Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Overview

Welcome everybody to the panasonic gauge three fast start class so in this class we're going to going over all the buttons all the features all the functions of this panasonic camera now this camera I have this is I think my twenty first camera that I have done classes on and this one I think very easily is the most challenging class to get all the information figured out you know in one particular feature I read the instruction manual twenty times I went on youtube checking to see if anyone had a video that explained it I was googling it and I just couldn't find anyone that had a good explanation of it and so there's a lot of interesting features that I'm going to go through and explain on this camera now one of the things that I think a lot of people are really keyed in on this one as you can see by our microphone up here this is not part of the camera this is an extra a little device that a lot of you already know about is exactly am I going more towards still or video? Well I'm goi...

ng to explain what the camera does carry the camera itself in my opinion is primarily a stills camera that shoots very good video and so we're going to talking about both those features I will be to going into all of the nuanced video features and talking about what they do it why you might want to use them I will warn you right now, I'm not going to be going into all the video accessories that you might be able to use, so if you're a hollywood director and you're wondering which techno crane you should use with this, I don't have that in this class, we're not going to be talking about all the aftermarket accessories. We will be talking about the panasonic accessories and a few of the basics that some of the beginners might want for shooting video. So let me show you kind of the layout of the class and what we're going to be doing today to start off with. I just want to give you an overview of the panasonic product lineup, the fourth third system, the lens miral ihs system. We're going to talk a little bit about that just to make sure that it's positioned appropriately among all the other cameras that are on the market. This is not a photography class, but we are going to go through just a few basics just to make sure everyone is up to speed on a couple of shutter speed aperture bits of information as well as the sensor size on it. Most of the class, though, will be hovered around the buttons and display in menu section. We're going to go through every button on the camera. We're going talk about every port, what you're going to plug into it, how useful it is and what it does and so forth, we're going to talk about all the different displays, and a big section of this class is going through the menu system. This has an extensive menu, it's pretty well organized. I've seen some some kind of cluttered cameras in the past, and we're going to go into the menu section, and I will mention that when you do purchase the class, you do get a pdf, which I printed out here. It's mostly designed just kind of for taking notes during the class, but one area that I find very, very helpful, in fact, I use it sometimes over looking at the camera is I have the entire menu on one page and for anyone who's visual, which is a lot of photographers and peep this video it's very easy to scan over the page and go there's that feature, and I've also put on here recommendations for both beginner users and more advanced users on a good way to start it up, you'll want to customize it yourself, but I found this is a good shortcut key and that comes with the pdf with the class and then at the very end we're going to go through just a basic operation of the camera how you would set it up and work with it in the field so let's get started now when you get this camera it does come with not only one but two instruction manuals that are pretty thick in huge in size you could easily spend fourteen hours going through this and I have spent quite a bit of time paging through it trying to pull out all the relevant information now this class I am estimating is going to be about five hours in length which means we're going to disappoint two different types of people some people who want to learn how to use this camera in ten minutes this is the wrong video for that it's just not possible to really comprehensively go through all the features of this camera in ten fifteen minutes or even an hour or two hours we'll find that other sets of people will be disappointed that I'm not going into more detail on every specific feature there's a lot of things that this camera can do and we just don't have time to go into everything for instance we're going to go into a wifi I'm gonna hook it up to my phone down here we're going to see if we could do a group shot with me and russ but I'm not going to go through every feature and every menu setting on wife, I'm going to show you how to get hooked up, how to do some of the basic things, and then that will hopefully get you headed in the right direction, and so you still we'll want to use those instruction manuals if you want to pull out very specific bits of information or things that we just don't have time to cover completely in this class. Another note, as I said before, this is not a photography wanna one class if you're not familiar with the difference between shutter speeds, apertures, depth of field and all that other stuff, this class is not going to explain it. We're going specifically on the g h three in this class, and so if you are using this camera and you need a little bit of brush up on some of those basics, there are other classes that you can take, and we might talk about those as we get into the class. All right, so let me just start off for the first with a little bit about panasonic. Panasonic is one of the oldest companies out there that is making cameras, although they didn't start with cameras, they started with a lamp socket that was their first thing, they're primarily and electronics company that got into video in the eighties and the first digital camera was nineteen ninety seven, which is very recent in the world of cameras, and in two thousand six they got engaged in a program with a couple of other manufacturers. I'll talk more about in a little bit on a four thirds system, which is a smaller size sensor compared to a thirty five millimetre frame or what is known as full frame and digital now and they came out with a bunch of cameras are a few cameras, I should say in a lens system that didn't sell very well because the image quality was not well up to par with what a lot of the other manufacturers were doing. So it decided to take the mere out of the camera and create a system called micro four thirds and these cameras have done much it's better in sales because they're much smaller in size and they offer a good value package for the size and weight in the quality that you get out of him. This group, this consortium that they worked with his mainly with olympus but like a and kodak were also involved in this, and they kind of came to an agreement about a lot of standards in the way the camera was built and it's called it was called the fourth third system it still is called the four third system and the whole idea was using a sensor that was noticeably smaller than the full frame censor. This was to save money and to be able to make smaller size cameras. Now, one of the other unique things about this is thie aspect ratio is a little different than traditional thirty five millimeter film or what you'll find on most cannons and night cons. It's a little bit more boxy, if you will. I find it better if you were shooting verticals, but I don't like it quite as much for shooting landscapes and so it's, just a slightly different size and shape on the edges. The other thing that's unique about four thirds is the lens mt. One of the great things about this system is that you can take a panasonic lands and you can put it on our olympus camera, and vice versa. There are a variety of manufacturers that are making lenses that fit onto this lens mount, so it's become very, very common and it's been, I would say, the fastest growing ecosystem of camera lenses and accessories and that I've seen in the last twenty years. Now where this got started when they first started making these four thirds cameras, these were single lens reflex or similar style cameras that they were just trying to make smaller than a lot of the cannons and night cons and they had a bunch of what are called four thirds lenses and if they said they weren't the most popular so they went near lists and I just want to warn you right now that there are two different lenses that you will find from panasonic and one of them is called four thirds one of his one of them is called micro four thirds as you can see in the example on screen there are two different twenty five millimeter lenses and one of them will not work on the g h three so you do have to be particular about making sure that you get a micro four thirds leads for this camera so here's how it kind of started out and yes, this is an olympus camera because they kind of made most of these single lens reflex is the's four thirds single lens reflex is and they worked like a traditional single lens reflex with a light coming through the lands bouncing off amir and up through a prism system. Now one of the things about having a mere in the camera is that the distance between the lens mount in the image sensor is pretty sizable. It takes up a lot of space in the camera by taking out the mere the prism system and that whole viewfinder you're able to take that lens mount and get it much closer to the film plane you're able to actually make smaller lenses and have those lenses much closer to the sensor and you're reducing the size of the package and it is a terrible name, folks, I admitted mira lis camera, we're naming the camera for the one feature it doesn't have, but it does describe it, and it does seem to be what everyone has chosen, and this is what we mean by a micro fourth or its camera camera that does not have a mirrored system in it. Sometimes you will see it referred to as m f t that's micro four thirds now the micro four thirds versus the fourth third system has the exact same sensor in it. It has the exact same lens mount, but there is a different set of lenses because the lenses are mounting closer to the sensor. If you did have some of the older four thirds lenses panasonic did make and does make the d m w in a one, which sells for about one hundred bucks so that you can mount the older four thirds lenses onto the micro four thirds camera. And the great thing about these marylise cameras is that very short distance between the lens mount and the sensor allows you to mount all sorts of old lenses. In fact, pretty much any lens from the days of thirty five millimeter photography can be mounted on this camera with the appropriated after now there's a variety of manufacturers that make these adapters panasonic generally doesn't make him, but there are other manufacturers that make everything from very cheap twenty dollars lens adapters to very high quality rigid five hundred dollars once and so if you have a collection of old lenses, you can get it to work on this camera albeit in many cases it's going to be manual focus sometimes you have to manually set the aperture there's a lot of manual adjusting that you'll have to do with these one of the more interesting attachments that's come out recently is the meta bones speed booster and this allows you to use a full frame lens on this camera and this actually has linds lenses inside. Where is the other adapters over on the right side of the screen there just hollow tubes so that you can mount olympus this meta bone speed booster actually has a lens in it and what it's doing is it's taking the large image circle that is projected through a full frame lands and its condensing it down to the smaller size of the four third sensor and by doing this you don't get the same crop factor that you do with the other adapters and it's about point seven one whiter which puts it somewhere between the p s c sensor and a full frame sensor so it's not quite getting it back to the full frame sensor view but it does add one stop of white that's right? It adds a stop a light because it's taking the light that has spread out and it's condensing it into a smaller area and there's a limit to number of these out on the market but I expect we'll see more. The major downside on this is of course that it has a lens element on the inside and any time you introduce a new lens element you are more than likely going to be reducing the image quality but that will vary according to this system that you hook it up to but that's just an interesting accessory that's come about because of this mirror elice camera now with panasonic you are getting into one of the newest camera companies you might say they have not been making interchangeable lens cameras for very long, but they are a longstanding electronics company. They're one of the largest companies just in the world on their own and they seem to be doing it quite well and have come at it with a fun new direction, you might say and they have a number of very good cameras. I kind of splitting into two categories those with high level viewfinders and those without but they do make a wide variety of very small lightweight cameras to the very full featured gh stream, which is their top of the line interchangeable lens still camera they have really come out very quickly with a lot of very high quality lenses as well as a lot of affordable other lenses for regular consumers in anyone who want something unique and something different there had a very fast growing lineup there flash system is not quite up to parr was sane icon in cannon for instance but they do offer additional flash for people who want to add on additional flash units the beauty of the four third system is that they are working to some degree with olympus they be chosen their own path on the making of lenses but you can take any olympus lens mounted on the camera and it is absolutely fully functional for instance right here I have a little olympus forty five one point eight which is a nice little portrait lands and take off the panasonic lands put on the olympus lands it doesn't match real well but it works totally fine one hundred percent auto focus everything works on it a cz you would hope and expect and so you have kind of doubled your lens line up when you get into this so immediately you have several dozen choices to choose from with this camera which is great because panasonic has chosen to do certain things with lenses and every once in a while you go who I like that one and I like that one and now you can use both on this type of camera so the gh three as I mentioned is that the top of the line camera from the panasonic lineup it started with the g h one stage two and so this is kind of their top hybrid camera that she was really good stills as well as a lot of video the g h two actually kind of surprised panasonic by how popular it was with people shooting video there was a lot of video hacks getting into the hardware heard the camera to get better image quality out of it and so they took a look at that and they really beefed up the video system in the g h three and you know, I would have to imagine that pretty much everyone that bought the gh three knows it's good and video and has intention in using it I don't know that there's a lot of people who are only interested in still photography who would be drawn to the camera although I'm thinking for anyone who was shooting wildlife this might make a very good camera for that I was testing this out this last week and shooting some sports and it is surprisingly good at auto focusing subjects that are moving back and forth and so in many cases you'll see it termed as a mini dslr so it's a smaller version of your night cons and cannons and it is definitely smaller and it is fully featured in that smaller size package one of the things you will notice when you get into the instruction manual are all these crazy warnings about what not to do with the camera and they could probably simplify the whole thing by just telling him not to be stupid with the camera but the fact is is that the camera is very well built it's got a magnesium alloy die cast frame on it it's very strong and it does have dust and weather proofing but it also goes in there to say that the dust and splash proofing of this unit is not a guarantee of full protection against the intrusion of dust in water. So first off it's not an underwater camera. Secondly, if you are out in the rain, you're probably going to be fine to shoot there for quite a while how long? Well they don't specify so you'll have to use your own discretion when doing it if you were going to be out shooting in a rain for a long period of time I would probably invest in some sort of rain cover protection for it because there's a lot of ways to get in and not all the lenses are web weather sealed and there is a connection between the body and the lens very important in some cameras have the weather ceiling and some do not so you might want to check into that depending on the type of conditions you work in there all right, so let's, make sure your camera is ready for today's class. You're gonna want to charge and install the battery, of course takes about three and a half hours to charge it. You could expect to get around five hundred still images. You could shoot around two hundred fifty minutes of video. There's a lot of variables depending how many things you have turned on. Make sure you have a lens on memory card installed. We're going to be taking some pictures just for practice reasons. Turn the camera on and it kills me to say this, but turn your camera to that I a automatic setting on the camera and go ahead, just take a picture. I'm going to take a picture of rest here just to make sure things are working out well and it is firing, so we're good on that. Let's, take a take a little break and I'm just going to go through about five minutes of basic photography, so if you know what you know all the basics, time to go get it a cup of coffee and come back in a couple minutes. But if you want to see a little bit, this is basically a cut for my class fundamentals of digital photography, explaining about all the basics of photography, so and I've explained a little bit of this already, but we have a marylise camera in front of us, and so as light comes in through a very high quality lands, there are lots of lens choices. We have wide angle lenses, we have telephoto lenses as well in the lands itself is our first control for controlling the amount of light community camera, and that is an aperture, and it varies in how much light it lets in, and you can have control over this with the f stop or the apertura, as it is known in this example, you can see that we're closing the aperture down with each step we're letting in half assed, much light as we open the aperture up with each step, we're letting in twice a cz much light. And so this is the first and one of the easiest ways upon which to control how much light is coming in the camera, but beyond just controlling how much light is coming in the camera, it also controls the depth of field or how much she is in focus. In this example, you can see the red lines are indicating the front edge in the back edge of focusing as we close our aperture down, we're stopping or aperture down, you can see our debt, the field is slowly growing with each aperture change. Until we get to f twenty two in this case which means we are at maximum depth of field at least for this lands in this scenario so that's all what's happening just in the lens of the camera now light comes straight on back to the image sensor which is being fed electronically to the lcd on the back of the camera or to the e v f which allows you to look at a small viewfinder that is pretty high resolution it's not quite industry leading at this point but it's pretty good and allows you to see the camera with the camera held much more firmly up against your forehead also allows you to see the image under bright sunlight now what's happening at the sensor requires a little bit closer look so let's magnify what's happening as light comes into the image sensor because this camera has a shutter curtain which also controls the light that is hitting the sensor now for viewing purposes these shutters have to remain open so that light can get to the image sensor so it could be fed to the viewfinders when you take a picture what happens with this camera is the first curtain will close the sensor will dump all the information and ready itself for the actual picture and then the shuttle will open this is your exposure and then the second curtain will come in from the other side blocking the light off making sure that each pixel is exposed for exactly the same amount of time, and then the second curtain needs to open back up very quickly so that you can see what's going on for the next image. And this actually has a lot more shutter curtain movement than a typical slr because they have to close and open rather than just open it has to close open, close and so there's a lot of movement going back and forth in there. One of the options that this camera has that we'll talk about when we get into the menu city is an electronic shudder, and this is simply very much like a light switch that you turn on and off as lights coming into the sensor. You start by taking a photograph, the camera just kind of flips a switch and immediately starts recording what's going on on the sensor and then immediately just turns it off. Now, there are good reasons and bad reasons why you would want to do this. Part of the problem with leaving this turned on is that it can't turn on all the pixels at exactly the same time. It kind of turns him on one at a time, and so not everything gets recorded exactly in the right way it's it's something that can be referred to is a rolling cheddar, but I'm going to show you some effects that aren't too good when using the elektronik cheddar. However, the electronics that are on this camera is freaking amazing because it is totally silent. If you were on a movie set or you were in a studio or a theater where you wanted to shoot pictures that were very, very quiet, you can fire this camera without any more noise than the actual button press that you put on the camera. No physical noise in the camera. Also the electronic shutter on this, I think it's going to very useful for some people in some environments, but the shutter unit itself is very important for controlling the amount of light and for stopping action. So a fast shutter speed, like one two thousandth of a second is good for stopping a whale breaching out of the water. For instance, a shutter speed like one five hundredth of a second is usually necessary for stopping human action like dance and sport one hundred twenty fifth of a second good form or casual action like some camels walking in the desert. As we get down to a thirtieth of a second, we're getting into the slower shutter speeds, so depending on how much something is moving in it's going to be blurry, most likely within these slower shutter speeds here, in an eighth of a second, you can see the bridge is sharp, but the people are a little blurry because they're walking at a normal pace. If you like those blurry shots of waterfalls and rivers, you get that around one second, if you like doing nighttime photography and lite painting, or you like being able to photograph the stars, you're going to need a long shutter speed down to thirty seconds in this camera will actually go down to sixty seconds on its own, so that's what's going on on the image sensor itself. So there's a lot of things involved in this camera's opening up some new ground on technology and it's always good to know exactly how your camera is working and what its capabilities are. So within the field of cameras that are available on the market today, one of the distinguishing factors is what size sensor is in your camera and there's a number of common sizes in different cameras on the market today. And here are some of the more popular cameras available today and the different size sensors that they have in them, and we're not going to be too concerned about the smaller size sensors in this class, but there will be a lot of talk among serious photographers about what size sensor now we've mentioned that this camera uses the fourth, third system which is notably smaller than the full frame sensor that is thie, exact same size as thirty five millimeter film. Now, for a variety of reasons. For about fifty years, thirty five millimeter film was the most popular choice for photographers, and it had to do with the fact that it was small enough to have a nice, convenient camera size. But it was big enough to make a nice, decent size enlargement that was very practical, but the image sensors, we're very expensive, and so manufacturers started making smaller size sensors like the one that is known as the size, which is a crop factor of one point, five times smaller than the full frame sensor, and the four thirds which is a prop actor of two times. And so the angle of view that you would expect from a fifty millimeter lands when you put that fifty millimeter lands on a panasonic gh three suddenly looks like the angle of view of one hundred millimeter lands. So on the camera here in front of me, I have a twenty five millimeter lens. I think we can maybe see that on the front, maybe not so it's a twenty five millimeter lens, which translates times to fifty. This is my normal lens for this camera, and so you have to kind of convert things if you plan on switching from the full frame down to this so it's a big advantage for anyone who's shooting telephoto and going to be using any of the traditional full frame lenses just a quick little tip for anybody who plans to use the supplied strapped with the camera it comes with a little scrap adjuster and when you thread it through the camera you want to make sure that the tail and goes on the underneath side that way there is pressure on the top locking it in so that it doesn't accidentally slip out all right another little tip for you beginners out there pick up the camera put it in your hand and notice whether your thumb is on the top or the bottom as you hold the camera because the technique that is better is with the thumb on the top of the camera and the reason why you want your thumb on the top of the camera is it if you put it on the bottom that puts your elbow kind of way out here in the air where there's not a lot of support for it so by putting it down here it gets it down closer to your torso and you're able to hold the camera a little bit more steady it also allows you with longer lenses to kind of put the base of the camera in your palm and adjust focusing resume with your fingers with a little bit better control line ok, next up, I got a couple of words for you. What do you think about these words? Which one do you like? Which one is better? Do you like things automatically done, or do you like to do him yourself? Well, this camera has a lot of options for automatic choices or manual choices in a lot of different areas photography and how you like to have your camera set is up to you, but it often depends on how much time, how much effort you want to put in and how much knowledge you have about how it is supposed to be said. The more you get to shoot, the more you're going to know exactly where you want things to be, and you're going to want to set things in a more manual men or some things, if the camera does a good job and you like the way it does it, you can leave it in auto. But consider how you're going to want to have your camera in the future and how you want to control things because we're going to go through, and I'm going to recommend a lot of different settings, and we have a lot of different types of users in here from people who are brand new with photography, and this is their first kind of serious camera to people who've been in the industry for many, many years and know exactly what they're doing. And they're just looking to pick up a few other tips on how to get their camera set manually.