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
Bottom Controls
Let's take a look on the bottom of the camera. We have our standard tripod socket which is a quarter 20 plug. Works on all standard grip and tripods, monopods accessories. We have our lens toggle and our bottom cover which will then come off. It's a little different design than on most cameras but it's very traditional with Leica cameras. We have our battery compartment and a little battery release switch to get the battery out of there. It uses a rather large battery. It has much better battery life than almost any of the other M Leicas out there. The BP-SCL2 is your standard battery pack. You'll get anywhere from 500 to 1,500 shots depending on your power usage and the rest of the way you shoot with your camera. It comes with the BC-SCL2 charger. It's gonna blink green when it's charging. When it gets 80% full, it'll give you a little indication that it's mostly full. When it is completely full they'll have both of the lights turned on. If there is a problem, they will both be blinki...
ng at the same time. The battery charger comes with a long cumbersome cord in some ways. A way to get around it is with an X after market accessory right angle plug adapter. I have a couple of these here. Let me grab them 'cause I wanna show you what this looks like. With the standard charger, if you wanna travel with the minimum size, this is your standard charger for the M240 camera and it's got this long cable that plugs into the top and comes out of it. What you can get is you can get a number of different adapters. Leica makes this which is called a duck head adapter and maybe you can see why it's called a duck head adapter. There's also a right angle adapter like this. These are types of items that are available on Amazon and some other sites pretty, pretty easily to get. What's gonna happen is this is gonna plug right into here. Let me set this down. Plug into here and then this whole unit will plug into the wall. It's a fairly compact system. Of course you can pull this out and it's very smooth and easy to transfer with. Both of these work. It's got just enough room to plug it in and that works really well. I knew that I would lose these so I bought about four of these for $12. They're pretty cheap and easy to get and they're useful on a variety of things 'cause there's a lot of camera manufacturers that don't have travel adapter plugs in there. I think that's a good little accessory that you can find and pick up on your own that isn't too much money. Cheapest accessory ever for the Leica probably. When the bottom cover is off, you're likely to get a warning if you try to turn the camera on telling you that you've left the cover off. You wanna get that on there. There is a couple of options. If you do like grips on your camera there is a Leica handgrip M. This is a nice little way of getting just a little bit more finger purchase on the front of the camera to give you a little good grip on there. Put that and the finger grip on the back and you'll have a really good handle on your camera. On that there is a little screw hole on the side and that's where you can put this finger loop. They make three different sizes, small, medium, and large to fit different size fingers on there and that once again is just a good way of having a nice handgrip especially for those of you who don't like wrist straps or shoulder straps on your camera. There is a more...advanced version of that handgrip in the multifunctional hand grip. This has a GPS receiver in there which will add GPS data into the camera using the port on the bottom of the camera. On the back of the handgrip are four different ports that you might wanna use. USB for downloading images from the camera to the computer. DC in, so if you're trying to power the camera for studio or technical work. A PC socket for connecting up to studio strobes and an SCA flash terminal for hooking up for different types of flash units. This is gonna sell for more money. The basic grip runs around $300. The multifunction grip is gonna run around $900 at current prices. It does give you more features and that GSP feature. It's very interesting. It's nice when it's working but from what I've seen on it, it can be a bit slow on picking things up. Picking up a GPS signal make take several minutes depending on how clear the environment is around you. Of course in here we also have our memory card options. It takes the SD memory cards. If you do not have one in the camera, it's gonna give you a little warning that there's no card in there. With these cards they do have a lock switch on the side. Be aware that this gets bumped and you won't be able to record or read information off the card. There are different size cards. That's the SD, the HC, and the XC option. The maximum speed of the card is not gonna matter too much on this camera. The camera is relatively slow at three frames per second but one of the things I have found is that if you do have a faster card in the camera, the start up time is a little bit faster. The time from turning the camera off to on and being able to take your first photo will be a little bit faster when you do have a faster card in the camera. If you are shooting video, you might wanna pay a little bit more attention to the minimum speed. Most cards these days are gonna be more than fast enough for the video that gets shot in this camera. You just need a class six or faster. Most cards on the market now and going forward are gonna be faster than that. For downloading your images, you're most likely gonna wanna use a card reader. If your computer has a card slot, that's gonna work very well. One of the things you'll wanna be sure of is formatting your SD cards. Anything that's new to the camera from a different brand or brand new or from even a different Leica. Probably wanna format the card in here. Be aware that that does delete all your photos. Don't do it on anything that's important. Just do that on a card that you wanna clear off all of that information.
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!
Student Work
Related Classes
Camera Guides