Lessons

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu 2

Alright, we're already at shooting menu 2, we're one fifth of the way there, not. Okay, so bracketing, we talked about bracketing earlier because there's a button at the top of the camera that does the HDR and bracketing. Well, this is just straight bracketing on its own. Now, bracketing means doing something different, you're gonna shoot a group of images that are different in some manner of speaking. Now the most common way of doing this is with exposure bracketing, shooting different exposures and you can see all the options listed here as far as the number of frames and how far apart they are in their exposure bracketing, so that when you shoot a photo that you're not sure is the correct exposure, you can shoot one over and one under and you can do this in three, five or seven images, .3, . or one stop exposure value increments. And so, this works best in my mind in aperture priority, I tend to like to do either a three or a five stop bracket with a one stop difference, that seems ...

to give me a nice collection of images that I can work with for a variety of purposes. But feel free to choose on your own as you need. You could also bracket white balance settings, this would only be really important with JPEG images. If you wanted to get a series of JPEG images of different colors, my suggestion would be, just shoot raw and adjust it as needed later, if you need to. But, it's here if you need it. You could adjust the flash power if you wanted to, I think this is something that's better checked ahead of time to make sure it's right, it's really hard to shoot a bracket series with flash with people because they're often changing expressions and so forth, but it can be done. Alright, it's not for me to decide whether it's a good feature or not, I can tell you if I like it or not but, some things just can used by more people than others. You could adjust the ISO if you wanted to. Once again, this is one of those, I'm not sure who's gonna use this, but you can do it. We have an art bracket and I've used this one a number of times, just something cause I'm trying to explain how these cameras work and what's going on here is that you shoot one photo and it gives you one version of everything and this is for the indecisive person who likes or doesn't know what they want, they can get a version of every single one of the art options, when they shoot a photograph. And then we have focus bracketing, also known as focus stacking, now this is a very, very interesting feature that I think is highly valuable for people with special needs. And so let's talk a little bit more about what focus bracketing is. Now the title cover shot of this class, of this camera, I shot in my studio, spare bedroom. From my studio and problem is, is that cameras have depth to them, from the front of the lens to the back of the camera, it's hard to get it all in focus so when I shot this photo, which was taken with another Olympus camera, I could focus on front of the lens but then the camera wouldn't be sharp. I could focus on the camera and the front of the lens wouldn't be sharp. And, even if I stopped down to f22 or 32, I can't get it right. Now the solution is, focus stacking, where the camera focuses on the front of the subject and then on successive photos, changes the focusing so that you end up with a collection of photographs that when put together in the right program, you will get everything in sharp focus. And so, one of the keys to doing this is that you do have to have an Olympus lens in order to do this. So this is not something that most people are doing on a regular basis, but it works when the camera's on the tripod, shooting something that is not moving. So, architectural or product photography, it can be very, very, helpful. Now, there are a number of options in here, this focus stacking option within here, is where the camera will automatically stack the images for you and create for you a final version so you don't need to buy any extra software. So this is kinda like the timelapse option, where it's, you have the option of all the individual images or a final finished product. Now in this case, it takes eight images and it saves nine, the ninth image is the finished, completed image. It's a composite image of all those images and it is slightly cropped and so you do have to be very careful and leave a little bit of extra space on the sides. I have tried this and once you get to learn focus stacking, you may not be totally happy with it but it's a good way to kinda get started in something immediate, right out of the box, you might say. Now, for normal focus bracketing, you could choose the number of shots that you need and this is gonna vary according to how extreme the depth of field you're trying to capture in your particular image. The focus differential is how much the lens changes its focusing from one to the next. This is gonna depend on what aperture you choose and how much you need it. It's hard to say in here, I have in many cases, done the narrowest one possible if I'm trying to get the highest quality so that each image is very close to the next and there's a lot of information for the computer to pull everything together. If you are using a flash, like you would do in product photography and the flash needed to fire on every shot, normally the camera fires these images all very, very quickly. But if you want it to delay each image to allow time for the flash to recycle, you could input that time right here. Alright, so I'm gonna do a focus bracketing right here and now. So what I need you to do is, I need you to grab a camera and I'm gonna grab this other Olympus PEN camera and I'm just gonna set this right here, at a bit of an angle to this camera and I'm gonna shoot kinda down the length of this camera, getting both the left side and the right side of the camera in focus. And so, let's get my camera turned on and I'm gonna get down here, nice and close and so, I'm gonna get my focusing plate right up here on the corner of the camera. And so, I have my camera, I'm gonna set my camera up manually. I wanna be very, very deliberate about this and so, I think the most important thing here is the depth of field and so, I don't want to stop my aperture, oops, I gotta get that flicked down. Let's get down to a nice, low ISO of 200, get my switch flicked back, my camera's not in the right place and so, aperture wise, I don't wanna shoot all the way stop down, because my lens is not as sharp when it's all the way stop down. And, I don't wanna shoot with the shallowest depth of field, there's no reason for that, let me get this locked in here, get this turned... Clear information. And so, I'm gonna choose an aperture of f8, that's a good, f8 and b there, those of you in photography know that. Now, my shutter speed, I'm gonna adjust so that I have an even exposure here and we'll actually add 1/1.6 is our fraction and actually, that looks a little on the bright side, so I'm gonna just darken it just a little bit, so we're at one third of a second, so now, I need to dive into the menu system and I need to find where we were, I think we were in number two with bracketing, so this is a little complicated and I gotta turn that off. So I'm gonna go into bracketing, to the right, I wanna turn the bracketing on, see the arrow to the right? Go to the right. Which one of these do I want? I want focus bracketing, see the arrow to the right? Go to the right. Do I want focus bracketing off or on? Ooh, another arrow to the right, wow, we're getting deep in there, folks, deep in there. Focus stacking, I'm gonna turn on cause I wanna show you what this looks like. Now, something to be very careful of, if I go in here and I say, oh yeah, I want it on and then I go back, it says off, why? Because I didn't press okay, okay, I want that. Now it's confirmed that it's on. And so, if I do this, I'm actually gonna do this twice, I'm gonna do the one where it gives us one completed image and then I'll do the individual ones. Focusing differential, I'm just gonna leave that on five, but you can that's right in the middle of the range. I'm not worried about flash. And so now, I'm gonna press the shutter release. Actually, I need to press okay, I'm gonna press okay, okay, okay. Now if I did not press okay on all those times, it might have left it turned off and so, focusing bracketing is turned on and we're gonna let it do its thing here. So it's using an electronic shutter to move the focusing, it is now compressing all of these images into one final image and so, here is our final image, here is our previous images and you can see, if we go back to the first image here, it's very sharp on the near side of the camera and as we scroll through the images, it gets sharper on the back side. So it seems like it focus through the camera pretty well, the problem with this one, is that it cropped the image a little too tight, so let's do the same thing with a more manual version of this. So bracketing onto the right, go down to focus, you can go up. Going up is like going down if you do it right and so, go to the right, go to the right, go to the right, turn it off, hit the okay, coming down, I do not need 99 shots for this. I'm gonna try 15 shots. And, hit okay and focusing differential, whoops, go to the right... Go to the right, I'm gonna bring this down to a difference of, let's do, two. Two down here, and then I'm gonna hit okay, okay, okay, okay, alright. Okay, okay. Now, I need to focus, move my focusing point where I want the camera to focus, press the shutter release and it's gonna go through 15 photos, moving the lens in its focus. You can see it's already changing in focus and those pictures are done, so I'm gonna play those back and this is where it's focused onto the background and we're at picture number and we're gonna bring it back so that the nearest side is in focus. And so, right here is our first shot at number and so if I wanna come in, you can see it, how sharp this is right here. And, as I scroll through the images, you can see how the sharpness, let's see if I can, we can follow the sharpness, oh see now, the lens is really sharp down here, let me go down a little bit further on the camera. You can see how this dial down here is not sharp, but it's getting sharper as I move my images down, now we have a really good sharpness here. I'm gonna back up here, so we can see the whole rest of the image and then, we get through to picture number 28. Now, you take those excellent blur photos, how many or they happen to be in this case, there were 15 photos and then you put them into a program like, Helicon Focus, which is a program that I use. And I press the go button or whatever it says, and it... Puts them altogether and gives me a nice little image that I can save as a JPEG or a TIFF or maybe a few other file sizes and that's what created the cover shot of this entire class of this camera. And so, it's a really cool feature for anyone who needs lots of depth of field. When you're shooting in one of these bracketing modes, does it increase the size of your final picture or is it still a 20 megapixel picture? It's still a 20 megapixel image, so it's just a group of 20 megapixel images and it just presses it altogether and what's actually happening is that, the programs are looking at, which pixels are the sharpest and it saves those, so of the 20 million, what are the best in this photo, and the best in this one, and the best in this one. And so, it's kind of like, cutting out all the different areas, but seamlessly putting them all back together. Okay, I just wanted to turn bracketing off myself, you gotta be careful about turning things on, turning things off, something else won't work on my next demo. Alright, so that's the bracketing section. Normally, you're gonna leave that off, probably. Alright, next up, HDR. So we saw this before and you can access it here as well. And so this is where you can shoot either a group of individual images, that you can work with later, which would be the bracketing, second half of that. Or you could shoot a compressed image that shoots it all in one. This is only working for JPEG images, again. You can shoot multiple exposures with this camera, this is something that a lot of people would just do in layers in Photoshop, but the nice thing by shooting it in camera, is that you can kinda see how things come together out in the field. So you can shoot a number of images, overlay them on top of each other and get an image that just doesn't exist in the real world, at least, not yet, here in Seattle, till we build those other three Space Needles. So, the things that you can do in here is, you can choose to have it turned off or to shoot two frames at a time. You can add an auto gain and an auto gain, what it's doing is, if you think about what multiple exposure is, you're taking one photo and then you're adding more exposure to it, so if you shoot a big multiple exposure, it's gonna throw off your exposure system unless you manually account for all that extra light coming in the camera. So the auto gain will automatically compensate and basically make your pictures darker, so that when you combine them, they're of a normal brightness and so, people who know how to do bracketing and handle the exposure manually, will probably leave this turned off. But if you're new to multiple exposures and you wanna easily deal with it, you leave it turned on. You can choose a previous raw image that you have shot, this is about the only time you'll see a raw only warning sign. You can choose a previous raw image to overlay onto an upcoming image. And so, in some cases, you're gonna go out and shoot something fresh, one image here, one image there and another case, you can go back to something else on the memory card and choose that to be overlaid with another subject out there, so there's multiple ways of working with this. But normally, that will be left off. Keystone composition, if anyone is aware and knowledgeable of tilt shift lens, which I love, I think they're really cool, this camera can do tilt shift, light options built right into the camera. So let me show you a little video demo of this in operation. So you can basically stretch the sides using the front dial of the camera, dialing it back and forth and then you can stretch the top and bottom of it by turning the back dial of it. Now the normal way an architectural photographer would do, is we go up, to try to get all your vertical lines perfectly straight, so right about there, is where you want things to look, as the way it would look at least on the back of the camera. And so, here is what your standard image would look like and you'll notice that the building lines are kinda pressed back and so, what the after image with the keystone compensation is doing, is that, it is stretching the top part of the frame. You are actually losing a little bit of quality because it's taking a certain number of pixels and it's kinda throwing them out and it's stretching the ones that are there. But it does get you that effect and to my knowledge, there's not a lot of tilt shift options available, especially for somebody who wants a fully compatible lens with this camera. And so this is a way for doing the tilt option at least, not the shift op- excuse me, this is doing the shift option, not the tilt option, relatively inexpensively, all built into the camera so, cool option to potentially use there. Normally, of course, gonna be left off. Alright, then we get into our anti-shock and our silent modes, and remember, we've talked about this before in the drive settings, the anti-shock is the first electronic shutter curtain. The silent is our dual or our full electronic shutter curtains. And so, this is where you can go in and specify how these work. With the anti-shock, the reason this was first developed in mirrorless cameras was to avoid shutter shock from the shutter opening so quickly it caused a vibration throughout the camera, the photo then being taken had a little bit of a blur cause the camera was moving around. So they thought it'd be good to have a little bit of a delay when this was activated and so, you can set it relatively short, like an eighth or a quarter of a second for hand held work. Or if you're working from a tripod or some other sort of, stabilization system, you might set it at two four or some other length of time. In the silent mode, you have the exact same option, it's how much of a delay between the pressing of the shutter and the actual start of the exposure. You could choose whether to have a special noise reduction added to those images taken in the silent mode. The silent mode tends to have a little more noise than when you're using a mechanical shutter and so you can choose whether to put this in auto or off. Getting into the silent mode settings, so when you put it into the silent mode, one of the options is because you actually want the camera to be quiet, more than anything else, and so you can tell the camera to turn off the beep, and I'm very pro-silence and anti-beep, and so, I'm all for turning off the beep. So I say, turn that off. But this is just when it's in the silent mode setting and so, sometimes when you're in the silent mode, it's all about being discrete and so, when you put it in the silent mode, do you want it to also turn off the AF illuminator? And I'm also anti-illuminator, I'm not a big fan of that, it doesn't do a lot of good, it disturbs a lot of people and I just don't like having that laser beam out there in people's face. In the flash mode, if you have a flash attached, do you want it to block that flash from firing when you go into the silent mode. And so, it kinda really depends on why you are going into the silent mode or are you doing it for vibration reasons or because you wanna be a discrete photographer and so those are some tweaks that you can make when you are in the silent mode. Next up, high res shot, now we saw this before, we talked about it before, it's in the drive mode and you can come in here and you can have a delay built in. I was a little bit careless, folks, I gotta admit to you, when I shot my high res photo earlier, I did not use this delay mode, which I should have done, but I was just, for demo purposes. Normally I would put on something like, a two second delay so that when I press the shutter release, there is no vibrations from me touching the camera and so that would be highly recommended because you can't use high res and the self timer at the same time because they're all part of kind of the same grouping and so you would have to come here to set in a delay, unless you were using a cable release. If you're using a high res mode and it's shooting those eight photos to get a higher resolution image, do you want there to be a delay to allow time for your flashes to recycle. So people in product photography or in the studio would appreciate setting a couple of seconds delay, give them time for their flashes to recharge. That's our high res shot mode, finally on shooting menu 2, is the remote control mode. I apologize, we are not gonna have time to go into the full details of hooking up with multiple strobes in this class, but if you do wanna hook up, you're gonna need flash on the camera and you're gonna need a flash that it triggers wirelessly. And you're gonna need to turn it on here in the camera before you can get that process started.