5 Sony Settings I Wish I Knew Sooner

Our Sony Alpha cameras have a lot of hidden features, some that will make our lives infinitely easier and photography more enjoyable, and a feel that could ruin our professional career and make us want to skip town with a whole new identity. I have got no choice. Yikes. But don't worry, my name is Jason Vong and I'll make sure you'll never have to disappear. So here are five hidden Sony settings that I wish we all found out a little sooner. And shout outs to PPA for sponsoring a portion of this video. Number one, silent shutter. Wait, this again? Yes, I brought this topic and issue up before in a previous video. But since then, I've actually ran into a new issue with silent shutter that I want to talk about in just a bit. But just so I can catch the newbies up here, silent shutter is a feature that allows us to take photos without the sound of a mechanical shutter. Great for when you want to be covert and not be that person at a quiet event. But it could also be very dangerous at the same time, depending on the lighting condition that you're shooting in. In certain indoor lighting conditions, when using silent shutter, you may see these weird banding lines in your photos, and they are next to impossible to edit out. Now, some commenters in a previous video suggest shooting with a slower shutter speed, like 1 over 50 or 1 over 60, so it's in sync with the indoor lighting frequency, and I can confirm that it works. If you're shooting static subjects only. Unfortunately, it's not going to work when you're photographing something with lots of motions, like a concert or a wedding reception. When using such a slow shutter speed, you will get blurry photos. Okay, easy. Just don't use silent shutter when LED lights are present, right? I was wrong. You see, I was photographing this dance parade back in the summer using my trusty A7CR, and for whatever reason, I was like, you know what? Let me use silent shutter here. There's no LED lights in sight. We got mother nature's sun here. That's not going to give me any sort of banding problems. Shouldn't be an issue. Big mistake. When I got home, I noticed all of my shots were wavy, slanted, distorted crap. Now, it wasn't so much because the performers were in motion. It was because I was in motion. The camera was panning from one action to another, which was what was causing the waves in the slants. Now, luckily, I was using more than one camera that day, and the other camera I was using was not on silent shutter, so I still ended up with some usable shots. So once again, my advice is to avoid using silent shutter altogether, unless you know you can work around these limitations. It's only amazing when you're using the higher-end Sony cameras like the A1, the A9, and possibly some mid-level cameras. Otherwise, if you want to see if you might have this issue with your camera, just simply turn on silent shutter, walk up to a pole, and just do some panning back and forth motion at a high shutter speed to see if you get any slanted photos. Number two, low-quality photos through wireless transfer. For this next setting here, you might want to get your camera and your phone ready. This has happened to so many of us, right? We take an amazing photo. We want to share it right then and there, but obviously, we're not near our computer to make the transfer. So what do we do? We can, of course, wirelessly transfer the photo directly to our phone. But, uh-oh, why is our photo so ugly and so low-res? I thought I was shooting with a professional mirrorless camera, not a professional mirrorless potato. Now, for whatever reason, your camera will always send a two-megabyte version of your photos to your phone. No idea why they thought that was a good idea to make it a default, but what we're going to need to do is go to your Imaging Edge mobile app on your phone, go to settings, and change image size for importing from 2M to original. Now, it should transfer the full-quality JPEG version over, or if you're shooting exclusively RAW, it should send the RAW file over. However, I still prefer and highly recommend using a USB-C SD card reader instead, especially if you're capturing exclusively in RAW and want to use apps like Lightroom to edit on your phone right away. This is my preferred method of photo transfer to phone, as wireless connection can be very finicky sometimes. Like, transferring less than 10 images is fine, but if you want to do a bulk transfer, it's always better with a hard wire. If you're a JPEG-only shooter or a video shooter, then you might want to pay attention to this. And hey, why the hell not? RAW shooters, this could benefit you too. Here's an incredibly underrated feature loads of Sony users are not using, and that is the toggle setting. Now, I shoot with auto settings in some shape or form all the time, whether it's aperture priority, or auto ISO, or even auto white balance, and there ain't no shame in that. Especially in a fast-paced environment, it's hard to manually adjust your settings to the T on the fly. So instead, I let my camera do some of the quick guesswork first, and then I lock it down with the toggle setting. It's going to be much easier when I show you an example. Come with me. Now, the sun here isn't perfect, but you'll get the idea. So right now, my background and my subject are evenly exposed. But as soon as we move to the shade for a split second, the auto exposure will quickly compensate for it, and my subject might be bright, but now my background is overexposed. If we're aiming to make professional videos, this would not be acceptable. And you're thinking this is acceptable. We don't want this jarring exposure change to keep happening, but we also cannot keep our hands on a dial to manually adjust it while we're shooting. So what can we do? We can program an auto exposure lock toggle to one of our custom buttons, which basically locks down the exposure so the camera won't change it until we press the button again. So we would press it here, where our subject and our background are nicely exposed and lit, and proceed to film. In the shade, the subject is dark for a second, but the background is still nicely exposed. And now our subject is back to being evenly exposed while our background stayed consistent. Now, toggle on and toggle off not only works for auto exposure, but also for auto focus and auto white balance. To program any of these toggle settings, for my menu 2.0 users, go to the yellow briefcase tab on the bottom, custom key setting, and choose a button of your choice and find any of the settings that you think would benefit using toggle the most. For my 1.0 menu users, go to camera tab 2, locate custom key towards the last few pages, choose a button of your choice, and cycle through the menu until you find the toggles that you want to program. Now, you can tell when AEL toggle is on when you see this asterisk on the bottom of the screen, and auto white balance toggle is on when you see AWBL on the bottom of the screen. By the way, instead of toggle, you can also program any of these features with a hold instead, which just means you have to keep the button pressed in order for your camera to lock down that specific setting until you let go. So both options for you to try, hopefully this will benefit some of you out there. Number four, bright monitoring. Not to be confused with monitor brightness, a tip that I shared in a previous video, which you can queue up right up here. But bright monitoring is incredibly helpful when you're photographing in pitch darkness, when enabled, it temporarily boosts the brightness of your LCD screen or your electronic viewfinder, making it easier to see and compose your shot in dark environments. So this is bright monitoring off, and this is bright monitoring on. You see how much brighter it is? Loads of long exposure photographers use this, and loads of astrophotographers use this. You can see in the dark, it's night vision. Pretty much like a secret weapon. But remember this, bright monitoring does not affect whatever current settings you have at the time of the shoot, nor does it affect the final outcome of your photo. Now, bright monitoring is probably the most hidden setting out of all the settings here, okay? So for my 2.0 menu users, go to the yellow briefcase tab, custom key setting, choose a button of your choice, and on the first red tab, navigate to shooting display, and select bright monitoring. For my 1.0 menu users, go to camera tab two, locate custom key towards the last few pages, choose a button of your choice, and cycle through the menu until you find bright monitoring. Again, not to be confused with monitor brightness. Now, you can tell when it's on when you see this icon on your screen. We still got one more tip left, but before that, I want to share with you an incredible resource for going pro in photography. Professional photographers of America have over 900 online courses from the basics of photography to running a business, to marketing yourself to clients, and much more. On top of that, the moment you become a member, you get $15,000 worth of gear insurance. That means you get full replacement coverage with a flat $350 deductible, or you can repair your equipment with a flat $50 deductible. I know you, Michael. You got some serious case of butterfingers. PPA also offers data loss, negligence, and malpractice protection with their identification trust. I mean, those two benefits alone will allow you to have a bigger peace of mind when you're out on the job. To learn more, check out my link in description box below, which you can also use to save $25 off your membership when you sign up. Thank you, PPA, for sponsoring us. Now, back to the video. Number five, Switch Vertical Horizontal AF Area. Now, for those of you who often alternate between vertical and horizontal composition in photography, then you might find this hidden feature incredibly helpful. And I say hidden because on some Sony cameras, it's simply labeled as Switch VHAF Area, which doesn't explain much, but basically, enabling this will allow us to keep the focus areas and or focus points separated for each orientation. For example, you can have center focusing in the horizontal orientation and zone top area focusing in vertical orientation. Now, to find this, for my 2.0 menu users, go to the purple AF MF tab, focus area, and find Switch VHAF Area. For my 1.0 menu users, under the first camera tab, cycle through each page until you find the AF1 category and Switch VHAF Area should be there. Now, I personally enable both autofocus point and autofocus area. Changing to a different focus point and focus area will only affect that specific orientation that you're currently in. This is something that I use in concert photography very often, but it can be very helpful for portraits, weddings and other event related photography as well. Thank you so much for watching. Check out PPA and we will see you guys in the next video. Peace.