Lessons

Lesson Info

Top Deck: Mode Dial

Alright. The mode dial on the top of the camera is kind of the main control on the top. This is gonna control the shutter speeds and the apertures in which you shoot. And so we're gonna take a closer look at all the different functions on the mode dial so let's jump into the mode dial. We're gonna start off with the easiest setting on the camera which is the iAuto mode which stands for intelligent Auto and what this is doing, is it's automatically setting shutter speeds, apertures and a bunch of other features in the camera for you. But it's also trying to figure out what you are shooting and adjusting the camera to those particular settings. Now if you wanna give it a little bit of help, a little bit of direction in what it's doing, you can hit the OK button and bring up something called a Live Guide. And that live guide will look a little something like this, you can also activate it with the touch screen on the back of the camera and you can go in and you can make some minor changes...

on the camera. So let's go ahead and do a little live demo of that. I've got the camera in the iAuto mode right now, and so if I hit the OK button, it brings open this little side drawer you might say and we can go up and down and select the different items in the drawer, let's go to this top one which is color saturation. I'm gonna hit the OK button and now I can go in and I can increase the saturation or I can decrease it to get the look that I want, to a flat and muted look or a clear and vivid look and then when I'm done I can hit OK. If I wanna go back in, I can select a different item. Now of course all this can be controlled by your finger tips as well and you can just slide this up and slide it down for the brightness and darkness in this particular case. If you like to use the touchscreen, you have that available to you, if you don't care for the touchscreen you can do everything by the controls on the camera itself you don't have to use the touchscreen. Sometimes it can be a little bit fussy and some people aren't used to using it and so you're free to use it either way on the camera. So that is a way for you to start just playing around in that auto mode, just a little bit. The buttons on the outside edge if you press those, that will change the focusing area. So lemme show you on my camera again a little bit on the focusing. Before we are pressing the OK button right in the middle and so if I press to the right or to the left, it starts changing the focusing modes. And what it has set is it has all of them set, so all of them are set right now, so it's gonna focus on whatever is closest in front of us. (beeping) And if I go to the right, it immediately changes it from all focusing points to just one. And if I go all the way over to the edge, it then reactivates all of them. There is more sophisticated ways that we can go in and adjust the focus and we will do that later in the class, but for right now, the ways that you can control it is either all points or a single point and you can choose wherever you want that point to be. And you can hit OK when you're done or you can hit the shutter release halfway and that kicks you back into the regular shooting mode. And so that's a quick way for adjusting your focus, as I said, we will talk more about that later on in the class. The iAuto is your fully most automated mode on the camera. Next up we have an Art mode, these are the art filters. There's a number of different filters that you can choose and if you're into Instagram and using different filters on a situation, there's lots of different filters you can use in here. So you're gonna hit the OK button to activate the filters and then there'll be additional filter effects by pressing to the right as you go through 'em. Lemme me show you a few examples of the Art mode that I've shot through. Here we are at downtown Seattle, Pop Art is using some extra saturation, we have a soft focus which blurs the image a little bit. Playing around with the contrast and the color on a number of these or turning it to a black and white image. A lot of different fun things you can do. Pin Hole adds a bit of vignette, plays around with the color, the Diorama doesn't work too well in this particular scene but in some areas it'll make images look like miniatures especially if you're shooting up above looking down in certain places. So lots of different options, lots of different black and white options, some very artistic modes and so if you wanna play and have some funky styles with your images, you got a lot of different Art filters that you can play with in this camera. There's an area that I'll show you later on, there is a way to set it up so that when you shoot a photo, it gives you one of every single Art filters and so you shoot one picture it actually shoots like 20 different pictures and you get all of them to choose later on. It's called an Art bracket and we'll talk about that later on in the class. Fun little modes that you can play with in there. Next up is the Scene mode and this is where it is gonna be changing shutter speeds and apertures and more important I would say, camera functions than the Art filter. The art filter is kinda setting the camera up for normal pictures and then just kinda tweaks with the colors in the contrast of it. This is controlling the actual settings of the camera. In the scene mode we have lots of different modes that you might find yourself shooting in and you can select them by hitting the OK mode and then going up and down and potentially going over to the right to look for some more information. Few things to note, the ones with a little asterisk on 'em are for use when you are using one of the extra special lenses that they have, the Fisheye Converter, Wider or Macro Converter, that's when those modes would really come in. It doesn't give you the fisheye effect, it's for use when you are using those particular lenses. Next up, is a kind of a unique Olympus mode, it is the Photo Story mode. This is where you would shoot multiple photos and it would combine them together into a bit of a collage. And you can also activate this, of course with the touch screen on the back of the camera. There's a number of different setups that you can do. In this particular setup I shot five images and the camera recorded a sliver of each one and combined it onto one image into a pseudo panoramic image if you will. There is a variety of other different compositions where maybe you're only shooting two pictures, but it comes up as one photo. And so as I say it's just kind of a photo collage built into the camera. Something that a lot of people would do in Photoshop but in this case, you can do it straight in the camera itself. Next up we have the Movie mode. On top of the camera we have a red movie record button and we can record movies at any time we want with this camera. But when we put it into the Movie Mode itself, then it really sets the camera up and it knows that you're intending to shoot video, so if nothing else at least it's giving you the correct framing for shooting video. You can shoot video anytime but I would recommend putting it in the Video Mode. Throughout this class, I'm gonna be having a number of shortcuts come up on screen like the one you see right now, and if you want to go into the menu system and make changes on this particular feature, this is where you would do it. So you would go into shooting menu number one, you would look under image quality and the movie options and you could go in and you could change the different resolution and frame rates that you are shooting. If you don't wanna jump ahead and do that, we will cover that later in this class, in the second half of the class, when we are going through the menu system. So this is just for people who would like to kinda cut ahead and quickly change their camera up right away and as I say you will see this numerous more times in this class so that you can go through and check it out later. We will be talking more about movies as we go along the way today. Next up on the mode dial, oh! A little bit of information about the mode dial I should say. We do have two different formats that we can shoot, we're gonna be shooting either in Movie Mode or in a Motion JPEG Mode. We have different resolutions that we can shoot at as well as different frame rates and there are a number of different movie effects that we can enact in the Movie Mode as well. We also have slow and quick motion movies available in the super control panel. And this is something that's a little bit unusual and I wanna show you on the camera because it is a bit of a hidden feature and so I'm gonna turn my camera into the Video Mode right now, so it's in the Video Mode. Yeah, let's get straightened up on camera here. Let's wake our camera up, it went to sleep, so I gotta turn off, turn it back on. Our Super Control Panel is something that we're gonna talk more about later on but it is activated by the OK button. So if I hit the OK button, there is a number of features if I go up and down you'll see on the right-hand side that I can change. And some of them don't have anything to do with movies and this is natural and this is the look of the image but down right here, is I have access to the movies. And I have four different presets along the bottom about the movie settings. And there's a whole bunch of different movie settings, we're not gonna talk about all of them right now, but notice down here I have a high speed 120 frames/second. And so this is that high speed shooting that you can do. And one of the things to notice on a lot of these and I think just about all of them, is that these are all kind of presets and we can go in and change them. Settings info and so we have an info button up here, if we press info, we're gonna be able to go up and change an aspect. In this case I'm changing the frames per second that the video is recording. And I can go from 60 down to and 30 is a pretty standard frame rate for video, so I'm gonna leave this one there. But, as you hit that Super Control Panel, you can go through and you can start making changes on these various different modes. So I'm gonna hit info in here, I can change the frames per second, I can change the quality, I can change the recording time, you can specify that the camera will only record for one second, or four seconds, or eight seconds or as long as you want. You can slow or fast motion, we can change this to half speed 0.6 speed it's off, 1.2 speed all the way up to, where's our high speed? 3.5 times. So if you wanna speed up time or you wanna slow down time, in your movies, you do it through here. So you need to have the camera in the Movie Mode, you need to hit the Super Control Panel button which is just the OK button, you need to go up ad down until you get to these movie setting modes down here. And then you can go left and right and hit the info button to make those sorts of changes. That is a feature that's a little bit hidden, it's not in the main menu, so I wanted to be sure to show you that right here and now. And finally on the Movie Mode itself, you can also use the screen, the touchscreen, to focus. And it's called a focus pull when you change focus from one spot to the other, you can do that by simply tapping on the screen where you want the camera to focus. We do have a maximum file size of 4 gigabytes. If you do choose a very large file and you record for a long period of time, it's gonna record a 4 gigabyte file and then it will start a new file right next to it so that'll be 2 that you'll have to put together in the editing phase of your movie. You do have a limit of 29 minutes, if you do record up to 29 minutes, you will need to restart the recording to start a new file on that. And because this is primarily a still camera and not a video camera, at any time in the Movie Mode that you wanna shoot a still picture, you can simply press down on the shutter release and take that still picture. And if you do not have the camera in the Movie Mode but you do hit the record button on the top of the camera, the camera will shoot a movie, but it will shoot it in a program mode, which means the camera is gonna work and figure out the shutter speed and aperture for you. If you are a little bit more of a cinema buff and you have very particular shutter speeds and apertures that you wanna have things set at, you're gonna want to put things into the Movie Mode, because then you're gonna be able to specify which mode you are shooting in by going into the custom menu movie setting, Movie Mode, and you'll be able to select whether you're shooting movies in Program, aperture priority, shutter priority or full manual. You'll need to get into the custom menu and we will pass by that when we do the menu section, second half of this class. (clears throat) Let's get over to the main shooting modes on this camera. First off is Program. Program is where the camera is gonna set shutter speeds and apertures for you, this is a very convenient mode for basic photography where you wanna let the camera figure out those basic settings for you. One of the things that you can do, is by turning the back dial on the camera, is you can change and shift the program. So lemme do a little demo on my camera here, with that. Let's switch over and put my camera in the program mode. We can see down at the bottom of the camera what the shutter speeds and apertures are at. So I am at 100th of a second at f/2. And if I move the camera around, it's gonna change to 125th of a second, or ADF, and move around a little bit. If I said, you know what, I really want more depth of field in this type of picture right now, I can simply turn that back dial, and what I'm doing is I'm essentially changing the aperture and the camera is changing the shutter speed along with it. And so I can shoot any of these photos and I'm gonna get a properly exposed photo, but with slightly different settings according to what I'm trying to achieve in that particular photograph. And so that is program shift and you'll see the letters come up Ps. That means that you have shifted the program to something different than the standard recommendation. Just while I have you on the camera right now, we're gonna turn the front dial next and that's gonna do something called exposure compensation. Where we can lighten the image or darken the image on the minus side. And you can see a little indicator right there too as to whether you're going brighter or darker. Back on the keynote. We can change that front dial as I just showed you for exposure compensation. So this is a great way if you're taking a photo and you're thinking, "You know, "I think this might be better a little lighter "or a little darker." This camera will allow you to go three stops underexposed or three stops overexposed and it will let you do that in third stop increments. It's a very nice wide range. Actually, I think I'm only showing you three stops, but it will actually go five stops. Lemme confirm that. Yes, it will go five stops but it only shows you three stops. And it's pretty rare that you would ever go beyond two stops to be honest with you. That is the exposure compensation and that is not available in the more simplistic modes that we talked about earlier. But it does kick in when we have gotten to the Program Mode. Next up is the Aperture Priority Mode, this is one of my favorite modes. This is where you get to choose the aperture and the camera will figure out the shutter speed. If we're gonna go live on the camera here real quickly, you'll notice that our aperture on the camera is in yellow. And that is a setting that we get to change on the camera. By turning the back dial of the camera, we are controlling the aperture. The white numbers are ones that are controlled by the camera itself and so if it's yellow that means, you have some control. This is exposure compensation and you can see moving the exposure compensation is really just changing the shutter speed. I'm gonna get this set back to zero and changing the aperture is in yellow and so as we get to more manual you'll see more and more of those numbers becoming yellow. Aperture Priority Mode is a good general purpose mode for a lot of people and a lot of situations. Next up is the Shutter Priority Mode, this is where you get to choose the shutter speed and the camera will figure out the aperture. I don't recommend this mode quite as much as I do the Aperture Priority Mode because there are not as many apertures for the camera to choose from. So you could be choosing in four thousandth of a second for instance, but the camera may not have an aperture that works with that shutter speed and you'll end up getting a very dark picture. I think if you wanna use shutter priority, a good option is to look at using auto ISO, which is something we'll talk about here very shortly. But if you use that in conjunction with the Shutter Priority then you can achieve some pretty good results without potentially having some major problems in there. Shutter Priority is good when you know the exact shutter speed that you want to choose. Next up is full Manual and this is of course where you get to control the shutter speeds and apertures of the situation and you'll be using the light meter to make sure that you have the proper exposure. So let's do a little look on the back of my camera and lemme get my camera set over to Manual in this case. Down at the bottom will see our shutter speeds and our apertures are in yellow. So we can change either one of those and we're gonna be looking at the light meter. In this case I'm gonna pick an aperture of let's just say f/8, I like f/8. Now what sort of shutter speed do I need? I'm gonna look at the light meter and get it centered out to the middle right below the zero, which happens to be six, which is one sixth of a second. So if I shoot a picture here, I'm gonna get a pretty decent exposure. If I feel like, ah, you know maybe this needs to be a little bit lighter, I could adjust either the shutter speeds or the apertures to the plus side of the light meter. If you have time to set up a shot and think about exactly what settings you want, that's when I prefer using manual exposure if there's a specific shutter speed I'm trying to get or a specific aperture, but I still kinda want the other setting to be pretty specific as well, that's when I'm gonna be using the manual mode. And I should mention that the screen that you see in the back here, is gonna be very similar when you hold your eye up to the camera and you look at it through the EVF. So you'll see that same information on either of those screens.