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Button Layout

Lesson 3 from: Olympus OM-D EM-5 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

3. Button Layout

Next Lesson: Display System

Lesson Info

Button Layout

We're just gonna talk about all the buttons, levers, dials and things on the camera. We're going to start off with just the basic controls that you obviously need to know about. So obviously you need to have the camera turned on for the rest of this, which is down there in the bottom right hand side. I will mention real briefly that it does turn off and you actually have to turn it off and then on again to get it actually on because it will shut down completely after about five minutes. Aa lot of times I think the camera will go to sleep. The camera goes to sleep very quickly because it uses a lot of battery power. So you need to tap down on the shutter release half way to kind of reactivate and wake the camera from its nap. It loves to go into little catnaps. The camera has a couple of controls, it has a main dial and it has a sub dial. Why do you think they call it the sub dial? It's because it's below the top dial. So you got two dials, which I think is it's kind of unique. There is...

n't any other camera that has two dials on the top like this one, and I really like it a lot because you can reach both of them. With your index finger in the front so you got two dials accessing with one finger, which is nice on the back we have the very acutely named arrow pad. I will sometimes forget what this is called and simply say it's the mouse it's a way to navigate through the menu system on the camera, and in the middle of that you have the ok button, which is the computer keyboard equivalent of the enter key. So when you want to say yes, this is the feature that I want to work with, you would hit the ok, but so those are things you should know for working throughout the camera, specifically the federally spot we're going to start on the top of the camera is basically comprised of three different parts. When you press down halfway on the shutter, release the camera, will auto focus and start to meet her, and that auto focusing is not something everybody likes, and we're going to talk about ways to customize the camera so that the camera doesn't auto focus. There are other ways to do it on when you press halfway down, but that's also a way that you're gonna wake the camera, then of course, you'll press all the way down to take the picture, so you need to have a little bit of a sensitive finger about where's the halfway point where is the all the way point? Because you'll be working at that halfway level quite a bit to make sure that your cameras alive and active because it will shut down after about six to eight seconds and so you kind of need to be fairly actively tapping that button when you're really ready to shoot a picture, you want to make sure everything is ready and primed ready to go and do we have an in camera in class question? Go ahead just to go back to what you just said that it shuts down in five minutes and then you just said it should stone in six seconds, sixty eight seconds I'm coming confused? Yes, thank you. I'm confusing people are okay. Uh, the camera is just like a person and it has different levels of there's like nodding off, you know, when people are like they're they're still awake that's the six second thing and then there's the cat nap where it's like it's kind of out on you really gotta wake it up and then there's the full debt on sleep were completely turned off so there's kind of different levels and so there's a six seconds with things start to power down the screen on the back starts to dim the light meter turns off after about six seconds the camera's still on and press halfway you're on again. If you just let the cameras sit for five minutes, you could press down here all you want it's not gonna wake it up. You got to turn that off and back on. Sounds like a dating. Listen, thank you for answering. So that's that's a good question. And it's a good question, because it frustrated me. All right, so the mod ill on the top left of camera is arguably the most important button next to the shutter release. And that requires a little bit of special consideration here. So let's talk specifically about all the different votes up here. So the eye auto, the intelligence auto mode this is what I like to call the child safety lock mode. Okay, so the camera is going to figure everything out it's going to figure out shutter speeds. Apertures is focusing and then it's going to go in and it's going to try to look at what you're doing and analyze it and figure out what would be good for you to have turned on or off on the camera. And for any photographer who really wants to get in and manually control, the camera is going to drive you nuts, all right, so when you want to hand your camera to your friend or a perfect stranger to take your photograph and you don't want them to mess up your camera and just take a basic photo that's the mode to put it in ok, because they're not going to be able to go in and screw up your camera for any concerning thoughtful photographer. You're probably not going to want to use this mode unless you are so nervous. You have completely forgotten everything about photography, and you just need to get a basic picture. S o I would recommend staying away from that, ok, we have the art mode, and I guess I should just backtrack a second and just let everyone know the way that I like to work with camera. I liketo work manually with a camera. I like to shoot as cleanly and it's simply as possible and doing the sort of manipulation later, I'm not a real big instagram person who like, let me see money filters I can use at the same time and take this picture. I would prefer to take a straight, clean shot and work with it later and so I'm not real ended this art mode, but if you want to go in, you can take all sorts of artsy photographs by simply putting it in that mode, and I have. Played with it for a few minutes, but I really haven't spent a lot of time in here. These are things that you can do afterwards, much better, but if you want to do it quick and easy and you want to goof around, have fun, knock yourself out. We're not to spend a lot of time on it next up scene mode this uh, slightly better than the art mode, it's slightly better than the eye auto mode. What it has here is a lot of pre selected situations that you could put the camera and to take better pictures in those. Now, the fact of the matter is, is that if you know what you're doing, you can do better than what the camera would do in any one of these moments. All right, it's the camera's not doing anything that you cannot manually yourself do on the camera, but they are there if you do want to put it into a little simple moat. So it's it's not even really a learning mode because it's going toe keep all the child safety locks on. And so most people who really want to get in and use this camera aren't going to use this, but if you are going to hand the camera to a friend who doesn't know anything and they said I want to take pictures of let's see what we have children I want to take pictures of my kids you could put it in the children mode and it will certainly take great pictures of children and so there is some modifications and info if you press the right hand arrow when you get in there to do that now there are some out on lenses now there are interchangeable lenses and there are add on lenses the differences is that it interchangeable lens actually mounts on the lens mounted the camera okay and add on lenses gonna add on the front like a big old filter and they make some add on lenses that you can add on that are less money less quality than an interchangeable lens and if you go in to use one of these like they have a fish islands they have had that wide angle converter lands and then they have a macro lens they have special modes that you would use on your camera in conjunction with these out on lenses I have never laid hands on these lenses typically if they're anything like things that I have seen from other manufacturers they tend to be a little bit lower quality but they're also lower in price s o it might be a cheap way to get a wide angle lens but I don't know that it's the best way to do it and there is a way of shooting three d photos with this, but you do need to have a three d tv and it's rather cumbersome to actually shoot because you need to shoot two pictures and move your camera a little bit and so it's awkward. I have done it. I mean, I've shot the pictures, but I don't have a three d tv, I haven't looked at him, so I'm not sure how good it is, but it is technically capable, you know, I think the designers of this is, you know, if we can possibly design something for, we're going to throw it in there, all right? So let's, get over to the movie mode now, all right, that is a movie camera, an old time movie camera. All right, so when you're in the movie mode, you have a little red button on the top of your camera, that is your movie record and stop, so you press it wants to start recording wants to stop, you don't need to leave your finger down on that. We'll talk a little bit more about some of the movie settings as we get into the settings of the menu and so forth of that on the camera. Now they do have this really weird reverb kind of echo thing that you can turn on in the camera. And so it looks like I don't know. I kind of like a strobe light, which you can play around it's got a one shot echo in multi echo once again, it's kind of like an art mode for the movie's. Awkward, not very practical, but kind of fun for about one minute. All right, let's, get around to the more serious stuff. So flip your camera over to the program mode, and this is going to be the the most basic mode that I would highly recommend what's going on in the program mode is the camera is setting shutter speeds and apertures, but nothing else for you. It is up to you how to focus, how to set the meeting system, the drive system, anything else on the camera you want. So for a very, very simple mode where you do want to get in to make some changes, you can throw it in the program mode, and you know that you can still access everything else on the camera. Now, in order to adjust the shutter speeds and apertures, which you can do in the program mode, you'll turn the main dial. And so by turning the main dial your adjusting shutter speeds and apertures, but the camera's always keeping them balanced, so you have the correct amount of light. Coming in the camera and so this could be a handy way for somebody who knows kind of what they're doing to get a little bit faster shutter speeds or a little bit slower shutter speeds now that some dial out in front does something called exposure compensation and what exposure compensation is it's it's a very simple way to make your pictures a little darker or a little lighter now it's not doing this by magical fairy dust it's changing gender speeds and apertures okay and so it's just adjusting them in a combination to make it a little bit darker or to make it a little bit brighter so it's a very simple and quick way to work because you can adjust to almost any shutter speed and aperture that's available and you could make it brighter and darker by adjusting that exposure compensation and looking at the light meter and looking at the little indicators it towards the minus side for darker or is it towards the plus side for being a little bit brighter all right we're getting slowly more serious each step along the way here so we have aperture priority now our main dial now controls the aperture and you can set it anywhere you want the camera will figure out whatever shutter speed you need this is probably the most popular mode for the serious photographer when they want to do things pretty quick and dirty that's a simple as they go what you have control of the aperture you can kind of get to anything you want to do in photography very, very quickly so I'm a big proponent of the aperture priority mt shut her priority is kind of the opposite similar we have shutter speeds now controlled on the main dial on the camera so you can set many different shutter speeds and the camera will figure out the aperture I'm not as big a fan of this I think it could be used successfully, but you need to know what you were doing in the type of light that you're in because if I right now was to put my camera in the shutter priority mode and just decide that I want to take a shutter speed of a thousandth of a second my camera is going to blink at me telling me that my aperture is not wide enough for this particular situation and if I wasn't paying attention I would take a picture and get a very, very dark image off of the camera so you really got any pain attention and you're less likely to make that type of mistake with aperture priority and then of course we get to manual full manual so this is where you get to set shutter speeds and apertures yourself so the main dial the top one controls the shutter speeds the front one or the sub one controls the apertures and this is going to be very popular for anyone who wants to get a bit more serious about photography because you can obviously set them anywhere you want. You will be looking at the light meter in the viewfinder or in the back of the camera kind of measuring getting your light meter towards the zeros probably for your first shot and then you might need to under expose overexposed beyond that and so that's the mode ill I don't know if we want to pause for a moment and look for any questions because there often or questions at this point I have a question here from sure arena it's not about modes but it's just kind of a general question and maybe you could speak to it. Why would you buy this camera over a full frame sensor camera? Can you talk a little bit about that and yeah uh this camera with a fifty millimeter lands and lends it goes up to three hundred millimeters I can fit in my hand like this is very, very small and so this is what I would consider the ultimate travel camera. All right, it is not the camera if you work for sports illustrated if you were going to do professional wedding photography this is not your main camera. It might be a backup camera it's for people who want something that small that still does a good job and they don't need the higher end it's it's not about being better it's about being smaller that's what it's all about ok should we go ahead and get into some other questions? Are you want to just keep it to motivations for now, things that we've talked about so far because ok, I think that a ce faras things that we've talked about so far I think we're ready I think we're ready to just keep moving on yeah okay all right so let's move on okay, so our main dials we have options beyond what we've seen so far in these air going to be able to be customized later on and these main dials khun control shutter speeds and apertures and weaken flip them if we want let's say shutter speeds were handled by the main dia we can have it controlled by the subtitle and I have announcement I have a new feature in my class have a new feature now this is specifically for people who are watching this on tape if you're watching this live you can't take advantage of this well you can but it's tricky what you see up on screen over on the left hand side is a short cut that you will see occasionally come up on screen because we're going to talking about a feature and I know I would be like ok he's telling me how to change this feature where do I do it? And so if you go to the custom menu b under button and I'il under dial function you can go in and you can customize thie now if you're watching live or you're here in the classroom not to worry we will eventually make our way to that points you don't have to jump ahead and find that on the menu right now but if you are watching this on take you can stop this use this as a clue on where to go change this feature because you want to change it right now and so I won't explain this externally so you'll see these pop up from time to time and this is where you can go to change this particular feature I'm not going to do everyone but I'm going to talk about the ones that are more significant and I know myself just the way that my fingers land up on the camera I've wanted to change the waste some of these buttons work and actually I am going to be really happy when this class is over because I have customized the camera so differently than it comes out of the box I haven't set up the way it comes out of the box right now so that I can relate to the way everyone else has their cameras set up but then after this class I'm going to switch it back over to the highly customized way that I have my dials because I've switched the rotation on the dials I've switched, which ones do which just so that they work up with the way that I like to work, and so you could do that with that button dial shortcut. Okay, we're going to jump topics here. We'll talk about the hot show in the can because it's on the top of the camera and this is where you can mount all sorts of stuff. It has a kind of traditional hot too, but right below it, it has a little port where you can plug stuff in. So first off, if you bought the camera in a kit like I did with this twelve to fifty lens, which a lot of people did it's very common set up, it comes with this very small little flash. I'm not a big fan of on camera flash, and so I'm more than happy that it didn't have a built in flash, but if you do need a little pop up flash, this will do the job for things that are pretty close by olympus makes some other flashes the one downside to the supplied flash it's also a good feature is that it uses the battery in the camera, so if you use lots of flash your battery in the camera's going to drain very quickly if you do a lot of flash photography, it be wise to get a flash that uses its own battery system? Olympus makes the f l fourteen, which takes a couple of trip it triple a's. I can't imagine that those batteries would last very long in there, they do have another, slightly bigger flash, and this one has a wireless function on it, and so if you want to get multiple olympus cameras for wireless flash, this will work with that. I haven't done that whole set up myself, so I don't have a lot of technical details on on that whole set up by additional that it can, and if you want to get a really big flash of flash that is actually larger than the camera, this is designed for their other four third system. This will use for double a batteries and will last much, much longer in number of flashes. All right, so keep in mind when you are using flash that it is only good toe a particular distance. It depends a little bit on how far the flashes, but in general, most flashes, especially the built in one it's stuff, right in front of you, it's not going to get to the mountains of a far off in the distance if you haven't oper upper balcony seat at a concert, it's not going to reach stage so it's just not going to do that good all right we've seen those flashes firing haven't we it works really good if you got somebody right there in front of you and you want to fill in the shadows whether it's on a cloudy day it can work quite well it works very well on a sunny day sunny days just have too much contrast flash can fill in the shadows that's why we call it fill flash we're filling in the shadows all right we'll talk about some other accessories that you can actually mount on the hunt you a little bit later on all right up in front of the camera we have function number two what happened to function number one it's not on the top of the camera so we're talking about function number two now as this comes from the factory this can control highlight and shadow detail white balance the aspect ratio and let's see those those those different features and you would press and you would hold the button but this is one of those buttons that I think it's going to be wise to adjust and normally what you do is you're gonna press the button and then turn the main dial but here's the list of all the things that you can get it to control not all at the same time and looking down that list the one that really jumps out at me is hi sl it's really nice to be able to change the eye, so with a quick and easy button press so that's the one that I recommend changing it to, and will be doing that when we get to the custom menu in the button functions, weaken, customize that to just control the ice, so so he would press the button and then turn, and I'll all right. Next up, we have our movie record button, not actually it is going to work, I should mention this, it will instantly start record video, even if you're not in the in the video mode s so if you are in any of the reading, this family, I mean, double check here, uh, if I have this on, it does instantly start recording video, so you don't even need to be in the video mode, but it is going to be in an auto mode on lee, so let's say you're in manual, the camera will only be recording in auto. Now, you can record video in manual, but you have to have the video set up in a manual mode so it's a little bit complicated and not totally obvious. All right, we're going to switch over to the back side of the camera, we obviously have our monitor, which can be tilted, and so I usually I would like to shoot at low angles, which is really nice, kind of a nicely waist level viewfinder like a hassle, glad world twin lens reflex, and you can shoot above your head as well. So that's it's, a pretty sturdy device in there, feels like it's got a pretty good hinge on there, which is nice, it's, also a touchscreen monitor. I'm not huge in the touch screen aspect of it, but we will talk about that a little bit later on the electronic viewfinder. Obviously, you're looking at in the viewfinder now be aware that right next to that is an eye sensor, and if you have the back display turned on, let me turn on the back display on this camera, and so we'll throw this into an aperture priority mode, and you can see my exciting notes here. When you put your hand in back of the camera, it automatically turns off because it senses whenever your eyes pretty close, and so sometimes if you're using this as a waist level finder and you get up close to it, you'll suddenly turn off the e v f, and so that could be a little frustrating, and so there is a way to manually turn it on and off, but right now, it's on an automatic sensor mounted on the side of the the view finder is the monitor on and off switch and so if you want to switch back and forth between having the back display on or off it's simply a button press to do that okay below the hot shoe is the accessory port and there's some oddball accessories that could be thrown in here this unusual unit is a flash it is a macro arm light that extends out in front of the lands and you convey amended so that you can light a macro subject that is close right in front of your lands it's kind of an oddball device it's available for about fifty bucks there is the olympus pen pal okay what this is is it's a basically it's a wifi transmitter it transferred images to a computer or smartphone or another camera unfortunately it is limited to hd quality pictures which is it's nineteen twenty by fourteen forty insides so they're not full resolution raw images by any means so you can send out small images to a nearby phone and then they have their own microphone set up so if you are going to record a lot of video and you want better quality audio getting a separate microphone is one of those steps to recording better quality audio olympus olympus makes this little adapter set with a microphone and I think you can plug in other microphones as well into that and that would be a stereo microphone, of course we've talked about her on off switch we have our aero pad and our arrow pod when it's not being used for anything else kind of controls focusing system and so let's talk a little bit about the focusing options in here. So we have a grid area in the middle of the frame and you compress anyone of the arrow pads up, down left and right to activate the focusing on the camera and got to be in the right note to be able to see what's going on. And so if you hit one of those you can activate the focusing point. Now if you want to change you would hit the info button and that gives us the next option. We can then hit up and down and I realize this is not the easiest to remember are the most obvious you can go up and down to change from one to nine to thirty five boxes or you can go left to right to have happy faces all right? And so what this is is face detection and the different ones we have the first one is we have face detection, then we have the face detection which will actually adjust the focus to focus on the eye all right, we have one that will focus on the left eye or the right eye and if you are focusing on the eye it goes to the closest side I be honest with you, I have not done a lot of testing on this, so I can't confirm it how good this is. I'm not a big fan of facial focusing, I prefer to use just either the small black it, the small single box or maybe a nine box area that's the way I've been usually working with the camera so far, but those are options in there, so just hit an arrow pad up or down, and then what you're going to do. So let me do this may be for the cameras, they pick it up and so hit the arrow pad up, I will hit the info button and then I can go up to go to the thirty five to the nine to the single I can go left and rights to change the different facial recognitions I'm going to turn that one off and then leave it at the single box in the middle and then hit ok and then hit the shutter release halfway to get out of that note and so it's not the most obvious, but once you get used to it, you'll remember it. We have a little playback button you'll notice things in blue have to do with playback, so some people have complained about these buttons being a little bit small and hard. To reach and get out, and I agree with them something that could be improved, but there's not a lot of room to work with on this very small camera, so obviously you're going to get that for playback. We have our garbage can button for simply getting rid of your images, deleting them in camera and for scrolling through your images for previous and next you're just gonna use the air a pad left and right. If you are playing back a movie up and down will control the volume that the movie is played back at that time. Now you can also jump up on top of your camera. The main dial and the sub dial can be used for going through your images as well, and I find them actually much easier to work with. If you're trying to scroll through a lot of images very quickly, the arrow pad gets to be a little bit hard to work with because it is quite small in size, and the main dial is also used from magnifying your images. You'll notice on the back of the camera there's a little magnifying glass, a little something that looks like thumbnails kinda looks like a checkerboard, and you can turn that dial to zoom in, and then you can use the aero pad to zoom around and check sharpness in your photograph. You can hit the information button for either more or less information with your picture. You can, of course, see your picture without any information, which is a great way to judge composition. We can pull up some basic, simple information. It talks about what type of format it is the date it was taken. The time it was taken. We can pull up a larger display, which is going to give us our shutter speed aperture artist a gram in some additional information in there. But the picture does get a lot smaller in size. We have a large list, a gram in here and there you can see another shortcut where you can go in and you can customize what display options you see. And this history graham is not inherently one of the options that you have. You have to go turn it on in the custom in. So if you want that, that particular display will have turned that on later on. And then there is a highlight shadow option that you can turn on a swell, which will show you shaded areas and either blue or orange that are kind of blown out. Highlights or really dark shadows clip shadows, which could be helpful information in certain types of exposure situations. Now there is also something called light box on here, and this is where you can compare photo a with photo b, which is kind of nice if you're trying to check for sharpness between two images or just look for two images you want to see him side by side, it does limit the amount of space that you can work with. Now to turn on these extra features, you're going to need to go into your custom menu and add that in that custom menu letter d now we also have a touch screen option and so here's a little video on me playing around with the camera with the touch screen. So obviously we're going to be swiping things back and forth. We're going to be scrolling in there's a little zoom lever, it doesn't have the pitch to zoom, so you'll be using this lever you'll hit the thumbnails toe back out of that, you can scroll through lots of images pretty quickly, just with the touch screen. Tap on an image if you want it, you can even go all the way back to a calendar mode and see pictures that you took on different days, so if you're traveling, going toe, have pictures on there for many, many different days. Works out pretty well so it's it's a nice option I don't use the touch screen in fact I forget that it has the touch screen because the hell out of my hundred cameras have ted screen option on there but it but it can help out in some situations the menu is something that we're going to spend the whole second half of this class going through so that's more to come function one these is another one of those customizable functions and as you can see from the list here we have lots of different ways that we can customize our camera and there's some very interesting options. One of the options that I like in a number of other photographers like is what's called back button focusing this is where you don't focus with the should a release on the camera you focus with a button on the back of the camera and you can program this camera to do that it's the first option it's the a e l f l and there's kind of a funky way to get in and program that auto focus and I'm going to show you that when we get into the menu setting of it but any one of these different modes you can program in into the function one setting so their lots of customization settings on this cameras I said and in order actually here's how you would actually do back but focusing leave that button programmed as a l f l which is the way it comes out of the box but then you need to go in to the custom menu a under a e l f l and turn the manual focus mode to mode three this may not make a lot of sense right now, but I'll make more sense later on at least a little more sense like you're hot and what happens then is that when you put the camera in manual focus, you can override press the function one button and the camera will start auto focusing while you are pressing that button so it's a nice little feature tohave so let's let's stop and go through whatever questions we can get through right now because we've gone through a lot of stuff so far all right, let's do that I'm not sure if you answered this earlier, but this is a video question this is from serena and she'd like to know how many minutes at a time when the camera film for like, what is the video length actually the, uh camera try to remember what the limit is and I don't know that off the top my head, but if we could get a live shot on the back of my camera, we can see in the bottom left corner I will you know in my class there's a phrase it's called there's a slide for that, and they do actually have this life, but in the bottom right hand corner, there is the number of shots that you have left and right above that is the amount of time you have left that you can record in your card and a ce faras how long you can do in one clip, I don't have that off the top of my head, I think it may be thirty minutes, twenty nine minutes, fifty nine seconds, and you kind of touched on this a little bit, so maybe you can talk about it a little bit more narrowed answer wants to know a little bit more about the wifi connectivity and the benefits of that. Have you played with that much at all? I have not played with wifi on this camera at all. I have been working with the new cannon six d, which has wifi, which has a lot of people very interested because we all have these smartphones it's like let's get this hooked up and so it's generating a lot of buzz and interests and having played with it, I can tell you eyes just not that interesting, it's it's it's a tool it sounds really cool, but when you get to practically working with it, it's like, ok it's first off it's oh, I'm talking about a different camera a little complicated to get set up and so it's a little awkward and it's useful in a few situations if you want to have the camera in a remote location and you want to see what's going on and actually in this case you can't do that but in this case you could simply send it to your phone so if you wanted to upload a picture really quickly it could do it how often do you need to quickly get a picture from this camera to your phone so that you can upload it? Some people do that quite frequently it depends on who you are and how you work but you are going to be limited to nineteen hundred twenty pixels on the long side so it's a small size but I mean if you're going toe upload something really quickly it's going to be to facebook or something like that that you don't need a lot of resolution and so it would be a bad technique if you're trying to get high quality files to your client very quickly ok, that sounds really cool, but it limited applications I think in the real world ok, yeah that's what this person with thing I was kind of laughing to myself they say it's it's a game changer, right? Kind of what is your super if you're super facebook are that's true it is people like teo teo teo you know doing what they're doing and they spoke right away. Yeah, I mean, it saves you from downloading to a computer. Yeah, and so for certain people in certain situations I just don't see a lot of photographers doing that on a regular basis they're out there and diminish him in any way but it's just it's za fairly small segment interest I know several e mails are all those people ok, another question this is an image quality question this is from nina scootin who says I feel a bit confused to my experience the quality of the picture is very much related to the lens you are using so my question is even with like a lens is that still not that good? So it's still not that good? Well god, there is a different call quality in the different lenses I have one of the highest quality lenses. I think this is the like a design not build there's a difference built by panasonic twenty five millimeter one point four and these supplied twelve to fifty millimeter lands is not the sharpest lens in the bunch and I can compare these two and clearly see this one is sharper but it's enough so that depending on what you're doing, the twelve fifty is probably going to be good enough for a lot of day today uses and so it depends on what you're gonna be doing with your photographs and how critical you are. I love a good, sharp lands I also like a nice small package that does the job, and if it does the job, it does the job. And so I personally I've kind of gone with the mix of things that are of average quality and some that are higher quality, and when you need that, you could bump up to it. It's not as sharp it's, not his detailed when you compare it with the top of the line cannon or nightline, I mean, for the money in price, those are much bigger objects, it's it's not really a fair comparison, but for an average photographer it's going to have more than enough quality? I think it just depends on what you're doing that's why we have lots of different choices these days. I actually wanted to ask you because we had a couple of questions about night shooting, we're going to talk about that at all later, or we don't get into specifics, but this camera does have a feature that I have been waiting years for called live bulb and live time, which, if you've worked in a dark room and you have seen your picture come to life in the tray that's that's a cool thing, and you could actually do that with the back of this camera. The problem is, is that at the same time, it's does what no other camera does in that regard. It's terrible at nighttime photography when it comes to the viewfinder. I was up at mount rainier and I was trying to shoot some star shots, and I had my canon camera with fast lands. I'm looking through the viewfinder, and I could just see barely outlines of the mountain ridges and mountains, and I can get it all framed up and with this one with the elektronik viewfinder, nothing, absolutely nothing. I didn't even know where I was pointed at the camera, I couldn't focus the lens, and so I had to take a flashlight out and kind of guess, well, ok, this was ten feet away, maybe that's a quarter mile, and I'll take a picture and felt I didn't focus it right? And so focusing is really tough composition is really tough because we're working with electronic viewfinder and so not completely there for the night time photographer. So the specific question was about setting your lens to infinity, like under the cannon, or were these have elektronik and there is no focusing scale, and so it just keeps spinning. You know and so on a lot of lenses like traditional lenses they would rack all the way over to infinity on one side or the other and by the way on infinity they actually go beyond infinity so you have to be a little bit careful exactly where they're set with newer nikon and canon lenses sometimes they'll turn and then they'll turn not quite a smoothly and you'll know that you're into the range and all of these lenses that we have from olympus and panasonic have these endless turning elektronik focusing and so getting focused right it's going to be a challenge you're gonna have to take multiple picture in order to get it right so not the best night time cameron okay let's take one more this's from j marcus who says well he'd like to know how to make the post shot review time longer in order to examine a shot for a longer time immediately after I snap it do you know how yeah it'll be in the menu system we'll get to it ok so let's just keep moving on and just get right right not to that but we will eventually get to that so hang in there okay over on the left side of camera and actually over on the right side of camera these couple mystery holes in the side of the camera that's actually the stereo microphone it does have stereo left channel right channel the problem with the built in microphones is it hears you touching the camera and clicking and moving and focusing and zooming and other things going on. And so if you want really good quality sound, you need to get an external microphone. But hey, built in stereo microphone is more than most cameras have over on the side of the view finder on the left kind of hidden is a di achter it controls the focusing of the viewfinder. Occasionally this can get bumped, and your viewfinder looks like it's, wonky and it's broken and it's just a matter of turning the dial on making sure that it's in focus it's kind of hard to get to you actually need to pop open the lcd on the back of the camera so that you can get in and flipped open the little rubber cover to get into the ports on the side of the camera, so we have a usb connection. And so if you did want to download pictures one way of doing that, I don't recommend it, but you could plug in the usb cord and downloaded to your computer. I don't recommend it simply because it's kind of slow in awkward, and I generally just recommend taking the card out and plugging it into the card slot on your computer or your card reader, but don't throw this cable away. Because if you want to update the firm where which we will talk about in a little bit you need to have this cable in order to do that if you want hook your camera to a tv so that you could do slide shows on the tv you could do that with one of their tv cables if you want to get their remote cable so that you're not touching the camera when you want to fire it you can use the remote cable that you see one sells for about forty bucks and it's nice for landscape photographers I have not purchased it I use the cheap shortcut method which is a two second self timer and usually works unless you're trying to time a specific event rather than predicting something two seconds ahead of time but for a lot of landscape cityscape type shots to second self timer works just fine below that we have our hd my plugs so that we can plug in and connect up to an hd tv all right we have on this lens but not on all lenses we have a lens function button and just like the function one in the function to button you can go in and have this programmed to do anything you want and you know there's so many choices there I don't know what to choose and part of my problem is is that I'm only using this lands part of the time and so I don't want to get in the habit of having anything important there because I can't get to it on my other lenses, and so I haven't ended up programming anything on this one at all, but it is there if you do want to customize something on this particular lands and there's a lot of camera features that you could get in and do that as well. Now the twelve to fifty lens that I bet a lot of you have cause it it's, it's, it's a nice range and it got packaged with this cameron. They sold a lot of him with this cat eyes it's a good range to have and the macro mode on this is one of the best I have seen with a kind of all purpose zoom lens like this. It does a very good job and most of the time that these cameras do macro, focusing there at wide angle, which looks really awkward. And if you go around ebay, you see people who are constantly photographing whatever they're selling about three inches away from their product and it's kind of this very distorted fisheye look that looks. Terrible of this object that they're trying to sell and this is shooting anymore telephoto range. I don't know exactly what focal inc that's at because the camera is kind of awkward you do have to it is it is kind of weird because you do need to press in on the button while you are pushing the ring, the main ring on the lands all the way forward and then it can get in and focus up very close and I don't know if we're gonna be able to do this, but we can see this actually let's do the hopefully the guys in the back can get on this there we go so it can focus it's quite close in front but it's not awkwardly worked out and so it does a very good job focusing up close so it's a good general purpose lens for a lot of different things and that's what that macro button is all about. Over on the right hand side of the camera we can see our monitor on off switch a little bit more easily. We have our memory card slot. This uses s the memory cards. We can also use s d h c high capacity and extreme capacity cards so these different names air just different sizes of cards and it can use all the cards that are currently on the market today something to note about these cards is that there is a little switch on the side of the card if you flip that down, you won't be able to delete or take pictures with your camera because the card is then protected and so be careful about that little switch getting flipped on you if you are going to shoot a lot of video, you want to pay attention to the card speed the card classifications and it's a little awkward because they have speeds two, four, six, eight, ten and then they go backto one because it's kind of a new classification but you want class six or higher, which is what most of the cards out there today, but if you look at cards on a website and they got some really, really cheap cards, you might want to check because they might be some older, very slow card. So if you're going to shoot video, spend a little bit extra money and get a faster card. I mentioned before that I wasn't a big fan of using the supply the usb cable for downloading images using a card reader or if your computer has the slot already on and there's a a lot of computers and know a lot of max these days have built in sd card slots on it that's going to be the fastest way to download your pictures from the cameron to your computer working our way around to the front of the camera, we have a little lamp on the front that turns on we have the self time returned on. It also is a tiny little flashlight that turns on when you need to auto focus and it's not the most powerful one in the world on is of limited capabilities, but it is there in case you do need it. We have our lens release, obviously, for taking lens on and off there we can see our four third sensor. One of the things I did I don't like about these cameras is that when you take the lens off, you can see the sensor and dust can get in on the sensor. Now. The camera does have a automatic cleaning system to try to keep it clean, but I would limit the exposure without a lens or a body cap on this camera, we have electrical contacts, which you need to make sure in good condition, there's nothing you need to do with these there's no maintenance, but that they're going to meet up with the contacts on the lenses. We have our little mount index, you know howto position your lens when you're mounting it up there and that's it for the front of the camera over on the bottom, the camera is where we're going. Install the battery that deal in one sells for about fifty bucks comes with a charger with an awkward cord on it, which is a little goofy. I like the travel chargers that other companies have, but what I have found out is that if you have apple products and a lot of people have apple, you could take the little plug adapter off their chargers and plug it into this charger and plug it straight into the wall and make it become a travel charger and there may be some generics out there. I haven't found those yet, but you don't need to take the whole chord with you if you have these other little charges because it's a very common plug in that it has on it, there is a grip connector, and this camera has a very unique grip system. It's a two part. They call it the power battery holder because it holds an extra battery called the h l d six and it's, a two part unit, and you get both, and that costs about three hundred bucks, which is a little spendy um, nice my in my opinion, the landscape unit will give you a new shutter release for holding the camera in a landscape moat and does from what I understand and from what I play, but gives a very nice feel to the camera, and I might end up with one of these at some point if you showed a lot of virtue verticals, you can add the portrait unit to it and makes the camera much more comfortably for holding vertically, but it does add to the size of the camera considerably and so you have to be aware of that when you start purchasing bags and how you're going to carry the camera but it's a very nice unit that looks like it works really good if you showed a lot of portrait ce I would highly recommended if you shoot landscape stuff and just want a better hand hold better finger grip on it it seems to be very good now something that you may have noticed about my camera let me turn it around so the camera to get a closer shot I have made myself a little finger stop finger loop yeah, I actually got this idea from like a which camera has kind of some reminiscence of some like things to it and like I had this little loop on their own like that that seems strange because my hand will never fit through that and I realized how it was how it would work. I'm like, well, that would be kind of cool maybe I'll just get that put it on here and the like a little finger loop strap thing, whatever they called it wass one hundred and sixty five dollars and so I go you know I got an old camera strap and I have some electrical tape and so I took about ten inches of strap and I wrapped it around and what I do is I stick two fingers right through here and it leaves the's fingers completely free to work but if I want to drop and just you know hold on to something else it's just a little bit more secure for holding the camera and it's not a huge strap that gets in the way of everything and so it's a nice little thing anyone could make it I was going to do a little arts and crafts here were actually cut it made it but you know it's it's just very, very simple and it's small and I like it give it a try you might like it as well. So that's what I got but minor diversion. Ok, so back on the bottom of the camera we have our standard quarter twenty tripod mount for all your standard tripod stuff and then your serial number and you can note that for your insurance purpose. Okay, let's talk about lens is a little bit so there's a lot of different lenses from olympus panasonic and I'm not going to talk about all of them but I'm just going to talk about some of the ones that you're most likely to encounter or should know about the fourteen to forty two is they're cheap kit lands it's small it's lightweight it's not much money and there's not much to write home about it other than it's not much money the twelve to fifty lands better quality lin's it is whether seal we talked about that it's got pretty good wide angle capabilities it takes pretty common filter size which is nice and is a good general purpose all around lens and if you're going to use this for travel which I think it's great for it's a good one lends to have on the camera and so we're going to have our manual focus ring out there the twelve to fifty also has a power zoom now one of the cool things about this camera is that we have people migrating from nikon people migrating from canada now if anyone's gone back and forth between canon and nikon, they will know that they like to do things in opposite ways the way that they focus you can program the focusing on this lands to work like cannons or like night cots and so when you look at these arrows there pointing in the direction of infinity so depending on which direction you want to go so canon's got one direction nikon has one direction you can control that in the focusing ring option in the custom menu we have the zoom ring as I mentioned on the twelve to fifty it is a power zoom it's you can manually zoom it which I like for the most part predicting still pictures but for shooting video you consume very very smoothly if you put it into the powers ill so that's the elektronik zoom and then we have a little mounting index which will match up with the index on the camera the zoom lock on the little lands just is so that it stays in the small position while you're walking around all right so these are what I would call just notable lenses things that you should know about if you do want to get a one lands really does everything they do have a fourteen to one fifty so for those of you who are more versed in the traditional focal lengths this is a twenty eight to three hundred it's not the sharpest lens in the world but it gets it all in one lands they make a little pancake seventeen millimeter lands if you want a nice little street photography lands that's very small in size reasonably fast and not too much money the seventeen millimeter lens is going to run you about three hundred bucks. The big fourteen to one fifty zoom is going to go for about six hundred dollars if you just wanted a matching telephoto they have a forty to one fifty which sells for about three hundred dollars. Yeah, I wasn't a big fan of that one and although I'm not going to talk about it in the slides I do have one in front of me this is a panasonic forty five to one fifty and similar in size I kind of prefer some of panasonic's lenses to olympus lenses in some cases with their resumes. I just kind of like that the way that worked the way that they look ergonomics on him just seemed to be a little bit better in my opinion as faras zooms and then if you want the really big zoom you're going to africa and so far you want a lot of telephoto they make a seventy five to three hundred so that's like a one fifty two six hundred millimeter lands not the fastest aperture in the world on that one. All right, so these are the good lances. These are the little jewels of the crown, you might say now olympus does make some pretty sweet prime lenses and so on white angle f two lands they just brought out a nice kind of normal wide angle seventeen so that translates to a thirty four millimeter land. That twelve millimeter lens, by the way, is that around eight hundred dollars and unfortunately they charge more for the black version which I wanted to get from my camera, which it is a limited edition and that was like an extra two hundred dollars the seventeen millimeter lens is going to run you about five hundred bucks the forty five which I have right here which has an aftermarket hood on it it's a nice small ends this is a great little portrait lands this one sells new for four hundred I picked up one off of craigslist for around three hundred and so this is your eighty five one eight lands that's if you want to shoot portrait's with shallow depth of field doesn't pretty good job and it's quite affordable in price now I don't know if anyone from olympus is listening but what were you thinking when you have these colors with different colored chrome because this is not the same color chrome that the seventeen or the twelve is so they have all these really nice perfect little lenses that are slightly different in color and it's just done what they did that and then possibly one of the sharpest lenses that they have. I've been hearing some great reviews on the seventy five one point eight so if you want a longer fast telephoto they've got it now panasonic has some really nice lenses as well the lens that I have and this is the like a design but panasonic twenty five millimeter one point four so this is the equivalent of your fifty one force if you want to fast lends this is really fast focusing its fast an aperture and I'm gonna make a fairly bold claim here that of any auto focus lens I've ever had this has the smoothest manual focusing any nikon any candidate if you like to manually focus this just feels really good and so if you like manually focusing its a great lands for that some of the other lenses like the kit lands it's very small and kind of has a plastic on plastic feel this other one really feels well when we used to used to work in the camera store we used to take an old lenses and we want to check how smooth they are and we like how good is that lands it's like butter s oh this one is like but it's a good one and so it's a like a design made by panasonic and panasonic came out with a couple of new zoom lenses in the last few months they have a twelve to thirty five so that's like your standard twenty four to seventy two point eight fixed fast aperture lands and then they have the telephoto version of that thirty five to one hundred now the twelve to thirty five is going to run you about eleven hundred bucks and the thirty five to one hundred going around about fifteen hundred bucks and so these are premium lee priced and they're very nice lenses they're a little bit bigger but I think optically they're very good they're fast they worked perfectly well on this camera as they do on the panasonic ce the common lens mountain is a very nice thing to have and so it is an option for certain people out there I know a lot of people with the olympus have really liked those prime lenses I wish they'd make him in black but nevertheless they're good enough that I will own him in silver put silver and black that's fine because they're so good that forty five is just a really nice one for portrait work as well bleyer hope I'm pronouncing that correctly wants to know he says I want to ask john how he compares the olympus seventy five one point eight with cannon eighty five one point two or some such linds I have not shot really pictures with the seventy five one eight I just kind of mounted on the camera played with it I was actually just reading in a block post by scott born this morning's brush up on the camera and he has the lands and he thinks it's the sharpest lens of the whole bunch and might be sharper than lenses from other manufacturers I forget I forget the exact words but he thought it was like one of the sharpest lindsey's he's ever seen and so clearly a very good review there and so that's a big statement yeah yeah and so I don't wantto quote I forget what he was but if you look up scott born great photographer his kind of switched over to this camera and has that lens and absolutely loves it I don't think there was anything better than the eighty five one point two cannon it's going so I never shot with that land I've heard I've heard I think ok another lens question this is from michael jordan and he asked michael jordan michael jordan uses this camera he asked is it possible that changed zoom ring direction on the panasonic zoom lens on the and five no you cannot change the zoom direction so they actually have that labeled on the top and so there's wide to the right and tell he took a laptop is what it is okay cool let's see yes we can ask this question from sioux who want to know if there's another button that can be used for back button focus you khun onley use the function one button to my knowledge okay not the best button in the world I agree at least it's there another question from t gee this is going back tio adapters or I'll just read it and you can have sir is there only one adapter for the m d and five if yes does it help with waterproofing et cetera the lenses that are attached or is it just for helping attached none and for third lenses. Ok, so if I can clarify this little bit, olympus makes an adapter to put on their four thirds lenses because remember, we have micro four thirds lenses on here. There are other manufacturers and there's a whole range of companies that just make stuff. Now, these companies that just make stuff or they're probably not going to be waterproofed. In fact, I don't think the one for olympus is, I don't think I doubt that you need the adapt others are going to be waterproof or water resistant and so there's a wide right it's kind of a wild west scene. If you go into a camera store, you look at the adaptors, there's everything from twenty dollars to five hundred dollars on these adapters, but I don't believe any of them do with water proving. But you should be able to get to virtually any lands that was ever made for thirty five millimeter camera to get it to fit on this camera if you find the right after pretty cool. Yeah, ok, let us last let's. Ask another one. This is from carlo abera. What kind of photography need will justify an olympus? Seventy five millimeter? If I have the forty five millimeter, is there a need for the seventy five million? If you want to shoot with mohr shallow depth of field and you have the distance to work, uh, seventy five is going to give you that more shallow depth of field in practical terms, what I found that if you're shooting indoors portrait of people the forty five is perfect. If you have a seventy five a lot of times, you'll back up and you'll run to the back in your living room. Unless you live in a very big house, you're just not going to have enough room to shoot with the seventy five millimeter lands. If you want to go down to the local park, then the seventy five it's fantastic it's also a very nice focal length for street photography, where you're a little bit further away or you're shooting a little bit tighter for most people, I think the forty five is a more practical lens for basic portrait short telephoto stuff, and the seventy five is just a longer version of it that's going to give you showered up the field, but you need more room to work with.

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!

a Creativelive Student
 

I'd already purchased the camera and have only ever used auto mode for any camera. I was having trouble understanding the instructions that came with the camera and so googled to find help. Came across this course and well its the best thing I did. IT was easy to understand, very thorough and easy to listen too. Can rewind and keep going back to to the video for review, so much better than going to a camera shop course at triple the price and forgetting most of it by the time I get home. Great instructor , thankyou Sharon

Student Work

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