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Custom and Setup Menus

Lesson 9 from: Olympus E-M1 Fast Start

John Greengo

Custom and Setup Menus

Lesson 9 from: Olympus E-M1 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

9. Custom and Setup Menus

Lesson Info

Custom and Setup Menus

Okay, let's dive into exposure Metering in eso the exposure value steps. So when you're changing center speeds and apertures, you can do this in third stops, half stops or full stops. Most people prefer to work in the very fine increments off 1/3 stop. Noise reduction can be done in camera. I don't recommend it for people who are a little bit more serious about their photography because they'll be able to do better noise reduction on a computer software program of their choosing later on. Something like light room. If you're not familiar with that, and you want the camera to deal with noise reduction, which will happen when you use long exposures, for instance, one second or longer, the camera will automatically apply as much as necessary. Makes it nice and simple, but you'll be able to do a much better job if you turn it off and work with it later. There is a noise filter on this that works at higher Aiso, higher I esos The differences is noise reduction deals with long exposures, noi...

se filter deals with High I. Esso's. For instance, I s 0 6400 You can turn on auto noise reduction and it's going to try to reduce the noise in that which seems like a good thing, and it is. But I don't know that I want the camera to take care of that. And so I leave. It turned off in my camera. That's something I'll work with in light room, and I'll be able to do a better job than the camera can, because I can adjust it for each picture individually and I'll have a nice large monitor. To judge those settings on the eye is so you can choose. Just as we saw as many other places on the camera. They've just thrown it in here because they got everything else to do with eso and exposure in here. Most people prefer to be able to change. I esos in 1/3 steps, but there's a number of kind of a growing trend of people who just take full steps in I esos. They'll make the third of the step jumps in shutter speed apertures and they'll just make full steps in the isso. So whatever you're choosing, I usually have mindset on 1/3 in case I want to get to a very specific shutter speed or aperture Automatic eso auto set. Here's where you get to choose to different important factors if you choose. Auto is a what is the maximum is so that you want your camera to go to 326,400. Those might be some good numbers to put in. Remember when I showed you the examples of the IAEA? So the camera is very clean up through ISO 800. After that, there's kind of degrading qualities that it goes down. Teoh and I don't like to go beyond 800 in this camera, but if I have to, I'm more than willing to go up to 32 or 6400. And this is where you get to draw your limit on them. The default. I also can also be set, which is kind of what is the standard I s so that it's going to try to choose. Normally I would leave this 200 but there are situations where you're shooting action and you need a faster shutter speed. See would set this 2 400 or 800. Perhaps eso auto will deal with which modes are you allowed to shoot auto I s o n and so normally I would prefer to shoot in as many modes as possible. And I want to check a little something on the camera right now, I'm gonna dive into this mode because there's something I may have failed to tell you. And that important little piece of information is that you cannot use auto eso in manual, Which is why one of the options in there is not m with that other p a n s. And so you can only use the auto I s O in program aperture priority or shutter party. So if you are in manual, you are in manual full with eso Manulis. Well, ok, moving on. You can also choose Army during system. Third time we've seen this in here. We don't need to talk about it. You know what to choose. Digitally sp Auto exposure a l metering auto exposure Lakme eatery. Remember this A e l button on the back of the camera. Well, if you want, you can program that button to activate a different meat oring system than you normally have chosen. So if you really like using, say, spot metering from time to time. You can re program this button to use the spot metering system if you leave this in auto, which is where I recommend setting. When you press this, it's going to meet her using the metering mode that you have chosen elsewhere in your camera, which was actually just one line above where we're at. Whatever system you've chosen, there is what you will use in there. So that's the most common setting. But you could set this up to choose that second different metering system if you were wanting to access that on a quick basis. Bulb time timer. Here is where you get to set the maximum exposure time for the longest shot that you would like to take. You can set in anywhere from to 30 minutes. 30 minute picture would probably wear down the entire battery and end up being very, very noisy. I've set eight minutes as my upper limit for doing nighttime shots because I don't know that I've ever shot a nighttime photo longer than eight minutes. And so that's as long as most people I think are going to need with this camera bulb time monitor on this one. Uh, let's see. What do we want to set this at? Uh oh. This is the brightness of it. Let me double check. I'm having second thoughts if I put the right information in on me now, so I'm gonna dive in Teoh E. I just want to see something real quick. Full time monitor. Uh, I would just normally leave this at zero. How bright the monitor is when you're in the bulb setting on the camera. Live bulb is one of the coolest functions I've ever seen on a camera. If anyone has work in the dark room and they've taken that image that they've just cast the negative on and they got the print in the hands and they dump it in the developer and they're shaking that develop, trade back and forth and you see that image just start to appear from nowhere. That's kind of what this live bulb is. And so what happens as you shoot a nighttime exposure? You put the camera in bulb and you leave it on for longer. You're going to see the image get brighter and brighter and brighter. And it's a great way of saying OK, it's bright enough, and you can let off of the shuttle early so you can see your image forming on the sensor. Now. Unfortunately, it is somewhat limited as to how many times it can update the photograph and how frequently it can update the photograph. So you're going to need to try your own experiments to see what works with you. I have found that an update every two seconds works for works for me, pretty well under very, very dark conditions. If you're working mawr under twilight conditions where it's not that dark, you may need more frequent updates. If it's darker, you may need to have less frequent because there's a limitation on how many times they could do this update. But it's kind of giving you a live feed of what is the image look like now in the development process. And so that is, if your camera is in the bulb mode, we also have the same option in the live time mode, which are very much related modes. The time mode simply is where you press. It wants to start on the shutter release and then once again to turn it off, and it's showing that you that same live updating. Okay, this is something that has changed with recent firmware changes in this camera. We're gonna talk about from where, At the end of the menu section, but something that has surfaced about a defect or a little issue with this particular camera. If you remember back to the beginning of the class where I talked about how the shutter units opened and closed and we had the shutter units are open. When you're looking through the camera and then the 1st 1 closes, it opens. That's the picture. And then the 2nd 1 closes. And part of the problem with that system is that that 1st 1 closes and then opens, and as it opens, it causes a slight vibration in the camera. And people were getting slightly blurry pictures at shutter speeds around 125th 160th to 250th of a second. There was just this. Not quite a sharp is. It could be because there was basically a shutter shock going on in there. And so this camera had an anti shock mode in it. That was Mawr designed for putting this camera on a telescope or microscope, and it was designed to have, like, a two second self timer delay so you could put the anti shock. Two seconds. You fire the shot, it opens the shutter, or it closes the shutter and weights. Or what does it do? Excuse me. It closes the shutter. It opens the shutter, and then it weights two seconds before it starts the exposure. And it would use a digital global shudder to turn the exposure on. And so there would be no movement immediately before the picture is taken, as I say, normally done for Astro photography or for scientific purposes. But if you set this 20 seconds, which I highly recommend, what happens is that when you choose those specific shutter speeds, it's kind of strange. What happens is that it still sends the normal first curtain across the shutter, and a fraction of a second later, it digitally turns on its global shudder and starts recording the image. And so it waits just a fraction of a second in order to start the exposure so that there is no blur because of that slight movement of that first curtain. And I tried it out, and it definitely works. I was a little skeptical because I thought that there was gonna be a little bit more shutter leg in waiting for the shutter to go. And it was imperceptible from what I could tell. And so get set this to zero, and you will get sharper pictures around that 1 25th to 50th of a second. Was that geeky enough for you guys? Okay, we're all the way to letter F deals with flash and other custom settings so you can choose the top shutter speed. I would like this to be as fast as possible, so I'm gonna leave it at 1 3/20 of a second. You can choose the slower limit. And here is where you get to decide how steady are you at holding the camera under low light conditions. I feel pretty comfortable down around the 15th of a second. Especially with the stabilization in the camera. Somebody who had a little bit shakier hands might set it to 1/60 of a second. But you, uh, considered wherever it is you want in their down to 30 seconds. We talked about exposure, compensation, and we also talked about flash exposure compensation for the more sophisticated understanding manual photographer. They're gonna want to keep these things separate. They're gonna want to do their own exposure compensation in their own flash exposure compensation. So you would leave. This turned off if the whole world of flash and dealing with natural exposures daylight exposures at the same time is a little complicated. Leave this turned on, and you would just make one simple adjustment for making your pictures lighter or darker. But if you do want to get in and manually start controlling very specifics, the control of the exposure from the camera versus the flash, that's when you would turn it off. And that was a really small menu here. We're onto G already, then okay, so G is where we're going to set customize J Peg settings and so you can go in and not only choose J pegs because I think we've already done that. In the Menu City, you can choose the exact size of the J pigs, and so if you needed to meet a very specific size, you can do that. In this image quality setting option. You can also choose to shoot middle or small size J pegs. This is only dealing with J pegs, so not only dealing with the exact resolution, but generally the whole medium or small size shading composition. This is gonna be dealing with JPEG images and let me show you an image. And this image suffers from vignette ing or darkening of the corners. If you turn the shading composition on, it's gonna try to lighten up the corners to make it seem as natural as possible, because some lenses, especially very fast lenses, have a natural vignette ing to them. And so while this might seem like a great idea to turn on, I don't really like to have it turned on because there are some photographs that I think look better with it turned off, especially photographs of people. It's part of the characteristics of the lens, and I kind of like that, as a lot of photographers do. So a lot of more serious photographers are gonna want to leave that turn off. I think next up is our white balance control, and this is the same as we saw on the top of the camera, same as we saw in the super control panel of the camera, so don't really need to discuss that one. If you want, you can go in and adjust all of the white balances to tweak, um, a little bit warmer or cooler in their settings. If for some reason you found that they were all off, you could do it. I don't recommend changing this, but you could do it if necessary. One of the options is keeping the warm color in. So, for instance, on the tungsten setting, it's a very warm tone, and when you set it to tungsten, it really cleans it up and makes it very, very white. And some people like keeping just a little bit of that warmth in there as Ideo. I think it looks a little bit more like it does to our eyes rather than trying to overly correct it. When you were dealing with white balance, I would normally and flash it can get a little complicated because if you change the white balance in your camera to incandescent, for instance, but then you fire the flash, you're gonna be working with two different lights that are working under two different color systems, and so If you leave this at White Balance Auto, the camera's going to try to set in in between to get these kind of matched up, you might say. And so it's going to try to figure it out. If you are filtering the flash and there are some people who will add on a flash, and then they'll added jail onto the front of this, that's when you would want to turn this off. So if you're into that sort of manual flash control, you could turn this off so that it's not correcting the white balance for what you're correcting in the flash. Okay, continuing on through G. Here is our color space. I briefly mentioned this before. If you are shooting J pegs, you're just uploading your pictures to Facebook and nothing else. You can leave it in S RGB, which is a smaller color space, but if you have higher aspirations of your photographs, you would like to print them off at some point in the future. Then you want to set this to Adobe RGB. If you shoot raw, you inherently get adobe RGB. That's the only auction. If you have J pegs, then you have the option of this. Okay, we've scrolled down, were on to h. The end is in sight, folks, At least on this custom menu, we still have more menus to go through Quick erase. This allows for a single delete the leading of your photographs, and this is just a little too quick in my book. So when you see an image you press the garbage can button, it's automatically gone. There's no confirmation that you're looking at a quick way to get rid of your images, though, but it's a little too quick. In my opinion, Raw Plus J. Peg allows you to kind of separate thes so that you can delete on Lee the Raw or the J peg. And that's not something that most people are going to be doing. So I would just leave this on Raw Plus Jay Peak, and we did have someone who had a question about file names earlier, and this is where you want to look in your camera. Normally, the camera automatically continues counting from where it left off. The camera does suffer from what I like to call a y two k problem, which means it hits a top number, and then it goes back down to the bottom number. And that top number is 9999. And so if you take 10,000 and one pictures, you're gonna have to pictures that have the same file number. So, uh, this is one of the reasons why it's a long term strategy. You should be renaming your files when you import them into your computer. Because if you were to take 100,000 photos, you would have basically ah, whole bunch of photos that have identical photo numbers. All your pictures would have 10 pictures that have the exact save number on it. And so you should be renaming these when they get into your computer. You can also go in, induce a little bit of adjustment on the file name. You can edit the three or four letters prefix in the final name, So if you want to add in your initials, for instance, you can kind of identify the pictures coming straight out of the camera as your images, at least with your initials priorities set. You want to set this to yes, and what happens when you present it to yes, is that when you press the garbage can button and your camera is gonna go Oh, you would like to delete a picture the normal way that what the camera does. And I've always found this a little irritating because when I hit the garbage can what is it that I want to do? I wanted to lead a picture. And so if I set this to yes, the first option that it picks is yes, And all I have to do is hit OK And the picture is gone normally when this is set No, it assumes every time I press the garbage can button, I had made a mistake and I don't really want to delete the photograph. And so this is going to save you one button press every time you need to delete a photo. But it still gives you a little safety protocol of Are you really sure you want to get rid of this? Yes, I am. DP I setting does not matter unless you are gonna be printing directly from your camera toe a printer. And if you ever have plans to do that, I would set it at 300 dp. I It's kind of a standard that most people set for getting good, sharp images on a printer copyright settings. This allows you to go in and put your name into the camera as the owner of the camera. The copyright holder, the creator of that particular image and that will, when you download it into a program like Adobe Light Room and many other programs will automatically be put in there, right in the metadata of the photograph. And if your camera was to get stolen and the police were very inquisitive, they could potentially find who the original owner of this camera waas and so might be good for that reason as well. Next, little grouping deals with movie functions, so when you put your camera in the movie mode, it normally gets thrown into a program mode where the camera figures out shutter speed and aperture. But if you want to shoot a little bit more serious movies, you're gonna wanna have specific control over the shutter speeds and apertures, in which case I would recommend setting this to him. You could also set it to shutter priority or aperture priority. But I think the two main options are going to be program and m movie sound. If you don't want to record sound, you can turn it off. Most people like to have it in there so you'd leave it turned on. The movie effects that we were playing with earlier can also be turned off if you have no need for them, and I don't think there's a big need for him, so I'd turn him off. Wind noise reduction allows you to go in and make some customization to how the microphone works with windy conditions. With the built in mic, there is a low, a standard and a high setting. So if you are in a very windy situation, you would set it to the high setting, and it will kind of help filter out a little bit of that wind noise. It is very limited with the built in microphone. Though recording volume can be adjusted, I would leave it at standard. There is also a low and high setting for that, and on the Jet J for the built in the VF. Okay, this is where you get to choose your style. Number one style number two or style number three style number three gives you the biggest image style. Number two gives you a smaller image without the overlap of information On top of your image. Style, too, is my preference. I don't want to see any colors in there from style Number one information settings. We talked a little bit about this before when we were looking at the displays I go in and I just basically checked all these off. It's just a screen that will come up when I press the info button. And if I don't like it, Aiken cycle past it. But they all have their own unique information that could be helpful in different types of exposure situations. The displayed grids. This is in the electronic viewfinder. So we did see this before, but that was for the back LCD. This is for the IV E if that you hold up to your eye and so you can actually program the back screen as well as the eye level screen differently. Normally I'm gonna be in my Uncluttered mode here once again e V F auto switch. And so the E V F auto switch is that automatic switch that switches back and forth between the back LCD and the top. Normally, I'm gonna want to leave it turned on. But if it doesn't work for you, you can turn it off. You do have to dive in here to turn it off, though it is kind of buried a little bit far. In my opinion, the E V f adjust will adjust the loo minutes and the color on the electronic viewfinder. Normally, you shouldn't need to be able. You shouldn't need to make any changes here. Halfway level. Okay, so there is a level that tells you whether you're tilting left or right and what happens once you've set your exposure and you press halfway down on the shutter release. That's where the halfway comes from. The level will replace the metering system in the camera. And so if you take unlevel photographs like I am known to dio, my horizons are a little bit crooked. From time to time, you leave this turn on and it's gonna give you a nice built in Elektronik level. And I don't like the fact that it covers up the metering system, but you should have already taking care of metering by the time your finger is back on the shutter release. So I think it works out is a pretty good trade off, so I kind of like it in there. Okay, Last one ear is the utility section. One of the problems with digital cameras is dust on the sensor. If you have an image that looks like this, you have a very, very dusty sensor and you need to clean it off. One of the things that this camera could do is something called pixel mapping. What need to do is you need to photograph a white sheet of paper and the camera will map out where all the dust is, and then it will remove it by cloning around it. Now, I don't like to have this done automatically on my camera, so I prefer not to do this. I would rather manually, physically clean it if I have the opportunity. I don't always have the opportunity. So this is a nice emergency backup option for getting that dust off the sensor. Even though it's not really getting rid of it. It's just working around it. Exposure sipped shift. Ah, let's see. Oh, if you need to adjust the exposure for the meat Oring modes. You can do that. I don't recommend it. This is only if you're camera is having problems reading light, and it's doing it incorrectly. You can also go in and adjust the focus on this. And this is where all lenses are going to have their focus adjusted forwards or backwards. And I don't recommend doing this unless there is a very specific problem with your camera. How quickly do you want the warning level to come up on the camera? This is an unusual one, but you can change how quickly your camera warns you that you're getting into a low camera because some people want to be warned very early on if they're battery is getting a little low because it's not the most accurate reading. I would normally leave it at zero and see if it needs to be changed. But it's probably gonna be fine there. If you do have the vertical grip for the camera, there is a second battery that you put in the grip, and you can choose which battery you access first. If you get the grip, you're probably gonna be using the P B H battery first because it's a little bit more easily accessible, so that's the one that you would probably have selected. But you can choose if you wanted to. For some reason, if the level in your camera is off that horizon level, you could go in and recalibrate it. It is pretty accurate. It may not be as accurate as a true bubble level, so be careful with it, knowing that it's not perfect. But it is pretty good. But you would go in and fix it if it was found to be off. In this case, if you don't like those touch screen options, you can turn them off. I don't use them a lot, but they are kind of nice to have for certain types of photography. So I would leave that turned on, and that is a lot of custom modes in this camera. So when I say this is one of the most customizable cameras, I think that is proof of it right there

Class Materials

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Course Outline

Ratings and Reviews

Hal
 

John does an excellent job of making the OMD E M1 understandable. His knowledge of the camera and relaxed style clearly and painlessly walk you through the maze of buttons, menus, and functions. He objectively points out the strengths of the camera as well as those things Olympus could of done better. His opinions of the camera are consistent with other knowledgable reviewers, and are consistent with my own (limited) experience. The manual tells you every little thing the camera CAN do. John helps you understand what is important to get the best use of the camera in most situations.

user e35335
 

Three simple words, " Thank you John " I have really enjoyed the course. The OMD EM1 is a wonderful camera, and with the clear guidance of this course I feel instantly at home with all its capabilities. Clear concise instructions delivered in a faultless manner. A joy to watch.

FerOlea
 

John is a very good teacher, and this is indeed a useful class. Class material is excellent as always. But I don't think this is his best work. He seems to be too conflicted with Olympus' menu systems and design decisions (which I admit, are a bit strange) to give the students a clear picture of the full potential of their new gear. He also fiddles/struggles with the camera a bit too much in all the live demonstrations. I would recommend this class only to absolute photography beginners and not really to people with any experience.

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