Hey what's up everybody, Miguel Quiles
here and in this episode of The Breakdown
I'm going to show you one of
my favorite features for customizing my
Sony cameras and it's actually this
little button right here. Tune in and I
will tell you everything you need to
know about what it is and how to set it up.
Welcome back to The Breakdown, my name
is Miguel Quiles, and today I want to
talk to you about a feature that is
almost like a hidden secret feature on a
lot of these cameras and it's called the
Focus Hold Button, and so with me right
now I have the Sony a7RII and I have
the sony 85 mm 1.4 GM lens
and all of the GM lenses from Sony
have this button, and for the longest
time I was trying to figure out what
is this button for, and so for example
here on the 24-70 GM, you'll see
on the side of all of these lenses that
there's just a little button, and it's
not really marked. it doesn't say exactly
what it does or how to set it up but
it's actually a very, very, useful feature
so I'm going to go ahead and talk to you
about all the different things that you
can customize with this particular
button to make it easier for you to
shoot portraits, or shoot video or really
do a whole host of different things. So
Focus Hold Button - let's go into the
camera settings and I'll tell you how to
set it up, and everything that is capable
of doing. So first and foremost you hit
menu on your camera to enter your camera
menu, and in order to find the Focus Hold
Button you actually have to set it as a
custom button, so in the top menu here
you want to go to your little gear icon,
and again this is on the a7RII, the
actual page number might be a little bit
different based on the camera that
you're using but you will find in one of
the menus, it will say custom key
settings, and that's where you want to go
to be able to customize this button on
your lens, so we'll go ahead and we'll
hit the center button here to enter that
menu, and on the custom custom key
settings you want to go to page 2,
and the very last option is the Focus
Hold Button, and that is the button
that's actually found on these GM
and Sony G series lenses, actually have
the sony 90mm 2.8 Macro from
Sony that also has the button as well, so
the upcoming 85mm f/1.8 also has it and
there's probably going to be a bunch of
other lenses in a near future that also
will have this button, and you can
utilize this feature on all of them. So
once we enter that Focus Hold Button
menu you can see how you could customize
that button to do a bunch of different
things. Now I have mine set to Eye AF
so when I actually push that
button it will automatically divert to Eye
AF, which i did a video for
AdoramaTV talking about how to set that
up, and what cameras it's compatible with
whether it's continuous or not, so make
sure that you check out that video, but
this gives me a very easy way to access
the Eye AF feature on my camera, so
that's one of the things that you can do.
But as you scroll through the menu here
you can see that you see that you can customise this
button to do a lot of different things,
so for example, a lot of people like
using back button AF with their
cameras, you could actually set it up
instead of it being on the back of the
camera, you could set it up on the actual
lens using that button that we've been
talking about. So you can have instead of
back button AF maybe on lens
AF I don't know...! Come up with a
creative name but that's one of the
features of, and I'll just kind of scroll
through the menu here, so you could see
some of the different things. My favorite
features, my favorite functions to add to
this button, would be the EYE AF,
AF on, for this button, you could also set this thing up to
do focus magnification so if you're
shooting video you want to punch into
your video, to see if your subjects are
in focus you could actually use that to
be able to zoom in to your image, you
could set it up to start and stop
recording, to turn on your zebras, you're
peaking levels and peaking colours. Now if
you have a camera like the a7RII the
a7SII as an example, there's other
cameras that offer Silent Shooting as
well but you could actually toggle on
and off
you're Silent Shooting, so let's say
you're outdoors you're doing some
photojournalism or some street
photography, and you want to silence your
camera so that the shutter doesn't make
a sound. You could actually just go ahead
and push the button on your lens, and now
you have Silent Shooting. Very, very, quick
very easy to access, just kind of scroll
through some of the other options here,
you can change your drive mode, so if you
want it to go from a single shot to
continuous shooting, you could set the
button up to do that, your flash
compensation, so there's a number of
different things, you could do your basic
stuff like your ISO, your Metering Modes,
White Balance... you could set it up for
Picture Profiles to be able to enter the
menu and change those options,
SteadyShot on and off, changing the size of the
image, Aspect Ratio, Quality.... there's a lot
of different options and honestly for me
as a portrait guy my two most used
features for that button would be
to set it to AF on or Eye AF, I
find those to be the most handy features
for this particular option on these
lenses, and so once you've selected it
for example, if i select AF on, now the
button is set for that. So once it's set
to AF on, now I could actually just go
ahead and hold this button down, and you
hear the confirmation that it's in focus,
so rather than pushing the shutter
button halfway down to get that image in
focus or to use back button AF, I
could actually do it directly on the
lens so if i was shooting i could just
push this button down and then push down
to take the shot so it's a little bit
different of a configuration, but it's a
really cool very, very, simple way for you
to rather than use back button AFs
do it on the lens, and I think it's going
to revolutionize the way that many of
you guys are shooting your portrait or
landscape or a bunch of different
situations much, much easier to focus.
So there you have it folks, a really easy
awesome feature, for you to be able to
customize your camera with the Song GM
and G series lenses, hopefully you
guys try this thing out. Let me know in the
comments section what's your favorite
customization for this button, for me I
talk to you about
eye AF and AF on, and silent
shooting, but I know for you guys you may
want to customize it to something
completely different! So if you found
this button useful let me know in the
comments section how are you customizing
this button for your particular camera, I
want to hear about it! And I'm sure
everybody else does as well so also make
sure that while you're here you
subscribe to AdoramaTV, there's a number
of awesome videos being dropped every
single day, and also make sure that you
check out the Adorama Learning Center
where there's more articles and more
great content for you to watch. Thank you
so much for watching The Breakdown, and I
will see you in the next episode.
Bye everybody
