Lessons

Lesson Info

Camera Controls: Back Side Controls

Well, we are in the middle of kind of doing a walkthrough on the outside of the camera and we are continuing on to the backside now. So let's go ahead and take a look at what we're dealing with on the backside of the camera. First and foremost is the electronic View Finder they put a very good View Finder in here. It's gets up to 120 frames per second if you want, there's an option in the menu that will be able to select to turn that on for tracking fast action, which is quite nice. There is a little diopters not visible in this view right here but just on the backside of that eyepiece is the Diopter which is really important. A lot of people get bumped and they look through the View Finder and it's not totally clear. You just wanna adjust that so that you can see the numbers and the information in there nice and clearly, has nothing to do with the final photos it's just your viewing experience. The Eye Cup is removable and replaceable after years of use the soft rubber which is nice a...

nd comfortable against eye, may wear out in time and so that can be purchased for very little about of money. Next up, what do we have, we have the large LCD on the back of the camera, which is also a touchscreen as I had mentioned before. And from there we have the monitor switch which allows you to switch back and forth between the electronic View Finder and the LCD. Now the normal operation is that the Eye Sensor will sense when you're holding your eye up to the View Finder and we'll switch over to that EVF but if you would prefer to go manual with it, you can hold down on the monitor button, this is a little bit of a secret feature not a lot of people who have Olympus has realized this, which was me before I read the instruction manual. I hold down on that and you can switch the IVF on and off and so that is a good way if you know that you don't wanna turn it on or if you want to have it specifically on or off. Let's take a look in the View Finder itself to talk about what we see in the frame. First off, there are three different styles of framing which use up different areas in the View Finder. And with these options, I am drawn to a couple of these and first thought is I want my image as large as possible which would be style three but also I don't like numbers and clutter over my composition, because then I can't see my image as well which brings me to style two. And so I tend to prefer style two but that's just me, I can completely understand wanting style three and getting the largest image area possible. These can be chosen in the custom menu under I for the EVF and the EVF style. Next up, you will see focused frame brackets according to the size of frame brackets that you have chosen. And so you'll see little black boxes where you are going to focus green if you are actually focusing and it has been confirmed that you have achieved focus there. When you're in the continuous focusing modes you're gonna see a variety of other brackets depending on whether your subject is tracking it, whether you're pressing halfway down on the shutter release or whether the camera is not able to figure out what that specific subject is. And so in those tracking modes, the camera can actually track a subject left right all around the frame and you'll be able to see that very clearly on screen if it's engaged in that tracking or not. One of the nice things on style three is that you can get it to see image only. So this is the maximum image size that you can see in the View Finder. Now you're gonna be able to cycle through different views and looks and you'll be pressing the INFO button on the back of the camera to cycle through those different looks. And just I like to say there's nothing ever hurt by pressing the INFO button, you can always just press that to cycle through the different options. The exposure information will be down along the bottom, the main important shutter speeds apertures light meter and so forth will be down there, and so you'll see that in most all situations. Then there is a bunch of basic information, I'm not gonna go through every bit of detail here, I will put it up on screen for you to see. In general, these are all general parameters that you should be aware of on a regular basis to see if they are set in the correct way that they are supposed to be set because if they are set in an unusual manner, it's going to possibly not allow a lot of other functions to work on the on the camera. For instance, if you have the camera in the pro capture mode, there are certain things that are gonna work and certain things that are not going to work. And one of the kind of common problems with the modern digital camera is turning on a particular feature that then limits you in what you can do with other features and then trying to figure out what's the feature that's causing the problem. Well, this is a good place to check to see what's turned on and what's turned off and that may be the source of conflict with other features throughout the camera. The INFO button will have a number custom options that you can choose from. As you cycle through the different options, one option is always going to be image only but you're going to have some custom options that you get to choose what comes up in the frame. And so these custom options, there's one and two and you can choose three different things to be in either one of these two custom modes. So we also have something called a Field Sensor Info, which is gonna show you additional information, so let's look at what these different bits of information are. The histogram is gonna show you a visual representation of the brightness of the image that you are seeing. This is, in my opinion, much better than the standard or traditional light meter, gives you a lot more information as to where the highlights, the shadows are the main amount of information and there's gonna be a sub grouping a Green Mountain of information and that is showing you where the spot meter is reading light. And so you have actually two histograms in one in this particular case. Next up is highlights and shadows and what happens here is that there will be blink ease in orange and blue to show you where the highlights and shadows are potentially clipping in a particular exposure reading. This can be very helpful for getting understanding and how to change your exposure to get a better quality exposure. A low level gauge is there to help you make sure that your camera is tilted in the proper direction for getting an even horizon line. And the Field Sensor, this is something new that I haven't seen on many cameras before. There are many cameras that do have GPS, but this will actually show you the information right in there and as far as I know, this is the first camera that shows you what temperature it is outside. And so if you want to find the temperature, you can have this turned on and see what temperatures, I don't know where the temperature gauges in the camera and how much it's affected by sunlight, but from my rudimentary test, it seems to be pretty accurate so it's pretty good. It'll also show you the elevation and the air pressure so you might be able to do some weather forecasting with this camera to some degree. So all of that information can be customized in the custom menu under EVF for info settings, and so you can go in and customize which ones on custom one, which ones on custom two and then as you press the INFO button, just the right amount of information will show up at any particular time. We also have a great deal of customization with different types of grids that you can turn on. First off, there's different types of grids for architectural or landscape lighting the horizon. Sometimes when I'm shooting photos, I wanna know where the exact center of the frame is and so there's some ones in there that are very good for that. So not only can you choose different styles, you can choose different colors and you can choose different opacity levels. If you want them to be kind of subtle in the background you can lower the opacity settings, if you dive into the menu under custom menu EVF/EVF Grid Settings, you can control all those parameters to get just the type of grid setting that you want. So there's a lot of things going on when it comes to the EVF in the camera. Next up is our Function Button. There's a little color around it, which we'll talk about in a moment but the button to start with is a general function button and to start with it, the button itself is for controlling the focus area. So let's talk about where this camera focuses and how to control it. (clearing throat) To start with, it has 121 targets so there's 121 different boxes where it's focusing, it's a hybrid contrast and phase detection system here. So it's using the contrast off of the sensor, it's using Face Detection pixels on there, which is very quick at picking up exact distances. And one of the other little tidbits that's not real well known is that this is horizontal and vertical detection. There are some other companies which will remain nameless at this time, there are large brands, very very large brands that only detect, I believe it's vertical subjects, they don't detect horizontal subjects and so it's very hard picking up on certain types of lines. This is a very very highly sensitive system that does very good and one of the reasons why it's so good at tracking motion in here. So what you would do is you would press the function button to activate this particular part of the camera, you can then use the arrow pad for moving left and right up and down. If you have a focusing point, you can move it to any selected area. If you want to change the size of your target, you would turn the front dial and there's small medium and larger sizes that we're gonna talk about next and you can go in and just kind of flip through all the different options in here. So let's take a look at the different options we have for the different targets. The first option is All Targets. And so this is a grid of 11 by 11. This would be very general purpose if you do wanna focus on pretty much anything the camera is pointed out, it always wants to pick up on whatever is closest to the camera. For the more discerning photographer, you would want to choose a single target so that you could be very specific about where it is and of course, you can move it to any one of those different hundred and 21 positions. If your subject needs to be even more precisely focused, you can choose a small target which cuts the size of the target size, about in half. For targets that are a little bit larger or targets that may be moving a bit, the five target group is one of the first of several areas that you might wanna go to for a moving subject. The next would be a nine target area. This is one of my favorite for focusing on general moving subjects. For subjects that are a little bit more erratic, you can go with a larger area, like the 25 point. This is good for maybe birds in flight that are very erratic but also very quick in their movements. And finally, one of my favorite features is the custom feature which allows you to custom build your own focusing points and ways of moving around it. Now in order to do this, you need to dive into your custom menu under a to auto focus manual focus and go into the mode settings and turn on the custom options and then you need to select and control the settings. And since I think this is so fun and cool, I wanna do this right now to show you how to do this. So we're gonna dive into the custom menus of the camera a little bit here. So we're gonna be jumping ahead for just a moment. So let me go ahead and turn the camera on, let's show you what the camera normally does when we press the function button. So we press the function button, right now we have a single point, small point, there's our five, 25 everything back down to one. And so I'm gonna go into the menu and I'm going to turn on the custom options and I believe I said this was in A2 mode settings and you'll see here is we have all single five point, nine point. And here's the custom one and custom two, and you can scroll down because you see the scroll bar over on the right hand side and I can turn on all four of these if I want. Then I'm gonna hit menu and back out of this and then I'm going to come down to target mode settings. Hit the OK button in here and I can customize any one of these four, I'm just gonna do one as an example to show you. And to be honest folks, I had been working with Autofocus cameras for 30 years, and not one camera has designed a focusing system, which seems so logical and obvious to me way back 30 years ago and nobody's ever done it and finally I can do it on my own camera now. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna go in here to the right, and we're gonna choose the size of the focusing area. Now we can choose single point, all the way up to full vertical, we can go horizontal. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do an in between size of three by three, I think that's a good size focusing bracket. I know we already have a three by three but that's fine I'm gonna do something else unique here in a moment, I'm gonna hit OK, we're gonna come down to step. Rather than using all hundred and twenty one points, I'm gonna reduce the number just down to three and down to three. This remind you of the rule of thirds at all, it will in a moment perhaps. And so we're gonna press OK, we're gonna back out of this. So now I'm gonna press the shutter release to kick out, press the function button to go back in, let's dial through our options, single, small, five, nine, 25 and boom here we have our three point nine focus and with one press of the button, I can go from the middle to the upper corner to the lower left. And so I can do my rule of thirds type focusing here, love it or hate it, it's very valuable and I can get a nice wide focus point. Now if I wanted a smaller focusing point like one or larger five, I could do that. If I wanted to, I could do a whole row of focusing points all the way across the screen from left to right, which would be perfect for focusing on UFOs, or tall and skinny all 11 points for really tall and skinny people or whatever you want to do. It does need to be symmetrical, you can't choose like one point over on one side and three points over on the other. So design your own custom features, choose where and how quickly you want to get to those by moving the steps access in there and get that customized because I imagine that everyone's got their own idea of what might be good, just like I do. Alright, so those are the different target areas that we can choose. Beyond the target size, we can also choose to use Face Detection. And Face Detection is just what it sounds like where the camera detects faces and will automatically focus on those faces. We do have different versions, straight old Face Detection, or you can have it actually looked for the eye or specifically the right eye or the left eye. This can be really good for portrait photography in wanting to nail focus, I would recommend using the eye detection in most of those cases because it will do a better job than the standard Autofocus system. However, I would leave this turned off for general photography, so that that doesn't accidentally catch on when you're not intending it to. So it's good feature to use if you do a lot of people photography. Next up let's talk about the Function Lever. We have a number one and number two position and this is one of these customizable pieces that can be adjusted to your needs by going into the custom menu and the function lever option and choosing what it does. And what you'll find in there is that you have three different modes or you can turn it off so that you don't even need to use it. When it's in the first mode, which is kind of the default position, the function one mode is for changing shutter speeds and F-stops with the dials the front dial and the back dial. When you flip it down to two, you can quickly change the ISO which is good for general photography. Mode two is an AF toggle. So this might be for people who have different types of AF modes that they wanna switch between. Maybe in one case, you wanna be very precise with a single point. But you're also shooting action and would like to have a nine point focusing system. You can program the camera to mode two set up your Autofocus in each of those situations so that you can just flip the switch to quickly change different focusing modes. Mode three is you can quickly switch between stills and movies, and for those of you who do shoot a lot of movie or video, it's a good way to click back and forth rather than turning the dial on the top of the camera. If you're the type of person that just bumps this dial and it just doesn't do anything for you, then you can just completely turn it off. And so you can do all that in the custom menu under the function lever option. Now you can also turn it into another option, you can actually make this the power switch of the camera. Some people do not like the fact that the power switches over on the left side of the camera and requires your left hand to operate it. If you want to be able to turn the camera on and off with your right thumb, you can do so by turning this into a power lever which is also in the custom menu controls. Next up is the auto exposure lock and AFL button. This is designed for locking the exposure, there's actually two of these buttons, one for vertical and one for horizontal. And so if you are in an aperture priority, shutter priority or program mode, this will lock the exposure. Funny enough, the AFL doesn't lock the focus on this particular button, you can get it to control the focus. If you do wanna lock the focus, there are custom buttons on many of the pro lenses and possibly some of the other lenses but definitely all the pro lenses. And there's also other buttons on the camera that you can program as a focus hold feature if you do wanna use that as a focus Hold OPTION on the camera. Next up, the Rear dial we've talked about this before in the playback mode, you'll see things related to playback in blue. And so this is how we can zoom in on our subjects and pull back and go into thumbnails so that we can see a greater number of images on screen all the way back to a calendar of days that different pictures were taken. The Multi selector there are two of these, this is for mainly moving the focusing point but you'll also find that this works for navigating in some of the other menus as well. The INFO button controls what you see on screen and it's either gonna pull up more information or push it away so that you can see just the image. By pressing the button multiple times, you'll be able to cycle through different amounts of information, you can dive into the custom menus to control what sorts of information you will see by cycling through that INFO button. If you don't like a particular set of information, you can turn it off in the custom menu. The card access lamp is gonna let you know when the camera is writing to the memory card. Most importantly would be Do not disturb the card when this is blinking and so if you've taken a rapid series of a lot of photos, it's gonna take a little while to download all those images to card. Probably don't wanna turn the camera off but the camera will continue to store them even if you do turn the camera off. Definitely do not wanna open the door and take the card out of the camera if that light is still on. The arrow pad we've talked about many times before it's generally for navigating, you can use it for navigating the menu, you can also move the focusing points, so it'll be used for a lot of different features. The OK button is used for confirming features that you are selecting within the menu, but it also allows you access to a shortcut menu called the Super Control Panel I'm going to talk about that at the end of the section on the backside of the camera 'cause it dives into features I don't wanna double up on ahead of time. And so we're going to talk more about that in just a few minutes. The Playback button obviously plays back images that you have already taken on the memory cards. When you do this, the camera really does kick over into a very different mode and a lot of the buttons and dials change mode. Obviously the erase button down there on the left is gonna be used for deleting images off the memory card. You can use the arrow pat on the back of the camera to go to previous and next images as well as the dial on the front of the camera whatever one is easiest for you to use. There is a lock key the AEL button and what that does is that prevents images from being deleted in the camera. It's not a super secure form of protection because you can still format the memory card, you can still take the card out and lose it and reformat it and computer and so forth. So it's a low level kind of a first level line of protection from an image being deleted. You can use the back dial of camera to zoom in and out if you wanna check focus or you wanna look for images within a large group of thumbnails. So with the INFO button and playing back images once again, you can hit the info to select different groups of information, you can look at just the image, you can pull up more information, the overall display is one of my favorite because it gets to show you various settings like shutter speed, aperture, exposure, compensation, what you actually did during that particular photograph can be very handy. Judging the exposure the histogram can be very handy to look at as well, good thing to have turned on. Not all of these will be turned on by default as you get the camera new out of the box and so you're going to need to dive in to turn some of this stuff on. We have the highlights and shadows that we talked about before in live you can also be seen in playback, the field sensors showing you various information about where the picture was taken, elevation and so forth can also be seen here if that information is turned on. And then the Lightbox is kind of unique on this it allows you to compare two images side by side, you can go in and do close up comparison. So if you're doing a portrait and you take a number of photos you wanna see which one is sharpest, you can pull them up side by side, zoom in together. And so the base image is on the left, the selected images on the right, you can scroll through your different images with the common controls on the camera and then press the OK button to kind of move an image to the left as the base image that you're trying to compare with. And so using the left and right to go through your different images, you can also use the front dial for that as well and then you can zoom in on the back of the camera. And so let me go ahead and show you that real quickly on this camera because I think this is an interesting feature. And so let's go ahead and take a couple of photographs I'm gonna take one here, and then I'm going to manually unfocused but try to get it kind of close, and we're going to see which one's sharper here. Take this picture here so I've taken two pictures, I'm gonna hit Playback, I'm gonna hit INFO until I get two images side by side. All right, so I've got one image let me see if I can scroll around. So here's one image and the second image and I wanna zoom in to see which one of these two images surface and you can see one's definitely quite off here. And when I zoom in, and if I want to I can move this lock feature, this function and I can move which area I am zooming in on, so that I can zoom in on different areas simultaneously. And so I can move this around and this is a good way of judging images out in the field and that's just by going into the info. Now this may not work for you right out of the gate because as I said, you do need to go in and turn this feature on within the menu system. And to do that, what you do is you dive into the custom menu under D1 display under info settings, there's some checkboxes and I would encourage you to check them all off to start with, see which ones you like to use and then uncheck the ones that you don't use as you move further on it throughout the camera. When in playback, you can hit the OK button to edit images. This is something that normally I would save till after the fact until I'm on my computer when I have a good big screen and lots of tools for editing your image. But if you want to go in here, you can do an edit to an image, if you want, one of the interesting things that you can do is you can do an audio recording and so let's go ahead and do an audio recording on a playback image. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit playback and find an image, doesn't really matter, we'll just take this image here, I'm gonna hit the OK button. And one of the things I can go down to is the microphone and then I can hit okay and it's gonna allow me to record a message. This is my favorite picture of the day, all right and so now when I hit playback. This is my favorite picture of the day. Allows you a little note, and let's say if you're traveling and you take someone's photo and you said, Hey, tell you what, let me email you this photo just a moment, let me just have you tell my camera this is your email address that way you don't have to write anything down and you don't have to take any notes and so if you just want to remember something as a quick little audio note, it's a great little tool to have that you can access later on. So next up is in the movie mode, you can go back and you can edit your movies here, you can play them back, there's gonna be some basic controls as far as going right to fast forward, you can go left to rewind, the OK button is for both pause and play on that. You can use the up and down for controlling the volume and then you can use the front in the back dials as well for controlling going through it as the videos as well. Next up is the lock button on the back of the camera. So with a camera with vertical controls, they sometimes get bumped, not hit and trigger and do things that you don't intend them to do. So if you would like to lock the vertical controls because you bumped them in the way that you handle the camera, you would flip this switch in the upward position to lock off the vertical controls that you see indicated on the right side of the screen. Under normal operation where you want to have access to all the buttons you leave this in the unlocked position. But there's a lot of buttons that you might hit on the camera and so this camera Of course allows you to customize the locks. So you can go into customize lock settings and choose which buttons will be locked when you put it in the customized lock feature. Perhaps you would like the top buttons on the camera and then main dials locked up for some reason, well, you can do that by going in and customizing all the locks that could be very handy for somebody say shooting a sporting event where they know they want specific shutter speeds and apertures the entire match, the entire game, you can lock those dials in so that no matter how rough you pick the camera up and down, it's always on the right settings. Next up on the back of the camera we have a dedicated White Balance button and this is gonna be controlling the color of the light that you are recording. There is a number of preset options that are pretty obvious in their style. There's also some custom options that you have in here. So this is based on a Kelvin scale we have Sunny, cloudy and shade which are pretty common natural situations that you'll have. Incandescent is probably the most common unusual lighting situation that a photographer will deal with light is very orange and skin tones do not look correct, colors just do not look correct when you have an orange light and so if you are under this type of lighting, set it to the appropriate lighting and you are going to get much better colors in your photograph. There is special settings for underwater as well as a few others. The main one that a lot of people are going to use is auto. This is where the camera will automatically choose the correct balance based off of information it sees throughout the highlights of the scene that it's framing up. And this is gonna work pretty good for most people if you shoot raw it's gonna work fantastic because you have full control over this setting after the fact when you are shooting raw images. The custom white balance will allow you to set a specific Kelvin temperature. If you know the Kelvin temperature that you're working in, you can set that up to that specific number. And finally, you can calibrate with a white surface. And so if you are under an unusual lighting situation and you have just as simple as a white sheet of paper with you, you can essentially photograph that white sheet of paper and calibrate that white balance system to the light that you are working under. So it's got all the options you might need for getting the right color. Next button is the card button and this controls which memory card if you have two memory cards in the camera that you are either recording to or playing back from so you could have separate cards with different information and you can choose to save images to one card, you can choose to save or record images and play them back from the other card here and make those selections with this card button here. We'll have more card customization when we get into the menu system. Next step those little holes in the back of the camera are the speaker system so that when you're playing back sounds, that's where it's coming from. We talked about the Erase tool which is gonna be valuable once you're playing back images. We have a couple of little lights that will turn on when you are engaging USB charging. And so if the camera is turned off and you have power plugged in through the USB socket on the side of the camera, you can charge the batteries in the camera. It is a slower process than the standard charger that comes with the camera, but it's a good option to have so that you can charge in camera, it's a good backup for travel photographers are good option for charging multiple batteries.