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Bottom & Front of OM-D EM 1 Mark II

Lesson 16 from: Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II Fast Start

John Greengo

Bottom & Front of OM-D EM 1 Mark II

Lesson 16 from: Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

16. Bottom & Front of OM-D EM 1 Mark II

At the bottom of the camera, you'll find the serial number, tripod socket, and battery door. In this lesson, John also shares how to add the vertical battery grip accessory, an AC power adapter, and how to safely swap lenses.
Next Lesson: Olympus Lenses

Lesson Info

Bottom & Front of OM-D EM 1 Mark II

[Presenter] - Onto the bottom of the camera we have of course your serial number, which is good for insurance purposes, the standard tripod socket right in the middle, which is good for all of your monopods, tripods, and other grip accessories. We of course have our battery door in here for the new larger battery, and so this is giving us a little bit expanded life. It's about 25 percent more life span than the previous version, on the previous camera. It is new, it is bigger in size, and so that of course comes with it. There's a little orange release tab to make sure that it doesn't fall out too easily. Camera does come with a battery charger. And plug into the wall, it'll blink while it's charging, and then give you a charged green light when it is done. Now, I personally do not like the long cord that it comes with, and so you can purchase on your own, there's a number of these different little devices out there. This is called a Duck Head adapter. You can go onto Amazon, or you ca...

n Google any place that sells a lot of electronics. Don't look for Duck Face. Duck Face and Duck Head are very different. Duck Head refers to the little shape of this, and so you can plug it into the side and it's basically a travel charger then, and it allows you to not have to use that big long cord. And so, not supplied. They're small, they're easy to lose, and so I bought a pack of three for about 10 bucks, and so they are super cheap. And I haven't lost one yet, so I'm doing pretty good. Also on the bottom of the camera is this little rubber cover which allows you to hook up their PHB, their power battery holder, which is a vertical grip on the camera. So if you shoot a lot of verticals it can be very, very nice. You can put another battery in there. It also allows you to work with the AC adapter if you need continuous power all the time for the camera. It's gonna duplicate a lot of the controls on the camera, on the back so that you can hold it vertically in your hand and be more comfortable. I find that they are very nice if you do a lot of people photography, whether it's portraits or sports photography, your camera ends up being in your hand vertically and this just make the camera more comfortable to shoot in a vertical node. If you just want a bigger grip on the camera or you need more battery life, it's another good reason for using the grip. It sells for about 250 dollars. The AC adapter in itself is kind of pricey, that's about 150 dollars as well, for anyone who needs it for studio, or potentially scientific purposes. Working our way over to the front of the camera. We have our little flash, PC flash. Doesn't stand for personal computer. It's so you can hook up flash equipment strobe equipment, synchronizing equipment through that. The lens release has a little alignment pin. One of the things I always find a little strange, I've been into photography for so long, it never bothers me, but I see someone who buys a new camera, they'll say, "I'm not even sure how to take the lens on and off", and so they always get scared about taking lenses on and off. And it's really not a big deal. And so, just real quickly. You got the lens release button over here. And there's a little indicator on the lens where there's a red dot here and a red dot here. There's this little pin here, and when it gets locked in on the lens in the right spot you'll hear a little click, so if I mount this up and I do it correctly you'll hear a click. Right there. Then you have it on right. I would be careful about changing lenses in a dusty environment, because the sensor doesn't have the shutter in front, it doesn't have a mirror in front of it like an SLR, it is prone to collecting more dust in there. Now it does have that sensor shake that it knocks off the dust, but it's best not to get the dust in there, and so just be careful in dusty and wet environments when you are changing lenses. Our sensor is a 20.4 megapixel sensor. It does not have the low pass or the anti aliasing filter on it, so it's possible you could get more A with certain types of patterns on there, but it is a way to get a little bit more sharpness out of the sensor which is why they took it off. We have CPU contacts which is communicating all sorts of information with the lens. Make sure those are not obstructed or broken or damaged in any way. Our lens alignment mark will be visible on all the lenses. And then we have function buttons. They don't really have names, it's the front top button maybe, and what you can do here is a one touch white balance. And I want to show you how this works. And I'm gonna take my fancy little color checker and I'm gonna switch it over so that we can see the white part of this and it has a calibrated white section on here. So let me turn my camera on, and I'm gonna zoom in on this white card right here. And I wanna make sure this is white. I don't know what color light source we're using, I'm just gonna go to manual focus to make this a little bit easier. And so if I press the top button, and you can't see it but I'm pressing the top button on the camera. Top front button on the camera. Point the camera at a sheet of white paper. Okay, well this will work. And then I'm gonna press down the shutter button. You see how it says press, plus shutter button. I'm speaking too much. (audience laughter) All right, I take the picture, and I can calibrate that to any one of these settings here. So I'm gonna save that to setting number one, all right. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna flip this around and I have some pink Post It notes, and I'm gonna calibrate the camera to these pink Post It notes, which is something terrible. I'm gonna really cause the camera to do something wacky here. And so now, point the camera at a white sheet of paper. Yes, these are white. And I'm gonna shoot a picture. And I'm gonna save that to number two. All right. So it's trying to make those white. And so now I can change my white balance, which if I recall I can go in and flip this into two, and I can change my white balance between one and two, and let's take this out of the way and look at our scene and see what it looks like. Let's go back in the matte auto focus. And so, with white balance number one, very clean. And with number two it looks a little bit green, which I'm guessing is the opposite of the pink setting there. And so one is the correct color, and two is the off color that I calibrated off of the wrong color. And so there are some photographers who will calibrate with the wrong color, to actually get a warmer scene, or a scene that has a particular look do you want. So this camera has four different places that you can save that information in those custom white balance options. So that's the one touch white balance. Next up we have another function button which is currently doing depth of field preview. So let's take a look at a demo of this one. So when you press down on the button, it stops the lens down to it's working aperture and shows you in the viewfinder what that image is going to look like. And so that's helpful to see, how much depth of field am I going to get in the camera. There is a custom menu that allows you to boost the viewing brightness of that image when you are looking with the aperture stop down in the depth of field preview, and so that's generally something that I would recommend leaving turned on. And so we'll deal with that when we get into the menu section. If you want to reprogram one or both of these buttons, that is gonna be once again in the button dial lever section of the custom menu where you can go in and select one of the many, many different features to reassign to those buttons. The front of the camera has a little light that turns on during the self timer, and as a AF illuminator. Some people find this to be a little distracting for their subjects, and so if you want, yes you can customize this as well by turning off the AF illuminator in the custom menu.

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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