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Display System

Lesson 4 from: Olympus OM-D EM-5 Fast Start

John Greengo

Display System

Lesson 4 from: Olympus OM-D EM-5 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

4. Display System

Next Lesson: Menu System

Lesson Info

Display System

So we're going to talking about the e v f what you see in the viewfinder as well as the monitor on the back of the camera, so e v f and monitor of the terms that I will try to use, of course we have the monitor on off switch, and so if you want to go back and forth between these, if you want to turn the monitor on that's basically going to turn it on and off, there is the auto switch, so if the monitor is on, it will turn off if you get close to the back of the camera looking through the f what are you going to see? Well, you were going to see the image that your cameras pointed out. If you want, you compress the info button on the back of the camera and change and add or subtract information in there. One of the things you can do is add information shutter speed, aperture, all good stuff as well as a horizon level, which will tell you if you're tipping the camera left and right, or forward and back. Press the info button again and you can pull up more information about what s so you'r...

e at motor drive, image quality, press it again and you can get hissed a gram in information in there so you can see a live hissed a gram over your picture. Now, if you're wondering with that little mountain of information what it is well, you should watch my fundamentals of digital photography. If you're wondering about that little green mountain within the white mountain in this particular case that is explaining what the spot me during area is reading versus the entire frame. And so it's kind of showing you to history grams in one. So you're getting a two for one there. Now, one of the things that you can do and we will get to this when we get into the menu section is you can customize the dvf. And personally, I prefer style number two like this. And so the downside to style number two is the picture is a little bit smaller. Okay, I like big pictures, but there's, nothing on top of the picture. All the information is below the frame, like in your traditional icons and cannons. And so I kind of prefer this style and we have different options in here. So once you press the info button here, you could get the horizon level, which is awkwardly obscuring the picture a little bit, we can pull up more information. Which you think they could have put all the way off to the side, but they did it, and then we can pull up the history grant information as well, so we have lots of little options in there, and so the stuff that you're going to see in there is going to explain settings on your camera or warning, so you have your battery check in there, it explained how the if you have the battery hooked up on your p h b, or the vertical horizontal grip on the camera, if you have a flash on and it's going to fire it's going to show you there, there's a little dot is just a visual confirmation that your camera is in focus, and so just another way, because I recommend turning the beep in your camera off to be a little bit more stealthy. This could be just an additional way to say, did that camera actually focus? Yes, that light is on, and if you're really you know, you're good at your camera, when you don't even take it away from your eye, and so if you can work with it up to your eye, just reach around, grabbed the controls, turn them odile the am, you'll see it there, we're going to talk about my set when we get into the many a system but there's a about four, I think, therefore presets where you can customize tons of features on the camera and this will let you know which one you're in if you have your camera an auto exposure lock, which is that function one button that's the lock button, we have our shutter speed and our aperture you'll notice in this illustration, there in yellow, if they're in yellow, that means that they are active and you can change them, and so when you're in manual, they're both going to be yellow. When your insurer priority on lee, the shutter speed will be yellow. If you were using exposure compensation, you'll see it here, mr dizzy there a plus or a minus number? We have our light meter, which is on the bottom half of the scale. We have our flash meter on the top half, so if you want to do flash exposure compensation, you will see that on the top half of it, you can go in and tweak the way the camera records tones you can tweet the highlights in the shadows. I don't recommend this I think this is better done in a computer program like light room or photo shop or something else, but you can tweak it in camera if you do tweak it its warning you that you have tweaked it you're white balance will be their next is s o, and here we go with the video time remaining and the shots remaining, and so these numbers will very depending on the card size and what you have set as faras video recording and raw versus j peg, which we'll talk about in a little bit. All right, so if you want to turn the monitor off, excuse me if you want to turn the monitor on, what you're going to see on the back of the camera varies, but is pretty close to what we were just looking at. Once again, you compress the information button to flip through the different options, where you're looking at their virtual horizon additional information, and then we go into the touch screen options and over on the left you can turn the touch screen off. You can activate it for focusing so you can tap the screen to focus, or you can tap the screen to take a picture, and so you would basically tap through those little green ovals on the left to get to the different options on that can be useful in certain situations. I'm not big touch screen user, I prefer the shutter release, but those are options that you have when you press the ok button and the back screen is on, you get to the lie what's called live control. And the way you're gonna work with this is these are a bunch of features that we're not going to talk about in length right now we're going to get to them after the break but these are kind of the main controls on the camera and what you're going to use is you're going to use the arrow pad to go up and down and then left and right to change the different features in here so this is where you can get to most of the features you don't need to dive into the full menu system just hit the ok button and you go into the live control actually we're going to get into that information here shorter than that I remember so if we turn the monitor off and then you hit the information button you can pull up the horizon information or more importantly you can get to it's called the super control panel all right this is kind of got all the controls laid out so that you can get to all the goody things and this is a good mode to be in it so you hit the ok button which I'm actually going to do on my camera turn off the monitor and get to the be careful about getting in back of the camera cause it turns offices I get back there so if I had the ok button I can get in and I can start working with this super control panel now to navigate around this, you can use the main dial to move around and then if you want to make a change in any one of the boxes that you were looking at, you would turn the sub dial right in front of it so you can use the top dials or you can use the arrow pad in the back of the camera. Now the top half of the screen is just going to have general information, date, battery levels and so forth. Next level down we have our esos and so I also is setting the sensitivity of the sensor on the camera. The best quality images are going to be a tie so two hundred and if you want to shoot under lower light conditions or with faster shutter speeds with action that's moving, you'll need to bump that I esso up a little bit further. We do have an option of a it will go up to twenty five thousand. One of the complaints on this camera is that it doesn't go down to one hundred in some cases two hundred is a nice native eso because everything is you get a faster shutter speed, the limitation of having two hundred is your eyes. So is that if you take a lens like this forty five one point eight, you go outside on a reasonably bright day you can't shoot it at one point eight because you don't have I so one hundred, which is what you need bright light situations because the camera doesn't have a fast enough shutter speed and so that's the limitation in the hopes that when they come out with the successor to this camera that it has so one hundred but I'm going to show you some examples of the ice so a little bit later on, but two, four, eight hundred all look really good on this camera. Next up we have white balance, and so we have a number of different options in here if you are new to photography, well warning here cameras don't always know what color light source is lighting you're seeing and it's trying to guess at many times, and so if you have an understanding of what type of lights you're working under, you may want to set this yourself, and so we have a number of options. We have sunlight clouding in shade and those air slightly different on a in a shade situation there's a gigantic blue reflector overhead which is causing everything to be a little bit blue and you can correct for that by setting your camera to the shade mode and then there's a number of options for artificial light whether you're under incandescent light florissants flash, of course, is very even in queen light and so if you are getting funky light funky color in your images you may want to reset your white balance to one of these settings now we do have another set of options we have a custom white balance where if you manually knew the color temperature you could just set it anywhere between two thousand and actually all the way up to fourteen thousand you could just go in manually into the menu system and said it and I know this sounds really awkward but if you were you know had your own studio and you knew your light source you could just set it to that light source we can also do something called capture white balance information what you do here is you photograph a white sheet of paper and you basically tell the camera I want this to be white and it will figure out what that color balances and fix it for you and then there is auto this is where the camera figures things out for you and frankly I think otto is actually pretty good this was one of the few cases where I let my camera do auto for me so I keep my camera and auto white balance if it looks bad I will adjust it myself and I'm not too concerned if it's a little off because I generally shoot raw images and if you shoot raw images which we'll talk about it a little bit you can fix that later in post without any negative effect on your images, and so without any damage to your image, you can fix it. If you're shooting j pegs, you need to be a little bit more on it with with the white balance to make sure that it set properly because it's a little bit harder to fix later on. So that's the white balance setting white balance auto for now is good there's gonna be a lot of customized settings in here if you want to tweak with your pictures so you can control the amber in green tent tear images, I generally leave these set at zero no, I always leave the set it zero next up picture mode. This is where the camera can go in. We've kind of looked at some of this before we're going to start seeing things for the second and third time pretty soon, so we're going to move a little bit more quickly and so you can go in and you can tweet the picture mode in the art mode as well. Here on the camera, you can go in a just the sharpness. In contrast, I usually leave these at zero because I'm shooting in raw if you're shooting and robbie's won't matter at all it's on lee if you're shooting in j peg and I generally recommend shooting as clean as possible in camera so that you can work with it later. You do too much in camera, you might get to a spot that you can't fix things later on and that's the problem with tweaking things out in camera. Too much the meter read system, the camera has a few different metering systems and some awkward ones in here. First off, digital dsp is a three hundred and twenty four segment area that's looking at the whole scene and trying to balance the bright light but the shadows and give you a good overall scene. And that is where I have left my camera one hundred percent of the time. It has done a very good job, but you do also have a center waited in a spot monitoring system, which could be useful in a number of situations. Now they also have a very awkward highlight spot and shadow spot. And what this is is it's, a spot meter combined with exposure, compensation and it's a little awkward because its preset at how bright and how dark it is and you could try this out. It's a limited success on my part on dso that's, that's, what's going on it's combining spot meter with exposure compensation next up what we have, we have sequential shooting kind of known as the drive mode on cameras, so single shot is where I usually have my camera set we do have a continuous high which can shoot up two nine frames a second but it cannot continuously auto focus and meter through nine frames a second, so once it starts locking on for the first picture, it stays focused on that and has the exposure locked on that first image when it shooting at nine frames a second we have a continuous low mode that is customizable out of the box I think it's a three and a half frames a second, but you can bring that up and you can bring it down. The camera is still going to have a tough time refocusing and remembering during that segment as well. We have a twelve second self timer and a two second self timer. The two second self timer, as I mentioned before is very handy if you're working on a tripod you're working at the camera just simply want to get here hands off the camera while there's no so there's no vibrations on the camera. We have our flash mode over here obviously this isn't going to do a lot of good unless there is a flash on the camera and so you'll need to put your flash on the camera too move it through the different modes there we do have a red eye reduction mode which I'm not a big fan of because that delays the shutter release a little bit and you kind of miss the moment second curtain which could be a fun little special effects mode and you can go in and manually set the flash haven't really worked with camera locked with flash and more of a natural light guy with this type of camera but it's there if you need it next up we have our auto focus mode this one's pretty important if you're focusing static subjects subjects that are not moving or action and as great as this camera is it is not a great action sports camera so if you were trying to track athletes moving towards you or away from you it technically khun do it but it just doesn't do a very good job so don't expect too much out of the camera so we have single auto focus which is where a lot of people are gonna leave their camera set at because it is very fast when it is on sadiq subjects and then we have the continuous mode which you may want to go to for subjects that are moving we have manual focus which is very good of course and then we have s a f e m s and what that means is it's single out of focus with manual override if you leave your finger down on the shutter release and it focuses you can then go in and manually touch it up and adjusted some people might like that mode if you don't like the way the camera is focusing and you want a little bit of manual override now the continuous autofocus with t r is tracking and what's going on here is that if you choose let's say you choose the little box in the middle to focus on that box will start moving around the frame tracking your subject if you're in the continuous mode it's going to stay on that one box right there in the middle and so you have to think is my subject going to be moving away from that box or not? I have not done a lot of action photography with this, so I can't vouch to how good that is but that's what it's doing next up? We have our auto focus target now we were able to do this on the back of the camera simply by pressing the up and down arrow, but we can go in here to the super control panel and have access to it, which might be a little bit easier to make those changes but it's the same changes we've already talked about and then we have a separate control for turning off the face detect modi usually leave this turned off the color space is the range of colors that were recording I would recommend changing this to adobe it's a larger color gamut you're not going to notice any difference on the web, but if you do some printing and you shoot j pegs, you'll have a little bit wider range of colors to work with. If you shoot in raw, you are going to get the larger adobe color space anyway it's just part of shooting wrong and then once again for the j peg shooters you can change the gradation, the highlight and shadow area I recommend not touching this as well as not touching the saturation, but you can go in and do all these in camera tweaks, but if you don't have a computer to work with, you don't have software, you could do it and tweak it so that it does look better coming straight out of the camera because there are some people who may want to shoot with this camera either don't have access to a computer on a regular basis or they just want their j pegs to look more like they want him to look like and you can go in here and you're going to need to do some practicing and testing to see what style works for your photography but I want it tweak it too much just cause I like to shoot as clean as possible in camera bottom half of this we have stabilization mode now, as I said before, this camera is a fantastic stabilization note I normally leave it in ice one, which is a standard mode. If you are panning horizontally, you don't want the camera counterbalancing you're smooth pan, and so you would want to goto eyes too. If you are panning with the camera in a vertical manner, you need to go toe I s three and so these air kind of hard to remember, but they are important if you like to do panning shots with your subject for most people, I asked, one is where you're gonna want to leave the camera most of the time does a great job right above that. If you have a flash attached, you can adjust the power of the flash and if you're going to use the supplied flash that came with a lot of these, this little guy here it's not very powerful, but even though it's not very powerful, it'll often over exposed subjects in front of you. So if you're doing a little fill flash, I would highly recommend powering this down like I do have on the keynote here to minus one some people will go from minus two thirds of a stop, but just powering that down a little bit so that you're not blasting your subject with too much light the record mode this is where we get into the raw and j peg option and so we of course have a raw option in this camera, which is where I recommended everyone who wants to get the most out of their images set because the camera's not doing anything to the image it's going to give you the straight true image that I've got but you can also shoot j pigs which are very, very practical for a lot of uses and we have different sizes we have large, medium and small size is we have fine and normal quality compression. If you are shooting j peg, chances are you're going to want to shoot the highest quality j peg you khun you can get out of the camera, which would be the large fine setting if you need smaller file sizes, you can set that as need be, but I generally recommend shooting either raw or large fine. There are some special situations where you may need to shoot rob, but you also want to jay pick out of there and you can set the raw plus j pegasus well and when we get into the menu system, you'll see how that you can really customize the j pecks. You can choose exact pixel dimensions if you have a very specific need for pixel size on those j packs next up we have aspect ratio the camera has a sensor that is a four by three aspect ratio, so if you want to get everything that you're sensor is grabbing, you want to leave it on four by three but if you want to match hd tv, for instance, you would need to shoot sixteen by nine if you want to shoot like your cannons night cons, which use a three by two ratio or one by one and a half it's going to crop off and not record a little sliver along the top of a sliver along the bottom, I generally like to record with as much information as the sensor can get it get its hands on and so I'm going to leave it at four thirds and crop later, but there might be times where it's nice to see the crop in camera. We also have a square crop and a weird vertical within horizontal crops, so you don't have to turn the camera vertically to shoot a vertical, but you're cropping out a lot of pixels and so your file size is going to be reduced in size but it's an option but an assignment you can get in and start controlling how the cameras buttons are customized and so this is going to be probably the quickest way to go in and do this we're going to talk a little bit more about it when we get into the full menu system and then down along the bottom you have your basic shooting information what should he mowed shutter speeds apertures and the rest of the goodies down there and so that is the super control panel so that's where you're gonna be able to go to change most of the basic features on the camera and so that's the first half of the class so we'll take some questions and then we'll take a short break let's check in with questions, all right let's do that way have several all certain okay, dave t of michigan he's a regular hair creative live high dave he wants to know does the camera feel unbalanced if you put a larger lens on it? Um I guess I haven't put on a really large legs. Let me take it off the tripod here for just a moment. So the biggest lens that I asked kind of a great thing is everything is so small and I suppose if you put on a really large lens so this lands is a three hundred millimeter lands. And so if I'm in the camp camera went to sleep they think I'm happy it went asleep and so let me put this into a fairly simple cameras not set up the way and so I am tight end on susan and not even on krista here, all right and so on and so uh play that back so you can see how tight and we're going out it's hard to tell the distance we have huge studios here a creative lives just like a mile way but getting back to the original question this is the biggest lens that I have on it I mean, this feels perfect like this it might actually feel awkward with too small of lance with the little forty five, which is a nice portrait lands put this on there it's it's small I mean, the camera in some ways is is a little small for may I mean, I almost wish it was a little bigger, but it's it's pretty good uh and so get myself and so not nearly as close here, so let me play this back and see if we can see this uh this feels very comfortable and so I haven't put any bigger lenses on it, but I could potentially see with a three hundred to eight nikon lands and an adapter it's going to seem a little awkward, but I think with most of lenses that are designed for it, it seems fine. So maybe just one more clarification question I know we're going to break pretty soon, but somebody wants to know david t of michigan wants to know he wants you to clarify the the file format so it doesn't shoot raw images oh it's you j peg shoots raw it's the olympus version of raw, which is different than icon, which is different in canada but it is a raw that photo shop and light room aperture and all those mean photo programs understand and know how to read and so you can download and work with him like a regular raw image excellent that's exactly what he wanted to hear. Okay question from darren keast who said on image stabilization do you keep it on or off for long exposures on a tripod since it is in the camera if on which setting yeah, this gets to an interesting little dilemma and that is on night constant cannons it is recommended that you turn off the stabilization because what's happening is it's built in the lands and there's lens elements and they're moving around kind of looking for movement and when you have the camera perfectly still and these lenses air moving around, they cause blurriness and so I've done some testing maybe not the end all be all testing, but I've tried working with this on a tripod, turning the stabilization on and off and I can't see a sharpness difference, so I leave it turned on all the time and there are some customized ways that you can work with stabilization that we'll get into the menu system, for instance, you can leave it stabilized when you press halfway down on the shutter release or on lee when you take the picture which might save a little bit of battery power but I like that stabilized looked kind of it kind of enables you to really line things up and then when you look through there how steady it's holding things it's amazing a little bit more battery power but I like it so this isn't a question but I just saw this pop up in the questions chat room rhett says overall excellent presentation and content exactly what I personally was looking for so they're learning along never know what they're expecting when they tune in well yeah doing great good all right we have a couple more minutes less us let's ask another question this is a question from photo joseph and the question is I find the jpeg compression and noise reduction to be excessive in this camera and so far haven't found a way to adjust that just high low quality settings anyway to tweak that issue raw plus j peg so have the raw but which the j pens looked better yeah to be honest with you I haven't shot a lot of j pegs with this and so I don't have a solution for fixing that problem I think that I have heard of that issue from other people and that's why a lot of people are just shooting raw and you've got to get your workflow your your set of steps set up so that you download the raw. You could potentially have that sent through some noise reduction automatically, even on importing within light room and in some cases. And so I don't have any magic solution for that person, unfortunately. And so she, ron fix later.

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

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