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Backside: Viewfinder Display

Lesson 10 from: Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II Fast Start

John Greengo

Backside: Viewfinder Display

Lesson 10 from: Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

10. Backside: Viewfinder Display

Navigate through the LCD monitor as well as the electronic viewfinder on the OM-D E-M1 Mark II and learn how to customize what you see on those screens. The digital camera offers three different styles for the electronic viewfinder.

Lesson Info

Backside: Viewfinder Display

We are moving to the back side of the camera. So, we've got the big flip out LCD touch sensitive screen on the back. Which is very helpful and handy. We also have our electronic view finder, 2.4m dots. Which is one of the higher resolutions out on the market. And one of the ways that they wanted to make this camera better than in previous versions, was a faster frames per second in the view finder. Cause your looking at a T.V. monitor in there and when your shooting action, this is gonna give you one of the clearest views of any camera, any mirror less camera out on the market. Over on the side there is a diopter which controls the focus of what you see in the view finder. Now that will occasionally get bumped from time to time and you won't be able to read the numbers and the technical information in there properly. So, just make sure that you dial that in, appropriate to your eyes. Now, where you see the image in the EVF or on the LCD depends on the monitor button. So, you can press ...

that to go back and forth and you will either see an image or you'll see something that we're gonna be talking more about called the Super Control Panel on the back of the camera. And so, some people like composing on the back of the camera and then putting their eye up to the view finder. Some people just like having technical information on the back. So, once again very customizable, and that one is very easy cause it's just a simple button press. There is a rubber eye cup. Potentially could wear out after a period of time and that's the EP13. Sells for about 20 bucks if you ever need to replace that item. There is an eye sensor so that it can determine whether you are looking through the camera. It actually just senses if something is within about four inches of the view finder and then it turns on the EVF and turns off the LCD. If you don't like that auto switch you can turn it off by going into the custom menu. It tends to be pretty good but you have to be careful especially in any sort of rain or mist because if a water droplet gets on it you'll have to wipe that clean so that it works properly. So, looking in the EVF let's talk about what we're gonna see in there. We have three different styles of view finder. Style one has that bright blue back ground down there and I prefer not to have bright colors in the view finder so that's not my favorite. Style three gets you the largest image possible but it does over lap the image with important information. And so, I prefer Style two but you can chose whatever you want by diving into the custom menu and we will see that once again when we get into the menu systems. In the view finder itself the frame will be 100% accurate because it's just showing you what's coming in off of the sensor itself. They have a number of different focusing frames. We're gonna talk about focusing coming up here in a few minutes. And your gonna see a little black box in there or you're gonna see a green box for areas that it has kind of confirmed it's focusing on. So, that'll very depending on the situation. The info button on the back of the camera can be pressed to change information. If you want you can see the image only, which is what I like for compositional reasons. But if you press that you can get into other information as well and so one of the options is getting basic information. Which is this large collection of information along the bottom of the camera. Mostly this is gonna be telling you if something is turned on that maybe shouldn't be on. Give you a little bit of information. The battery check. I'm not gonna go through each one of these. But it tells you, you know what shooting mode you're in. What mode you are in. Then it gives you exposure information. That's the really important stuff. Shutter speed, aperture, exposure information, as well as the meter. Now that meter is kind of interesting because it's got a scale on the top and the bottom side of it. The bottom is your light meter or exposure compensation. So, that's the basics of whether your picture is gonna be brighter or darker than average. But indicators on the top half of it are telling you about flash exposure. So, if you are one that likes to power down your flashes a little bit, you will see that indicated on the top half of that exposure indicator. There's a number of other features as I say that you can have turned on and off and we will be talking more about these as we go through the rest of the class. But everything in there has some sort of importance and that is under the basic info. There is also two different custom options that you can create. Custom one and custom two are a grouping of information chosen between these three things. So, you can chose histogram, highlight and shadow, and level gage all depending on what you want in custom one and custom two. And so, for instance you can have the histogram, which will show up at the bottom of the screen. And that's gonna show you a graphic display of how bright the image is. Now if you notice there's a part of that histogram that is green. Well, that's kind of special because that is what the spot meter is reading at a given point when you have the camera pointed at a subject. You can chose highlight and shadows, where it will blink in orange and in blue where the highlights and the shadows are in a particular photograph that will warn you for potential over or under exposure in a photograph. You can also have a level gage. Which will show you if you are tilting your camera left, right, or forward or down, and what you can do is go in and chose custom one to have one, two, or three of those options. And custom two to have one, two, or three of those options. And so you get to kind of chose which one are available to you. And then you would just simply cycle through those by pressing the info button on the back of the camera as you are looking through the view finder. And you're gonna be able to control all of this and we'll talk more about this when we get in the custom menu which has a lot of features. This one is under the display option in a feature called Live View Info. One of the other options are grids. If you like grids for compositional reasons, there's a number of different grids that you can chose from in here. There's a wide variety of reasons that people would want to use these and these can be turned on and off in the display grid option in the custom menu. Now this is an area that a, can be highly customized because you can go in and you can customize and I've never seen this, and this is the best I've ever seen on any camera. You can chose different colors and different opacity levels. So, if you said I like it red but not too bright a red you can, you can scale back how bright a red, or blue, or green, or you can really chose it's infinite on the number of colors that you can chose. Now, this camera as I say has more things in the menu system and it's very conflicting. And so the option under D3, the display grid option, will turn grids on in the view finder and the LCD on the back of the camera. But sometimes you don't want the same grid in the view finder as you do on the back of the camera. And so you can specifically go into the EVF option of the custom menu and chose which you want to see in the EVF and you can have something different displayed on the grid of the camera in the back. And so I'll tell you more on how to do this when we get into the menu section.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Olympus EM1II Recommended Settings

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

This is exactly what I was looking for - I really feel like I'm not able to control my camera, rather than the camera controlling me! :) I really learned a great deal - some of it was a great review, some of it was crucial information that will (hopefully) make me a better photographer. Thanks for a great class, John!!

Spyro Zarifopoulos
 

Great and very informative class.... John has done a fabulous job explaining all the simple and intricate details of the very sophisticated EM1 II. Thank you !!!

John Epperson
 

This is a great course on learning about the OM-D E-M1 Mark II. I have watched it many times to get to were I know it by memory the best I can. I like to go over it as much as possible because there is a lot to learn. I do wish that John would do an updated version since now it is up to Firmware 3.1. It is like a whole new camera with the new settings.

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