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Segment 5 - Button Layout: Back Side Part 2

Lesson 5 from: Olympus E-M1 Fast Start

John Greengo

Segment 5 - Button Layout: Back Side Part 2

Lesson 5 from: Olympus E-M1 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

5. Segment 5 - Button Layout: Back Side Part 2

Lesson Info

Segment 5 - Button Layout: Back Side Part 2

we're gonna talk about the playback functions in the camera, so the little blue playback button will get you to play back the last image. If you want to view previous or next images, you can go left and right. Or you could jump up to the top of the camera, the front dial, and you can spend the front dial. If you turn the back dial, you can zoom in and out of your photographs. I'll do a little live demo here in just a moment, but the video record button when you are in the playback mode that adds that little check box to the pictures. So if you're trying to find a particular image, you can add that end. And then, of course, we have our garbage can button on the back of the camera. So let me I do a little live demo here. We've been taking a few pictures on this camera, so let me get it set up while they get their camera spun around over here on this camera. And so we're in the playback mode right now. Actually, there's our playback mode. Want to make sure that were there and so going bac...

k and forth through images as pretty obvious there. But one of the cool things is zooming in to an image, and you can check sharpness by moving around, using the tab in the back of the camera, and you can zoom in to 14 times, which is very powerful. The good way to check sharpness. But what I really wanted to show you was zooming back beyond. Come on back to one, you'll get to a screen that shows you about, UH, 25 or 30 pictures, and if you go back even further, it will go back to a calendar. So if you have not downloaded after several days of shooting, you will see pictures on each individual day and you'll be able to go through the calendar and go to that one day. So it's very helpful for anyone who's doing travel photography that is, shooting basically on one memory card for many, many days for them to jump around to go look at pictures from one particular day. So you would just navigate to that particular day, and then you would zoom in on that day to look at that, uh, that days collection of images okay, back on the keynote. One of the other options is that you can hit the info button to display mawr or less information. Once you are playing back an image, you can look at just the straight image itself. You can also look at Let's get this information appear basic information about the file type and file name and when you shot it, you can also go do an overall display, which will show you a hist, a gram in the bottom, left with your red, green and blue channels as well as your overall brightness levels. And then there is an option for turning on a hist a gram display. And so, if you want to see this, you may need to jump into your custom menu under your display options and go in and turn this on and off, and we will be going through this when we get to the menu section for warning. One of the other options is that you can do ah highlight shadow display, which not only shows you the blown out highlights, which is what many cameras do, but it shall shows you the blocked up shadows in blue areas, so you can see if you need to make exposure adjustments. One of the other neat features it has is something called lightbox, and what this does is allows you to pull up an image and then pull up a second image so that you could do a side by side comparison of those two images on the screen at the same time. Ah, great way for checking sharpness to see which one is the better of the two images, and so lots of neat little options within the playback. If you are playing back a movie, you can also record volume in there as well. When you do playback, you can do some editing options in there as well. So once you play back an image, you can edit a raw image. You could do some interesting things, and one little demo that I want to do for you is Let's go play back an image. Let's see, we confined a nice image. Teoh to Dio. Here's Ken and I. We were doing a uh, where is it? I was testing out the remote functions of the camera, and so I had the camera. I took the picture from my phone, and I'm gonna press the okay button, and I'm gonna go down to the microphone, and I can now dictate to the camera information about the picture. This is an awesome photo. And now, when we come back to this, Did I Did I get it right? I may not have got it right. Let me try this again. I need to hit the start button. I'm my mistake there. Sorry, folks, this is a totally awesome photo. Okay, so now when I come back to it, I'll put my microphone close to this so you can put audio annotation. So if you want Oh, like, if you were traveling and you met somebody and you wanted to email them the photograph, you could say, Just tell me your email and record it right there in the photograph that you took them, and so that when you play it back, you could go write that down. So great way for a journalist to keep track of information while they are out shooting pictures. So there's a lot of meat, little things that you can do there in those edit options. Okay, moving forward Now, you can also use the touch screen in the playback mode as well, as well as in the shooting modes. And so we went through these before that you can disable, you could just use the focusing. You can also use the shooting mode, and so those are the basic controls. You can also bring up and control something called the Super Control Panel, which allows us to go in and change a lot of the basic settings on the camera. We're going to get into that in just a moment for the playback options. Some of the things that you can do is you can swipe back and forth between images, just like you would on a smartphone. You could magnify into check sharpness, and you can. You can also have a little slider. Presume. I'm gonna show you this for just a moment, but you can see on screen. There's a lot of different symbols that are used for the touch screen. One of the unusual ones too hard to figure out is the wife I share. So if you have her camera set up in a WiFi system, you could be looking at an image of the decided dishes. Share it on your phone will get into the WiFi and a little bit. Let me go back to the camera throughout, back into the playback mode. Okay, so I don't want to hear that right now. I'll go to a different image back out of that on and so on screen. Let's see if we can get some of our touchscreens so we can go from side to side on this. And if we want to play back, weaken double tap to zoom in and they'll be a slider on here on the side where you can zoom in and zoom out and you can pan around that image to see what else is going on. And then pitch actually used the slider to zoom out. And so using that touch screen is a good way of working with it from time to time. Okay, let's keep moving on the okay Button is going to access what's called the super control panel, and this is just a large collection of features that will give you a little bit quicker access than diving full into the menu system. So let's take a closer look at what's going on in here, so you will notice at the top. We have the date, all right, so we'll have date information will have your basic exposure information down there at the bottom. And let's just kind of quickly go through. We'll have our ISOS. We've already talked about setting our ESOS, but we can do that quickly from this. It's often called the quick menu. In a lot of cameras, we have our white balance, which has a direct control on the back of the camera. We're going to see a lot of things here for the second time. We'll see him for 1/3 time. When we get into the menu, this next little grouping of options allows you to change. The look of a J Peg image has nothing to do with the raw image in general. I like to leave all these at zero unless there is a really good reason for changing it. And it's not something that I really want to do on any sort of individual basis at all. If you found that your pictures in general had a little bit of a green cast to it, you could take that off in some ways. The one that we had talked about for was the picture mode in this. What it did was it changed all of these for specific different types of scenes? Once again, I'm Mawr. The the idea of just leaving this in the natural standard state and making those adjustments on a computer where I have much better controls and I have a much better view of the image on a much larger screen we can control. The flash mode here will see this again when we get into the menu system, but it's a little bit quicker to get with here. And so while the camera does not have a built in flash, when you do at a flash, you can change to the modes that you see here. Most of the time. I like to leave it in the Fillion mode, where if I pop the flash up, it's just adding a little bit of fill in light. Filling in the shadows is what that's indicating. We do have a red eye reduction mode as well as some slow synchronization mode, so let me give you a few examples on these red eye reduction. I think is not one of my favorite things. I would prefer to deal with that later on because it always delays the firing of the shutter by about 1/2 to 1 second, which often means you're going to miss great moments. Fill flash means it's gonna fire no matter what, no matter how bright it ISS and adding a little bit of fill flash outside when you're shooting people, pictures can really help out. There's a couple of slow synchronization modes of standard one and a second curtain sink, which will allow you to synchronize the flash with the second or closing curtain, which which can allow you to get some very interesting effects when you're shooting action. There is also an option for wireless off camera work. We're not gonna really get into that in this camera. That's more of a flash class about the Olympus flashes, and unfortunately, we just don't have time for it in this class. The top shutter speed that you can get to is 3/20 of a second if you are using the little built in flash right here. But if you are using kind of more standard flashes, you want to be probably safely around 100 25th of a second, especially if you're using any sort of studio flashes. So when is a good time to use a flash? A good time to use the flash is when you have somebody standing right there in front of you. A little bit of fill flash can fill in a little bit of light to the eyes, and the eye sockets and under the chin on can give you a little bit of highlight in the eyes, which can definitely help out one of the times. A lot of people don't think about using flashes when it's bright and sunny out, and that's when we have very dark shadows that can be lit up with a on camera flash. And so it's not real powerful. You need to have your subject pretty close in front of you, I would say comfortable talking distance to somebody right there in front of you. One of the options that you'll be able to take control of in the camera is the power of the flash. The camera normally wants to fire off what's called a T. T. L flash stands for through the lands, and it basically means the camera is figuring everything out on its own and in general, with flash. What you want to do is you wanna have a little bit of flash, but definitely not too much flash. And so powering the flash down is something a lot of photographers do, and there's a lot of good reasons to do it. In this example, you can see how the camera over exposed the T TL flash and powering it down to T T l minus two got us to the most natural skin tones. And so, as a general course with any sort of on camera or in camera flash, I like to power it down about one stop. And so leaving TT Ln minus one is a good general place just to leave the flash because you don't want to be overpowering on the flash. You can see that we have the flash modes, and right below it, we have the flash exposure compensation where you would dial down that particular flash. So let me do do just a quick live demo because I haven't showed you too much about the super control panel, and I don't have the flash on, so I don't have access as you can see. You know, I can see what's going on. Here we go. OK, so let's add the flash online and see if this automatically. There we go. So now I can go in here and I can control the flash settings. And so you can see down here along the bottom I could go to Red Eye and it's pretty obviously telling you what it's setting, too. So we have all our different options on here. I'm gonna leave that in fill in for right now, and I'll just press the okay button on the camera. Press okay again to bring up the Super Control panel. I'll come down and here's where flash exposure compensation is. So I'll hit okay to enter that. And then I have never used a camera with it on the plus side. I mean, I did just to shoot a couple of tests pictures, but I've never shot real pictures with it. So normally I would just leave this at minus one. So when it fires a flash, it will be powered down just a little bit. And so I think that's a good place to leave a camera in general. OK, let's continue onward. Next up is the stabilization that is built into the camera. So the camera has in camera stabilization. So no matter what lens you use, you do have stabilization in here and there is a plethora of different stabilization options. Normally, I would just leave it in S I s one, which is the standard stabilization mode. If you are doing panning there, is it modes two and three, depending on whether you're doing horizontal panting, panting, panning, not a dog panting or vertical or horizontal panting where the cameras in a vertical position. There is also an S I s auto mode, which is not to be confused with S I s one auto, very similar names. And so the S I s automotive will automatically detect whether you are panning in a vertical or horizontal position on the camera. And I think for most people's basic photography, just leave it in S I s one, and you're fine. If you get into panning photography, then you're gonna want to look at the remote to three or s. I s auto. All right. Next up is what we just talked about is the A F area and so This was controllable by the function one button. But if you decide to re program that button for something else, you need a way to get in and change your focusing points. You could do it here on the super Control panel. The motor drive. Well, we had the sequential shooting is Olympus calls it. We had that button up on the top of the camera, but that button can be repurposed, but we see the same options as we saw before. I don't think we've come across the raw J peg option. We'll see it again when we get to the menu settings, and your options here are raw or JPEG or a combination of these. And so if you want to get the highest quality images out of the camera, you want to shoot with raw and do a little little bit of work afterwards in the computer. In some sort of software program, my preference is adobe light room. Adobe Photoshop is quite good, but I think a light room is a great photographic program that most photographers would be very, very happy to use for organizing, developing and working on individual images. But you do need the appropriate software toe work on those raw images. So if you don't have that program, you're gonna need something else. And the camera does come with its own proprietary software. I'm not a big fan of it s so I don't use it on a regular basis, and that's why I I used Adobe Light Room because it's a much better program. In my opinion, it's much more common. But if you shoot J pegs, that's the way of getting simple pictures out of the camera, something that you can email transfer on a computer very easy to work with. With the J pegs, there's a number of different settings. There's large, medium and small, and with those the large medium small referred to the number of pixels that you were a recording, and for most people, you're gonna wanna have it in the large setting. Of course, there is also fine and normal settings, and that has to do with the compression of the image. And the more you compress an image, the more you're throwing out color information and so you don't want to do that for image quality purposes. So if you want to shoot J pick. I would recommend L f for a large fine. You do also have the option off shooting raw plus J peg if you want to keep the raw for long term usage, but you want to use the J peg for a quick, short term basis, you can shoot raw and kind of any size J peg that you want to shoot at that point because once you have a raw you can create any J peg you want from it. Later on, I in this camera for the most part, shoot just straight raw because once I download it and work with it in light room, I can make any size J pic I want. And I don't generally need that short term J peg with the raw just kind of makes everything confusing having to file types every time I take a single picture so raw if you want to get want to get the highest quality J. Peg. If you're trying to get just simple, quick, basic fast pictures out of the camera, and those are my two main recommendations there. Next up is the focusing modes that we already talked about. There's the button up on the top left shoulder of the camera that controls the auto focusing mode. S f single Autofocus is a good general purpose place to leave things the metering system, which we also saw upon that top left shoulder of the camera digital E S P. It's a good standard metering system. Then we have something that we didn't see. One other place in the multi function number two is the image aspect ratio. So this controls the shape of the image that you are shooting. The sensor on the camera is four by three. So if you're trying to make use of all of the pixels on the sensor, which most of you are probably trying to dio, you want to choose four by three. If you are trying to match up with a different framing for some reason, like an HD TV, you could set it at 16 by nine or any of the other aspect ratios that are chosen. But any time you choose something other than four by three, you are not recording pixels that you have purchased and have the potential of using. And so Theo nly advantage of going to these other aspect ratios on the camera is that you get to see in the viewfinder what the final image looks like for compositional reasons. And so, if you knew that it was gonna be a square image, you get to see it in the viewfinder, which is a bit of an advantage rather than trying to guess where it would end up. Being next is controls for color information. We had some color color information before, but now we have saturation, the graduation of the color and the color space. We also have our face priority, which was controlled in our focusing system. So that's duplicated. But most of these I'm gonna leave kind of zeroed out, and I'm not gonna touch. I'll talk about color space when we get into the menu system because they do have specific recommendations for that. Then we have access to changing all the functions on this camera, and there are buttons all over this camera top front, back of the camera that you can re program in order to do something else s so you can get in here. We'll see this again when we get into the menu section. But if you want to quickly go in and reassign the functions on a particular button of the camera. This is probably the quickest and easiest way in order to get that done from air photo went in this section. Why is my raw option great out? And so I cannot choose Raw as an option, Okay, If they are in one of the simplistic modes like I auto, they're probably not gonna be able to get to that. Let me see if I could run the superficial panel. There are some of those art options. And so if I set my camera in art and I know I can't even get to the super control panel so they may not be let me try the I auto. Let me get down to where is my raw options down here? I still could get to their in the eye auto so they may have something. What about Pea? Gwen Assange? Back to the other question about white balance, white balance and piano. Do you should definitely be able to do that and they pull up white balance. Let's see if there's what got set on my camera. It's so interesting how that happens. And so he had her toe Wonder Color creator. I wonder if I put mine on color creator that it wasn't allowing me to do that. And so where is my white balance again? Over to the left. And now? Okay, So I had my camera in some sort of color creator mode where I was adjusting the colors when I this was earlier in the class, I had accidentally, I think, moved it off into a color creator mode, and I wasn't able to change it. And so the differences and let me do this on the camera so that you can see it is I was I had gone over here to I guess Natural and I had played with this and I had put it in this color creator mode. Or if you put it in the pop art mode, for instance, and we come back, we may not be able to. Now we can there, Right. But I had mine in a color creator mode, which was the wrong thing to have, And so I'm gonna go back to this and just said it at I would write past it so I don't have to go all the way back around. There's so many choices. Natural. Why did they put natural at number three? I don't understand. And so now I can get back in the white balance and I can change all my settings. If I have it in number two, I should be able to move the back dial. Yep, I could move the back dial and adjust all my different setting. So check and see if your camera has it is in some quarters some sort of strange picture mode would be the problem. It's always hard on these cameras. I mentioned this in a previous class. These new digital cameras give you so many options, and they're not able to do everything with all the options turned on. And so sudden, these u turn switch a on you can't get to switch be and you have to remember that you turned switch A on. Worse comes to worse. I will show you in the menu how to completely reset all the functions on the camera back to the factory default settings, which hopefully you don't have to do

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Course Outline

Ratings and Reviews

Hal
 

John does an excellent job of making the OMD E M1 understandable. His knowledge of the camera and relaxed style clearly and painlessly walk you through the maze of buttons, menus, and functions. He objectively points out the strengths of the camera as well as those things Olympus could of done better. His opinions of the camera are consistent with other knowledgable reviewers, and are consistent with my own (limited) experience. The manual tells you every little thing the camera CAN do. John helps you understand what is important to get the best use of the camera in most situations.

user e35335
 

Three simple words, " Thank you John " I have really enjoyed the course. The OMD EM1 is a wonderful camera, and with the clear guidance of this course I feel instantly at home with all its capabilities. Clear concise instructions delivered in a faultless manner. A joy to watch.

FerOlea
 

John is a very good teacher, and this is indeed a useful class. Class material is excellent as always. But I don't think this is his best work. He seems to be too conflicted with Olympus' menu systems and design decisions (which I admit, are a bit strange) to give the students a clear picture of the full potential of their new gear. He also fiddles/struggles with the camera a bit too much in all the live demonstrations. I would recommend this class only to absolute photography beginners and not really to people with any experience.

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