameras are like oh pardon me sir you don't mean to delete this image do you and I have to go yes I do want to delete the image okay you may now delete the image the lengthy image again and so you gotta press all these buttons and so normally when you pressed the lead it says cancel as if you accidentally pressed the button this one allows you to go in and just press one more button to delete it so it's to button presses rather than three to delete an image slightly better in my opinion turning the mod ill on the top of the camera will turn up a little guide the old microsoft paperclip if anyone remembers that one who I see you would like to change your mode can I help you with that when you're first using the camera you can leave this on it'll help you learn about the camera but after about a week or so you're going to turn this off to save yourself the annoyance of this screen popping up all the time I'd leave the brightness at zero you can go in and change the brightness of the viewfinder but I'd leave this when at auto it seems to do a pretty good job of dealing with it if the color drifts at some point in the future you can go in and adjust the color if necessary probably won't need to be dealing with that one next grouping set up number two if you have this camera does have a gps setting in here and you can go in and you can adjust some of the gps controls now I had this when I was out shooting the panorama shots that you saw earlier and so here's a screen shot from my light room page and you can see where in this barren dirt field tulips would then blossom at some later date where I was with in that field shooting those photographs and so it gives you locations and how many pictures you shot in that location and gives you very specific latitude longitude and even altitude information which is kind of cool kind of nice to have all that and they're especially in light room next up powers save how quickly do you want the camera to power down I would leave this in the standard mode you could choose a particular amount of time I think one minute is fine for the camera to go to sleep if you're dealing with hooking this camera via the hd connection you can control a little bit how the cameras connected with that I would leave that one in auto and for the control for h g m I would just leave this turn on so that you can control the camera from another hd dot htm my device that you might have controlling it which might be the remote for your tv and question about the display on the feed that we're getting out of this that un compressed feed do we see all the junk on the screen or do we get the pure image? Well, for those people who want the pure image you turn this off for other people who want to monitor the settings you can turn it on and you can see what the cameras recording in addition to all the other settings so different people have different needs and that scenario okay, next step usb connection I would leave this on auto khun work with different types of usb devices and auto will figure it out for you, which is what I like this camera has kind of a weird way of reading images from the memory cards if you put this in multi, it'll look for images on both memory cards and so I would prefer it look all over for for pictures rather than just one card okay, the little beet deep on cameras if you're serious if you are if clients are paying you money, they don't pay you to hear the beep beep ok if they're paying you if you're professionally over, your picture died and your photographer has the beep beep on you might have made the wrong choice ok got to turn that off if you want to use a psc lenses those of the dt those with smaller crop frame sensors if you leave this in auto, if you accidentally load up one of those dt lenses on here, it will automatically crop down, which is fine autofocus micro adjustment if you have one of the fast aperture lenses like the eighty five one for the one thirty five one point eight, you want to make sure that they're focusing exactly right on. If they're not focusing right on, you can adjust them a little bit. You can pull him a little bit forward or push him a little bit behind. If so, if you are getting consistent front focusing or back focusing, you can go into your f micro adjust and adjust that to a small degree so you don't have to send it all the way off to sony to have him fix something that's. Just a little tweak. All right, the final page finally okay, you're going tohave your firmware version every once in a while, sony will come up with better software that's running the camera. Maybe they'll fix a couple of little bugs that I pointed out and we'll have version one point o two, in which case you go to sony and you download the stuff and you follow their instructions and you upload it to your camera for free and so just kind of keep an eye on their web site should go back there. Maybe every six to nine months to see if they come up with a new firm or version for your camera appropriate language cleaning mode and so you when you turn the camera off it automatically goes into a cleaning mode but you can physically clean it right now and it actually kind of makes a funny noise where it's doing the little harlem I mean sensor shake in there to get that dust off of there. You know one of the questions that I was kind always wondering about this is when compared to a traditional camera traditional camera has a shudder in front of the sensor which blocks dust and it has a mere that comes down but it moves and that causes an air kurt to circulate back there and that cheddar going up and down has more movement so that kind of gets dust coming back there now this has more of a solid mir in front this at block more dust because behind that solid mere the sensor is wide open but it's got a solid mere in front of it and so it's kind of half one way half the other. What you can do on this camera is you khun pop up the translucent mir and have access to the sensor so if you're used to cleaning your sensor with the variety of tools that are out there, you can still do it with this camera if you are in a dusty environment, you need to take precautions with your camera. S o sometimes I remember when I was in the sahara desert and it was just blowing sand. We went back into the car to change lenses because we did not want to change lenses outside where there's a lot of problems, and so do take precautions. It doesn't seem to be any worse than any other camera, as faras dust on the sensor, it seems to do a pretty good job with it, as do most cameras these days. There's a demo mode if you're in the sales department and you want to sell the camera, it's going to show you video things on their normal, you're going to leave that turned off initialized, there's three different levels of resets on this camera, the custom oats up on top, one, two and three let's say you just want to clear those out, that would be one level. The second level is all the things in the menu system, and then the third level is reboot everything, like even the clock is reset at that point. And so, if you want to completely knock everything out, you khun do kind of the most intensive of these, and so there's the reset, default that's, the everything mode, the ciric reset record mode that's kind of basically the whole menu and then there's just the customs settings that you can reset so there's a lot of different levels that you can reset it and that for me was a lot of talking thanks for sticking with that hat. Okay, herb g had another question he was wondering about adobe rgb as color space, right? And he was wondering why you would choose adobe rgb if you have a monitor that can on ly display srg b for a color space, why would you want to choose a toby rgb? You're going to get nerdy on me, all right? Yeah, I'm a little bit okay, so adobe rgb is a larger color gamut of colors when you select raw, you are getting adobe rgb, whether you want it or you don't. So basically the only option is is when you shoot jay pick images and they're right if you only have access and are only using the rgb space, that would be a better choice to choose just straight rgb. But chances are at some point you're going to access these pictures in the future when we have better technology and you have a better monitor and you're going to want to get all the information out of that picture that's why I want the adobe rgb if somebody said all I'm doing with this camera is just uploading pictures to my facebook site first I would say give me that camera it's way too nice a camera for somebody who's just uploading pictures to facebook but just say that's the scenario and they want their pictures to look as good as possible I would tell him to just set it to our tv because that's the color space that is being used basically on the web today and your pictures will look slightly better by doing that but if they want to print their pictures if they want to access the total amount of information in their pictures later on you're going to want it as adobe rgb and the question is do you want your camera to down five downsize it two rgb or do you want a program like adobe photo shop or light room would they know anything about color and photos they do a really good job at it and so it's popped up in different forums and people have gone on just seriously long rants almost like mine and it really you'd be hard pressed to see the difference it's a very subtle difference between the two praying thank you all right let's do some rapid fire questions before moving on to the next one so fella the card former a tool doesn't automatically reformat both cards does it no you have to select a card to format so if you put two cards in you can reformat when you go to reformat it says what slot do you want to format and it does one then you have to select the other one great and then also from fellow he says the auto exposure bracketing how many shots are in that bracket you get three five is an adjustable I'm trying to talk about my head I believe it's three well I'm gonna actually check the camera here I was thinking it was three but now I'm thinking that there may be an option to do more than that and yes, you could do five and see if you can do more than five you could do him in third stops half stops to third stops three frames or five frames great great thank you so cristal a dj art had asked about the peking would you suggest a low medium or made or high peaking level? They weren't paying attention I recommended what does anyone remember what I recommended? Low very correct give that person a camera wait on then one last writing the rapid fire segment from our harris who asks why are some of my menu items great out? And do I have a feature turned on? Do I have to select something so I can access those great out menu item there's a number of items that are great out depending on what mode you're and and I didn't go through all of them and tell you which modes it's going to be great out, but sometimes there are only things that you can do when you have jpeg images selected or when the mod ill is in one of the like the t a t ten mode, or in the suite panorama. What you're only going to be able to get into those when it's in that particular mountain. And so there is something that's just kind of temporarily locking you out of that mode. Great, thank you. And one more from fella, who has a ton of great questions, is clearly sitting there with the camera of maybe you talked about this already, but in the menus was there a place to enter copyright information to be embedded in every image? No, there is not. That is something that I have seen a nikon and canon cameras, but it do not have in this camera, so you would then just do it upon important to do it on in horton, s so if you have light room, you could do that right on import. Great, great.

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Amazing... The sony corporation should give a gold medal. Congratulations on the professionalism and elegance in worshop. Thanks 'John Greengo and all Creative Live team for providing such a wonderful experience.

a Creativelive Student
 

Congratulations CreativeLive and John Greengo for stepping outside of your more typical Canon/Nikon comfort zone and giving us this introduction to the A99. I have never seen any pro photographer treat this camera as fairly as John does - least of all with this much enthusiasm. John's course is thorough, comprehensive and very enjoyable and, once I'm able to, I will be purchasing this camera. With any luck. Now I'm looking forward to a course from John on travel photography that's just as brilliant.

Bob Wurst
 

I don’t have the Sony A99, I have the Sony A65. It doesn’t have all the features of the A99 but it has many of them and this course helped me understand them better. The material is very thorough and well presented. Thank you John Greengo!

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