5DII: How do you use yours? (Custom user settings; My Menu; dealing with noise, etc)

[Feanor]

Having been unable to find any tips on setting up the 5DII's many customisable features, I thought I'd start a thread to see if there are any interesting ideas out there. There are so many options to change on this body that there are clearly meany different ways of skinning this particular Canon, as it were.


Having had the camera for a few months now, I have just set up my Custom User Settings and used them in anger last night at a particularly challenging shoot in a club for some DJ friends. Being able to switch rapidly between settings for flash and settings for low-level ambient light was invaluable. I have my custom settings dial set up as follows (I am not specifying settings yet that I always leave the same or have not changed from default):


C1: My default settings. I'm always changing the settings for P, Tv and Av and then forgetting to put them back (shooting in bright daylight at ISO3200, for example). So this is primarily for use in good daylight and with speedlight (580 EXII), or as a starting point before changing other settings.
ISO100; Evaluative metering; AI Focus


C2: For use in tracking fast-moving subjects, such as birds in flight:
ISO200; Spot metering; AI Servo; Center focus point only; AF point area expansion = Enable


C3: For use in low-light situations without speedlight:ISO3200 (changed to ISO6400 for last night in club only); Eval metering; AI Focus; High ISO speed noise reduction = Strong; Speedlight flash = disable (so that I can both make use of the AF Assist beam and quickly switch to C1 if I want to use the flash).


It's a shame there aren't more C numbers on the dial - if there were, I'd set some frequently used Tv and Av settings but as it is I've set up catch-all settings based on P. If I'm wanting to use Tv or Av though, those settings are remembered anyway if I have to switch briefly to one of my custom modes.





My Menu:
Live View/Movie func. set
External Speedlight control
Mirror lockup
(Those are the only ones I think it's worth having in there but I've also put in High ISO speed noise reduction; Highlight tone priority; Safety shift just because I have the space. I'm not sure yet if they'll ever get used though).




My "Set" button is configured to open the Quality menu but I nearly always shoot in large RAW and small JPG - I'm still struggling to find the time to learn photoshop so I rarely have the time to PP my images much, so having (relatively) low res, noise-reduced and ready-to-email images is very useful. And I don't want to waste drive space with both large RAW and large JPG files.


Noise might be a better subject for another thread (I know how much debate this can cause) , but I find the Noise Reduction function makes a huge difference at ISO 6400. But what's the disadvantage? And why do high ISO images require more memory than low ISO images - even RAW, which apparently have no NR applied?





Of course, everyone has different styles of shooting, but I'd be very interested if people have had better ideas at getting the most out of the body to make life as easy as possible.

[richscorer]

http://community.the-digital-picture.com/forums/p/892/6055.aspx#6055


- useages of custom function & my menu on digic 4


hope this helps -Dan's posting certainly helped me!

[Feanor]

Thanks, some useful stuff there. I might copy and paste my post there and close this thread later