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Back Side Features

Alright, the camera also has a touch screen as we've been talking about before. You can shoot, you can zoom as well. And so let's do a little demo, 'cause we showed you focusing and so forth, but we can also zoom in as well. And so on this, let's turn the touch on so that we can actually go in and focus. And one of the things that you'll notice is that over here in the bottom right there's a magnifying glass, and if we hit that, we can zoom in and we can actually scale around here. Let's see if I can do a little squeeze. And now I can choose to focus on that information. And so I'm gonna hit this little thumbnail, magnify back, and there's a little scale over here on the right where I can change the size of the box that we're gonna zoom into. So I'm gonna get it really tight, and now I'm gonna zoom in. And if I wanted to manually focus, let's see if I can, well, that's gonna throw us off. I'm not gonna try that, I have a funky lens on here. And so, by focusing on this, we get the magni...

fy, and then we can go in and adjust focus, see if our focus is getting in right. Let's move the camera a little bit. And so now we're focusing in the right areas. Let's see if we can get this back out. Get this, ah, it wasn't on the camera. So now it's on the camera, now I'm gonna zoom in. Now I can see if I'm focusing on the right camera over there. And so you can do that, shooting photos or just for focusing as a focusing aid. Handy little device, works very helpfully, usually when you're on a tripod. Little hard to do when you're handheld. You can also use the touchscreen in the playback mode. And so if you want to swipe between images the same way you would on many phones. You can tap an image twice to magnify in. And so there's a lot of very common gestures that you use in other tablet type devices that you'll be able to use on the camera. It has a very good and sensitive screen for doing that. If you don't want to use the screen, you can use the regular controls, the up down left right controls on the camera or the dials, as we'll be talking about more in the playback section coming up in a bit. So the menu button will dive us into the full menu, and that's what the second half of this class is on. And so we'll be covering that later on. The info button is something that you can pretty much always hit to see either more or less information. Whether you're in playback, you're in the movies, or shooting still photos, just hit the info button and hit it repeatedly, and it's gonna cycle through different groups of information. And sometimes you want to have a lot of information, you want to see your shutter speeds and apertures. And sometimes you don't want to have any of that. That's all set, you just want to look at the composition. And so a lot of different options in here including the histogram, and then showing us our highlights and shadows again on the back of the camera. And then the level gauge as well to see if we're getting our horizons level, and you get to choose what you see in your camera in the custom menu. You'll be able to pick and choose which items are turned on. Next up we have our playback button, so let's talk a little bit about what playback functions are gonna happen on the camera, 'cause a lot of the buttons change form as to what they do. So once you hit playback, you can use the arrow pad to go left and right to go to your previous and your next image. You could also use the front dial of the camera, and sometimes that's a little bit quicker and it's a good option to use. The back dial will be used for zooming in and out, so it's a very quick way to zoom in to see if you've got the right sharpness on the picture. You can also zoom in very quickly with the function one button. It'll zoom into whatever framing you had your focus point at. So it's just a quick zoom, you might say. The function two button becomes a protect button. What it does is it locks that particular photo from being deleted, protected in that manner. You can still format the memory card, and so you still have to be careful because you can erase that information, but it prevents it from being simply deleted. We also have a select function, which is a way to kind of give you a thumbs up on a particular photograph. If you take a bunch of photos and you're trying to indicate that one is better than the others, you can give it a little check box to check off, and you'll be able to search and find these later, because that becomes added to the metadata of the photos. And then of course down at the bottom, you have the red garbage can so that you can delete any sort of images that you want right then and there. So on the info options, there's gonna be different groups of information that you can cycle through. You can look at just the basic image, some of the basic information and overall display, which is gonna show you the histogram and more technical information about the pixel resolution, any sort of adjustments you've made to that image in the camera. And then another one with a very large histogram, which is a nice graphic display to show you whether you're overexposed or underexposed. Again, we'll have the highlight shadows blinking at you to show you that the photo that you took has areas in the exposure that are too bright or too dark to handle on its own. And then it has a lightbox, which allows you to compare images side by side. And this is a very cool feature that I've only seen on a few very high end cameras. And so it's something today I want to show you real quickly here, and first off what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take a couple of photos so that we have a couple of photos to work with. And just to be different, I'm gonna go into manual focus on my lens, and I'm gonna take one photo, and another one, and another one, and another one. So I've taken four photos manually focused, and they are of different qualities. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit playback. So I've hit playback now, and I'm gonna hit info options until I get two side by side pictures. Alright, so I got two side by side pictures. One is one that I took earlier today, so I'm gonna try to jump back to some of these earlier photos. And I think this is the first one that is all from the same series. And now what I can do is I can zoom in to both pictures simultaneously and I can move around, let's see, where's my lock? Okay, so I can move the image that's on the right to the left, so you can see this is both picture number 13, and so now, I can change this picture to number 12, and I can see that picture number is much sharper than the other one. And so it's a way for you to do a side by side comparison between images, and it's often used for looking for the sharpest image. So in this case, that doesn't look very sharp. That doesn't look very sharp, that's a little bit better. That's better, this is a better image. I can hit okay, and that now becomes the selected image and I can come over here and go left and right and look for a better quality image. And so it's a good way if you're shooting say a portrait, you shoot several photos and you want to compare them real quickly in camera, one picture side by side zoomed in together. So it's a neat feature to play around with. I encourage you to take a closer look at that and see what it can do for you. Alright, so once again going side to side will give us our next pictures, and then zooming in. And on our lightbox we'll have our base image. And if we hit the okay button, we'll move that image from the right hand side of the screen to the left hand where it becomes the base image. And we continue to select and look at new images to compare two images side by side together. And we can zoom that, we can lock that zoom together with the function one button, and that can be very helpful if you're trying to check for sharpness and you have the camera on a tripod, for instance. Alright, all of this information can be customized and selected when we get to the custom menu in the play back settings of the info settings. And so lot's of things that we will be seeing in the menu section of the class. Alright, so we can also play back an image and do some editing on that image. And so actually, let's do another little demo here. Let me go ahead and play back an image. And so, I think we had some more and more out of focus pictures, and I think the last one was the sharpest one, which was right here. If I hit the okay button, I can make a jpeg edit. I can add it to my clips, I can protect it. And one of the interesting things is it's got a little microphone down here. And this is something that only the top of the line Nikon camera has, and the top of the line Canon camera has. I can make an audio annotation about this photo. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit the okay button, and then I'm going to speak to the camera and it's going to record what I have to say about this image. And so let's go down here and start the recording. This is a totally awesome image. And then I will hit the okay button to stop. And so now, when I go back to this image, this is a totally awesome image. It plays back that little information that I recorded with it. And this is like really important for people who shoot sports photography, and you know, a big play happens and they say, "touchdown, fourth quarter" and so they know exactly when that happens. Or if you were taking a photograph if you were traveling and somebody says, "Hey could you email me my photo?" I don't have anything to write it down with. Well just tell me what your email is and I'll record it. And so there's a lot of neat little things that you could do adding in those audio annotations to your images that you've already taken. So that's in your edit options of the play back of the images. Now if you have movies in here, you'll also be able to do a few other options as well as far as putting it into a slide show and a few other little things, as you can see there. Alright, the arrow pad on the back of the camera is normally controlling the focusing section of the camera. So let's talk a little bit more about how we can focus. So one option is we can use all points for focusing. And we can use the arrow pad to move up, down, left, and right to choose an individual area for focusing. If we hit the info button, then we're going to be able to change how the camera focuses. And so, in this case, if we go up and down, we'll be able to change the size of the focusing area, and if we go left and right, we'll be able to change whether it's doing a face detect. So let me bring my camera out and show you some of these differences on the camera. So once again, all we have to do is hit any one of the arrow pads, and it's gonna kinda kick us into the focusing mode. And as we said before, you go over to the edge, it activates all of them. Keep bringing it around, it's the single one. So it wants to go back and forth between one and all of them. But if you notice in the bottom left corner it says info. If you hit the info button, and now you notice in the bottom left corner, if you go up and down and left and right, it's gonna change some features. So let's go down, and we get to a super small point. So if you want a pinpoint focusing, you would have a very very small point focusing, so I want to be very particular about which camera it focuses on, I've gotten a very small point. I hit info again, I go down. It now moves to a box of three. And so let me hit okay here, and now I can move this box of three around anywhere I want in the frame. And if I go all the way to the edge, it activates the entire frame. And so we're switching back and forth between all and something else. In this case, I have three activated. I'll hit info, I'll hit down, I can select everything. A normal box, a super small box, or a group of three box. Now, if I go left and right, there's a little yellow happy face over here, which indicates that it will focus on faces. And so you can focus on standard faces. You can focus on the eye of the face, the right eye, which is eye R, or eye L for the left eye. And I typically don't want to have the camera go into facial detection mode, because I may or may not want to focus on any particular face. And if I just choose one focusing point, not too small, but the basic one, it'll give me a lot of versatility, which is where I personally like to leave the camera. But if you do a lot of people photography where there is one significant person in the frame, then that eye detection and the face detection does work quite well. So if you do a lot of that, I encourage you to experiment with it and see if it works for you. So that is our focusing area options. A lot of different options in there. And the kind of the key thing to remember is hitting that info button in order to be able to go in and change the size of the box or to get control of the facial recognition options. Okay, next up, the OK button will activate something called the super control panel. Control panel would be fine, but I guess they've gotta call it the super control panel. And what this is is a shortcut to a lot of the menu functions that we'll be talking about in the second half, but this is where a lot of the key most important features that you're likely to want to change are going to be. And so let's go ahead and talk about the super control panel. So the top part of this is just going to be giving you some basic information. We're gonna make our way around, starting in the top left with the ISO. So the ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor on the camera, and it's gonna get its best information at ISO 200. And you will raise it up from 200 if you need faster shutter speeds, oftentimes when you're working under lower light conditions. We do have an A setting for automatic, where the camera will figure it out for you. And the camera does top out at 25,000. Now as I say, the best setting is at 200. You can set it down at 100. The down side of setting it to is the camera doesn't have quite as much exposure range that it can capture, so it's not capturing quite as much information. But if you really need it to get a slower shutter speed, there is a way of doing it in camera with that low 100 setting. In order to make the change, you are going to press the set button to activate. You're going to use the up, down, left, and right to get the box over the ISO, and then you can change the option by turning the front dial. You can go to the next box of option by turning the back dial on the camera. So give that a try. Right next to that is the white balance option. And this is balancing the sensor's light or color to the light that you happen to be working in. Our eyes as humans adjust for different light conditions that we are in, whether we are outside on a bright sunny day or we're inside under fluorescent light. Our cameras don't do this automatically, and so we can change it in our cameras to the particular situation that we are in. Now, we do have some other options. We do have a custom white balance, where we can set a particular Kelvin temperature. Not too many people do that, but it is available. We have the option of capturing white balance information, where we would shoot a neutral colored object, often a white piece of paper, and the camera would then be able to figure out what color the lights are, and be able to correct for that so that everything has a natural color to it. And the camera does have an Auto white balance, where it tries to figure out what color the light is And it does this by looking at the exposure and seeing if it's predominately blue or yellow or red. And what it's doing is it's looking at the highlight information to see if that is of a particular tint. And it's trying to correct for that. And it generally does a pretty good job, but occasionally it misses the mark. If it misses the mark, that's where you need to go in and adjust the white balance to the most appropriate setting for the type of lighting conditions you're in. And so they have a lot of different options for all the different types of common situations. Now one of the things you will notice on this list is capture WB info, white balance info, one two three four. And what this is is gives you the ability to set four customized white balances to different types of environments. So let's just say for instance you shot pictures in your living room, your kitchen, at your office, and at your kids' basketball arena. And each of those had a slightly different white balance. If you brought a white piece of paper to each of those locations, you shot it, and you got it programmed in to the camera, you could have those preset up so you only had to do that set up one time, and they're set in your camera for easy, quick changing. So that is our white balance section. Next up, we have a group of features we're not going to go into individually, but these are controlling the basic look of your image. And this is once again not going to be something that would affect anyone who is shooting raw images. It's going to be only affecting those shooting jpegs. And so if you get jpeg images out of the camera and you're not totally pleased with them and you would like to tweak them a little bit, you can get in here and you can tweak them a little bit. The picture modes will kind of do a lot of it on your own, but if you want to get in and control the contrast and the color yourself, you can do that as well in here. For the most part, I prefer to just leave this on a very basic setting of natural and everything else at its normal, neutral setting. Next up is control over the flash of the camera. We have the flash mode and flash exposure compensation. And so let's talk a little bit about some of the different flash options on this camera. So we do have a redeye reduction mode, which'll help reduce redeye. A fill in flash is a flash that'll fire no matter how bright it is so that you're filling in the shadows with a little bit of light. Slow sync will allow you to use slower shutter speeds. Slow 2 is a special type of slow shutter speed which synchronizes the flash with the second curtain, which can give you some very fun results with fast moving subjects. If you have one of the external Olympus flashes, you can use the wireless off-camera multi-strobe system where you have the built in flash triggering the other flashes. The camera does have a top sync speed of 1/250 of a second, but it's gonna drop down to 1/200 when you're using something other than an Olympus branded product. And if you are in the wireless mode, it drops down again to 1/160 of a second. So variable shutter speeds depending on exactly how you have your camera set up. So using flash, especially for a portrait, can really add a nice little fill light to the face, a catch light to the eyes, which could make that portrait just a little bit more compelling. One of the problems, though, in some cases, is that the flash will overpower itself, not understanding the exact subtleties that certain skin tones need in their lighting. And so flash exposure compensation allows you to power the flash down or up, but chances are you'll want to power it down about one stop to get a more natural look. In this particular example, I'm thinking TTL - is the best when it comes to the skin tones. And so depending on what the background is and the brightness of other objects in the frame, it's gonna affect where you're gonna wanna have this set on your camera. But I think for most people, if you're going to be shooting people photographs, changing that to about TTL - on the flash compensation would be wise. Next up is our image stabilizer. The camera has a number of different ways of stabilizing the camera. This camera is stabilized, so every lens you put on it is essentially stabilized, because the camera has a sensor moving system that stabilizes all lenses that are put on it. It has a number of different modes on the camera, and the S-IS Auto, or S-IS 1 Auto is a good general mode that'll stabilize the camera in all directions. There is a special mode for horizontal panning and vertical panning, and then a final one that automatically detects which direction you are panning. And so if you are doing a lot of panning, you might want to look at S-IS 2 or S-IS 3 or the S-IS Auto. For most everyone else, S-IS 1 Auto is gonna be a good, standard stabilization mode for general photography. We then have our focusing area, and we talked about this just a few minutes ago when we were using the control pad on the back of the camera and the info button to change areas, but we also see this again here in the super control panel. Next up, we have our sequential shooting, and I do a lot of classes on cameras, folks, and this camera has more options than any other camera I have ever seen when it comes to the drive mode, or what they call sequential shooting. So the basic options we have are single shooting, continuous shooting, and self-timer shooting. And so when you press down on the shutter, what do you want to have happen? One picture, a group of pictures, or it to be delayed when you take the photo. And there's a two second and a 12 second timer in there. Now what these also have in here, which really makes all the choices, so many choices, is the little diamond and the heart. And what these diamonds and hearts stand for, the diamond is anti-shock. And what it is is it is a electronic first shutter curtain, which reduces the amount of shock the camera receives during that first shutter opening, because it's now electronic on it. The heart mode is a silent mode, where the camera is using a completely electronic shutter release. And let's do a little demo on this. And this is more on the microphone side than the video side, but I will go ahead and change this around. So I'm gonna put this into the drive mode. So this is in the normal drive mode, and just listen very carefully to the way the camera sounds, and I'll fire off a couple shots. (camera shutter clicks) Alright, now I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna change it to, where's my options, this is to the anti-shock mode. So this is going to be an electronic first shutter curtain, and it might sound just a little different. (camera shutter clicks) Not much difference, because we still have the second shutter curtain coming down. So now, I'm gonna change it into the next mode, which is the heart mode, the silent mode. And listen very carefully. I'm gonna get in really close. Did you hear that? I took three photos. And so if you want to be able to take photos in near perfect silence, you can do it with this camera. And so if you ever run into a situation where they won't allow you to take photos because of the sound of the shutter, take about five or six photos and say, "Did you realize I just took five of your photos?" And see if they allow you to shoot photos in that case. Because it is a way for you to get perfect silent shooting and allows you to be extremely stealthy. Now, I don't recommend leaving it in that mode all the time. There can be some banding and some problems with certain types of artificial light because of the way that it's using an electronic first and second shutter curtain. And so that's why we don't normally leave it there. But it is okay using it there for special situations. You'll have to do a little test to see if it works in your needs in your situations. And so you can add that anti-shock or that silent mode to a lot of the other different features that are on the camera. And so, the diamond is the anti-shock, the heart is the silent mode. Another time where those might be very handy is when you're using your camera with a very long telephoto lens or a macrolens or a telescope, or any time on a tripod or for scientific purposes where you want no vibrations, because that shutter opening and closing can cause some very very subtle vibrations when you have extremely high magnification or very critical focusing going on. Alright, next up, image quality. Very important here, this is where we get to choose either raw images or jpeg or a lot of different variations on jpeg images. So our more advanced users are probably gonna wanna shoot raw, because that gets you the full information off the sensor, and you can work with it later in post-production software like Lightroom and Photoshop. If you want to get pictures right out the camera ready to go without any fuss, without any muss, you might want to choose the jpegs. And we have different size jpegs. You'll probably want to choose the large fine jpeg to get the highest quality image. If you don't need that and you want smaller file sizes, there are a variety of smaller sizes that you can choose that changes either the size or the compression of the file. We also have options where you're shooting raw and a jpeg at the same time. For most people, I don't recommend this, because if you shoot a raw, you can create your own jpeg at any time later on you want. There are some certain special situations where you do need raw for long term highest quality images, but you need immediate jpegs off the camera, and this would be a place that you could set it up for doing that, but you would end up with two images for every picture that you take, and so it does kind of clog up the hard drive with unnecessary information. So large jpeg for basic users, and raw for the more serious users, would be my recommendation. Alright, next up is the auto focus mode. And here we have the choice between single, continuous, manual focus, and then we have single auto focus with a manual focus override, and then we have single auto focus with a tracking option, as well. And so normally, I would leave it in single auto focus, where it focuses on a subject and stops. Continuous is gonna be used for any sort of action photography. And manual focus for anyone who is working off of a tripod or who just likes manually focusing is gonna be there. And if you do like to touch up manual focus, you could try S-AF with the MF. So this allows you to let the camera focus, and then you can grab the focusing ring and change and adjust the focus if you want. Now, the final mode, the S-AF with tracking. This one is a little unusual, because the camera is tracking like it is in the continuous mode, but it's trying to use a little bit more brain power, you might say, when it comes to tracking that subject as far as figuring out, is it moving towards me, away from me, how fast is it moving? And sometimes it's better, and sometimes it isn't. And so this is something that you will have to kind of do a test on. It is a continuous auto focus with a little extra mojo magic for them on the tracking. But as to whether this really works better than the standard continuous mode is something that you'll have to try with the type of action that you shoot. Next up is our metering mode. How do you want the camera reading the light? We have three basic systems. We have the digital ESP system here, which is a multi-segment metering system that is very very versatile in a lot of situations, and it's where I would leave the camera virtually 100% of the time. We do have a center weighted metering, which measures the light predominately in the middle of the frame, and then a spot metering system, which can be handy from time to time when you want to get an exact reading off of a very small area. We have two additional ones, which are spot meters with a highlight control and a shadow control. And what these are are simply spot metering and exposure compensation combined at the same time. So it's a spot metering system with about a plus two exposure compensation or minus two exposure compensation added in. I have personally never used these. It doesn't really jive with the way that I tend to work with a camera, but I could see how they might work in certain situations if you were say photographing a person in a spotlight on a stage, it is a way of potentially getting a easy exposure in that case. Next up is our aspect ratio. The sensor on this camera uses a four by three aspect ratio. That's the width versus height aspect ratio. And if you want to shoot in a different aspect ratio, you can. Normally I would just recommend cropping your photos later on afterwards, but the advantage of changing the aspect ratio in camera is that you can actually see it in the viewfinder itself for composing the image. And so if you have something that going to be very tightly composed within a square, you could set it to one by one and you'll be able to look through the viewfinder and see exactly what the final result will look like. But for most cases, you're gonna want to leave it in four by three so that you're capturing the entire image area off the sensor. Have a collection of images here that are once again controlling a lot of the tweaks to the color of the image. We do also have the face priority mode, which there was a shortcut just with the buttons on the back of the camera and the info button, but we can set it with the super control panel as well. The function controls allow us to go into the various function buttons of the camera, the function one, two, three, the movie record button, the right button, the down button. Some of the lenses have lens buttons on them that you can program as well, so you can dive in here and program those buttons to do the function that you find most practical. And all of this is buried within that simple little OK button activating what's called the super control panel. Finally on the back of the camera, we do have a little speaker back there, so when you're playing back your movies, that's where you're trying to press your ear up to to hear what's going on.