Master Custom Menus for Lightning Fast Camera Settings

Speed up your camera setting changes with menu items you probably never use!

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography. Before I start this week’s video, I have an ask of you. It would be really helpful if you could subscribe to this channel, as it enables the YouTube algorithm to send more people to my channel. I appreciate your help in advance.

Most of the time, you keep most of the settings on your camera the same, and you probably only change the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. If that is you, you probably miss out on ways to make shooting easier. Knowing when to deploy different auto-focus modes, metering modes, or timers can help you shoot more efficiently.

Most of the latest cameras can customise the various buttons and dials on your camera to put your most used functions at your fingertips. But what happens when you run out of buttons and want to use something frequently?

Today, I will demonstrate some easy ways to change function settings. I’ll use my Canon R5 to explain these tips, but other camera makes and models have similar capabilities.

Let’s start with Custom Shooting Modes. If you have different photography interests, say, sports, wildlife, and lunar photography. Each of these genres needs different setups from which you will start. For sports, you will need a fast shutter speed and a wide-open aperture; the auto-focus will be set to recognise the human eye. It might be the same for wildlife photography, but instead of auto-focus recognising the human eye, it needs to go to an animal’s eye. For lunar photography, you’ll want a slower shutter speed (but not so slow that the earth will be spinning faster than your exposure, the metering mode will be set to spot metering, the aperture will be slightly smaller, say f.8, and we’ll need a single focus point with Continuous AF switched off.

If you have a good memory, you can try to remember the starting settings. But if you are in a rush, feeling cold, or just getting a bit old, your brain might not recall everything. That’s where we can set up Custom Shooting modes.

We’ll start by defining the shooting mode for sports photography. I always shoot in Manual mode. I’m going to set the shutter speed to 1/1000th of a second.  The aperture will be set as wide-open as possible, in this case f/2.8. I’ll set the ISO to 200 as a starting point and this will be the thing I will adjust most of all based on the conditions on the day. The Autofocus operation will be set to AI Servo, and Continuous AF will be set to Enable, so the focus point will move as the subject moves through the frame. The focus area will be set to eye-tracking and the subject to be tracked will be humans. Finally, the shooting mode will be set to continuous high-speed shooting. You can see that there are quite a lot of things to remember, and they are all on different menus. Well, let’s make it easy for us.

Head to the Yellow settings menu and scroll along until you find the Custom Shooting Mode (C1-C3) item. Select this and then select Register settings. You can now apply the settings you have just dialled into one of the three available shooting modes. I’ll add this to Customer Shooting Mode C1. I’ll do the same process for the other two genres of photography, applying wildlife to C2 and lunar to C3.

Now, to switch between these three shooting modes, I press the mode button at the top of the camera and select either C1, C2, or C3. The settings are automatically updated according to how we defined them. That’s great, but what if we have a fourth set-up that we might use less frequently? There is another way to quickly access settings without scrolling through all these menus.

At the start of my videos, you’ve probably seen the ridiculous poses with stupid expressions. I shoot all of these alone, without anyone else in the room. I need the autofocus mode switched to Continuous AF, the AF Method set to eye detection, and the subject to be humans. I also need an interval timer so the camera will take a picture every second until I have done enough stupid poses.

To do this, I will set up a custom menu that has all the menu items I need in one place. It’s over here on the green menu items. A tip for Canon users: you can switch between each colour grouping by pressing the Q button on the back of the camera.

I have already set up a few Custom Menus, but I’ll add a new one specifically for my self-portraits. Go to the last of the green tabs, select the Add My Menu Tab option, and click OK. We now have a new tab with nothing on it, so we need to select Configure and then Select Items to register. Now, we need to scroll down to add all the menu items we need.

In the future, we will scroll to the relevant custom menu and quickly select the options we need.

If I could give Canon a wishlist, I would love to be able to rename the custom tabs to make it easy to recall which tab is being used for which genre. Even without this, I find custom menus and shooting modes a great way to easily access regularly used functions and setups.

If you’ve enjoyed this video, it would be great if you could like it and share it by clicking on the thumbs-up button below the video. That way, a few more people will get to see it. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel with this button. I send out a monthly newsletter to my subscribers with news about photography, as well as exclusive offers. Scan this QR code to sign up. My name is Rich Dyson, from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this has been Coffee Break Photography. See you next time.