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Shooting Menu 2

Lesson 17 from: Olympus PEN-F Fast Start

John Greengo

Shooting Menu 2

Lesson 17 from: Olympus PEN-F Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

17. Shooting Menu 2

Next Lesson: Playback Menu

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu 2

All right, so that is the first page of the menu system. It seems like we're going very quickly, but trust me, we're gonna get caught in some areas of rabbit hole. So second page of the shooting menu, we have a bracketing option, and so this is used most frequently for bracketing exposures. And so when you taken exposure and you're thinking, well, maybe it would be better if it was a little lighter or a little darker. You can either do it manually or bracketing will allow you to do it automatically so you can adjust the number of frames, the increments between the frames, and you can end up with a series of photos that covers the scene from dark to light. And so it all depends on how you want to, particularly set it up. And so this is how bracketing is normally referred to. But as you'll see on the screen there, we have not only not only auto exposure bracketing, but we have white Mallon's bracketing, which will shoot with different white balance settings. That doesn't seem to be real ...

necessary, because you could simply shoot in raw and adjust it later. If you wanted to You have flash bracketing which will adjust the power of the flash I s o changes the I s o art bracketing, which is I mentioned back in the art filters will shoot all the different art filters on the exact same photo and finally focus bracketing. So I want to do a little demo on how focused bracketing works because I don't know of any other brands of cameras that have this. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use more little menu guide outline right here in front of me, and I want to lay it down here. And so what I'm gonna dio is first off, I need to turn on focus bracketing. So let's go look at the camera and dive into the menu system and go into what we own. We're on page two bracketing, and I want to turn it on. And so I'm gonna go to the right because I want to enter in this mode and I'm gonna go down to focus bracketing and I want to turn this on, but I want to adjust it and so you can adjust the number of shots up to 999. And so for this experiment, I think 10 shots is gonna be fine And the focus differential. What it is going to dio is I'm gonna focus, and it's gonna take a series of photos that are a little bit further away than the 1st 1 And so there's gonna be 10 shots that have a little bit of difference in where the camera is focussed at and let's go into this five and you can either have in a wider spread or a narrower spread. And I'm going to make it a little bit narrower spreads. So we're going to do a difference of three. And what is three mean? I don't know. It's just a scale that goes from 1 to 10. So and if we were going to be using a flash like we were in a studio and we needed the flash needed time to recycle, we could set a specific amount of time between each of these shots being taken. So we're gonna do 10 shots, they're gonna have an increment of three, whatever that is, and they're gonna happen all right in a row, and it is turned on and So what is different about this is that the camera uses the silent shutter for taking this picture. So you're not gonna hear anything, But when we're done, we'll see the photos. And so now what I want to do is I want to focus as close as I can on this. And so this is gonna be perfect for this, so you can see that we're on really shallow depth of field. In fact, I'm gonna move my camera to aperture priority, and I'm going to set it on the shallowest depth of field Possible F 2.8 on and I'm gonna leave it on Plus one. We're on a white piece of paper. And so let's see if this works. I should be able to press the shutter release once, and you might have been able to see it. It's kind of scan through the focusing, so let's go back and look at the photos. And so let's go back. 123456789 10. That was her friend. Practice one. So let's zoom in and see how much the focusing changed. And so I'm going to zoom up a little bit here, and I'm gonna turn the front dial so that each photo can you see that focus movie. Each of these is a different photo, and the focus has moved by an increment of three, and so I could make it move mawr. And so if I want to zoom in a little bit closer, and so if I wanted to focus on one line, going the wrong direction and down so we can see a little bit more, each of these is controlled at a different place. So if you wanted to do product photography and you wanted to use a focus stacking technique, in fact, I do a little bit Product photography and the product photography you're gonna be familiar with is the cover shot of this class. I photographed this camera and the problem with photographing a camera, especially with a lens on it is it's got a fair bit of depth on it. And so I could use this camera to focus on a cameras front lens, have that in focus and then focus at little increments all the way back through the camera body. I could then take those 10 images, or how Maney ever images that I shot and then use a program. And I believe the program I'm using is Helicon Focus to compress all of those into a single photograph that contains the best sharpness of each photo. And so then I could have, ah, compressed photo. And so if you go back to the cover shot of this class, that is a not a single image. It's actually multiple images that I put together through focus. Bracketing in a camera like this can really help out in that regard. Because you don't have toe manually focus every single time, it'll automatically move that focus for you. So if anyone's interested in doing macro photography product photography, this camera is uniquely qualified to work in those types of subjects. All right, next up is HDR high Dynamic Range, and so we have two things going on in here. We have the camera that is going to shoot in multiple different exposures and compress it all into a final image. And then, finally, it's gonna do another bracketing. We talked about bracketing just a couple minutes ago, but it's got another set of bracketing options, which give you an even wider range of exposures to shoot. So let's look at HDR images. So first off a non HDR J peg versus an HDR image, and you'll notice the tree in the bottom right hand corner is much lighter as we get to the HDR images. If we look at the history grams between these images, you can see by the higher level of HDR images. It is pulling back all the highlights and compressing that information so that we can have a wider dynamic range of tones. And this may very well help in some situations that are extremely contrast now because the cameras shooting multiple images, you gotta have the camera really steady on a tripod and with subjects that are not moving around. So that's HDR one and two. The other options that you can dio are basically bracketing, and this is designed for people who want to shoot HDR. But to use a program like Photo Matics or some other program to compress this data and work with it later afterwards. And these are bracketing just as we had mentioned a few minutes ago, but with a wider range and so we have three frames that are each two stops apart, which are pretty extreme where you could do seven frames to stops apart and on each extreme there, you're getting nearly a black and all black and an old white photo you can do three frames that are three stops apart. You could do five frames that air two stops the park. So whatever system you like to work with this camera is probably gonna have an option for setting the bracket for you. So we do have the HDR options. I'm not a big fan of the HDR options. They do end up with a J Peg Onley image, and I think if you work with in a raw image, you're going to be able to get a great exposure latitude out of the camera. But if you do want to shoot, uh, the bracket Siri's, it does give you a lot of great options for using that information later in some other separate program. The camera has a built in multiple exposure, pro, uh, option where you can go in and shoot multiple exposures and see it in camera. And this is sometimes better to do in a program like photo shop. But it's nice to be able to see what you're doing out in the field. One of the options is whether you want to turn auto gain on or off, and this is where the camera will adjust the exposure for you. And so, if you're not familiar with doing multiple exposures, you might want to turn auto gain on. It's just gonna make dealing with exposures and multiple exposure much easier, because you won't have to do any math to figure out the exposures. For those of you who know about multiple exposures and you have very specific exposures and you might want to have one photo that's a brighter than the others, you're gonna want to turn auto gain off. That's gonna leave you in MAWR exact control over the final exposures. Now you can do Triple and Mawr exposures by combining and adding on with double exposures because on its own, the camera will only do a double exposure. But you can doom or by simply going to that double exposure and making it a triple exposure and taking that triple exposure and adding one more and making it become a quadruple exposure. And so it's got a lot of creativity that you can get into, and it's just gonna be a matter of getting in there and playing around with those specific features. Next up is Keystone Composition. Now. Anyone who's watched my lens classes will know that I'm a big fan of tilt shift in perspective control lenses, and this camera essentially has a tilt shift lens, or at least a shift lands built into the camera. And so let's take a look at what it's doing. And so, in this case, if you put it in the mode, you can go in and you can control the stretching of either one side or the other side. And we are, you know, kind of stretching our image up and down. We can go up and down and stretch out the bottom, and with the building like this that we're looking up towards, we want to stretch out the top. That's a little too far. Let's dial this back and we want to get nice vertical lines. And so something there is about what we would normally do with a tilt shift lens. And so the difference is between our original image, where we have this keystone in effect, where it looks like the building is kind of falling backwards, and so in camera. What it will do is we'll go in and it will stretch out one end, and it will fill the frame with it. Now you will get the total number of pixels, 20 megapixels for it. What's happening, though, is that the camera is going in, and it's kind of pushing and pulling and stretching these pixels in there. And so it's not truly as good as a tilt shift lands. But it's better than nothing. And if you want to be able to see what you're doing right in camera, it does. So when it's very, very easy. In fact, let's Ah, let's do a little demonstration right here and I just see if I can use our little Rubik's Cube, which I am pointed down at, and you'll notice that on this, the lines and get turned this off here. It's not fully straight in there because I'm not shooting it straight on, so I'm going to go into the menu. I'm gonna go into Keystone Composition, and I'm gonna turn this on and sit, okay, And so now info, info, info. Where's my Where's my controls. One more, maybe right here. Okay, so now I have the controls. So let me get centered up, left and right were about centered here, and so clearly it looks wider at the top and narrow at the bottom cause we're kind of pointed down at this. If I go, this is exactly what I need to do right here. So if I just stretch out the bottom, I can now get a straighter, more rectangular image. I could make it taller on the top if I want to. And you know, if you want to have some real fun, put someone's face in there. I think this could be really interesting with someone's face. You could really stretch their nose out if you want to. Ah, but it's mainly designed for, you know, working with architectural or product photography. And so in this case, if I wanted to make sure that that really looked like a square, I could shoot it right there, which is stretching out the bottom by several will clicks on the end, and so you can always see a thumbnail down here in the bottom right hand corner. As to how much it's stretching out. So fun little feature, not something you would normally leave turned on. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn it back off. That's the keystone composition. All right. Next up is the anti shock and silent mode. This is something we talked about before in the drive mode, and we can go in and we can make controls on this if we want to have it set up so that it is either in the mode or not in the mode. But what we can also dio is we can set up a delay time. So if we're worried about some sort of motion, we could have the camera wait after the shutter has been open a second or two seconds or 30 seconds to fire the electronic shutter because there was a little bit of movement with the aperture moving. And so if you needed a delay in there, and that would be mostly for some sort of scientific type purposes where it's in a laboratory and you can't have any motion or anything moving at the time the picture is taken, and so there is that option in there. There was also a noise reduction and we're gonna talk more about noise reduction as we go through this class in there now, the silent mode settings that's gonna open up into another option. And so when you put the camera into the silent mode, is it because you want the silent mode option just for itself or because it specifically doesn't make a lot of noise? And so one of the things that you can have is the deeper the F illuminator either turned on or off when you go into the silent vote. Because perhaps you like to use a silent mode because you don't want any distractions of any sort, so you can have it automatically turned the beep off and turn off the F illuminator and turn off your flash so that your flash will not fire. And so it's just one of the further ways to customize the camera toe. How you like it to work. Next up is the high res shot mode, and we took a look at this example before, and so this is where it shoots multiple photos to get a higher resolution shot, not something you're normally going to dio, but it's something that if you are shooting from a tripod with the subject that has no movement like a building or a product. You might want to give it a try if you need that extra resolution, because you could get up to an 80 megapixel raw image from the camera. The charge time is if you are working in a studio and you need time for the flash to recycle. Next up we have our flash modes and our remote control the RC modes. Normally, this was left off because we don't have a flash on the camera at all. But if you want to be able to communicate wirelessly from the flash that is mounted on the camera to an extra one, you could go in here Now. There is a whole set of functions and features that we're not gonna go into because we are not working with flashes right now with the camera. But there is, ah, a great number of ways that you can control your lights so that you can get just the right lighting on your subject.

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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