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Back Side: Super Control Panel

Lesson 12 from: Olympus PEN-F Fast Start

John Greengo

Back Side: Super Control Panel

Lesson 12 from: Olympus PEN-F Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

12. Back Side: Super Control Panel

Lesson Info

Back Side: Super Control Panel

Alright, Right in the middle of it is the okay button. But it's also access to the super control panel. And the super control panel is going to give us access to a whole lot of features that we would normally have to dive into the menu to get to. But this is a shortcut in order to get to them. So let's talk about the super control panel. So by heading the okay button, it's gonna give us some general information and shooting information on the top of bottom. But then there's gonna be more specific information in each of the different cells. First up is Theis. Oh, and you know, we've already done this, folks, where there was an I s o button on the back of the camera. But as I just mentioned, if you wanted to re program that to do something other than changing the eyes, So it is right here in the super control panel. And so, by navigating over to the I s so you can change the setting by turning the front dial, or you can go to the next option by changing the back dial have already talked ...

about it. So we can move on. Next up is white balance. We've talked about this one before as well, and so same settings as we would have done directly on the back of the camera. There's a whole group of them here, and I'm not going to each individual one. But these are basic image perent image, image manipulation controls. Now, if you're shooting raw, this has no effect on your image. It all. If you are shooting JPEG images, it will adjust the color or the contrast or even the green of your images in some cases, and so you can change the look of your images by going in here in tweaking with him. In general, I like to leave things very simple and get straight, clean images out of the camera unless I'm trying to do something very, very specific. So we do have the picture mode here, and this is probably the best analogy is It's like using different types of film in your camera. If you remember back to the days of Kodak and Fuji Film and various other films that had different looks dumb, well, you can go in the picture mode and you can choose different types of modes, like a vivid mode for a landscape, or maybe a muted mode for shooting portrait's, where the colors air not too intense. That would look good for portrait. And we have a number of other options and they're one of the more interesting ones is monotone where you can shoot black and white options, and so there's some some neat little things that you can do in there. Once again, this is Onley affecting JPEG images, not J. Pagan and not raw images. We have our flash controls or flash mode, which we talked about earlier, cause there's a flash button on the back of the camera, but we also have our flash exposure compensation, and this is a little different than the flash modes itself. When you fire a flash with this camera, the flash has a certain amount of power that the camera is determining how much power the flash needs, and oftentimes that power is a little overdone. And this uses uses a system called T TL flash, and it works for general things. But for people photography, it's often advisable to tone the flash down a little bit, and so that it's not too powerful. And so in many cases, a lot of photographers prefer to tone down the automated flash by about one stock to minus one. And this will depend on the background and the lighting of the situation and other factors in there. And so this photo here, these series of photos, I think tt l minus two looks more natural. And it has to do with the dark top and the dark background. Our skin tones just seem a little bit more natural when we've powered our flash down to the minus two city. And so if you do use flash and you do a lot of people photography, I would definitely experiment with toning the flash down a little bit. So power in it down to teach TL minus 2/3 of a stop or one and 2/3 or whatever that little balance that you find works well for your type of photography. So that's something that I would definitely use with flash photography. Next up is the cameras built in stabilizer mode. This camera has a built in stabilizer by moving the sensor up, down and left right with the gyro sensor, and there it knows how much you're moving the camera and it can stabilize your movements by acclaimed four stops of exposure. And so that's very, very good. And so this camera does very well under low light conditions because it does stabilize each and every lens that you put on there. Now there are a number of stabilization modes that you can use. The standard one is S I s one auto and that's your standard stabilization mode. They do have two different modes number two and number three, which are designed for panning which turn off the stabilizer in one of the directions so that you can pan without it trying to correct for your panning movement, there is an S I s auto one, which is an auto panning detection. And so if you're panning and sometimes you're shooting verticals and sometimes you're shooting horizontal, that would be the best one toe have. But for general purpose, I would use the S. I s one is just compensating for all your standard normal hand movements and moving the camera. Next option are the F area. The focusing points that we just talked about on the back of the cameras. So if you would read on that button, you can access that information here is, well, our Dr Button, which once again is a duplicate button for duplicate access to the same button on the back of the cameras. So we do have a lot of duplicates here at the beginning. And so, in case you're looking through your camera right now and you're thinking, Well, I don't have a many options as you're showing on screen, it might be because in shooting Menu number two, you have the anti shock and silent mode turned off. And so this is something that can be turned on and off, and we will be going through the menu and talking about that mawr in the second half of this class. But if you don't see all the options, you can dive into there and turn that feature on so that you can have access to those extra controls. Next up is the image quality. This is a very important setting. This is how what type of file were recording from our camera? How our cameras recording the information and the basic choices are either raw image or J pick. If you choose J peg. There are number of choices between large, medium, small J pegs, and then there is fine, normal, different compression ratios of those J pegs. We do also have the option of a J peg, plus a raw. So if you take one photo, you're gonna get two pictures from the camera, one that's a J peg and one that's a raw for the serious shooters out there. You're gonna want to shoot raw. That way you get the most data. You get all the original information from when the picture was taken, and then you can work with it later in light room or photo shop or whatever you like to use for people who want to get just basic photos out of the camera. They don't want to fuss with a lot of extra processing. You're gonna shoot J pegs, and you'd probably want to shoot the largest, highest quality Jay Peak possible, which would be the large, fine JP. There are a few special situations where you might want to shoot raw and J peg at the same time, but in general you probably don't want to do it on a regular basis, because you, if you have a raw you can create a J pick. And so if you have J pegs, you can't make Ross and so you can't use It's kind of a one way street in that regards. And so, if you if you want to shoot both, it's generally because unique quick access to J pegs for something right away. And so either large, fine or raw are going to be the two main choices for most people, huh? Okay, we talked about the focusing area. Now let's talk about the A F mode. We have the options between single focus and continue focus. So when we press halfway down and our lens focuses, does it focus and stop when it finds out what the appropriate subject is? Or does it continue to focus when we press all the way down? And so normally s a F single autofocus is our standard mode, but when we're shooting any sorts of action, we're gonna want to have our camera in the continuous mode, and this is where it will fire at up to five frames per second, tracking a subject following the subject, moving back and forth. So if you have the cameras set to J pegs, you can shoot an unlimited number of photos. If you're shooting RAWS, you'll be able to shoot up to 65 raws in a row. So this is a very important setting for anyone who's gonna be shooting static subjects versus motion subjects. And I will have to say that the camera is not particularly good at tracking subjects. And so if you do a lot of sports photography, you're gonna want to play around with how maney focusing points you need on that subject and using some of the different lenses because some lenses air faster focusing than other lenses. So that's single and continuous. We also have the option of manual focusing where we can just turn the lens focusing ring itself to focus. We do have s a f plus MF and what that is. Is it single autofocus with the option of going in and doing some manual touch up focus. And so there are some people that kind of want to let the camera control the focus, but they want to be ableto override it at a moments notice. And this is really good for somebody who likes to manually focus and just wants a little bit of help in focusing. Finally, there is CF continuous autofocus ing plus tracking. And this is where the camera uses its own tracking abilities and can emits its own artificial intelligence to try to figure out what your subject is and tracking that particular subject. And this is a little bit more hit and miss with a lot of users. It depends on the type of subject and how clean it is separated from the background as to how well it's going to actually be able to track that subject. And so, if you are doing action photography, I would say you're you're go to mode is probably see a f continuous. But you might want to experiment with the tracking option to see if it works for your type of photography. And that's why they have options in there so that you can choose the best one for you. So most of the time I think people are gonna be leaving this in single autofocus for stationary type subjects. Okay, next up is army during system, and this is how it reads light coming in the camera. The digital E S P metering system is a good, very good excellent system for reading light. It breaks the scene up into multiple areas and gives you a good overall reading of a light coming in. Some people prefer a more traditional center weighted, which is looking at the light just in the center of the frame. And some people like working with a spot meter, which is highly concentrated in the middle of the frame. But most people are gonna want that digitally. SP There is a couple of unusual ones the spot highlight and spot shadow, which is a spot meter combined with exposure compensation of about two stops overexposed or under exposed. And I would find that these are probably pretty rarely going to be used. And so most of the time it's going to be in the digital e S P steady. We can next change the aspect ratio. Now, the natural aspect ratio of the center of this camera is a four by three aspect ratio, and you're probably gonna want to capture as much information as possible on that sensor. So that's where you're gonna want to leave it. But if you knew that you were going to be shooting and it needed to match up with 16 by nine aspect ratio on an HD TV, or you wanted to shoot it one by one or some other setting. You can do it and you will be able to see it in the viewfinder, which makes you much. Makes it a little bit easier for you to compose your image because you can see the final frame that you're trying to get to. But most of the time you're gonna want to leave this four by three. Next up, we have a variety of other controls on the camera, which you're gonna control either the look of the camera. We also have our face priority focusing option here, and I'm not gonna go into each one of these. They're fairly clear as to what they're going to do. And we're gonna talk about some of them a little bit more in depth when we get into the menu system. And then we have our function controls and there's a lot of different buttons on the camera that can be programmed and customized. So let's take a quick look at all the buttons on the camera that can be customized so if you find that you don't like the way either a dial or button works, you can change it. And so, as you can see on this camera, there are a lot of different controls on this camera that you can go into either right here in the super Control manual. Or you can dive into the menu system under the button and dial option and button functions to go in and program these buttons. And so, like I say, customize your camera, make it perfect for the way that you like it toe work. This is a bit of a shortcut on how to get in there and customize those buttons to do that.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Olympus PEN-F Recommended Settings
Olympus PEN-F Keynote

Ratings and Reviews

Jay Linsenbigler
 

Awesome course and thorough description of the PEN-F capabilities and functions. HOWEVER, John's "big boy camera" bias comes through when he describes some of the creative functions as "just fun". I highly disagree- because like other tools and features- it depends on HOW the photographer uses the tool or feature. Like HDR, the creative features can be used tastefully or look "overcooked". Film photographers who use a variety of different films in film cameras- is this "just fun", or do they offer creative options? I encourage John and any listeners to look up the Olympus Visionaries and many other professionals using Olympus cameras in their daily work to see the amazing results they create with them. Instead of the same old Nikon and Canon "muscle-flexing" biases- lets look at what the pros produce with the camera tools. All modern cameras are superb and capable of great results. And this PEN-F camera offers groundbreaking control over the image making IN CAMERA at the time of exposure- which can be used to adjust an accompanying RAW file if needed. Not everyone wants to sit in front of a computer for hours doing post processing.

Jay Linsenbigler
 

Awesome course and thorough description of the PEN-F capabilities and functions. HOWEVER, John's "big boy camera" bias comes through when he describes some of the creative functions as "just fun". I highly disagree- because like other tools and features- it depends on HOW the photographer uses the tool or feature. Like HDR, the creative features can be used tastefully or look "overcooked". Film photographers who use a variety of different films in film cameras- is this "just fun", or do they offer creative options? I encourage John and any listeners to look up the Olympus Visionaries and many other professionals using Olympus cameras in their daily work to see the amazing results they create with them. Instead of the same old Nikon and Canon "muscle-flexing" biases- lets look at what the pros produce with the camera tools. All modern cameras are superb and capable of great results. And this PEN-F camera offers groundbreaking control over the image making IN CAMERA at the time of exposure- which can be used to adjust an accompanying RAW file if needed. Not everyone wants to sit in front of a computer for hours doing post processing.

Kate Mooney
 

The Pen 5 is an amazing camera - however it is capable of so much that getting to know it can be somewhat overwhelming at first. John systematically and logically works through every part of the camera in really clear and easy to understand steps, quickly converting my initial apprehension into confidence and excitement for the endless possibilities of this camera.

Student Work

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