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266 “Custom” (Gear icon) Menu Settings

6.3 GRID LINE

Menu Position MENU  1  Grid Line

What it Does Superimposes (or removes) a compositional aid onto the LCD

Recommended Setting It’s an intensely personal preference

Once upon a time you had to change focusing screens in order to see
special compositional guides in your viewfinder. Now, thanks to the
miracle that is Live View, all you have to do is push a button and you can
choose from one of 3 different grid line patterns! (Or turn it off, of course.)
The three grid patterns available can be seen in Figure 6-2.

In this book’s subtitle I suggested that this book is not being aimed at
beginners, and so I would intentionally skip some of the staples of my
beginner’s books which talked about the basics, including light and

Figure 6-2: You can have three different kinds of compositional aids super-
imposed onto your display.
composition, f/stops and shutter speeds. Well, these compositional grids
kind of fall into that ‘beginning’ category – I’ll simply say that if you know
what the rule of thirds is and you’d like to see a rule of thirds grid
magically appear in your display as a compositional aid, just set MENU 
1  Grid Line  Rule of 3rds Grid.
There are two other choices as well: A 6x10 grid which is roughly double
the density of the rule of 3rds grid, and a grid with two diagonals. The
6x10 grid is designed for people doing work with a copy stand to make sure
the camera is absolutely parallel to the work being copied and that there are
no converging or diverging lines. (Helps you spot distortions in your optics

Contents of this book Copyright © 2014 Gary L. Friedman. All rights reserved.