2020 SonyA7iii CAMERA SETTINGS for Portraits

today's video was requested by Albert he messaged me on Instagram and he even emailed me to make this video about my Sony a7 three settings for portrait photography we're gonna take a look at the main options I use in the menu we're also gonna look at how I set up my custom buttons and also look at the function menu setup so let's get started the first thing that we need to do is set the camera to photo mode so I'm gonna put mine on M and then we're gonna go ahead and push menu on the camera on the first page so we're gonna be kind of cycling through the main options we're not gonna go every single go over every single option because I don't use everything so on the first page the main one I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to file format we're gonna set that to raw under the raw file type we're gonna do uncompressed now I don't shoot JPEGs but if I do I'm gonna have it at extra-fine and also just make sure that we're at 24 megapixels page - I really don't setup anything I just leave it as a default settings page 3 the drive mode you have a couple of options you can either do single shooting or you can do hyde speed continuous I typically leave it at single shooting just because I don't really shoot really fast only time I shoot fast is when I maybe have the model walk towards the camera and I'm gonna do natural lights then I'll change it to continuous shooting but more often than not I'm gonna leave it at the single shooting so I'm gonna go back to menu and that's pretty much it now there are some memory settings you can set for custom button 1 and 2 here I'm not gonna cover it in this video but that if that's something you guys want to see let me know but I do have those set up but that's specifically set up for video page 4 I don't change anything there page 5 the most important one is going to be the first one here where it says focus mode I want to make sure we set it to autofocus continuous and the reason for that is that it's gonna obviously continuously focus on the face if the model is walking towards a camera it's gonna continuously get and pick up the eye autofocus so that's super important for style of work as far as the priority set I keep my net balanced emphasis and then the other one is gonna be the other important one here is gonna be the focus area so I typically use wide and it's going to try to detect kind of what should be in focus now this does usually a good job but there's gonna be times where maybe I'm doing a wide shot and I might have a model super far away and it might struggle to figure out what I wanna have in focus and it does happen at times when I'm doing wide shots or nighttime photos so if I'm not in wide what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the flexible spot and the reason why I like this one is that my joystick in back of the camera now turns into essentially a DSLR camera and I used to use this a lot because I wanted my camera to feel like the 5d Mark 3 I came from the 5d Mark 3 and then I switched into the Sony system and having that Joyce that guys my focus really felt comfortable for me coming in from the 5d Mark 3 so if I set it up this way with a small flexible small flexible spot small I can just basically move it to where I wanted to focus it at so that's very very helpful I can just half press the button to focus so you can determine what's going to work best for you in my case I'm just gonna leave it back at wide I'm gonna go back to menu and that's pretty much it for this section page 6 I don't have anything set here I don't change anything everything stays the same page 7 the same thing I don't change anything but you can take a look at my settings here if yours looks different but I don't remember changing anything 8 I don't change 9 the only important one is to make sure that your ISO is set to 100 because that's the base ISO and a Sony camera I'm gonna push menu again metering mode I leave it at multi I know I get this question a couple of times mine stays at multi page 10 I don't change anything that's on here [Music] page 11 the only thing I have different is just wireless flash I'm not sure if you need to have that on but I have mine on but that's just the way it's set up on my camera page 12 I get asked a lot what balance do I use in about 90% of the time I'm gonna use auto white balance now if I notice that it looks a little bit off well then obviously I'm gonna change it to something else but I'm gonna leave mine on auto now the important one here is the Dro / auto HDR now this setting I absolutely hate and you want to make sure it's off because for a whole year of shooting with the sony a7 3 what what happened is if you have this on what it does is it it changes the preview in back of the camera so in the back of the camera the photo will look great it looks like it's exposed perfectly looks awesome and then when you import it into the Lightroom for example what what happened is the exposure would look great for a second and then it would just get completely dark and it would make my image completely completely dark and I hated it and then I learned this from Nick page he has a youtube channel - and I'm gonna put the link there if you guys want to check out the video where he talked about taking the setting off and now whenever I import everything looks crisp and clean so thank you Nick page for that as far as my creative styles I leave it at standard and the picture profile I have off that's another question I get a lot page 13 don't really change anything here and page 14 as well don't change anything now we're gonna go to page two and I'm gonna skip about the first three because those are all more related to video and I'm gonna go to page four and the important one here is gonna be to turn off the electronic front curtain shutter you're gonna make sure that's off because if you leave that on and use flash like most of my work is with flash what you're gonna get is a bunch of lines that show up in your images and you don't want that to happen course so make sure that's turned off also make sure that steady shot is turned on for the image stabilization page five I don't change that page six this one's actually pretty cool the display button so I'm gonna kind of briefly go over this one when I go to display but I'm gonna hit set and I'm gonna go to monitor and basically what this means is what do you want the back of the camera to show when you're changing the displays like I like to have the levels show up I like the histogram the no display info in the display all now if you don't want to see the display all ever show up then you just uncheck it so those are the four that I like to have on when I hit enter there if I go back I can even adjust what I want to see in the viewfinder so if I go to finder the only things I want to see is the histogram and then no display at all I don't want to have all this junk as I'm shooting so I uncheck that I'm gonna hit enter there let's go back to menu I do like having the grid to help me frame for the rule of thirds page 7 the most important one this is the one that I really love it's the auto review feature so the way I set my camera is as I'm shooting and I have the camera up I take the shot what happens is there's a preview inside the electronic viewfinder so that I can see what the lighting looked like what the pose look like and I don't have to kind of chimp and look down at my camera so I set that to two seconds now sometimes I will turn this off when I'm doing natural light and I'm doing two fast-paced movements I don't want that little preview to be interrupting as I'm shooting page eight the only thing I did change was the dial setup which is the av2 TV only because I was familiar with the Canon cameras so I switched that and we're gonna come back to the custom buttons right here I'm just gonna finish it off with page nine I do have audio signals off so the camera will not beep as I'm focusing so I turn that feature off so we're gonna go back to page eight and we're gonna set up the custom buttons for photos and that's gonna be the first icon the second one's for video the third one is for playback so since this is about photos we're gonna go to the first one and when I hit custom kiemce I can set my control wiill and I set mine to aperture because I came from the 5d mark 3 now which is used to it that way custom button 1 is gonna be the focus area so that I can switch from wide focus to flexible spot or zone focus this is very helpful for if you're doing video custom button 2 is the focus mode which we talked about earlier and I just leave mine on continuous autofocus so I don't really change this one a lot this is more good for video when I want to go to maybe manual focus custom button 3 we have it set to white balance so custom button 4 I have it set to super 35 mode so that if I'm using an aps-c lens I can then crop in so for example if I'm using a 16 millimeter aps-c lens and then I put it on my full-frame Sony camera I can then turn that 16 millimeter into a 24 and crop in in addition to that I can also use full-frame lenses on the Sony a7 3 and I can crop in just a little bit so I can get some extra focal length now I've done this with client work at school sometimes I'll do headshots for the teachers and I have my 55 millimeter and I want to maybe get a little bit more focal length so I can get that extra depth of field and I can get that compression and I'll set that so the 55 then jumps into maybe like a 70 75 I'll put the number up here and what's cool about that is I get that compression but keep in mind when I do this with full-frame lenses I am gonna be losing some megapixels and if I'm not mistaken I think it turns the a 7-3 RAW files into 10 mega pixels so you have to think about when you're doing this what is your situation so when I was doing the headshots they were mainly for small prints and they were just for web-based stuff so 10 megapixels what's gonna be totally fine on page tomb we got the multi select center button I have set mind set to focus standard the center button that have center lock-on auto focus the left is going to be for the drive mode the right button is gonna be for is ohm and then the down button the face priority and autofocus on page three the AEL button the shot result preview is super important for me because what ends up happening because I shoot off camera flash and the moment I put a trigger on the camera what happens is the camera automatically tries to balance the light in the scene so in other words if I'm trying to get my ambient and I adjust it the way I want the moment I put the trigger on it kind of overrides all those settings and now when I'm trying to adjust I'm not getting the accurate representation through my viewfinder so if I hold down the AE L button and for the shot result preview I can then see what the exposure looks like without that auto exposure because of the trigger now the other option to is to turn off the trigger and turn it on which is totally fine but there's some triggers like I was using the Westcott FJ 400 it takes a little bit longer to turn it off because I got a push and hold and that's gonna take a little bit of a longer process so I like having this set so I can just push and hold it it turns it off and then I can see the result preview and then let it go and then I can go and adjust my flash settings this one is super important for off-camera flash users the autofocus on that's where I have my eye out of focus and then the focus hold button I have set to focus hold next we're gonna go into the custom settings for the playback options and I'm gonna set up one option that I learned from Jason Wang that was like super helpful so I'm gonna push menu and then I'm gonna go to the third option which says custom key here and I'm gonna go to custom button three and we're gonna set this to rating and the reason why this is super powerful is that as I'm doing client shoots especially for my school when I'm photographing all the sports teams you know I don't have a lot of time to then import and try to figure out okay what photos does this student want or what photos do they want for this specific portrait for the sports you poster so right after I get the photo literally right after I get the team's photo I show it to the players and I tell them look take a look at it push c3 and let me know and star the photo so I know exactly when I import into capture one or I know exactly what photo I'm gonna be working with and it saves me a ton of time instead of having them come into my classroom and then select the photos they just get it immediately right after I take the photo so now we're gonna go back to the menu we're gonna go to the function menu setup now I don't use this a lot but I do want to show you guys what I have set up in my camera so upper one I have the shoot mode I have white balance focus mode the focus area five is for the audio record levels when I'm doing video and function six is the drive mode page two I have the frame rate the zebra display the zebra levels the face priority and autofocus the gridline and the marker display so what this is gonna do if I push the FN button and back up the camera I get quick access to these options now a lot of these options we already have them set and the custom keys so I don't use this very often but it is there for those of you that may want to have an additional options so keep in mind that these settings are not going to be perfect for everybody these are what works for a meme feel free to customize the settings to the way you like to shoot so the last option I want to show you is how to make your own custom menu so that you can make your workflow a little bit faster and have easy access to options using the menu on a dedicated page so we're gonna push menu and back at the camera and we're going to go to the my menu section the star so here are some of the options that I use a lot is viewfinder brightness the s and Q exposure mode the record settings for video s and Q settings the auto review which is super helpful because sometimes I go from shooting natural light doing like fast-paced candid shots and then I talked about earlier why I like the two seconds and then of course I always format so if I want to add items to a page all I got to do is go to the third one or second one depending on how many pages you have I'm gonna then go to add item and you have access to all of the menu items so that you can have easy access to them so I'm just gonna add a random one here I'm just gonna add ISO for the heck of it and then here it says on page two and I'm gonna hit the enter button and it's added so now in other words when I push menu and back of the camera instead of having to cycle through all of these menus I can just go to the star and I have easy access to the main options that I always use and that concludes our video we've covered though of them and bear them now if you guys have any suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments below by all means my settings are not perfect it's not gonna work for everybody so keep an open mind as you look at my settings and figure out what's gonna work best for you guys peace out stay safe and I'll see you guys on the next one

Channel: Eli Infante

Views: 341,735

Keywords: sonya7iii camera settings, sonya73 camera settings, sonya73 portrait settings, sonya7iii portrait settings, sonya7iii portraits, Sony Camera Settings, 2020 Sonya7iii settings, Sony Auto Focus Settings, SonyA7iii Auto Focus Settings, SonyA7iii Setup, Sony A7iii Portraiture Settings, SonyA73 Settings, Best Settings for A7iii

Id: Ol1X0aClAVo

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020