Lessons

Lesson Info

Button Layout: Back Side Part 1

On the back of the camera, we'll see where we can flip that flash up there's just a little lever and it pops up so let's, talk a little bit about some of the flash options on this camera. First off, if you're not familiar with flash, it has a very limited distance that it can go so it can illuminate objects that are in front of you. But those mountains in the background. It is not going to reach there's a number of different flash modes that you can turn on or off on this camera red eye reduction to help reduce the red I fill flash will fire any time, no matter how bright it is out. Slow sink and rear curtain sink are both using slow shutter speed so that you can work under lower light conditions and still see the background, as well as potentially having a little bit of creative blurry. You can also use this camera a zey wireless, off, off camera multi strobe. If you have multiple strobes from panasonic hooked up to it, how do you change these modes? Well, you need to go into the reco...

rd menu under the flash. Section two where you can go in and select from any of these different modes now the sink speed or the top shutter speed that you can use that this camera is one three twentieth of a second which is one of the fastest out on the market so anyone who likes to do out in the field stroke photography that's ah nice fast shutter speed if you are using the external flash, it does slow down a little bit toe one to fiftieth of a second talk a little bit about some of the flash units that are available there's not a lot to choose from the nfl to twenty sells for around one hundred forty dollars has ah guide number that's about two to three times more powerful than the built in flash. The next one is the f l three sixty this is a wireless flash, so if you have multiples of these you can get them to trigger each other s so that you don't have to have cables running everywhere. It also has an led light so if you are shooting video there is a constant hot light right on the camera for illuminating people's faces and then there is the f l five hundred, which is the most powerful of all of these that's probably got ten times more powerful than the built in flash and so if you were going to be shooting no wedding or any sort of social event where you're doing lots of group shots that's going to be a more powerful flash all of these are going to be big in comparison to the camera in fact, they might even be bigger than the camera, so this is one area I think olympus could stand it at in some new flashes that are a little bit better design for the smaller scale of this camera, but they do work automatically. They do we're quite well and if you need more light there's some good choices out there, okay, let's, talk about some of the viewing options in the camera, so we've talked about the touch screen we've been using that a little bit on the back when you play back images, let me go ahead and do a little live demo here let's put it back into a camera mode, and so one of the things is is it works a lot like many people's phones these days you can just scroll back and forth there is a way to go out too thumbnails so that you can scroll through all your images see something you want you can tap on it let's say I don't want that image there we go and weakened just pinch to zoom beyond this, we can also use the controls on the camera to zoom in and out and so if we zoom in, we can use the four way touch pad in the back for moving around, so if we want to check sharpness, we can go in and see how sharp something is and so we can control zooms both in front and in back and so lots of controls both with touch screen and with other controls there's going to be these tabs on the menu on the back of the camera and the taps will be able to pull out so that you can see more options. Let me see if I can show you that go back so on the back of the camera we can have a function, but in here and this is where the function buttons we talked about that you can re program there's physical buttons on the camera function to function three function one but these are the kind of digital elektronik ones that you khun set to be whatever you want, we can close the function tab and we have the little arrow. We're going to pop that out and we can open up a variety of other openings. The main one here was thie touch to shoot tab we have played with earlier and so look for these little tabs and you can close him up if you're not using them or open him up if you need to get in there and access that information and you can control some of these touch settings in the menu custom page eight of eight the type settings option. We also have the live view finder up on top. Now be aware that on the bottom of this, there is a di achter for controlling the view of the elektronik view appearance. So there's a little slider right below this, and what you want to do is you want to adjust this so that it's sharp for your vision so that you can see the screen properly on the camera that's kind of hidden down there. Most people don't know about that, but it does get bumped from time to time and looks kind of blurry when you're looking through the you find her and no, you're not going crazy. You just need to adjust your di achter, and there is a larger rubber I cover that you can put around your eyepiece if you are using it with, say, sunglasses or glasses, it's got a little bit better protection, and that should sell for around twenty dollars herself. Now the camera has an eye sensor in it that'll automatically, since when your eye is up to the viewfinder so it can turn on and off the back screen versus the viewfinder screen up here so it'll automatically switch back and forth according to how close you are. To the sensor on it, and sometimes you don't want that. S o you can turn that I sense her off so that the back screen stays on all the time or the viewfinder stays on all the time, the variety of needs there that change. Next up, we have a display button on the back of the camera, which will just generally run through different displays. Let me show you on camera right now, let me actually turn off this history, graham, that I have that's a function seven that I have programmed in there, and so right now you're going to see there's a whole bunch of data along the top and bottom, and we can turn that off by pressing the display button or turn that on as well as getting our horizon line. And so if we can see if we have a straight horizon right there on the green line and so that's just hitting the display button and as we go in and play back him and just let me play back an image, so this is a playback image and we can hit the display and seymour or less information, it goes through a number of different screens that we can see and just cycles through those different screens, and if you want to switch between the lcd and the lvf, the back screen and the viewfinder there is a button on the top of the camera that you can go auto switching so it automatically switches if you hold the camera to your eye or you can just turn the live view viewfinder on or off. So let me show you some of the displays we'll talk a little bit about that for a moment, so I just kind of didn't went through this live demo hitting the display button you can go through and show mohr more or less information showing the tilt there's also another monitor info display screen and this doesn't show you what you're taking a picture of. It just shows you where the camera is set its exposure information as well as a lot of its other general settings that you can go in and change and we're going to talk more about this in a quick in a little bit in the quick menu we can also just plain old turn it off so that it's not using any battery power as well. Now the style of the screen that you look at me controlled in the monitor displays style in the menu system and here I am tourney between two different choices first overall, I like to see the images as big as possible, but the problem with that is that you have overlapping data on top of your image and so it's harder to compose and so you can choose to have the information outside the frame lines or inside the frame lines you choose inside. If you want the largest image possible, you choose the outside. If you don't want things overlapping on your image, my personal preference is to not have anything overlapping and cluttering up the composition, and so I choose the outside option. It means that the image is a little bit smaller, but it's still a pretty good view finder and I think that's a slightly better option for the way that I like to work within the displays. You'll see the shutter speed and aperture down at the bottom, and one of the things that I don't particularly like is the exposure indicator in here, because when it's at an even exposure, it'll give you the plus minus symbol and then a plus minus in zero if you were three stops under exposed that it shows you a more graphic scale, with scale going off to the left, as you can see on screen, that would be minus three or it might show you plus three, and this last one would be minus two thirds of two thirds of a stop, and so let me just show you on camera let me throw this into a manual mode on run through the displays. Quickly. And so if we are live on camera here yes, you can see that we are at even exposure right here. And as we change in this case are shutter speed. We're going to go up to three stops over exposed back down to even and then it switches over to the plus minus and then it goes back to the graphic scale on the minus side and so it jumps around a little bit and I appreciate the fact that they put our shutter speeds on our f stops up here, but it does clutter up to screen quite a bit, and I have always found it a little tough to follow exactly where I am on this. I guess they just need to use it a little bit more but that's, just another look at that screen. It's I say I think that could be improved in the graphics department. I have high demands on my graphics. All right now we also have a lot of touch settings on the back of the camera and so here's kind of a cheat sheet of a lot of the different symbols that you might see on the back of the camera. So the tabs we played around with we open that up that kind of opens up a little drawer with additional features on the inside, we'll see that for the functions as well we saw that earlier with the intelligent auto modes in the creative automotive where you can access additional features so any time you see something that looks like a little file tab on the right hand side of the screen, you can probably touch it and open it up and make some options about what's going on in there ok, so let's talk about some of the focusing options on the camera so obviously pressing halfway down on the shutter release we're going to be able to focus the camera, but this can be turned off there's a number of people like myself like something called back button auto focusing so you can turn off the auto focusing if you want to jump into the custom menu and turn that off the eye sensor can also be used to activate focusing so that when you hold your camera up to your eye it automatically starts focusing even before you press any buttons on the camera at all. There is also something called quick a f and this is a little unusual. This is a little scary what's happening here is that when you move the camera suddenly to a new position, it focuses sensing that you have chosen something new to photograph and it depends on how much you move the camera and so it's a little sporadic in its movement and I'm not a big fan of it but it is interesting on the back of the camera we have a little switch that goes very simply from auto focus to manual focus and within the middle of that is a button where we can lock the focus and exposure and we can also use it for focusing as well. And so what I have done on my camera is I have turned this into the on button so I could do back button focusing there's a lot of photographers who like controlling focus and showed a release with two separate buttons, but you can program this to whatever your needs are with that back button, you can also program the style in which it works. You khun program it to be a button that you press and hold or button that you press once and it locks in and so for doing exposure locking. If that was your choice for that button, it might be easier to be able to just press that button once and have it locked. And that way your finger doesn't have to be resting on that button for a long period of time for changing the focusing area. The f mode, which is the left button on the back of the four way controller on the back of the camera, will allow you to go into five different focusing notes, and I want to take a look the five different focusing modes now now now ok, there we go okay, so the a f modes there are five different modes that you can choose from and we're just going to go through these left to right we're going to start with face detection I'm not a big fan of face detection I think it works out pretty good if you have one person that you're focusing on but if you have two people or multiple people it can be a problem and so it will show you show you the frame lines in yellow when it's detected and in green when it has been focused if you would like to change the area you can press on the down arrow to to move that around to a different area a f tracking is the cameras intelligent mode trying to track a subject that is moving around and so there's different states when it's ready when it's detected when it's tracking or if it has a problem and in theory this sounds great. So if you were to have a kid running around the your living room floor in front of you, you could potentially put it in the tracking moat and it would track the kid is it's moving around playing around and keep it and focus all the time in reality it doesn't work quite as well you might want to give it a try to see how well it works for your situation but if you're trying to shoot sporting events with it, it's a little sporadic and doesn't hold focus on subjects that air moving really, really well, next up is the twenty three area focusing, and so this is basically using all the focusing points on the camera in which to focus and you can change these areas by pressing the downward arrow and then selecting which part of the frame you want to do and maybe for this one, I'll come over to the camera and we'll see if we can dio a little live demo in this, and so I'm going to hit the focusing button on the left side here and as you can see, I can switch to any one of the five modes that we're talking about. I'm going to go to the twenty three area and if I hit this on let's, see if I know let me try this again, it's activated. You'll see it down here in the right hand corner, it says a f ariel a f area and it's got a downward facing arrow, so I'm going to press down and now I can select which region of the area I want to focus in there's nine different areas that we can choose most of the time I'm going to focus in the center, but sometimes I might want to focus something off to the side and then I will hit set and so that's what the camera is going to be looking at focusing is those five boxes in the middle so it's just kind of breaking the scene into nine different areas next up is one area which is just one box in the middle this is one of my favorite modes justcause I can control it and I can direct it into whatever area that I want and so it's going to give us different signals if it's focused if it's choosing and no luggage new location you can move it around to pretty much anywhere you want let's see if we can go ahead and give that a try on camera so I'm going to hit my focusing button on the left to get my focusing turned on I'm going to go to the right I could just select it and it's going to choose to focus when we get something here to fill this on and so I can focus you'll see how it turns green when it's in focus I can also go down it says the affair oh down button and now I can move it around to wherever I want to focus and that is where it will focus on and so we're kind of using the touch focus to focus back and forth like that so if you want to choose different areas this is ah pretty quick way to be able to do that and that's the one area focus and we went through the adjusting frame position wait can also adjust the size of the frame I forgot to do that let's try doing that so by turning the dials on the camera, you can choose a really large box or a very, very small box and you can see move it around a little bit and you can choose a very precise area, and that was just turning the dial on the camera. The final one is called pinpoint and oh, I forgot. One other thing that you could do with one focus area is that the four way buttons on the back you can turn off the normal controls that they have and have it was called a direct focus area, so if you're constantly changing focus rather than going into the focusing system and going through, if those few extra button presses, you can just simply move the focusing point up, down and left and right it's a trade off whether focusing this more important or those other controls. But you could do that within the custom menu, and we'll talk about how to set that when we get to the menu setting, so the fifth and final way that you can focus is a pinpoint system, and it magnifies the pinpoint so that you can see what you're focusing on and so I think this is probably worthy of a little demo here, so let me go ahead and get my focusing button I'm going to move over to pinpoint focusing, and if I want to go down, I can control where this is going to focus on. I'm going to focus on this lens that's over here, closer in front of me and go ahead and set that, and so now you can see where these crosshairs are. Actually, I want to say I don't think I want the touch shooting on return that off, I want touch focusing, and so it magnifies the screen and I can switch back and forth between the magnified view and the regular view here. S o for changing the focusing point, I'm gonna go left, activate the area, I'm going to go down if I want to change the area and I can move where the focusing point isthe and then I will hit set and I could switch back and forth between full frame and this is just a magnified area in here that I can move around and I can adjust the magnification in here as well of what it's doing and so what this is going to be good for us if you're trying to get really critical focus and you want to zoom in and see how sharp something iss anytime you focus on it it's going to magnify it and look at it here's a good example, because I go from the background to the foreground, you get this magnified view that confirms visually allows you to confirm, visually that your subject is in focus, and so if you're going to do a portrait of somebody you wanted their eye and focus, this would be a very good mode for doing that. So long as you are there not moving towards or further away your distance is set, you can really check and get that down. Exactly right now. A couple of words on this filled with pinpoint focusing is it will only work in a mode called f s, which is single, focusing. I'm going to get into that into a moment. It doesn't work in the continuous focusing system that you would use for sports. It would be very, very impractical for that, and what happens when you do press down halfway to focus? It magnifies that center portion for a short period of time. How long a period of time will you get to decide in one of the custom pages, under pinpoint, a f time, you can have it turn on for a half second, one second or one point five seconds, so there's a lot of little customizable things, he's, so if you do very critical focusing that something that you're going to be one of the key on adjusting and getting dialed in right for what you're doing so as we go back to the back of the camera there's a lot of things controlling auto focus on the camera being able to control focus through the shed a release or the back button on the camera and as well as all the different touch options on the camera and I think this might be a good point because we're going to be kind of actually let me I think I got one more slide on focus options and then we'll go to break on that on dh let's just real quickly talk about manual focus before we go to break so for manual focus you would flip the switch on the back of the camera to go to manual focus and there are some very cool options for manually focusing on this camera in some ways of checking if it is sharp one of the options is that you can magnify your images you can see in the demo on screen you can magnify the image up to six times to check focus as you manually focus it and so you know I don't think my cameras in manual magnification most I'm not even going to try a live devil right now because it's probably not going to work and I don't want to go in and change it so it's a very good system if you want to check manually focus as you do it yourself and you can change the magnification either with the back dial or the top dial the back dial makes bigger changes in the magnification change and you'll be have a little thumbnail down at the bottom of the screen that shows you what area you are magnifying you can go in and turn on what's it called that imf guide which is just a simple little guideline down at the bottom of the screen that shows you whether you're focusing further away from you or closer up to you and then there is one called speaking this is one of the newer popular ways of focusing and you can see here you can see exactly what is in focus by what is highlighted in green on screen and so as you adjust back and forth you'll be able to see this and this one I am going to tempt fate and try a live demo but first I want to go into the menu and I'm going to go down to the custom menu to make sure that peking is turned on and page four of eight I'm just gonna go to page for and make sure peking is turned on ok so good it is turned on and so I'm going to flip this into manual focus and see if I can turn off some of these unneeded displays so you can see the magnification turned on and that lens is being highlighted if I go to the background and I changed focus, you can see the guide on the bottom and see if it glows a little bit just a little bit of kind of bluish steel we changed focusing points and our lens in focus shimmers a little bit with the peking so we got peaking magnification and scale are working at the same time, which is a little bit much for me and so it's a little bit of a cluttered viewfinder this isn't how I would set it up but it's fine for demo and how these things work and so I would probably pick and choose which ones you really want on there and I really like the peking, but I also find it really irritating to look at on a regular basis and so you're gonna have to be careful about choosing them. I like the magnification because it disappears and you don't see it the rest of the time so those are some of the options for manual focusing and I think it's at this point we might want to take our first break great well, thank you john I do have just a couple of questions they kind of they go back to earlier in the course, but that's ok one was just from steven underscore and see can video recorded at ten eighty be downsized to seven twenty, so when you're choosing what size in court you could, of course down size but not in camera, you have to use some external editor in order to do that, and then the second question was from guano, what settings are actually controlled in those c modes? When we talked about all the different custom functions, can you customize all settings of the camera? Or was it just certain ones? Well, pretty much any setting that has an electronic control you can do, I'm trying to think of exceptions, so an exception would be you can't pop the flash up because there's a physical control to pop the flash up on that even though there is a physical control for manual shutter priority aperture, priority and program, you can still do that in the custom mode. So it's going to be things along the lines of the motor drive, the media ring, picture modes, picture styles, almost anything in the menu that you can set that will be set for you? Uh, it's not going to change lenses for you, it's not going to change tripods for you, okay, my being a little obvious here, I'm trying to think of some other important limitations, and there aren't really any important limitations that I can think of for those moments.