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Menu System

Lesson 5 from: Olympus OM-D EM-5 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

5. Menu System

Next Lesson: Camera Operation

Lesson Info

Menu System

When you hit the menu button on your camera, there are going to be different groupings of information, and they're not laid out in the best manner, in my opinion, so we have a couple of sunni menus to playback menu, a custom menu, which is where they threw everything in the kitchen, sink on dh, then an excess report menu, though it was really small and mostly useless and then a setup menu, and so we're basically just going to go through things from top to bottom, and so if you want to have your camera out, just follow right along and we're going to talk about all these little goodies in here. First up is the card set up. We have two options in here, we can erase pictures or we can reform at the card. The better system is to reform at the car now don't do it right now don't right now, because if you don't know this, deletes all your pictures and so it's kind of the standard protocol of a serious photographer before they go out on a big shoot. Whether it's an event or a vacation is that ...

they're going to download all the pictures that are on that card. They're gonna put the card in the camera and they're going to reformat it while it's in the camera that they're going to shoot with it. And so if you're sharing cards between cameras, if somebody sells you their card or gives you their card in general it's best to get all those images off and reformat that card before you start taking pictures? It just establishes a clean line of communication between your card in the camera, but you can delete individual images in there, or you can delete all of them if you want, but recommend formatting for the most part reset and my set is a way for you to go in and customize a whole bunch of the features of your camera. Now in my camera, I'll see if we can get this on camera here I'm going to go into the menu system and the menu button, and I'm gonna go over to the right and down to reset my set and I I have under my set one I have a particular setting and that one is actually the camera default because I teach classes and they need to have my camera quickly go back two standard city, but under my set, teo, I have gone in and I have customized a bunch of the features on the camera, and what you do is just follow along. With me for the next hour customized the camera whatever way you want and then you can lock that into my set one two three or four now obviously you could go back and do this four times over you could have ah portrait mode where you have your camera set up to certain focusing metering auto focus systems and then have it completely different for travel or landscape or something else and so you can have up to four these set and then you can switch between these with various button functions now you do have to be a little bit careful about setting in resetting these things because I have on more than one occasion gone in and tried to add some new features because what you do is if you make some changes and you save it as my set one and as you go along oh here's something new and you want to add that to it you can add that to your setting but you want to be careful about not going back and resetting everything and so just look at the wording very carefully as you go and do you want to change all the settings do you want it take the camera settings that or anything that it's currently out so just be a little careful in their next up picture mode well these are the same modes that we've already talked about their access accessible in a number of different ways and here is just another way that you can go in and tweet your images it's not going to do anything two raw images it will affect only j peg images next up is a little bit more important this is the image quality we did see this in the super control panel but it's exactly the same if you reset it here it's and you go to the super control panel you will see whatever one is most current with what you have set so you can't set it two different ways and just to kind of bit on my nomenclature here I use thie kind of middle gray settings as a general recommendation things in red I am recommending for more advanced user so for a more advanced user I would recommend a ross setting for a basic user you might choose the large fine mode for the movie mode we have a number of options where we can shoot different resolutions and different compressions in general, you're probably going to want to shoot with the highest quality movies unless you're doing something specific where you want a smaller uh smaller size video but for the most part you'd want to choose the full hd fine quality image aspect is the same thing we talked about in the super control panel same options here gonna leave this at four by three cc's I want to get everything that that sensor khun grab digital telecom murder this is goofy and so this is where it digitally zooms in and this is something that you can do in photo shop or any photo program very, very easily. So this is something you most likely want to keep turned off. All right, we're into shooting menu number two were cruising along because there's not very much in the shooting menus, we have the drive mode which is once again duplicated from the super control panel. Same features, same options stabilizer mode is the same as we saw on the super control panel. Just be careful when you're doing your panning shots if you'd specifically wanted to apparent in shock that you get it set to the correct stabilizer mt next up we get to something that's a little different here. This is bracketing and so what bracketing is and we did this a little bit with exposure compensation, but this is a way to automatically shoot pictures that are overexposed and under exposed. A typical bracket siri's would be three pictures, but if you want you can do five frames, you can do up to seven frames, you could do only two frames and these air the this is going to work in aperture priority shutter, priority or program. It does not work in manual because you are manually setting shutter speeds and apertures but it's a good way for a lot of landscape shots to make sure that you got the right exposure, it's also very useful for people who want to do hdr high dynamic range photography and these are the options you can set it in third stop increments two thirds or full stop increments anywhere between two frames and seven frames. Now you can also use the motor drive mode in conjunction with this so that you shoot your pictures pretty quickly in a serious now you khun bracket in exposure, which is what this is this is a exposure that we've been talking about so far, but you can also bracket white balance flash s o or the artifacts so with white balance, if you shoot raw, this really isn't necessary because you can adjust that later on, you could do a bunch of pictures with different flash you could adjust your eyes so as I mentioned now, the art bracketing is really interesting because when you shoot one picture, it will do twelve different results in all the different artistic effects. And so with one picture, you get all the filters, all the art filters at the exact same time, and so you might want to be a little careful about using that, but if you're unsure as to what artsy mode you're in, you could just shoot every picture, all twelve options, all right, moving on next up is multiple exposures that's, right? You can shoot multiple exposures in frame now you're gonna have a couple of options you can choose to turn it off, which is where you're going to normally leave it for the most part you can choose to shoot two frames on it now there is a way to do multiple frames by going in and grabbing a picture that already has two shots on it and then added to it we also have something called auto gain which adjust the exposure for you. So as an example, we have two space needle's here in seattle in this this photograph but not in reality s o this is auto gain on where it's adjusting the exposure and when I turn the auto gain off, everything gets a little bit brighter because we're adding an exposure on top of another exposure and what you could do potentially with it is continued to add pictures. Now one of the options in here that's nice is that there'll be an overlay in the camera so that you can see that you're subjects are not overlapping on themselves so that when they become one picture things are laid out properly normally with multiple exposures I would say just put it in photo shop and create multiple layers but this is the one advantage of doing it in cameras you can really see how things line up against each other, so there is a slight advantage of doing it in camera in some cases, but normally you're gonna leave this turned off, I would, I would imagine next up, we have flash exposure compensation. This is the same one that we saw in the super control panel. If I had to leave it in one spot, I would leave it at minus one if you do want to hook up a number, which means two or more of the olympus flashes that has thie rc mode on it, remote commander mode, you can get in and do all that. We're not going to do that in here, but you can hook up multiple flashes, but you will need multiple olympus flashes to communicate with each other. All right, we've moved our way all the way to the playback menu. We have a slide show mode, and in here you can put your cameras into a slide show mode. And, you know, I was playing around with this camera last night, and I keep finding new things on this camera. I know I'm supposed to be the expert on this, and I know everything, but I'm going to turn this on, so if we want to grab this and back and we want to make sure the sound is on, because this is just going toe astound you if I put it into the playback mode. We have different music we have built in themes if you've ever wanted your own theme music wait, hold it up to my mic this's melancholy nice. Okay, this's this make you feel joy okay, just so cool and then the best one beat and so when you're playing back your images, you can have music with them, okay, first time I've ever used that so fun, you know, that's probably the last time I'm going to use you as well. And so if you're gonna look your camera to tv or something, you can create your little slideshow. What do you do? Uh, you can rotate your image is normally when you shoot vertical pictures on this camera is kind of nice because they'll show up to vertically, whatever, however, you look at it on the camera, but sometimes if you should've vertical, it'll be flipped wrong when you want to do it on the tv so you can go in and manually flip a photograph if necessary. If you want to edit your images, you can add audio and notation steer images. So let's say, you're taking a picture of something that you want to record exactly where you were, what the name of it is our information that you didn't record on the image wise you want to add in there do you could do that very easily you know you take a picture of somebody while you're traveling just have him say their name and what their email addresses and you could email them the photo later on which is a great way of kind of keeping those notes right there in the camera now if you shoot with raw you could take a raw image and you could create a jpeg image straight in camera let's say you don't have your computer with you and you're trying to email a picture home you're not going to email a raw picture it's probably too large where you baby can't work with it or the hotel doesn't have the right system for looking at the rock you can create a j peg image writing camera you can also create composites which we were looking at with the multiple pictures multiple exposures and so you can do that with ross now once you get it into a j peg or if you're already shooting j pegs you could go in and do a bunch of fixes and tweaks on your image now generally the camera is not the best place to do this type of work but you could do it if necessary straight in camera and I'm not going to go into the fine details on how to do this but it can be done in there you can also hook up your camera to a printer and print directly from your camera never done this I don't know anyone really who has but it is capable if you don't have a computer around you can print straight from the camera you can go in here and make the appropriate settings reset protect if you lock your images from getting deleted and I'll show you that a little bit later you can protect your images you can basically take off the protection on all the images at the same time is what's going on right here all right so we've been moving along pretty quickly through this menu system you're like how is this going to take so long it's because they have dumped everything into this thing called custom menu and they have all these different letters and categories of features in here and so this is where you're going to find most of the good stuff in the menu so we're going to dive in first with letter a which has to do with auto focus and manual focus issues and the very first one in here is the auto focus mode now this is something that is available on the super control panel so this is a hard way to get to it but you can get in here and so I think for most people single out of focus is it's going to work fine for some people they might like to have the ability of manually focusing has a little touch up and so those are the two recommended modes within that full time auto focus is something I would recommend turning off this might be handy if you're shooting video the problem here is that your camera is constantly focusing and using up a lot of battery power and the better to just generally have the camera focus when you want two okay we're playing around with back button focusing before well this is where you would do it the function one button on the back of the camera excuse me the function one button on the back of the camera is normally going to do the auto exposure lock and auto focus lock which is what this button does and so you can go in through in here and customize it and my customization is m three because that allows me to put the camera in manual focus and manually focused by pressing my thumb on the function one button in the back of the camera and I can manually focus if I want or I can auto focus with my thumb button you can also customize it with the single or the continuous focusing as well you can dive in there and see that there's a lot of different options depending on how you want to have your camera control resetting the lens what this does is it resets the lens to infinity when the cameras turned off it's just kind of a good base place to start so I'd leave it on chances are you really won't notice much difference without bold time focusing if you put the camera in a bold mode or a time mode which is a long exposure nighttime mode it allows you to focus the lands now I could see there's a pretty good argument for not allowing the camera two focus but there's some kind of creative things that you could do with a long time exposure and changing the focus and so unless you're going to be bumping the camera and you're probably not going to be touching the camera you can leave this turned on so it's an option that you could do if you get into that situation okay canan users nikon users you can customize the focusing ring to focus like the rest of your cameras or your former cameras if you've dumped the old system and are going with the new system or whatever when you think is most appropriate now from my understanding the way that cannon goes is more common in the industry if you talk about the way sony lenses, pentax lenses, movie lenses and so forth nikon is kind of the opposite of the way many other cameras are not that that's wrong it's just different manual focus assist what happens here and I am tauron on my recommendation on this one normally I leave this turned on. What happens is that when you start to manually focus the lens, the image magnifies and you're looking at a small portion of it so that you can get nice, detailed, sharp focus in a particular area. And then when you press the shutter, release down or actually wait two seconds, it jumps back to the full frame. The problem is, is sometimes I like this, and sometimes I don't, um, kind of tortoise to which one I like a normally I leave it on because I do like to manually focus, and it allows me to really critically focus properly, all right, kind of paging down there's a lot of things in this auto focus menu you can set home where the focus points are in your camera, so if you normally focus off to the left off to the right in a corner or something like that, you could set a particular home base where that one box or that group of nine boxes are, then you could use one of the function buttons to reset it backto home anytime you press that function, but and so if you're constantly using a certain focusing area you can go in and program and a program that in this feature here autofocus illumination is that little lamp on the front of the camera and I like turning this off I like to be a little bit more stealthy about the way I'm going to focus that light helps the camera focus in low light conditions but it doesn't do so for very long of a distance it's on ly things probably six feet in front of you or less and so it's not going to help out most of the time and so that's why I turned it off I just don't like a big bright light beeps coming on when I'm taking pictures face priority this is something that we've seen about two times before eso normally I leave this turned off okay so we're moving to the second section in the custom menu which that has to deal with things to do with buttons and dials on the camera and this first one is where you get to go in and customize the buttons on your camera now I've gone in and I have customized function number two which is on the top of the camera to be my eyes so I think that's a popular one that a lot of other people use but you can go in and choose whatever you want for whatever buttons you want and so you might want to spend some time we're going toe just move right on past this but there's a lot of things in here that you can really adjust to the way you like the camera to work I wish more cameras would do that all right, next up dialogue function now I've gone in and I've changed this on my camera just because I don't like the way it was set up and so you when you were in program mode, for instance, which dialled do you want to have control program versus exposure? Compensation? Which one do you want to have control the aperture when you're an aperture priority and it kind of depends on the size of your hands and how you hold the cameron and how you want to work with the camera, but look in their play around with a little bit and see if you can find out a system that works better for the way that you like to work next up is dial direction, and it depends a little bit on which side of the dial you grabbed you grab the front side of the dial or the back side of the dial, but I think for many people you're going to want to change this to dial two, which is basically an opposite direction. It'll seem more logical when you are changing shutter speeds and apertures and looking at the light meter because the light meter will move the same direction you turn the dial seemed a little awkward to me a dial one, but I think there's a different mentality with people who make the camera ok, quickly moving on to let her see things to do with the release in the drive mode normally when you're in the single shot mode the camera let me make sure I get this correct the camera must be in focus for you to take a picture and that's the normal mode if you wanted to turn this off so that you could take a picture any time even though you're out of focus you could program that to do so by turning this on but normally I would leave this turned off kind of just the opposite when it's in the continuous mode we often want to be able to take a picture at any time even though it may be slightly out of focus because these air generally action type events on dso we leave this release priority so we can take a picture any time we want in the continuous mt I would leave those set has indicated for the low speed continuous mode you can go in and you can customize this to a different frame rate and there's some reasons if you shoot action photography why you might want something a little faster or something a little bit slower you can also go in and customize the high speed frame rate to anything that you want or just about anything all right continuous mode with image stabilization and this is kind of a negative off off actually means it's on and doesn't make the most sense to me but if you leave it off what's going to happen is that when you press down halfway on the shutter release the camera is going to go into its stabilization mode and it's kind of nice to be able to look through the frame and see it stabilized but it does use up a little bit more battery power and if you were really conservative on battery power you would turn this on so that it's only going to be stabilized when you take a picture and actually I think I just explained the wrong thing I explained what right now sorry there's a lot of things in here so the previous one motor drive is if the stabilized stays on while you're in the motor drive mode and that's something you're normally going to want to have on and this is a double negative off off so it actually means that it's on ah halfway releases the same thing but with the release halfway on so here we do want this one on so if I'm not being real clear just look at the screen and look at my recommendations and probably just go with that sorry this care was a very complicated camera next up we have control if you're going up the camera to an hd tv you can control the output on it so that you can control it from a remote control on a tv for those of us here in north america, we have the ntsc for those in europe and other parts of the country. You might want to set this two year own home country system, which would either be ntsc or pal all right, control settings here. What you can do is you can turn off unwanted displays in here, so if you don't want to look at something one of the options in there, you can go in and turn off one of those information screens and simply set it up the way you want it to set up same thing goes here on the impose settings in the playback mode, the live you played, that grid options. All of these generally, I like to leave these turned on because it's something that you can kind of flip through and use as you want. But if you really know that you're never going to use these things, you could turn them off so that you don't even have to bother paging through them. Ok, moving on to a letter d things to deal with the display, the beep and pc connection mode guy. This is the ever so handy helpful guide that comes up and tells you what you are doing on your camera, which becomes very annoying after a couple weeks of use. And so, while you're just learning the camera, you might want to leave this on because it will help you learn the camera, but once you get into it, you're gonna want to turn this off because you know what you're doing and you're tired of the help menus coming up, live view, boost what's going to happen here is I would I would leave this turned off, and the reason that I would leave it turned off is that if you turn it on it's going to disregard any exposure information like exposure compensation or shutter speed change, and so you're not going to be able to see what the final picture looks like. One of the advantages of a digital camera in the viewfinder is that we can see what the final image is going to look like. And so if you do a minus two exposure compensation with this feature turned off it's going to look darker in the viewfinder so you can actually judge by simply looking at the view finder what's going on a little bit better now. There are some reasons why you might want to leave this turned on, but I think the average user is going to want to turn it off the art live view mode I would leave this in mode one if you use thie art modes on the camera. If you put this into mode to what it does is it lightens the rt effect so that you can easily see through the viewfinder and so the question is is would you rather more easily see the viewfinder see through the viewfinder or see exactly what the artifact iss on and so that's kind of a tradeoff there I think mode one where you see the art effect better is important in that mode but I don't use the art mode so it's not that big a deal so it depends on how much you used the art note play around if you do use the art known you find one that you like better live you close up mode I would leave this in mode one what's going to happen here is it's going to magnify the view and then when you press down on the shutter release it's going to cancel that magnified view in mode to its days magnified the entire time and so I think mode one is a little bit easier to work with four composition regions next up is the info off me check my notes normally when you press the information button it automatically goes to sleep takes a nap after ten seconds you can have it stay on indefinitely if you want and so for battery life it's probably wise to leave it on ten seconds but if you're not liking it disappear you can have it stay on there for a long period of time. Backlit lcd. Okay, the lcd on this camera consumes a lot of battery power and in order to save power it shuts down after eight seconds or at least it dims. Okay starts to not off it's still there you khun we'll have that hold on for a longer period of time if you want. All right, we have our sleep mode. How long do you want the camera to go before it goes to sleep now? It's not turning off but it is going to sleep in this case after one minute which is pretty common and to wake it from the sleep all you need to do is press halfway down on the shutter release which is different than the next feature that we're going to talk about, which is auto power off five minutes. So in this case, if I leave my camera for five minutes without doing anything to it and I press the shutter release nothing's going to happen it will not wake up. I have to go in the back, turn it off and then turn it back on. You can change this time to thirty minutes, one hour or four hours if you want so five minutes seems like a reasonable amount of time that's where I have it all right, so for the beat when you are in focus it beeps I think I still have this turn on so actually just still have this and focus it went to sleep and so I get tired I mean you can just tell an amateur photographer when you hear this would you take a picture and stop focusing so yeah that screams amateur mode it's just young amateur amateur images so I turned that one off especially if you're in any one of my workshops you remember the day you told me to turn off john let me give your camera give me a camera ok if you're going to have your camera to a computer you may need to go into the usb mode to tell it exactly what you're doing with it if you're downloading images or doing other things I don't recommend it for most cases but it is necessary for something that we'll talk about it a little bit but if you're gonna print you go in here and turn that on okay? So we're moving on to the next big category which they deals with exposure me during an s o the exposure value step I would keep it one third that's the normal increments that we work in you can change it to half or one tv if you want metarie mode this is the same thing we saw in the super control panel same options recommend the digital espn is a good general purpose mt auto exposure lock me eatery when you press the auto exposure lock, do you want it? Tio go to a different media ring system normally it's going to want to stick with the one that you have, but you could pick another one if you wanted to. So I think it's a really odd user that might want to do that. We're different user, maybe not odd, but different. Most people are gonna want to do that so I would leave it at auto s o same settings we've talked about before, but I will show you a little test that I did. I just wanted to see how this camera works at different vessels, and I know that some of you may be looking at this on a small screen, so I will give you my verbal definition. I think two hundred four hundred eight hundred are all just super clean on this. Sixteen hundred is still pretty darn good, and I I wouldn't be too shy going all the way up to thirty, two hundred. It does start to get a little crunchy, as we say at sixty, four hundred and frankly twelve thousand and twenty five thousand or garbage, so I would really try to avoid those like the plague unless you have a very good shot at bigfoot or ufl. Those air just extreme situations eso always keep it as low as possible, but you know if you need to go up to thirty two hundred sixty four hundred it's reasonably good I'd try to stay away from sixty four hundred but two hundred through eight hundred really cleans tough okay onward I so steps are normally done in third stops you could do it in full stops if you don't want to use the incremental ones which whatever to your liking they're perfectly fine to use I also auto set allows you to go in for the auto isil and customize where it starts off at and how high you will allow it to go. So if you found thirty two hundred I so to be unworkable for what you want to do, you could set sixteen hundreds the high limit and it would simply stop at sixteen hundred eyes. So so it allows you to customize auto aya so which I'm not a big fan of but now that you can customize it, it becomes a little bit more of a workable tool for a lot of people and I also auto you can limit which modes program shutter priority aperture priority it works in and it most people are going to want to have that available in those modes if they want to turn it on so I would probably leave it in all all right the long time exposure on this camera is when you put it into a bulb or timer mode, and this allows you to set the maximum length of time. Now I haven't tried anything longer than eight minutes on this. I think that it's going to gather a lot of noise have had trouble doing long exposures in the ten or thirty minute range, but you can do up to a thirty minute exposure, but I would expect lots of noise on this camera it's unlikely that most people will go beyond eight minutes for a nighttime exposure, so it seems like a reasonable limit on the time live bulb. Ok, this is going to choose the display interval, so when you are in the live bulb mode, what happens is on the back of the camera, the image will say slowly build in increments so you can see it as it is developing in the tray of chemicals, you might say, and this is a really cool mode, and this is the first camera that I've seen that has this and it's not quite perfect, because there's a limited number of times that it can update and show you the change, and so you could have an update, you know, every second. But the problem is is that it's going to run out of updates and you're not going to see anything after a short period of time and so you do have to be a little bit careful about this and so actually here's a little visual example of it are big great wheel on the waterfront here in seattle you can see it slowly build and then when you think it's done you can either press a button return and I'll kick it out of the live view mode and so just look at it visually and when it's done it's done take it out of the oven and so I think and I played around with this mode a little bit and I think two seconds is a good kind of in between setting that gets you enough range and enough increments to see what's going on now the difference between bulb and time they're very similar bolt mod is going to be best used with a cable release because the bulb starts or stems from the old term of a handheld bulb release there was an air bulb that pushed a cable and open the shutter and it was held the shutter open as long as he squeezed the ball and so in this case as long as you leave your finger down on the shutter release button is how long it's going to be open or how long it's on the elektronik cable release of the current paris now the time mode you press it wants to start and then you press it wants to stop and so you don't have to hold anything you don't have to do anything and so if you were going to do a time exposure for one minute here is actually a very good way to do it now if you press the camera let's suppose your tripods not the steadiest thing in the world and you don't want to have any movement on the camera all you don't want to push a button while you're doing it. So what? You d'oh because you cover the front of the lands you press the button, you then take this away, it starts the exposure, you stop the exposure and then turn it off on the camera and so photographers used to use their hat to put it over the lands to start the exposure, and so we don't use the top hats that made for perfect lens caps, but that's that's a technique that would work quite well with that anti shock this is maybe for scientific purposes it delays the shuttle release by two seconds so that we don't have the problem we were just talking about and so if you're going to do it on a regular basis it's kind of awkward to go in and turn this on because diving this far into the menu system gets to be a lot of button presses and so it's not something you want to turn on and off all the time, but normally you're going to leave that in the office. All right, sir, we're going to be dealing with the flash now. The exit, which is the maximum flash synchronization with this camera, is one to fiftieth of a second. I would leave it set there. The slow limit. Okay, this is a little bit of a personal quiz. How good at you at holding the camera under slow shutter speeds for beginning. Photographer a sixteenth of a second might be good as you get more experienced holding the camera slower and the and the cool effects that you could get, you might want to have something down pretty low. I have my camera set at about an eighth of a second. I know that there's just really hard for me to hold the camera less than that, but I can get an eighth of a second and get some nice pictures if I'm going to be using flash and I don't use flash with this too much. But somewhere between an eighth and a sixtieth, this may be where you should have yours. Next up is the option of combining exposure, compensation with flash exposure compensation and for the beginning photographer. This could get a little complicated, and it is better just to group these together and deal with making the picture brighter or darker all at the same time. For the more sophisticated user, you're going to want to separate the ease and independently controlled the exposure of the image versus the flash, and so it kind of depends on how you're working with flash and your level of understanding with the flash as well. Okay, so we're moving over to quality color and white balance noise reduction is something that we can do in camera, or we can do later in photo shop, in light room and other such places for a very beginning user with the camera, you could leave it in auto and let the camera do it. And so what's going to happen here is that when you use long shutter speeds, say a two second exposure, the camera will go through and try to clean up that noise. Most people, I would say, just leave it turned off and deal with it in another program, you can do a better job of it now. The problem with leaving this turned on in the auto mode or if you want to turn it on, is that if you do a two second exposure, it's going to stay on for two seconds? After the two second exposure while it's cleaning up that noise so it slows the performance of your camera down quite a bit, which is another reason why I want to turn it off noise filter is very much like noise reduction on lee in this case it's trying to fix noise at high I es cells and so for beginning user, you could leave this on standard and just kind of let it fix those eyes so sixty four hundred shots that have a lot of noise for most people I'd say turn it off and deal with that in another program the white balance is the same ones we've seen in the super control panel available in other places, but same options and all white balance correction ok, so if you wanted to tweak the white balance, you wanted to make everything a little bit more green or yellow or adjust the color temperature in some way you could adjust all the white balances in one direction, so for some reason your camera got dropped and everything's a little wonky and all the colors are a little off you could tweak it a little bit normally you're not going to want to go in and mess with us if you're getting good results from your camera white balance auto keep warm color oh yes this one so what's happening here you this okay? So when you are photographing under incandescent light bulbs the typical punks and lights and her house is this keeps just a little bit of that warm color to it which I kind of like I think it you know is kind of the way it actually looks to rise if you absolutely want to correct for it you could turn it off and so it's just a little bit of a tweak with the white balance and here's another one with white balance it gets a little tricky if you are in your living room and you've got tungsten lights around and you add flash to it you have natural flashlight and you have this awkward orange light how do you want your camera to color balance for this and so in this case I'm recommending just let the camera figure it out it's going to try to draw a compromise between the two it's not going to be a perfect scenario you could turn it off if you want to or you could have it if you turn it off let me explain that it would match the white balance that you have said in the camera and it's not going to adjust for the flash you could set it to white balance strictly for the flash and you're going to have these other very orange or green lights in there and so I'm willing to let the camera sort this out it all depends on how much you shoot. With flash and in what type of environments as well, I mentioned this before in the super control panel, but there's a little visual here to go along with it. Adobe rgb is a larger color gamut than s rgb the internet as we know it today works in s rgb and a lot of sites like facebook, for instance, or flicker going toe workinon, srg b range, and so to get that larger go color gamut, which might be helpful under printing situations, it would be better to set this at adobe rgb. If you are shooting raw, you get adobe rgb inherently when you shoot rock, and so you don't have to be concerned about it. But it's, nice to have your camera set up if you were going to shoot j picks scrolling down a little bit further shading camp is fixing vignette ing on certain lenses. Many lenses will get a little bit darker in the corners, and this will fix that and some people like that turn it on. Some people want to shoot the lenses as they are. I will leave it off if you shoot raw it's going to be off automatically on you not going affect your images. If you want to go in and customize the j pegs that you shoot, you could go in and specifically choose what size large, medium how much compression is being done on the jay pigs, which is very closely related to the next one, which is pixel count? You could actually customize how many pixels are in your jpeg images if you meet need to meet a very specific size requirement for some reason you could do that automatically writing camera most people aren't going to touch this stuff, but it is there if you need it with regards to exposure metering with spot metering doesn't use your focal point or the center of the sensor so would you please read that question again? I could. This is from sc sc studios with regards to exposure meet a ring with spot metering does it use your focal point or the center of the sensor? I do know when then I care. I'm pretty sure that it's going to be the center of a frame, but I don't know that one hundred percent I think I might have to fall back on I don't know sorry about that. I think that is a perfectly acceptable answer. We have many more. Okay, this is ah interesting question a lot of technical things. So there were there's another one from a neuro dancer who would like to know regarding the slow limit um he's asking are you are you are your recommended times on dh then he's got brackets around the eyes this is not going well his record times with stabilization on then he says a one sixtieth slow limit with the oly I b I s seems awfully fast considering it's supposed to give you it three stops of stability that questions totally going over my head I e he's got brackets around the eye in the slash I um yeah I'm gonna help me out yeah photographer people that honestly no I think to do have an idea well basically asking about stabilization is it no they're asking with flash right who didn't mention found flash okay just because one recommended limes were with flash and so if you're adding flash to your images that's slower shutter speed will let in ambient light in the background maybe you're moving maybe you're trying to stay still maybe you want to do a panning shot so there's a lot of options in there for hand holding the shots I've gotten pretty good shots down to a quarter of a second so that limitation on that menu setting where we set a sixtieth or an eighth of a second or somewhere in between that's on lee with flash in the automatic modes in manual you can set said any shutter speed you want well photo joseph has chimed in and he said he's asking of ice can be used at higher shutter speeds it can and it's not gonna have much affect but the thing the effect that I like is like with a telephoto lens it's connick constant you can't hold it steady and with stabilization you can really get the framing right on because a lot of times it's like I get really picking on my frame units like good bad good bad good bad and then you know steadies out okay there it is right where I want it and so I leave it turned on all the time so I just have one more here and I know you talked about it a while ago it's from holly and she says how do I turn off the explanation that pops up when I scroll through the menus I know you mentioned yeah there is a menu sitting in there but a quick way to do it is just hit info okay just there's the info button on the back of the camera that will turn it off there you go holly turn it off but you can go into the menu settings and you know rather than scrolling through the camera I'll just look real quickly here there is the mode guide letter d mode turn that off thank you. I don't know if you want to get into exposure bracketing we want to talk about it a little bit with that so yeah go ahead okay this is from sc studios and the question is with exposure bracketing do you press the shutter once or once for each exposure you had president one trees once for each exposure you could hold it down if it's in the motor drive mode so you could do it with one button press but you're pressing down through that that whole period of time and something else just the now that I think of it, I think I forgot to mention when you do have it in bracketing it is in bracketing until you turn it off so you could easily turn it on and forget that you have it turned on and you'll have this whole series of pictures for every other pictures lighter or darker s so you have to physically go in and turn it on and then go in and turn it off when you're done, so be careful about that, so I have one more than I could ask from buyer and kind of interesting they say how do I flag winners in camera? Is there a way to do that? Trying to think I don't think there is a way let me quickly turn the camera on playback of image and no, there is not a way to tag images that I know okay okay, I got my breath I'm ready to continue excellent. Thank you okay, so where are we? We're at the record erase h okay, so quickly race okay, this gets into we really find nuanced area of when you press now think about this we knew press erase what you want to have happen do you want the picture to be immediately gone or would you like the camera to say, are you really sure you want this to be gone? And so the erase button is a little too accessible in this case if you turn this on the erase button is just it's gone immediately no backup whatsoever at all and there is kind of an opposite of this and I'll talk about in just a second okay? So when you shoot raw and j pig when you delete do you want to delete both of them together? In most cases, yes, some people might want to separate and individually delete one of those, but I think normally you're going to want to keep these combined. You can go in and see the file name here, don't check here the camera automatically assigns a file name tell your pictures if you leave it in auto it's just going to started started zero zero zero one and keep counting up until it gets to ten thousand and it will automatically turn over if you want to put it at reset, you can reset the next card to start at one the problem with resetting is that you're going to end up with a whole lot of pictures that are zero, zero, zero one and it's bad have to have a lot of images with the same file number. And by the way, you should be renaming these things when they get into light room or whatever program anyway. But I would leave that in auto if you want, you can go in and you could add your initials into the final live so that's straight out of camera they've got your name on him for at least your initials. Okay, priorities set. All right, one of the things that bothers me and this is going back to the quicker race. When I pressed delete on this camera, the camera essentially comes to me and says, oh, it says you wanted to lead a picture. Certainly you don't want to delete this, but it's kind of tells, you know, you don't want to delete this when I say yes, I do want to delete it and then I press the button again and so I would recommend changing this, too. Yes. So in order to delete a picture, what I do now is I hit garbage okay, and so it's a two button rather than a three button and so it depends on the one press, one, two or three buttons you can play with quicker race and priority set to get it set up the way you want it to work if you're going to print from your camera, you can set up the dp I said a normally if you are going to do this, I don't think I ever will, but I sent my camera three hundred just because that's, where a lot of people like to have their prints, their images said at for printing copyright settings this is kind of cool. You can go in and put your name in your camera and so that when you download your pictures and this is a little screen shot from light room it's got who the name of the photographer is it's got their website you could put other basic information in there, and so if your cameras stolen, you could say yes, that's my camera, my name is on it in fact, it's inside of it so good wayto put your information on that. All right? So we're gonna deal with the movie mode now, so as I mentioned before, when you press that red button on the top of the camera, the camera will start shooting a movie but it's only in the auto mode. If you put the camera into the movie mode and then press record, you have the options of shooting in manual shutter priority or happens your priority, so if you're kind of a serious video shooter, you're probably going to want to do this manually so that you can go in and set a specific maybe a fiftieth of a second shutter speed in a specific aperture. If you just want to grab some quick shots, your friends, your kids or something like that, you can leave it in the program mode and it's just simple. Right out of the gate. Gonna work movie plus still dum dum dum you shoot a video, it shoots a still picture at the very end of the video. Why? Why? Why leave that off. Okay, movie sound. You could turn the sound off. You can turn it on your choice. I'd leave it. Turn out well, we got next movie of fact. If you want to do that little reverb effect it's available if you want to turn it on, I'm fine with that it's. Not on all the time. It's just available to turn on wind noise reduction. You can go in and you can set this toe low, standard or high. If you're working under with windy conditions and then the recording volume, you can leave it at standard or you can set it to lower high, depending on the type of environment that you're working in. Not a lot to deal with in there, so we're getting back to the camera regular camera sections so the built in tvs will even if we talked about this before the camera, I believe calm set to style three, which is large image with information over the image. I kind of like style too I mean, I like blue and all in style one, but I just don't like any other color information in there because your eyes look a color and is affected by color, so I prefer to have a more neutral tone back there, so I think style to is my preference. All right? The's info settings when you are working in the dvf the eye level viewfinder do you want to be able to see the history? Graham the highlights and shadows, the bubble horizon level or an image only even kind of choose which things you look at? For instance, I don't like looking at the highlights and shadows in there, so I've turned that off in my camera we have a grid pattern that you can turn on, which can be sometimes handy for keeping the horizon level sometimes for composition, for architectural type work might be handy for most people you're going to probably want to leave it as uncluttered as possible the dvf auto switch I explain that your camera will kind of switch between the back screen and the vf, depending on how close a solid object is back there that could bother you and you may just want to go completely manual with the switch on the side of the camera I think the auto switch in general is good it's not perfect, but you can turn it off if you want. Okay? Frame rate. I am a little tauron on this one as to what to recommend. In general, I would recommend a high frame rate. This is the refresh rate in the viewfinder. A higher for frame rate is going to make it look better in the viewfinder. The problem is, when you get under low light conditions, the viewfinders going to dim considerably. And so if you work in low light conditions, I would leave it at normal. And so you may need to do some experimentation in there, and it depends a little bit on what sort of conditions that you work in, but in general, I'm gonna leave it in high. And if I start working into a low light, then I'll switch. Excuse me, switch that over to normal. If the color in contrast of your e v f seems off, you can go in and adjust the color. This has nothing to do with picture quality of the actual photograph you were taking just the view through the elektronik viewfinder of the camera, all right, final big one, and here the utility section pixel mapping all right if you take a picture like this there's something wrong there's dust on the sensor and you should have it cleaned off the best way to clean it is if you can actually swipe it clean with the sensor swab but if you don't want to do that or it's not available to you what you would do is he would photograph a white sheet of paper and it would show you all the dust that's going on on the picture the camera would then map out where these problem areas are and it would clone over them and fix them so that when you take a picture it's going to be a clean white sheet of paper or at least you won't have dust on your photograph and so it's kind of an emergency dust cleaning scenario and so it's not something I do lighthearted leaks I don't like my camera cloning over pixels in the camera but it's an emergency fix for a dirty sensor next up exposure shift and what you can do here let's let me double check my notes is that you can go in and manually adjust for the different metarie modes and I don't imagine it's something that most people are going to want to do you can adjust how soon the battery light comes on toe warn you about a low battery you could have it come on a little bit sooner or a little bit later depending on whether you choose a plus or minus, I've left mine at zero, and it doesn't seem to be a major problem. If you are using the vertical grip, you could choose which battery gets used first, the one in the camera or the one in the grip. Most likely, you're going to choose the one in the grip, because it's more accessible. If the virtual horizon gets messed up on your camera, that seems to be off, you could go in and make a minor tweak to it. With the level of test you could turn off the touch screen if you don't use it, and it bothers you. For most people, you probably want to leave, it turned on, because it doesn't seem to get in the way. Under normal usage, if you have something, you probably don't even see this in there. If you have what's called a knife fight card, which is related to a wifi, you would have the ability to turn it on. What happens in is you can have pictures downloaded from your camera to a very close computer. You can also go out, shoot pictures on a knife, fight card, come home, just put your camera near the computer, and it will download to your computer, and so you can go to the if I website there's, a special a place where they explain how this all works, but you have to buy a special I fi card in order to do that. Okay, we're going to get to an area that most of you probably don't even see on your camera it's called the accessory portman you don't worry about this, you've got to dive into the little tool thing that we're going to talk about in about sixty seconds in order to turn this on, but it's not really necessary to turn on because most of the things in here you are going to use, we have the olympus pen pal share. And so if you do purchase that little wireless transmitter for the camera, you can go in and control some features of it in here. You can also upload pictures two albums through olympus is website by going in here if you have the little pen pal option, if you are going to hook up on elektronik viewfinder to a camera that already has an electronic viewfinder, you could go in and control it here if you want tio, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me and so it's there if you need okay time. All right, this is always a test for me, a personal test, because when I wrote this class, I was try to estimate what time of day is it when I'm actually telling you about the time and I estimated it was going to be one twenty seven and it's one o three so I was twenty four minutes off I knew the day but I didn't know the time so I will adjust the next class so it's where you put in the time of day all right, obviously your language next and then we have the monitor brightness. This has nothing to do with picture quality. It has to do with how bright the monitor is on the back of the camera. Normally, I wouldn't mess with that sort of stuff. Okay, I think somebody was asking at a certain point when they played back an image. How can they stay up longer? This is the record view. How long does an image stay up? Once you have recorded it generally, you take a picture it's going to show up on the back of the camera for four seconds. You can adjust that shorter or longer to your own specs. All right, this is what we were just doing a minute ago. We were in this menu display, and if you want to get in there, you you can turn this on. Most people don't need to turn this on and then firm where, all right so firm, where is software in the camera that runs the operations of the camera and from time to time they make improvements and they have made a number of improvements because the camera originally got shipped with firm where one point oh, and one of the complaints that I had and other people had that they have now fixed is that when you turn the camera on and stabilization is on there was a kind of a loud buzzing noise that you could hear I mean you can still hear it but they improve that quite a bit with firm where version one point five now they also have firm where with lenses now the twelve to fifty lands has been improved with version one point one and the way that you can update your camera it's a little different than other cameras is that you need to go to olympus is website now there are many different look this web sites but I'm just going to list the one that we have here in the united states you'll go to their software page you go to their software downloads you need to download this software program it's fairly small it's easy to get it's called the olympus digital camera update er and then what you need to do is you need to take the cord that I told you not to throw away all right and you're gonna plug this into your camera and into your computer and then you should probably remove the memory card just for safe purposes for safety, you're going to connect the camera to the computer and on your camera is going to be this little window in the back talking about the u s be in, which you want to do is you want to click on storage and what's going to happen is that you're then going toe open up the software and it's going to run through you through a few checks, and if it notices that your camera it's basically connecting your camera to the internet and it's going to check your camera to see if you have the current firm where if it doesn't it's going to update the firm where? Make sure that you have a pretty charged battery because you don't want your camera dying in the middle of this that could cause problems. Take the memory card out. Just don't let anything happen, your pictures there's something that could potentially happen, and your camera can get updated, so if you don't have version one point five on your camera, you want to update it and one point one on the lens, there are other lenses, I don't have all the olympus lenses, so I can't tell you what the number is on all those lenses, but you want to have the lens on the camera, and so right now I have a panasonic lens on this camera, so that's not going to do anything with this land because it's only gonna update olympus stuff, and so any olympus lends you have on there, you might want to send it through that sort of check, and that takes us through basically the full camera that's little menu system with gone through everybody. I still have a little bit more left, but be a good time to pause and kind of takes more random questions with questions. So yeah, question from hillary. Does the camera have a maximum shutter count? Maximum shutter count? No, it does not not don't know if they're asking about does the camera just stopped working because it's reached too many shutter clicks as faras durability reasons? You know, I don't know that I have seen that I know canon and nikon often list a shutter cycle life span of one hundred thousand hundred fifty thousand I haven't seen that on this camera, I would probably say it's a one hundred thousand range, but it might be different, I don't know. So a question about pixel mapping, which you touched on from rick stewed, who won our giveaway earlier hey asks, will pixel mapping help fix hot or dead pixels on the sensor haven't tried it, but I would think so because those would show up as blocks or, you know, areas with no information or too much information so I would think it would fix that thank you okay this is a question from a guest in the chat room who said in the menu you went from info settings to the mode guide and they're seeing three topics that weren't covered including the display grid picture mode settings and history ram settings is there any of those that you would like to touch on let's go back and read it again and I'm going to go back and find this area because they were talking about them what there is the said the menu went from info settings to mode guide and then they said that they had topping okay so I think we're under d I'll have to double check the kino they're really get there getting into this menu oh okay yeah there's some things I'll do this maybe so the camera can see me we got one of these other cameras pointed on the back of the camera there we go I can see the camera coming around little r two d two look over here. Okay, so we have the displayed grid and we're working in the display and so we can choose different grid patterns and we talked about this in the viewfinder but this is on the back of the camera picture mode settings we can go in and what are we doing in here to do each hands were tweaking our images, photoshopping her images in camera well, what we're doing here in the picture most settings were turning on and off these different options. If you do want to tweak these, for instance, you can shoot in vivid, maybe you never do it, and so you would be turning it off here if you never want to use thes. So do you want these to show up or not in the in the menu it at all? So that's picture mode settings hissed a gram settings you can go in and you can adjust where the clipping points are on the history graham and normally I wouldn't want to touch this, but if somebody says, you know, I want the history ram to show me when it goes above two fifty five for two fifty, you could adjust these it's not infinite, I turn to remember we can use their top dials down there there's a range that you can set the upper limit of the history graham in the lower limit. Most people aren't going to want to leave this, they're going to leave it at zero to two fifty five, so it shows you as many the widest range is possible going down mode guide we did get to that, so those were the ones in between I apologize on how those got missed no that's awesome thank you very much for that so a couple more questions maybe so this one's about color from tea and rick they say does does the keep warm setting have any effects if you're shooting in raw no way it would but it's adjustable so it's so when you do set a white balance when you're in raw and you said a white balance that's the way your image is going to look when you get it back but you can adjust it from there without any damage and so it does kind of set the initial setting but it's not the final place that we need to be a great so another question from buyers would like to know if we can touch on the hyper focal situation with this kid I'm t the hyper focal yeah he just kept asking about that over and over again and I'm not sure well there's never focal distance which is something I talk about in my fundamentals class which has nothing to do with this particular camera it has to do with a place you're supposed to focus to get as much in focus is possible and that really doesn't matter about which camera and since I don't have the visuals toe work with and it's not particular to this camera let's ask him if he wants to rephrase it in reference to this camera we'll see what he comes up I do have one more question about updating from where teacher somebody's asking does the camera maintain custom settings after you update yes, it does great yeah, I had I had a whole bunch of stuff said in my my set number two it was very particular and so it kept all those very good okay let's see here um we'll see if uh buyer gets back to us on that one said you have another one for him well, do you have more content? I have a bit more of kind of the operation of the camera but this is a it's a good time to start clearing out any of the major questions. Okay, we'll have one more opportunity for questions after this but ok, anything we can clear through here is a good time. Okay? Let's ask let's just we'll also does anybody in the studio audience have questions? I saw you playing with the camera over there. I got a question from a studio david regarding the shuttered speed limits when you're an aperture priority and you're using auto I also can you set a minimum shutter speed? No, you can't. I know on some cameras you can but it's not that customizable unfortunately. Okay, so micro forty three says anyway to playback images and the viewfinder other than the pope after a quick review I mean you can play him back whenever you hit the play button or they come up automatically after you take the picture those are the two options okay nothing fancy just that's it playback something that maybe we could get the other camera on my camera camera on camera action here I don't know what you guys are thinking about this thing about paris if you wanted to do the long time exposure how do you do that basically you just take the shutter speeds in this case just take him down to thirty seconds down to sixty seconds and then it goes down to bulb in time and so bold once again and let me adjust my catheter so it's something reasonable here is as long as my finger is on the shed a release so aiken takes a while there write that in there if I want to put it into a time exposure all I have to do is press the button once in the image will slowly build and I'll press it again when I want to turn it off so that's how you get into those village which something I didn't address earlier okay john there's a question from c delicioso who said well you talk about reset my set now that we set the settings okay so let's get our camera camera action here and what you do is you would set the camera exactly the way you want it to ok and then you would go to my set and you would pick one, two, three or four whichever one you wanted to do that say we're going to do number three here and you would go in set current shooting mode and settings and I would spray us ok at that point. So right now I right now on my camera I have three different things said if I want to go choose to number one, I'm just gonna go to number one and I'm just going to hit ok? And I'm gonna hit my set one yes, you have to be careful about going in and going to the right, and that resets it to whatever the way the camera is currently set out, so just look at the instructions very carefully and be careful about going to the right because that means you're going to reset the camera when you do that and so you can set it up into four different manners and you can also program one of the function buttons function one function to or the lens function button to kind of toggle through those different options there's almost an endless number of configurations it's mind boggling um, maybe one more kind of quick question and you can get back to your content, but dave t of michigan asks, what is the l c lcd screen like under bright conditions? What's your it's pretty good that's. The problem with cameras without viewfinders, that's. Why I won't buy a camera without a viewfinder. It's, just really hard to see under bright light conditions. Now, the screen on this, I can't really say, is that much better or worse than anything else out on the market. It does have the advantage of it is tell table, and you can pull it out away from the camera a little bit, so that you might be able to shoot, shield it from the bright light a little bit better. But that's, why we have the built in, do you find her so that we can see things in bright light conditions?

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

OlympusEM5_3.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

user-3b96d9
 

Thanks John Good clear instruction. I will watch a few times and practice. I've also purchased the mark 11 camera with pro lens. I'm due to leave for a trip to Greece and Istanbul with my new camera. Then I was overwhelmed trying to figure it out. this has helped a lot. I'm hoping to love this camera. I want to shoot video too. I'm hoping you do a Mark 11 course with video and shooting in low light. Many thanks you have saved the day...

Ron Villiotti
 

Excellent, excellent class. Just purchased the camera yesterday and the class gave me a fantastic start. Much better than I could have done in any other fashion. Having someone actually show you the inner workings of the camera and the complicated menu system is the way to go without question! The handout materials were a good method of taking notes and for future reference material. Thank you, John!

coastrbc
 

I bought a new OM-D EM-5 on clearance at the end of the cycle. Having always been a Panasonic user, I found the menu system and buttons on the E-M5 confounding, to say the least. I loved this course with John Greengo. He's a gifted teacher and he made every detail of the camera clear and easy to understand. In the end, though, I wasn't convinced on the camera. I just found it clunky and slow to use. The lack of function buttons, plus the buttons it does have are just not a smooth and simple touch. When I read the reviews of the new EM-5 Mark II, I decided to take the Mark I back and get the Mark II. Far superior camera in handling, video and stability. Now I'm hoping John will produce a tutorial for the EM-5 Mark II. Soon. In the meantime, I'm hooked on John Greengo and will be on the lookout for whatever he next presents. Thanks to John and cL!

Student Work

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