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Shooting Menu 1

Lesson 19 from: Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

19. Shooting Menu 1

In the first tab of the menu, gain access to different shooting settings, from creating custom modes to adjusting image quality. Besides creating an overview of the complex menu system, John shares his recommended settings for the different menu options.
Next Lesson: Shooting Menu 2

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu 1

We are going to be starting off on shooting menu number one, the first tab top item. We actually jumped into this very early in the class and I reset the camera back to it's factory default system. We're going to dive into a little sub menu in here. First option is to reset everything back to the factory resets. You can do a full reset, which is going to be pretty much everything on the camera. The basic one is just gonna do your basic exposure and focus information. Also in here, you can assign these custom settings to the mode dial, we talked about C1, two, and three on the mode dial. These can be how you want the camera set up. So the way you do this is just set the camera up the way you want it to work with your metering system, focusing system, exposure system as you like it. Come here in the menu system and you're gonna assign it to one of those modes. You can just simply assign it to C1, two, or three or if you want to reset these back to the default settings of really not havin...

g anything, then you can do that as well. That's where you would assign it if you wanted to recall from the mode you would normally turn the dial but you can also do it from the menu system where you would go in and say, "Hey, I want the camera to work in it's C1 mode" or any of the other modes. Normally, you would just turn the dial in order to do this. It's just giving you another option to operate it electronically from the back of the camera. First item down, 999 to go. (laughter) The picture mode, we talked about this before. You can select any one of the different picture modes in here and as I say, we've already talked about this. There's a number of things that we're gonna be talking about for the second or the third time because if something's really important, there's gonna be a button or dial on the outside of the camera. If it's pretty important there's also gonna be a short cut in the super control manual but then they throw it in here just so that you have access to it here as well. In here you can go in and get a little different display. It might be easier to see as far as what you're selecting, sharpness, contrast, those extra effects on top of the picture modes themselves. So be aware of any arrow that goes to the right. That means that you can dive in to another sub-menu and have further adjustments for that particular feature. Now as we go through this, pay attention to the recommendations that I am making. The ones in gray are what I call general recommendations which mean this would be a good place to put it for an average user. Somebody who's just getting the camera out of the box and they're not sure what they're going to be doing with it. For the more advanced users, I would recommend the ones in red. They're something that either they, like the natural look, it's just gonna be a more basic tone of your jpeg and you may want to go in and adjust your jpegs further after that. As you saw in the previous little slide, you saw that this was only affecting jpegs. This is not affecting raw images. You'll see these recommendations on the PDF as well going forward. We've already talked about image quality before but this is where can set it in here. Choosing raw for our highest quality image, large fine jpeg would be another good choice or if you need raw and jpeg at the same time, there's a multitude of options between a full size raw and a smaller size jpeg. Image Aspect Ratio: A lot of these things in the shooting menu number one are dealing with primary shooting characteristics. Normally, you're gonna be in the 4:3 aspect ratio 'cause that's what the sensor is but if you know the final output needs to be a different aspect ratio and you wanna see that crop in the viewfinder, you can set it here. The camera has a digital tele-converter and anytime you see the word digital tele-converter, start shaking, this is not necessarily a good thing. What this does is it takes the image that it gets on the sensor and it basically crops that and that's what it's recording and that's what you see in the viewfinder. This is something that you can totally do in post-production with just as much image quality. The only reason you would do it here is if you didn't have post-production available to you, you didn't have your computer, you needed to shoot something straight in camera and you needed more telephoto. You are gonna be losing a lot of pixels and a lot of resolution if you do this. This is something you would generally leave turned off. We have our Drive modes. We've been talking about these and so this is where we can get in and control which of these modes that we're choosing. Obviously, there are a lot of modes but we did talk about basically all of those so normally I would just keep it on single and adjust as necessary. Interval Shooting and Time Lapse: This is something that you wouldn't normally leave on but if you go down to the on option, you'll see an arrow to the right. That means there's a sub-menu where you can get in. If you're not used to shooting time lapses, they can be a lot of fun so this is a time lapse shot off of a moving slider. Shooting a picture about every 10 seconds or so and one of my favorite time lapses is from India. This was shot standard from a tri-pod and then I added a little zoom back and I did that post-production and you can do that depending on which video program you work with. Those are some examples of what time lapse is and the options for going in and creating your time lapse. First up is the number of frames. 300 frames is the number that I like because a lot of video is at 30 frames a second and this gives me 10 seconds and that's a nice little clip of time lapse. 300 frames is a good goal or more, depending on what your needs are of course. The start waiting time, how much time between the time you click the shudder and when the actual time lapse begins. I like a few seconds so that there's no vibrations from the camera but you could potentially program it to start at a particular time of day. Next up is the interval between one shot and the next. Typically this is somewhere between one second and one minute. It all depends on the type of interval you're shooting. A lot of the stuff I do is with people and boats and cars and clouds moving around and so 10 seconds seems to be a pretty good number for a lot of my intervals. If you want, you can have the camera record a time lapse movie which means first off, we're recording still images, 300 still images in this scenario right here. If you turn time lapse movie on, it'll record a finished movie. It'll take all those images and compress them into a movie right then and there and this is, I think, the only camera, probably the first camera, that has actually been able to record the individual photos and give you the finished time lapse all at the same time. Which I really like because after I shoot a time lapse, I wanna know what it looks like and I won't know until I take it home, download the images, and then go through the whole process of creating it. You can create a movie and I think this is fantastic, just to get an idea of whether it worked or not. The problem is is that the movie that it creates is not going to be as high-quality as what you can make on your own in post-production. For instance, if you want to shoot a 4K movie, you're only gonna get five frames per second, which is pitifully slow and would make a terrible time lapse movie in most situations. Even FullHD, you can only get 15 frames per second out of it and so you can get a HD movie out of it at 30 frames a second which is how most people are showing their movies. In my mind, I wish these numbers are better and I'm sure in future cameras they'll be better but for somebody who needs this and the reason I think it's valuable is just to get a good idea in the field whether the time lapse worked or not and shooting an HD version of this seems perfectly reasonable in order to do that. It's not great for getting a final video out of it, but as I say, for information in the field, it's fantastic. So that's in the time lapse which you would normally leave tuned off obviously. It's a special mode that you would go in to on an as-needed basis, that is our Drive mode.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Olympus EM1II Recommended Settings

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

This is exactly what I was looking for - I really feel like I'm not able to control my camera, rather than the camera controlling me! :) I really learned a great deal - some of it was a great review, some of it was crucial information that will (hopefully) make me a better photographer. Thanks for a great class, John!!

Spyro Zarifopoulos
 

Great and very informative class.... John has done a fabulous job explaining all the simple and intricate details of the very sophisticated EM1 II. Thank you !!!

John Epperson
 

This is a great course on learning about the OM-D E-M1 Mark II. I have watched it many times to get to were I know it by memory the best I can. I like to go over it as much as possible because there is a lot to learn. I do wish that John would do an updated version since now it is up to Firmware 3.1. It is like a whole new camera with the new settings.

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