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Lesson Info

Shooting & Playback Menu

We wanna get into the menu functions here. So this is a good time to take the downloadable PDF, which I have all outlined here, the entire menu on one page. We are gonna go through all of these functions quickly and give you some recommendations and some ideas on what all these features are doing. So, for the menu you will need to be hitting the menu button and the menu is broken up into different tabs of information and I'll have to admit in the past I've been a little confused as to where should I look for something because we do have two shooting tabs, which have some important basic shooting modes. Playback, pretty obvious there, but we have a lot of things kind of dumped into the custom menu and I do have a great explanation for that coming up when we get to that section as to how to remember where to find things. And then, a general setup menu at the very end. And so, we'll simply be going from top to bottom. So in shooting menu number one, we're gonna have a few items. The first...

one is your card setup. And so when you first get a memory card, you should format that memory card. And after you download your pictures, you should format your memory cards on a regular basis. And this is where you can choose to format your memory cards. You could choose to erase all the images, but I think it's better to format on a regular basis. Next up, is a reset. And so one option here, this is the option I took right before I taught the class here is I went and I reset my camera back to the factory default settings. And so it changes any setting that you might've made on the camera with the exception of the date and the language back to the original settings when you get in there and do that, but you're also able to go in there and set up customized settings for the way that you like to work the camera. So let's say you do landscape photography, but you also like to do birds and flight photography and they're very different settings on the camera. You can have that set as myset one and myset two and you could simply go in there and select that one setting rather than making 10 individual changes in your camera. And so this is a way for you to kind of customize a lot of the operations of your camera very quickly and change between different ones and you'll have four different ones there. The first reset is to do a kind of a factory default reset on the entire camera. Next up, is the picture mode and we've talked about this before and so this is gonna change the look of your JPEG images. It has no impact on the raw images, it's just gonna be on the JPEG images. For a basic user, I would say in the I-enhance mode where it will do, its kind of own level of enhancement that it thinks it needs. For a more advanced user, I would set it on natural. Even if you're only shooting raw, chances are you'll shoot JPEG at some point and if you shoot it at natural, it does pretty much nothing and it's consistent on all the different photos. So as we go through this menu and the class, as well as the PDF that you get, you'll notice that I have recommendations in gray over the right hand side and for the advanced users, I will often put them in red because sometimes I just can't choose which one way would I have it set up and so be aware that those are how I'm making my choices in recommendations as we go along the way here. Next up is image quality, we saw this before, and this is where we can choose between JPEGs and the different size of JPEGs, raw and whether we're shooting raw plus JPEG. My preference is of course is either with raw or the large fine quality JPEG setting. This is also where we can choose our movie settings as to what setting we're gonna have here. FHD stands for full high definition, which is the 1920 by 1080 resolution at 30 frames per second. Now the camera can actually shoot at 60 frames per second, but most people don't need this 'cause most standard video is at 30 frames per second, but it can be used for some special effects, slow motion if you need to. Image aspect, we talked about this before, the sensor on the camera is a four by three aspect ratio, so that's the one that makes sense, unless you're really shooting for something very particular other than that. The digital tele-converter takes the image that it gets off the sensor and it just simply shows you a small portion of it and records a small portion of it. And so this is something that is not getting you any better picture quality, it's just kinda falsely getting you closer. This is something that you can do in post production by just simply cropping you image and so this is something that I would recommend leaving turned off. Next up is a large collection of drivers, time, and timelapse, we saw some of this before, where we were selecting between the different anti-shock and the silent modes, but we also do have the option of going into the self timer mode as well in here. And so, in that option we'll be able to be choosing, to choose to turn it on and off and then going in and selecting a certain number of frames and how long a wait time before the whole thing starts and a time difference between shots. If you do this, you're gonna be shooting a whole bunch of shots. I tend to shoot usually around 300 images because in a standard video, that will end up being about 10 seconds, which is as long as I'm gonna want for most timelapses. So an example of a timelapse is something like this. Now this does have the added little benefit of being done from a slider, a motorized slider that is moving the camera to add a little bit more motion to the scene. Another timelapse is, this one is from India, and this is where a picture was taken about every 10 seconds over the course of about a half an hour. I did add a little bit of a zoom back as a Ken Burns effect later on in a movie software program. So timelapse can be a lot of fun, it's kind of the opposite of photography in some ways, taking a large amount of time, compressing it into a very short period of time. And you can do all of that in camera, right in here in the timelapse mode option. And that is our first page in the menu system. So next up is shooting menu number two. We have a bracketing option. And so bracketing is where you're gonna shoot multiple photos and the camera is going to adjust something about the photo. Now the most common bracketing is exposure bracketing, where you're gonna shoot a number of exposures, some lighter, some darker, and you can adjust how many images you're shooting and how far apart the increment is from them. It is to whatever your needs happen to be. And so this would be a common technique for a landscape photographer or maybe even architectural or real estate photographer to adjust for different brightness levels. One of the more interesting ones in here is the focus bracketing setting down at the bottom. Now as you see, along with the exposure bracketing, AE bracketing, we can bracket the white balance, the flash, the ISO, the art modes on the camera, but I wanted to just show you the focus bracketing and so what I need to do is, we're gonna do a little live demo here, but I'm gonna need to grab a prop over here and so I'm gonna grab one of our old camera props and I'm gonna set it down right here in front of the camera and we're gonna focus on this. And what focus bracketing does is I am going to focus on the front of this camera here and what it's gonna do is it's gonna shoot a series of pictures, sequentially moving the focus back a little bit with each one. So I focus on the nearest object and it's going to move from there. So let me go ahead and dive into the menu system and I'm gonna want to go into the bracketing mode. It's currently turned off, so I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna turn it on and you'll see there's an arrow to the right hand side. Turn this to the camera so you can see a little it better, and I'm gonna go to the right hand side. I need to decide, well what do I want to bracket? Exposure, white balance, flash, ISO, art filters, I want to do focus bracketing and notice another arrow over to the right hand side. Let's go to the right hand side. I want to choose it on and notice that arrow to the right hand side, keep going to the right. Now I can select the number of shots. Whoops gotta go to the right and I could choose a different number of shots. 10 seems to be fine for what I want to do here. The focus differential, you can choose, whoops, I gotta go to the right and I can choose how much it changes focus between each shot. I'm gonna leave it right here at five in the middle. And what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to focus on the front of this camera and I'm gonna give out camera just a little bit of a twist so we can see the difference a little bit better here. Let's take a look at the images. So this is the last of the 10 images and you can see that it is focused way way in the background. And as I go, I'm on picture number 92, 91. And so I think 82, so let's go in and take a closer look. So you can see that I'm focused on the front of this camera and now I'm gonna change, whoops going the wrong direction, and each of these is a slightly different focus and you can now see we're now starting to focus more on the back wall on the back of the camera and now the front of the camera. And so you can choose how much you change focus, how many different photos. It's a very interesting feature. I would say that the downside, a thing that you need to worry about on this one is that wherever you choose to focus, it's gonna continue to focus behind that subject. And if you were doing a portrait, focusing on someone's eye, you might want to focus in front and behind and the camera doesn't do it, you have to pick an object in the foreground and then it will focus sequentially behind it. And so it's a way to guarantee perfect focus in some potentially tricky situations, it's a very interesting feature that I hadn't seen on a previous camera, so I wanted to give you a good little show and tell as to how that works. So that is the bracketing mode. In most cases, people are doing exposure bracketing. Alright, next up. HDR, so the camera has built in HDR mode and that of course stands for high dynamic range. Let's take a look at what's going on here. So normally, the camera has a limited exposure range and under bright light with heavy contrast, by putting it in the HDR mode, if you'll look in these photos with the boat under the dock, you're able to see a little bit more information in the HDR two setting. What it's doing is it's shooting multiple photos and combining information from all of the photos into one final photo. And so you do need to be shooting from a tripod to get all of your images perfectly lined up. Now, these are also going to be JPEG images, they're not going to be raw images. And so you can be shooting this in a wide variety of ways. One of the options that is in here is a very wide bracketing mode. It is bracketing just like we were talking about a minute ago, where we can do five frames of bracketing, we can do I think it's like seven frames of bracketing in here at various different levels of exposure compensation. And so, when you see this mode here, HDR one and two, that is where it's shooting multiple photos and it's combining them into a photo. Where it says three frames 2EV, that is a standard bracketing mode and it does nothing with the final images. They are there for those of you who want to shoot HDR and use an accessory program to combine those photos, and so these are kind of an expanded exposure bracketing mode, and so this camera actually has two bracketing modes in two different areas. Next up is a multiple exposure option if you want to shoot multiple exposures in camera, you can do so. There's a couple of controls as far as the number of frames and the auto gain. And the auto gain is adjusting the brightness. And so you can either have the camera automatically adjust for the brightness or with sequential photos just add cumulative exposure from each additional frame. And so, it's very helpful to work with very dark backgrounds when you're working with multiple exposures. That way it gives a place for your subject to stand out in front of. So there's a lot of creative options within the multiple exposure option. There's also an overlay option, which will allow you to see the previous image that you're able to align up the second image in relationship to the first image a little bit better because you can actually see where it is. Next up is keystone composition. Now, I am a big fan. As big a fan you're gonna find of tilt shift lenses 'cause they allow you to do some creative things with the camera that you would not normally be able to do, but this camera has essentially tilt shift capabilities built into the camera for use with any lens. So let's take a look at a short video that I put together using the camera. Now, in this case, we can tilt the camera off to the right side, we can tilt it off to the left, it's not helping in this case, just wanted to show what we can do. We can go kind of in the opposite direction here. And what we would normally do in an architectural sense, is we want to enlarge the top part of the building so that we have straight lines up and down. And so we are doing the same effect of what a tilt shift lens would do to correct for a building in this case. Now, it's not as good as a true tilt shift lens because we're not getting the full image area of all the pixels because we are stretching and pinching different areas of the photograph and we are not able to do this in raw. We have to do it in JPEG, but it allows you to do it with any lens in camera without buying any sort of special lens. And so it's a pretty neat option if you need to correct for these type of lines for architectural or real estate type photography. So, neat little feature, glad to see it in there. Next up, we have our anti-shock and silent mode. Now, if earlier in the class, we were going through the drive modes and you notice that you didn't have some options available to you, you may have need to gone into here to turn them on. And so this is where you can allow your camera to shoot with the electronic shutter release and the anti-shock mode is a first electronic shutter curtain. The silent mode is a first and second electronic shutter curtain. And so these are areas that you can go ahead and turn on and then you will have those options available for you when you go into the drive and timer to see those available options to you. The flash and remote control option on the camera, if you want to have you camera trigger and external flash, you can do that and turn that on in here, there is kind of a whole class within a class that goes into how to set that up for best picture taking, but it is possible by getting in here and setting it up. Alright, let's go into the playback menu here. So, things dealing with the world of playback. So, there is a slideshow option, if you're gonna hook your camera up to a TV. So that you can do a slideshow, either with the movies or the individual pictures that you've taken and you can control all the little factors on that. You can rotate images that you might've shot vertically so that they fit right on the TV for those shows so you can rotate them. And so on this one, okay so this is the rotate when the camera excuse me, when the camera plays back an image. It will rotate the image if you leave it on, but I, in this case, I prefer to leave it turned off because I want to get the image as large on screen as possible. Now the camera still knows that you shot a vertical image and when you download it to the computer, it'll rotate the image for you because it knows inherently that it is a vertical image. But I like having this turned off so that you can have the largest image possible in the back of the camera. We do have the option to go in and edit. We took a look at some of the things that you could do with this before, you could record that audio annotation, you could take a raw image and turn it into a JPEG, as well as doing a lot of other little fixes, Photoshop style fixes on your images right in the camera. If you want, you can hook your camera up to a printer and get prints directly from the camera. And this will allow you to go in and set the parameters for which prints are printed and how big and how many and so forth. Reset protect will go in and unlock all the photos that you might've put the little lock on. This is that protection option that you have when you play back an image to prevent the image from getting deleted if you want to undo all of that on all the photos at the same time, you could reset that protection by saying yes, and it would just turn off all of those locks. You can connect up to a smartphone on this camera and this is where we're gonna want to do a little Wi-Fi connection, so let's talk about the Wi-Fi connection because you can use this camera remotely from your camera. And there's a number of different things that you need to do between your camera and your phone to make this set up properly. So the first thing you need to do with your phone is to go get the Olympus Image Share application and that is the control that you'll be running this from on your phone. Next up, on your camera, let's go ahead and get that set up here, so from your camera you're gonna need to connect to the smartphone and then on your phone make sure your Wi-Fi's turned on, enter the password and then open the app. So let's go ahead and do that now with my camera. So I got my camera turned on, we're gonna go into the playback menu and let's go in the menu, playback and connection to the smartphone, alrighty. And so it's starting the Wi-Fi system, so we got that symbol and that's gonna work and now we're gonna get a password and we're gonna get a little code here. Alright, so what I need to do is I need to turn on my Wi-Fi signal and I need to look for the Olympus camera and right down here it say E-M10, my camera, or my phone is picking it out and so it's gonna select that. Hopefully give me a little checkbox there. Oh, it look like it fell off here. Let's select it manually. We're halfway there guys, come on, just (clicks tongue) click in, click in. Okay, it got it, thank you. Alright, so now we're gonna go open the Olympus Share app and, I don't want to do that right now, let's go to remote control. And so we should be able to see what the camera sees now and I'm gonna go ahead and set the camera over here on our prop table, adjust it a little bit for wherever I am standing and come back over and you guys can see where I'm standing here at the table, camera's over here. And so if I want to shoot my photo, I can shoot my photo up there and there is my picture. And if I want to take that picture and I want to save it to my camera roll, I can save it to my camera roll and it's saving it down here into my photos collection. Okay, and I don't want to turn off the camera, that's fine. And so I can go in here and there's lots of little controls that you have in here. So, depending on what you have it set, so I can change the ISO, I can change the white balance in here, I can change exposure compensation, I can change the motor drive that we're using, I can go to the silent mode. I'm taking photos and I can't even heart it right now. So you can just see me working here. And then if I want to, I can go back into my photos on my phone right here and right here, there's the photo that we just took in class. Terrible phot, I'll delete that one later. Okay, so that is the Olympus Share app. Now, there's other things that you can do in here. You can simply import other photos that you've taken with the camera. You can edit photos, you can add geotag information, but the remote control is probably the coolest thing because you can put the camera in a remote location, see exactly what the camera sees, make changes on the camera, and take photos. I think it's just really cool that you can do that and it's available on so many cameras these days. So that's the remote app and how it works. Okay, so moving on in the menu section, so that's the Wi-Fi. Anything else that we need to know in here? Let's see, oh yeah, you can select, as I said the different functions, remote control, import photos, edit a photo, and add a geotag. And the first time you need to do this, I already did this, so I already kinda did the handshake and it learned the password, but there is a password you do need to enter, but that will just be the first time around.