Lessons
Class Introduction
05:58 2Welcome to Leica
15:54 3Shutter Speeds
12:38 4Apertures & ISO
06:30 5Accessory Shoe
06:46 6Back Side Controls
25:30 7Bottom Controls
06:24 8Front Controls
04:56Lesson Info
Apertures & ISO
Talking about the Exposure Control System, next up is the aperture. Pretty simple, there's gonna be a dial on the lenses and you turn it to the aperture you want. You can close the aperture down to a small opening like to get maximum depth of field out of the camera and the lens. You can open it up to 1. if you wanna shoot with very shallow depth of field. And so when you're changing the aperture, it is actually changing. And if I can show you, let me get my camera pointed around towards your camera so that you can see straight in the lens. And so whenever you use the camera, let's see if we can get a good angle, there we are right up at the lights. And so if you open wide open it stays wide open and then as we stop it down. Now, there is no real connection between the body and the lens when it comes to aperture as far as control or communication. And so this is gonna be something that's gonna just kind of a separate control than the rest of the features on the camera. And so this is ...
gonna be important when we get into Live View because if you are focusing in Live View by moving the focusing ring, you're gonna probably wanna have this wide open so that you can get very shallow depth of field and then stop this down to the aperture that you want. If you try to focus here you're gonna be focusing with a lot of depth of field and it's hard to see where critical focus is. And so with focusing in Live View, open it up to it's maximum aperture. Alright, next up, your ISO control. And we're gonna take a quick shortcut to the back of the camera 'cause it's controlled back here. And on this button you have to press it and hold it while turning the dial to change the ISO settings. So the camera will go, normally, between 200 and but there is an option of a PULL where it will shoot at but it doesn't have as good of dynamic range. So, I wouldn't recommend it for most of the time. I would, by default, want to keep this on and then bump it up as necessary. And on the push to 6400, we do have this extra high setting which is gonna have a lot of noise but if you really need it, you can push it there. And so I always like to do a little test and run the camera through a standard ISO test and shooting at all the different ISOs. And I don't know how well you can see your screen but 200, 400, 800 all look pretty good. 1600 is still pretty clean and 3200 is starting to show some notable grain in that case and 6400 is for desperate times. And so it hopefully won't be necessary but if you need it, you can push it there. So, obviously you wanna try to keep this as low as possible at 200 in most shooting situations. When you change the ISO, if you are coordinated enough to keep the camera at eye level, you will see the ISO changing in the viewfinder. So you can keep the camera up to your eye and change that ISO without removing your eye from the viewfinder. Now, the camera does have a Movie option which is what the M button is on the top of the camera. And so in order for that to work, you do have to have the camera in the Live View mode. And so there is an LV button on the back of the camera. Once you put it into the Live View mode, you can can press the M button and start recording movies. Now, anybody who shoots a lot of movies, well, this is probably not gonna be the favorite camera because there's just not a lot of fine tune controls for controlling how the movie is shot and frame rates and resolution and so forth. But, it is a nice feature to have in some cameras and for those of us who occasionally wanna record a little clip of video from here to there and we don't want to carry a separate device to do it, it's built into this camera and it does work just fine. One of the most important things when shooting video is getting and collecting good quality audio. And the camera's built in microphones are limited in the quality that they can get. So, Leica makes their own adapter set which will plug right into the hot shoe and get power from the camera and is very convenient and will give you stereo sound on your videos. And so that can be very handy. If you are going to be using this for video there is a Video setting in the Set menu. And you can go in and control your resolution and frame rate or if you want you can completely turn off the video if you don't like the video and you don't like accidentally hitting the button and recording video. And we'll talk more about this as we go through the class. But a few other quick notes on this is that while the camera is shooting video, if you want you can take a still image. It will interrupt and pause the video, shoot a still image and then resume the video afterwards. When you're shooting video it'll shoot in 1080p or 780p which is a 16:9 aspect ratio. So they'll be essentially black bars on the top and bottom. You will have shutter speeds 1/30 and faster, you can't select really slow shutter speeds when shooting video 'cause it's shooting at 24, 25 frames per second. And if you wanna get that 50th of a second that I mentioned earlier, that video shooters like to have, you can select that by selecting a 45th of a second. And then it will record this all into a .movie file. So let me show you real quickly on shooting movies on this camera. So, in order to shoot movies you do need to have it in the Live View mode. So, you're gonna press the Live View button on the back of the camera. There we go. So, we're in the Live View mode right now. And I don't wanna be in Bulb so I'm gonna go up here to a 45th of a second. So you can see I'm at a 45th of a second but as soon as I press the Movie mode, it's gonna change over to a 50th of a second. You can see that I don't quite have the right aperture for the right amount of light. I'll make a little adjustment, a little focusing adjustment here. And so I'm recording video in this case. So I'm gonna hit the record button to stop it right there. And we'll talk about playing videos back in a little bit. But you can set faster shutter speeds if you want. So if you wanna set a faster shutter speed, let's go 125th, it'll stay at 125th in that case. But it's the 45th that will change automatically to when you start recording and you can see those frame lines on the top and bottom come on and come off when we go in and out of those video modes.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
nancy mercury
This class was very helpful as a new owner of the Monochrome 246, even though there are some parts not applicable, most of the basic "get around" the menu and set up was extremely helpful. Very complete overview.
a Creativelive Student
call a really good class. I just bought a Leica M Typ-240 and it is my first time ever using a Leica. I have learned a great deal about how to use the camera. I do want to note an error though. In the Back Side Controls lesson at 21:52 he states to scroll through images in the magnified mode to press the menu button and the trackpad. On the M240 it is the Play button and the trackpad. I found it by trial and error after trying the menu button as instructed.
user-def74a
Very thorough and easy to follow! I have a Leica Monochrom M246, and this helped tremendously. I've taken other classes from John Greengo, and have always learned so much from him. Highly recommend!
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