Lessons

Lesson Info

Back Side Controls

Time to move around to the back side of the camera. The viewfinder. So, this is obviously where you're gonna be looking for focusing and framing your subject. If you do have eyes that are imperfect and you would like to have the viewfinder nice and clear and easy for you to see, you can get correction lenses from Leica that can screw in and correct for that. Now in the viewfinder there's a lot going on and so let's have a lot to talk about in here so let's dig in to the viewfinder a little bit more closely. First off, the focusing area is that patch in the middle. And so, that's where you're gonna have the double image that you'll kind of move back and forth so that you can get proper focus as we talked about earlier on in the class. So with the M10 we see a return to the frame selector and this allows you to see different sets of frame lines for different lenses. When it is pushed in towards the lens you're gonna get a 28 millimeter lens outlined on the edges, and a 90 millimeter in t...

he middle. So 28 and 90 come up together at the same time. As you move that rocker switch to the middle it's gonna go to the 50 and 75 millimeter frame lines. When you mount a 50 or it automatically goes to this for you. And so, this is just here for you to manually see what the other lenses that you don't have on your camera would look like if you had, if you wanna figure out what the framing is like. So there's your 50 and your 90. And then out from the body is going to be the 35 and the 135 range on this. And so, all the different options in there. Let's see if we can get all these up here at the same time. You'll never see all of these at the same time, you'll only see two at a time. Now, the thing to note is that these are quite accurate when it's for two meters away. They are based on a distance of two meters away. As you focus further away to infinity you're gonna get one to two frame lines more around the edge of what you see when you're focused at infinity. When you focus to the minimum distance which does change from lens to lens it's gonna be a little bit more to the inside. Now as you do focus these frame lines as you will see, they move a little bit up and down from the top left to the bottom right and they are trying to correct for the parallax problem of the fact that you're not looking through the actual lens, you're looking through a separate window that is nearby but not with the same point of view. But even with the corrections that they have, they stay the same size and so, you do need to adjust a little bit and your composition will be just a little bit off as you focus close and far away. And so, that might be a good reason to leave just a little extra room in some cases so that you can crop that off in post-production. At the bottom of the viewfinder is the LED information and there's not much down there but there's a lot going on. So let's take a closer look at what all these numbers and symbols mean. Starting with the numbers. Obviously you'll have your shutter speeds. So, when you are set to automatic shutter you're gonna see which shutter speed the camera is choosing in the viewfinder for you. When you are doing long time exposures or bulb exposures you're gonna see a countdown of the time in there. So if you do an eight-second exposure it's gonna count it down so you know how much longer you have for that particular shutter speed. If you are over exposed the number will blink at you. You know with cameras, anything that blinks is a potential problem so just be aware of any thing that's blinking. And so, if the 4000 is blinking that means you are letting in too much light, you may wanna change your ISO or aperture so that your camera can handle that light level. You can blink on the under exposure side as well. The longest shutter speed is 125 seconds. If it's blinking you're gonna have to make some adjustments to try to get more light in the camera. Changing your ISO, changing your aperture or trying to get more light in the environment that you're shooting. You will also see in there any exposure compensation that you've done. And so, there's a couple of different ways that you can handle exposure compensation but if you do have it set you will see it on a routine basis in the viewfinder so that it's gonna be a good warning so that you don't accidentally leave your camera, set it something in particular. If the memory card is full you'll actually see it say full and that's just letting you know that your memory card has no more space left on it. There are some arrows down here and the arrows and the circle are going to indicate whether you are over exposed or under exposed. The arrow pointing to the left means that you are over exposed by either a full stop or a half stop. The circle indicates that you are correctly exposed and then we have the arrow to the right that you are under exposed. If they are blinking you are out of range and the camera cannot figure out what's going on exposure-wise. Doesn't happen very often but it can happen. And so, the thing that's very, very handy and intuitive about the Leica camera is that these arrows are pointing in the direction that you should move the shutter speed dial or the aperture dial in order to get proper exposure. And so, back in the era of the M6, they changed the size and the direction of the numbers on their shutter speed dial so that this would coincide. And so, it's kind of different than it was on some of the older Leicas that are around, the older film Leicas. And so, if the arrows tell you to point to the right then turn the aperture to the right or turn the front of the shutter speed dial to the right. Next up we have a couple of dots. The dot above is indicating exposure lock. So if you have your camera with the shutter speed set to automatic when you press halfway down on shutter release as I mentioned before, that it locks down the appropriate shutter speed for that light reading. You'll see that light, that higher dot turn on while your finger is pressed halfway down on the shutter release. As an additional warning that you have set exposure compensation, when the lower dot is blinking you'll see that you've set some sort of exposure compensation on the camera, so that's just an additional reminder to you. There's also a lightning bolt in there. So if you do have a flash switch hooked up to the camera you can tell whether the flash is ready or if it's not ready when it's blinking. The viewfinder on this is improved over previous cameras, it's got 0.73 magnification. It's pretty easy to see with. They have a 30% larger view and a 50% improved eye relief. Now when I saw the 50% improved eye relief I got pretty excited because I know on some of the other Leicas you got to have your eye pretty close to the viewfinder. And in this case, the 50% improved eye relief is great but it seems to have moved the distance that you need to be from two millimeters to four millimeters. It's helped just not much but it's still a really good viewfinder on here. It is a little bit challenging to work with the 28 millimeter lens because the lines are so close to the edge but it is easier than previous generations so I'm happy about that. And working with the longer telephoto lenses, the 90 to some degree but especially the can be a little bit problematic because it is still relatively small in the viewfinder. I wanted to compare this to some of the older Leicas just to see what it was. If you recall that the earlier Leicas didn't have as many wide angle lenses and frame lines in there. And so, some of them did have a very high magnification like that M3. But it is an improvement over the 0. that we have had in other cases. The M6 did have a special 0.85 version but they didn't have the 28 millimeter lines in the viewfinder, so that was good for people shooting 35s. But then the 35 frame lines were kind of hard to see in there and so they actually made cameras that were a little bit better or worse at telephotos or wide angles. But now with the electronic viewfinder there is another solution to those sorts of problems. All right, we got some buttons to work with on the back of the camera. Fewer buttons than any other camera that I've seen out there and so, we have a live view button which is gonna turn on the LCD, it's gonna bring up the shutter release and turn the sensor or turn, lift up the shutter I should say and turn on the sensor so that you can see what the camera is pointed at. The LCD on the back is protected by the Gorilla glass which is a very, very strong scratch-resistant glass but they do make a cover that I'll talk about as far as protecting the LCD on the back of the camera. Right above the live view button is the brightness sensor. The LCD on the back of the camera can be set to automatic brightness and it will get brighter under bright conditions and it will get dimmer under dim conditions to accommodate for your eyes as the way they adjust themselves. Or you can manually set it yourself in the menu system on page two under display brightness. Now, the live view display can be very interesting, very good to use for certain types of photography but there's one little warning I wanna give you and that is with focusing. If you remember earlier, we talked about the lenses and their aperture settings. When you set the aperture it's set, it doesn't stop down later on. And so, if you're trying to do critical focusing it's best to do that with the aperture fully wide open at f/1.4. And so, if you are working in live view, if you are working with the EVF on the camera as well, if you really wanna get critical focusing in set the lens to 1.4, do your focusing and then stop the aperture back down to where you want because that's gonna show you the shallowest depth of field possible when you have that lens open. So, what you can do is you can use the crosshair to go up and down and change where you want to magnify in to see your subject in the live view mode. And so I wanna do a little demo here for you, we have our little prop table all set up but in order to see it a little bit more properly, I'm gonna take off my 50 millimeter Summilux lens and put on my 90 Summicron lens so that we have a little bit closer view on it. So this aside here. And so, we're gonna go into live view and let's turn the camera on and then go into live view. Try that again, there we go. Okay, so here's our subject over here. And so, if we wanna go in we can use the crosshair, so you could see the crosshair has come up and let's say we wanna focus on, what do we got, some apples over here. Let's focus in on the apples over here. And so, now I've got my target there and so, I'm gonna hit the focus button in the front of the camera, and so, I'll rotate this around real quickly just to remind you that we have the black button right in here for focusing, that's for doing the lens. And so I'm gonna hit this focus button and it's gonna magnify the image in. Get this set up right so that I have it set here. And so let's check where our crosshairs are. So that's where we wanna focus right there and I'm gonna hit my focus button. And so, now I'm zoomed in and I can adjust focus and I'm gonna set this to f/ just to show you that it's rather difficult to see exactly where the focus is at f/16. But I'm gonna open it up now and I have it in automatic shutter speed so the exposure is gonna adjust. And now I'm gonna set focus and you can see how quickly it goes in and out of focus, and we do have the peaky turned on in red right now, so subjects that are sharp and focused are red. Let's try on another subject that might have some more detail and we got some yummy fruit out here. And so, if we focus on the background you can see that shimmering on the background right there. And as we come forward we can see that shimmering there and we can turn that on and off and we can change different colors for that shimmery. And then we have different levels of magnification, we have a five times and a 10 times magnification. If we like it at five times magnification we can press this focus button in and it simply jumps back and forth between five times and normal. So normal, five times normal. It's going to five times. Let's use the dial to dial up to 10 times and now when I hit the button in the front it goes back to normal and instantly goes into 10 times. So you can have a favorite magnification set in there, control that and then we can move this around if we wanna see other things to focus on in the camera, and then zoom back. And if you want you can move those crosshairs anywhere you want. Let's go focus on a camera down here in the bottom corner. Press the focus button on the front of the camera and we can tell right away if we're in focus or not. All right. About there is where we're gonna get best focus. Hit the focus button in front and we're back to normal shooting. (shutter clicks) And can take an in focused picture there. So that's how the magnified view works in live view, that is the same way that you would work with it with the EVF on the top of the camera as well. And so that focus button is right there in the front, it's used for magnified view. If you're coming from other camera systems it's more of a function button that you can program in many different ways. Right now it's mainly controlling a magnified view. By hitting the center button over on the right hand side you can turn on and off additional information on here. And so, let's take a look at what some of these information is. So this is in the live view display, first thing is it's gonna show you your white balance. If you wanna adjust it you can dive into the menu system. The file format is telling you whether you're shooting RAW or JPEG and that can be controlled in the menu system as well. Next up is our metering system and these are all indicators just of the main settings that you have on the camera. The drive mode we talked a little bit about that one before. We have a Wi-Fi signal, let us know if it's turned on. We'll talk more about that later on in the class. We have our GPS signal, I told you about the GPS signal in the optional electronic viewfinder. The camera doesn't have GPS on its own, you got to get the accessory viewfinder for that to work. And then it's gonna show us which lens we are using and our battery level, at least a simplified version of our battery level. There'll be a better one that I'll show you here in a little bit. The exposure mode will switch between either aperture priority or full manual. Our ISO switch will be indicated on top as well and then we have our exposure meter and this is kind of split into two. There's the top half and the bottom half. And so, on the top half we have our exposure meter and on the bottom we have our exposure compensation. And so, correct exposure is gonna be with the white lines right there in the middle at zero and then we're gonna work in third stop increments of under exposure and over exposure. Now remember, the shutter speed dial works in half speeds and so, you're gonna see is kind of a different level of clicking because the apertures work in third stops. The ISO works in third stops in most cases or full stops in other cases and it's half stop with the shutter speed. So it's possible that you might click and see two marks go on the display on the camera. If it's showing you it in red that means it's more than three stops off so be aware of that. And so, as you move your exposure compensation you will see that move on the back of the camera in that lower part of the frame lines. And then finally you'll have an estimated number of images left. It's not an exact number but it is an estimated number of images left. Another option that we'll talk more about in this class is the exposure simulation. In the live view or in the viewfinder itself you can choose to have the camera show you a representation of what the final exposure is going to look like or you can have it set up so that it just shows you a nice bright easy to see image all the time. And it depends on what type of photography you're doing. For most people, the exposure simulation is probably gonna be a pretty good thing because you're gonna know very quickly and easily by how bright and dark the photo is or the image, as to what it's gonna turn out in the final print. If you're working with flash, you're working in the studio that's the time that you would probably wanna be turning this off. There is an option to turn a grid line on. This can be nice for getting horizons level or compositional reasons. Once again, this is something you can turn on and off in the menu system. There is also a live histogram for exposure information that you can turn on in the upper left of the frame which can be as I say, turned on in the menu system. There'll be a circle in the middle that you can use for spot metering. Spot metering is only going to work in live view, does not work in the classic normal view of the range finder. It's only when you are in the live view. There's lots of things going on if you do choose to use the live view option on the camera. And so, you can do that by just hitting the info button, that center button on the camera. If you do wanna protect the back of your camera Leica makes their own display protection foil for about $25. I've got that on my camera and you can actually see it, let's take a look at the back of my camera real quick. Gonna see if I can get it at an angle, you can see that there is this right here this little piece right here. It's kind of nice because any camera with a big scratch on it's gonna lose a lot of value on it and it gets very disruptive because you're looking at that for all of your images. And so, the screen here is a little bit, the actual image area, let me see if I can go in and playback an image so that you can get an idea. The actual image area, the glass screen is a little bit bigger and it's covering all of the important areas. And so, there is still some of that Gorilla glass exposed but it's on the outer edge outside of the area that your image is actually going to be on that LCD. All right, the second of our three big buttons on the back of the camera is the playback button. And so, when you hit this it's obviously gonna playback the most current or recent image. If you want to see your images on a regular basis there is the option of auto review. So after you take a photo you can choose to look at it on the back of the camera if you wanna confirm it right away. If you don't like to be distracted you can turn that off so it shoots and it conserves battery power, and you can look at it when it's appropriate for you. So that's a control that we'll see later on in the menu system. You can obviously go forward and back through the series of photographs that you have taken. If you want to zoom in you can use the dial to zoom in and then you can navigate where you are in the frame. A little secret for you, in the magnified mode, and so if you zoom in, if you press the playback and go left and right, you can go through the images that you shot. And so, let's do a little experiment here in class and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get things set up in a live view mode on our subject. And what I'm gonna do is I want to actually focus on my subject here. And so, I know this one's in focus and now what I wanna do is I wanna take another photo with the background in focus. Let's see if I can get the background in focus here. Right about there, I think the background is in focus. So I have two shots, one on the subject, one on the background. Let's playback an image. And so, we are playing back right now. And so, I can zoom in on my subject here and I can use this to navigate, and we can see that the background is sharp here. And then what I'm going to do is I am going to hit the playback button and go left and that's gonna change images. And so, now I have the image where I focused on the foreground. And I can hit the center button to pull information up and back. So what I'm gonna do is, so you can see I am on picture. Looks like I'm on picture 10 right now. Press in to playback, go left and I'm on picture nine now. And so, if you're trying to compare two photos that were shot very close together you could see which one had better focus. And so you can move this around. Let's see if I can choose different areas. And so I got that red flower right there in the foreground so now I've got this matched up. Actually I got that wrong. I got photo number and let's go back to this one here, 42 and 43. And we got our histogram up there that we're looking at for exposure information and we can jump back to five times magnification, and we can do the same thing. And then use the dial to dial back, back. Now we have a full image. Now we have all the images that I've taken, haven't taken too many images today. And so, we can navigate through a larger series of photos. If you have a lot of them you can do that a little bit more simply when you're down on the thumbnails like this. And you can zoom back in, back and forth with those controls. And so, that's a little bit about zooming in and out in the playback mode only. As you saw me do there, if you press in the center button you're gonna get a bunch of information about your shutter speed, your ISO setting. It knows what aperture lens you use as far as the maximum aperture but it can't tell you which aperture you specifically chose. And so, if you are trying to remember or you need to record that information, you'll need to record that in a notebook or in some other ways than with the camera because that information is not transmitted back to the metadata of the camera. When you're playing back an image you can hit the menu button and this is gonna allow you to delete an image in here, it'll allow you to rate or unrate images as well. The main reason that you would do that is to delete an image. And so if you wanna delete a single image or a group of images just hit playback, then menu and then you can delete any particular image you want. If you do want to rate your image with a star that will carry over to other metadata you can just go up and down to turn the star rating on or off, and this is a good way to indicate in the field an image that you do wanna remember and go back to for some reason. It'll be noted in the metadata of the photograph then. The menu is something that is, what we're gonna go through in the second half of the class. It's kind of a separate issue than the outside controls of the camera. It's where everything is buried in here and it's pretty short. I think there's like four pages and there's really not much stuff on the fourth page. And so, there's a limited number of items in here but there's some very important settings and there's a lot of menus within menus, little sub menus that can go in and have a lot of different controls. So we're gonna do that second half of this class. On the bottom we have our LED status and this is letting you know when the camera is working to store information to the memory card. And so, most important thing is don't take the battery off, don't take the bottom cover off when that is blinking at you. We've used the thumb wheel for a lot of different things. We used it for exposure compensation, zooming in and out and the menu selection when we get into the menu system. So let's talk a little bit about exposure compensation. So if you have your shutter speeds set to automatic then you can use the thumb wheel to change the exposure compensation that you have set. And so, there's a little bit of a secret and trick to this. If you wanna press the focus button which is more than just a focus button you can control your exposure on this. And so, if you wanna control the exposure you can do an under exposure or you can do an over exposure up to three stops in either direction. And if you want to you can have this dial always control exposure compensation without just pressing the focusing button on the camera. So, let me do a little demo here. Let's go ahead and activate my camera, it is in the aperture priority mode up here and I'm not going to use live view but I am gonna turn on this info button back here. And so, by turning this dial nothing is happening but if I press in on the focusing button, let's see. So yes, you can see that nothing is happening and what we're looking for is right here on the LCD. If I press in on the front of the camera, pressing the focus button and I am turning the dial, I can set the camera to under exposure or over exposure. So let's just do a manual bracket here real quick. I'm gonna leave my lens at where it is and I'm gonna shoot one picture at minus two, let's look at that one later. Hit the info button, come back on. We'll set the next one at zero. Take a photo. Info button so you can see what I'm doing and set it over to plus two. Now this is also gonna show up in the viewfinder so you could see this in the viewfinder as well. Take a photo. And so, let's play back these images and turn the information on so that we can see our over exposed, our correctly exposed and our under exposed image. You can see that information clearly up there on the histogram. And so, most important thing when using exposure compensation in my mind is return it to zero when you are done using it. So I'm gonna return it to zero right now. And so, right now it's kind of a little tricky because you do have to press in on that focusing button on the front of the camera while you are turning the dial on the back of the camera, and that with finger dexterity is just a little bit awkward with where the buttons and the dials are. And so, a lot of people who use the automatic shutter speed option, the aperture priority option will have this dial dedicated to changing the exposure compensation. There's really only two things that this dial can do if you wanna dedicate it. It's either exposure compensation or automatic zooming in when you're in live view. The directional pad is something that we're gonna be using for a lot of different features as you've seen. Rating our images, navigating the menu system, moving the crosshairs around. And so, that's something that is not a dedicated one thing it does, it does a lot of different things depending on what mode you're in. I mentioned a better place to check your battery and that is just by pressing the center button. This is a general information button on the camera. And so, you can see specifically how much battery power you have left, how many images and how much space you've used on a particular memory card. So it's a great status display, looking a little bit more closely at this. You've got your battery capacity and memory. Nice good visuals up there. Shows you exposure information, ISO, exposure and your shutter speeds. Remember, it can't record your aperture. And then we have a number of our most important settings right here on the next line of different options that you have set in the menu system which you'll be able to have more control of when we get into the second half of the class once again. And then more exposure information down here on the bottom. The lens speed and which lens you are using in which focal length, as well as the images left. And that is all with the center button on the camera. And so you can use this center button when you're just shooting regular photos, when you're in the live view mode and when you're in the playback mode. It all does slightly different things. And so, it's a pretty safe button to hit at any given time. And we'll also be using the center button for making menu selections when we get into the menu.