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Menu Functions: Shooting Menu Part 2

All right folks, we are in the midst of the menu section. We are going through all the different tabs, and talking about all the different features briefly. To talk about what they do, and how they work. So let's dive back in. And we are currently on tab number two, so it's the shooting menu number two. And the first item in here is bracketing. And this is one of these rabbit holes, if you will, that goes into a wide variety of different options. So when you see a arrow, you can always go to the right for more information or more options. And so if you turn this on, you'll go in and you'll open up the various different options in how to bracket. So the first is auto exposure bracketing. This is one of the most common and traditional ways of bracketing. Bracketing, of course, being the taking of several photos that are slightly different so that you can have a few different versions of a similar type scene. So in here, what we have is we have different frame options, and exposure value ...

options. So it depends on how many pictures you wanna shoot, and how far apart you want those exposures to be. So let's take a look at an example here. And so we can shoot with two, three, five, or seven frames. They can be various increments apart, from a third of a stop to a full stop. And the limits is gonna be either five frames at one EV apart, or seven frames at point seven EV apart. This can be handy if you're not sure about the correct exposure, or if you're doing a technique called HDR photography. We're gonna talk more about that because there's some special modes for that later on in the camera. But if you wanna shoot a variety of photographs for combining into a single photograph, this is a good technique for using that. Normally you would leave this mode off, so which is where we'll set it for now. Next up is white balance bracketing. This is not gonna matter to the RAW shooter, because you can adjust colors very easily in post-production. But if you do wanna shoot a white balance bracket series, you can do so here. Next up is flash bracketing. Flash can be very tricky in getting the correct amount of light on your subjects so that it looks natural, but still illuminates them. This is one way of shooting through a variety of samples to see what looks good in that particular situation. The ISO bracketing will change your exposure after the fact, by basically brightening or darkening the image. This is once again gonna be effective for people shooting JPEGs. It doesn't do a lot in my mind, because most images you can usually brighten or darken a stop without a lot of problems. And so I think this is gonna probably be one of the more less-ly used items in the menu system. Next up is the art bracketing filter. This is either the coolest thing ever, or the biggest nightmare you've ever encountered. The thing is, is that I think it's one of the coolest things because I teach photography and I teach Olympus cameras, and I would like to shoot a photograph with the example of every imaginable way that you can use an art filter. The nightmare scenario is when you wanna do a single photo with a single look. If you put it in this mode, it's gonna suddenly give you I forget how many, but dozens of different photos, all tweaked to a slightly different look. It's kind of the lazy way of figuring out which one you want, rather than just choosing one, you choose to shoot all of them all the time. But it can be kind of fun if you know that there's one particular image that you wanna tweak, but you don't know how to tweak it. And that's how it was intended to be used. And so you can use this as necessary, once again these are the types of things that you could recreate in RAW, if you wanted to, but they have a lot of preset stuff that you might not be able to figure out on your own, and might just be faster and easier to get to using this one. All right, focusing bracketing. This is one of my favorite bracketing options, it might be my favorite because it allows us to do something that you just can't do in regular photography. I mentioned this earlier in the bracket mode where you could turn this feature on and off, but let's talk a little bit more in depth about what this is. So, if you want a lot of things in focus, from foreground to background, you can choose a small aperture, like F 16, 22, 32, and sometimes that still doesn't get everything in focus the way you want it to. By taking several photos and combining them into one, you can have a photograph that gets everything into focus. And so let's take a look at an example here. And so we're at aperture F five point six, our foreground subject is in focus, but not our background. If we were to then take a series of photos, 12 in this case, and the final photo focused on the background, and each one capturing a different slice of that area in focus, we then combine it into a single picture. We can have everything in one picture in focus, where it would be impossible to do that with a traditional technique. And so this can be a very, very handy tool. So this is known as focusing stacking, or actually focus stacking, is an automated stacking program. This is where the camera will do the stacking in-camera for you and give you a final result. It takes eight images, saves nine images, and so it's the eight individual images and the one final image, and this is where it actually crops the image slightly, and so you wanna be aware of this. And this is one of the reasons why you may wanna use an external program if you are needing the full width of the sensor in this case. And this will do it only in JPEG. And so the focus bracketing that I like to do is usually with RAW, and I'll use an external computer to compile the data, but if you need something a little bit more quickly straight out of the camera, it can do it in here. You can control the number of shots, and you'll need to do that on an as-necessary basis. You can set the focusing differential, and this is gonna be greatly dependent on what your situation is. And you'll see how this works, I'll do a demo here in just a moment. And then finally, you can change the charge time. And so this is if you are using flash, and you want to wait for your camera to shoot so that the flash has a chance to charge up. So I'm gonna do a little example here, I'm gonna set my camera up, let me get it in the right position. I'm gonna need a foreground subject, so I'm gonna grab a little something from the shelf, put it on the table ahead of me. And if we can look at the back of my camera, we'll go ahead and turn it on. And we're in manual exposure, we're gonna zoom in and what we're trying to see is we're trying to see the foreground subject and the background subject in focus. And if I focus on the foreground subject and take a single shot, well the background's gonna be out of focus even if we, let's try stopping down all the way. I'm gonna press the depth of field preview, which is somewhere here on the front of the camera. And I can tell the background is still not in focus. So I cannot get this in one shot in focus. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a series of shots. I'm gonna do it at F eight, and we're gonna do this shutter speed right here. So I'm gonna dive into the menu. So in shooting menu number two, we're gonna go into bracketing. I'm gonna turn it on. I'm gonna go to the right, because there's an arrow. And I'm gonna go down to focus bracketing. I'm gonna wanna make sure it's on, but there's an arrow to the right where I'm gonna be able to set the detailed information. Once again, to the right. Focus stacking is where the camera compiles the information into a photograph for you. That's not what we're gonna do here. So, for the number of shots, what we're going to do here is I'm gonna increase this just a couple to 12 shots so that you can really see it going through the process. Next up, we're gonna change the focusing differential. And just for fun, we'll set this down at three. I don't know what this is gonna do, we'll see if it does the job right or not. And we're not worried about charge time, because we're not worried about a flash now. So I'm gonna hit OK, and something to remember with Olympus menu systems is you can't just exit by pressing the shutter release, you need to press OK to make sure that you are confirming turning things on. There's a few times where I've gone in, set things up, and then I exited before actually saving and telling the camera that yes, this is what I wanted to do. So now we have this all turned on, let's go back to our live view. And we could focus on the background, but with focus stacking, you wanna focus on the close subject first. So, what's gonna happen is I'm gonna press down on the shutter release, it's gonna focus and take a picture on the first item, it's then going to take 11 more photos. And I don't know if I have the focusing differential set up correctly, but hopefully it'll get the background subject in focus. And it's gonna do this all with a silent shutter, so you're not gonna hear this out loud, but you will see it on the back of the camera as the focus slowly changes. So here we go. And it's taking one, two, three, four, five, I'm not sure how fast it is. And it's continuing to shoot, I'm seeing the blinking going on, and I don't think we did the full job. And here's our final images, and you can see our image count down here in the lower right. And we'll go backwards like this. And so, we have our foreground subject in focus, but we don't quite have our background subject in focus. So we're gonna go back in, and we're gonna get this done right. So we're gonna go into focus bracketing, and I don't think I set the differential large enough. So we're gonna set it to five now. So between each shot there's gonna be a little bit greater distance between each of the individual shots. And we'll exit out. And we're gonna focus on our subject. It's gonna go through our 12 shots. Notice if the background gets into sharp focus. It's getting closer, looking pretty good there. And so now I'm gonna play back our shot. And you can see our final twelfth shot has the background in focus. Let's see if we can zoom in. And so there we are, we're zoomed in on our background, so we got that, so we knew we did that right. And as we step forward 12 pictures, let's see, we're on 96, we'll go down to 84. And we'll see that our foreground subject is nice in focus here at 85, excuse me. And so we're gonna take those 12 photographs, and then we would take them into an external program and compile them. And there's a lot of different programs like Photoshop and Helicon, and a variety of other programs that can stack photos in that way. And then you can have sharp focus from foreground to background with everything in perfect focus. Now, this does require a tripod, and it requires subjects that do not move. And so it is kind of particular in the type of subjects that you can use with it. So it has limited use in landscape photography, because things blow around in the wind. But could be very helpful for product photography, architectural photography, a variety of other types of photography of that genre. And that is our focus bracketing, which is all part of the bracketing system. Next up, HDR. So HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It allows you to shoot in very bright and dark light at the same time. And what this does is, it does two different things, and it's kind of a strange collection here because HDR 1 and HDR 2 create final photographs for you. The rest of this is just bracketing, and it's kinda like the bracketing that we've already talked about. So let's talk about those HDR images. So, if we take a standard JPEG image, and then an HDR 1 and HDR 2, we'll be able to see what it's doing a little bit more clearly if we look at the histogram of information. It's pulling the highlights in more towards the middle of the exposure, and the same with the shadow areas, it's bringing it up. And so it's trying to compress that exposure information into usable data. And so if you're in a tricky lighting situation, these would be the quickest and simplest ways to shoot with a JPEG image. Now, if you wanna shoot with RAW or JPEG, but just get individual images, you can also set the camera up to do a bracketing system. And this is very much the same as the bracketing system that's listed just above this in the menu system. You have a number of different frames, with a number of different exposure values, generally a little bit larger exposure values that you can work with, so you can cover a larger tonal range. And that is the HDR part. Next up is multiple exposures. And so, I've always thought that multiple exposures are supposed to be done after the fact, in post-production software. But the fact of the matter is, is that when you're out in the field and you're wanting to be creative, it really helps to see what half of the exposure is when you're shooting the other half of the exposure. So if you do wanna get into this out in the field, it's just another creative outlet for the camera. You can select the number of frames, and the only real option here is two frames. So you can shoot two frames and you can overlap them, one on top of the other. Auto gain is where the camera automatically adjusts the exposure for you, and this kinda depends on how good you are at setting your own exposures. Because if you are doing a multiple exposure, you are adding one exposure to another, and so that's gonna brighten up your image. And so you will need to make a manual adjustment if you are going to do that on a regular basis. And so this is where you can shoot the same image, in this case I shot this rose twice by tilting the camera once left and once right. You can choose to see an overlay, and this is gonna be on RAW, and that way you can see exactly where your subject or your previous subject is in the frame. And this can be very important for lining things up. Normally, though, I would recommend leaving multiple exposure turned off. Next up is keystone composition, and this is going to mimic what a tilt shift lens does in your camera. It's a pretty cool digital effect, and what it is designed for is for correcting many unusual point of view positioning problems. And so once you have it set in here, you can twist to the left and to the right, as well as up and down. And in this particular case, we have some keystoning with a tall building. And what we wanna do is we wanna move this up to correct for straight lines. And the correct place for this image to be, at least in a traditional sense, is right about here so that we have nice, straight lines in the architecture. And then it uses the software in the camera to fill the frame with that final image. And so here is the difference from the standard image to the keystone corrected image. And it is using that full pixel width, and so you are getting a large file size. And so it is kinda blowing this up in software, but it is giving you those results in full pixels in the output. And that's something that you would only engage on special purposes, of course. Next up is specific controls for the anti-shock and silent system. So once again, this is the electronic shutter. The anti-shock is the electronic first shutter curtain, and the silent is the full electronic shutter, which is first and second curtain. And so in here, with the anti-shock option, one of the options is to delay the actual exposure after you press the shutter. And so in some very highly sensitive situations, maybe where you have a high magnification lens, or a large telephoto lens, you want the shutter to open and then delay, wait for the vibrations to settle out, and the exposure to begin. And so this is something that would generally be used in a more scientific environment situation, not your day-to-day photography. The same thing is true with the silent mode, where it uses a full electronic shutter. The delay between when you press the shutter release and when the actual shutter capture begins, on this case. So most of the time, it's not necessary, it's a well-dampened system in here, these are only for unusual technical reasons. There is noise reduction, when you are shooting JPEG, that can be added to this. When you are using an electronic shutter there is a different type of noise than traditional noise that can affect your images. It's usually pretty insignificant from what I've seen, and so this is probably not necessary, but if you do need it, there is an option for turning it on. All right, so we're gonna dive into a little sub-menu for the silent mode, because some people use the silent mode not so much for the electronic shutter, but for the very quiet shutter in the aspect that you can really turn the camera down. And so there's some other things that you can turn on and off with this. For instance, the camera will beep when it's in focus. And if you want this to automatically turn off when you go into the silent mode, you can have that. Same thing with the illuminator on the camera. This is a low light illuminator, and when you put the camera in the silent mode, you might be trying to be really discreet and you might not want this illuminator to turn on, which would make perfect sense. Same thing is true with a flash, and so if you have a flash attached to the camera, you can have that turn of automatically when you are in the silent mode. So those are the anti-shock and silent customizations. Next up is the high res shot mode. We referred to this earlier, I showed you an example of what you can do with this, and if we dive into this we will see our menu in here. And so what this is, is this is the the time between the shutter release and the start of the exposure. Sometimes when you have a camera on a tripod and you press the shutter release, there's a little bit of vibration when you press that shutter release, and you would like a delay. And so I would recommend a delay of about two to four seconds if you were on a standard tripod and you want that vibration to settle out. Next up, if you are using flashes, the camera will shoot eight photos in the high res shot mode. If you need the flash to recycle, this will delay the time between each one of those photos being taken. Normally, I would leave it at zero seconds so it shoots all the photos as quickly as possible. You can adjust the shooting mode between tripod and handheld, and this will depend on whether you get your 81 megapixel image or your 50 megapixel image. And so if you are needing to do some documentary work in handheld, you can still get an incredibly high resolution 50 megapixel image handheld with the camera's sensor automatically doing the movement for you. But for the greatest resolution, you wanna try to be using a tripod. Next up is the live neutral density shooting. And so this can be used in the manual or the shutter priority mode. And I really wanted to do a demo in here, and I asked creative live if they would provide me with a large running stream through studio A, and they were not able to accommodate me in having this large stream through here. So I'm just gonna have to show you photos of an example of how this works. And what it does, is it mimics a neutral density filter on the camera. And so, normally, out in bright daytime, you're only able to get so slow shutter speeds. So I stopped my aperture to F 22, and the slowest shutter speed I could get down to was a thirtieth of a second. By employing the live neutral density filter on this camera, it does its own little magic that allows me to shoot all the way down to one full second without any extra actual neutral density filters or equipment necessary. And so when you come into this menu, you'll have the option of what ND filter would you like to use on your camera? And this will of course depend on what effect that you want to have, but this saves us from having to bring along a little extra equipment out in the field, allows us to do some things that we weren't able to do before in-camera. You can do a live view simulation, and if you wanna have a real trippy look, you turn this on because it then mimics what a very slow shutter speed looks like in the viewfinder. I have to be honest with you, a little stupid mistake I made is I turned this feature on, and I was working with the camera, getting the class made, and I had it pointed at a static scene and it wasn't doing anything. And I was just like, "Why is it not doing anything?" And I realized, "Oh, you gotta have something moving in front of the screen." Because that's what it's showing you the slow shutter speeds. Slow shutter speeds look the same if the objects are not moving. And so this is where you have to have a constant stream of water, or something else that's moving so that it can show you what the effect is going to be. Anyway, if you turn this on, you're gonna get a better idea of what the final image is gonna look like. And so it can be very helpful in many situations.