THE a6700 FIELD GUIDE photographs & video, from first principles · drewbreyer.com

Part I · Know the camera · 6 min

The menu, tamed

The tabbed menu looks like a phone book. Here is how it is organised and how to stop visiting it.

You'll learn

  • Navigate the seven menu tabs without hunting
  • Build the Fn quick menu around what you change most
  • Assemble a My Menu of your ten essential settings

Sony’s menu has a reputation, most of it earned by older bodies. The a6700’s is tabbed and searchable, and once you understand its logic you will rarely open it mid-shoot.

The tabs, in plain terms

The full menu is grouped into tabs that follow the job at hand:

  • Shooting — file format, drive mode, image quality.
  • Exposure / Color — ISO limits, metering, white balance, picture profiles.
  • Focus — AF modes, focus areas, subject recognition.
  • Playback, Network, and Setup — review, transfer, and housekeeping.
  • My Menu — the page you build yourself.

When you know which job a setting belongs to, you know which tab it lives on. That single habit turns a search into a reach.

The Fn quick menu

Press Fn and a grid of settings appears over the live image — the quick menu. This is where the settings you change often should live, so you never leave the frame to reach them. Hold the Fn button on any tile to reassign it. Good candidates: file format, white balance, drive mode, SteadyShot, subject recognition, and picture profile.

My Menu is the real fix

The permanent cure for menu-hunting is My Menu — a custom tab you populate with the exact items you dig for. Add a setting once and it lives at the front of the menu forever. The recommended shortlist:

  • File format
  • SteadyShot
  • Subject recognition
  • Zebra
  • Picture profile
  • Format card

Six items covers almost everything you will change deliberately. Everything else you set once and forget.

The ten-most-used, mapped

Between the two top dials, the control wheel, the Fn menu, and My Menu, the ten settings you touch most all have a home outside the deep menu: exposure lives on the dials, ISO on the wheel, format and profile on Fn, and the occasional deep setting on My Menu. The menu becomes a place you set up, not a place you shoot from.

In the field

Open the menu once, deliberately. Add the six My Menu items above, then build your Fn grid. Now close it and try to change file format, white balance, and SteadyShot without opening the full menu again. If you can, you have tamed it.

← Field check →