Hello I'm Graham and I hope everyone's having a great day and welcome to
episode 3 of this new video series that I'm running for new users to the
Panasonic Lumix FZ300/330 camera. Now if you're a new viewer it's
worth downloading the guide for this course which is available on my
photographic blog - I'll put a link to that in the video description below so
you can actually download it. If you've already downloaded the book then if
there are some additions to that book now from chapter 3 and chapter 4. So you
may want to download it again and if you're going to print it out you only
need to print out pages 33 to 44. If you're a competent user of the camera
you might want to also check out my user's manual which is now on Amazon.
It's available as a color book or a black-and-white book. If you buy the
black and white book if you send me your order number from Amazon then I'll send
you the color PDF so you've got the color document to work with as well.
In today's episode we're going to be looking at moving from the iA mode which
is fully automatic in every sense - we saw some ways we could tame it by using the
iA plus mode which gave us options for color tint, background defocus and
brightness control but it didn't give us much control over the way the shot was
taken in terms of ISO - the sensitivity of the camera or on where the focus was.
By moving to the P mode with this camera we have a lot more opportunities to be
more creative with our pictures we can get the image that we conceived in our
mind. I often refer to the P mode as the ISO priority mode - we already have an
aperture and shutter priority mode on the camera I refer to the P mode as that
ISO priority mode it allows you to set an ISO and have the camera determine an
aperture and shutter speed combination for the ambient light based on the ISO
setting that you've made. I'll explain more about that as we go through the
course. Will now set up the camera so we can do some adjustments with the P menu
and show you what's available, how to create better images by using that P
mode. To record in the program auto mode you need to turn the top control dial so
that the P aligns or the white mark on the flash - housing when you do that
you'll notice that you get a P appear on the LCD which confirms that you're in
the program auto mode. Now if you were to go into the menu choices while
you're in the P mode you'll find that you've now got an extensive range of
menus they can change the values in the camera. You can see that we've got seven
pages of adjustments. This set of menus becomes quite intimidating for new users
and that's why in the pilot program we just set up those options that are
needed to allow us to use the camera in most of the modes without having to go
into the menus again. Now the first thing that the program auto mode gives you is
the opportunity to set up the camera sensitivity. In the intelligent auto
modes the camera always maintained the control of the ISO and you didn't get
the option to change it so even if you had the camera mounted on a tripod and
you had a dark situation the camera would drive the ISO up to a very high
value giving you images with noise on. But here in the P mode we can actually
change the way the camera responds to light. In a moment you can see that I
have got an ISO value of 100 set - and that's my normal recommendation for this camera.camera
If you try to use ISO over 400 you will notice that the image becomes slightly
noisy as this is a very small sensor camera. So you can use the ISO control on
the four-way navigation dial to set that value. When you cursor up and go into the
ISO mode you can see that we've got the choice of auto ISO, intelligent ISO and
then the manual values that you can assign to this camera and they range
from 100 up to 6400. Now you don't use 6400 ISO as a very last resort if you
needed to get an image. Normally will work within the range of 100 to 400. If
you're only going to use the auto ISO mode - and that is available if you go to the
bottom if you set auto ISO here and then if you go into the menu and you set the
ISO limit set on page 6 to 800 it means the camera won't ever go
800 ISO so you won't run into the situation where you got noisy images.
In the "P"mode the camera will do its best to maintain the exposure by first
of all slowing down the shutter speed and then opening up the aperture until
you get to F 2.8. Once you've reached the minimum of F2.8 and the low shutter
speeds then you really do need to increase your ISO if you want to get a
image under those lighting conditions. Here I'm going to set an ISO of 100
because that's my recommendation that you use it gives you the lowest noise in
the picture and it gives you the best a range of colors from dark to light. If I
was to press the shutter button the camera will determine focus by the
focused target on the screen now and you notice that we've got a focus target
that we can change position of. In the intelligent auto mode we could only
roughly change the position by using a subject tracking - but in this mode if we
press our function button 2 - which we pre-programmed to give us direct access
to the focus area if - I press function button - you can see now we've got a
target we can move the position off by using the four-way navigation dial and
we can also change its size by using the top control button so it can make it
small or we can make it as large as we need. So if you wanted to focus on a bird
through branches in a tree set to the smallest area available from the camera.
There is also a precise area focus but we'll talk about that later in the video.
So here now I want to set the focus point on to this dragon's eye so I'm
going to move the position up and then across until it's sitting on the
dragon's eye, there! When I press menu set that will be the target area for the
camera. Now when I take the exposure if I half press the shutter button you
notice the cameras given me an exposure of F2.8 with a shutter speed of 1/25th
of a second - so if I take that picture you can see the exposure there. Because
this is a studio situation I'm quite happy with the 1/25th of a second. I've
got my mounted on a tripod so there's gonna be
no camera shake - but it was outdoors and I was shooting sports and I wanted a
higher shutter speed then in the program auto mode I use a facility called
program shift. Now program shift allows us to change this aperture and shutter
combination but the exposure will stay the same. So if I press the shutter
button halfway down and then turn the top control dial clockwise you'll notice
that we bring up a double-headed arrow with a"P symbol-that means we're
into the program shift mode. So whilst the combination of shutter speed and
aperture is on-screen I can now use this top control dial to change the aperture
and shutter speed combination so it gives me that opportunity to set
something like F5.6 which I want for this particular shot to give me more
depth of focus between the front of the subject and the back of the subject. So
now we will take this exposure with a 1/6 of a second at F5.6. If I wanted a
much faster shutter speed obviously with this combination I'm gonna have to go
down to F2.8 but I can only go to 1/25th of a second with this lighting condition.
If I wanted a faster shutter speed then I would have to change this ISO to
enable me to use that faster shutter speed. So 1/25th of a second if I wanted
it to be 1/100 of a second then I would have to go 2 extra stops or 2
complete increments on the ISO scale. So if I go to ISO and I go from 100 to 200
which is one stop to 400 which is two stops when I press the shutter button
now we should see we've got 1/100 of a second at F2.8. So you
can see how you can change your aperture or shutter speed and your ISO to gain
the situation that you want. I'm going to go back to the ISO 100 because we're
shooting indoors. If I used to use the Quick Menu Q menu here with a trash can icon -
function button 3 - if I cursor it into the one area options you can see that
I've set up for the large area - by default - but we do have this precise
pinpoint focused method. We've also got the custom multi which allows you to
define a shape or we can use the 49 area - as the intelligent auto does. We can use
for focus tracking or we can use the face and eye detection - so I can use any
one of those focus modes in that one area method. We look at the precise point
so if I press menu set your now notice on the screen is a very very small white
cross and if you move its position - you can't use the whole area of the screen -
it is more or less in the center of the screen that you can use the precise
focus point. When you got the point you want, press menu set and then that will
come back and show you the white cursor when you press the shutter button you
notice we've got a green indication that we've got focus lock on that particular
focus point. Back into the Q menu and we'll change that back to the single
area method. Now one of the failings in the intelligent auto mode is a fact that
white balance is always done automatically for you and in the P mode
by default it uses the auto white balance method. Now there are some
situations where the auto white balance can actually not give you the desired
results and in my studio situation here that's one of the cases. My studio
lights tend to be slightly magenta so if we look to that image in the background
you've probably felt that the image was slightly magenta looking the background
instead of being nice gray is a slight magenta color. So we can use what's
called the manual white balance and white balance is achieved by using the
white balance button here on the four-way navigation dial. So if I depress
that you'll notice we bring up a scale which have got auto white balance and
then some preset values. If we were outside in bright sunshine we
could use the sunshine symbol - if we were in clear cloud we could use the cloud
symbol. If we were in a shady situation where there's cloud in the sky but we're
in the shade we could use a shade option which makes it slightly warmer. Indoors
if we're shooting with tungsten lights that's normal household filament lights
we could use a preset for that tungsten white balance. And now there are the four
custom white balances that we can set so we have four independent controls of our
white balance if we wanted to make four setups. I'm going to go to one that we've
not already predefined and that's going to be the white balance number three. Now
to do a white balance set procedure you either need a white piece of paper or
a neutral gray card - and you can buy these sets of neutral gray cards on
Amazon or any of the local of retailers and it's basically an 18% reflectance
gray card - neutral in color so that it's not going to bias the image anyway. So
now when I go to the function white balance set operation I can use the up
arrow key it will show me the area that's going to be used to define white
balance and providing your gray card or your white sheet is fully covering that
area when you press the menu set button the camera will go through that process
and set the white balance very accurately. If I now remove that gray
card you notice that this image is now more neutral and if I take the picture
you can look at that you'll see that it's more neutral. So providing my
lighting situation doesn't change I can use that preset condition. Now in the
intelligent auto mode the camera used what was called scene detection to determine
what type of picture you're taking. It would look for the areas of color and
darkness and determine whether you're shooting a landscape or a portrait food
picture etc in the program mode we don't have this scene detection but we use
what are called photo styles. Now the photo styles are available
in the record setup menu so if I go into menu set if I go to page one you notice
we've got photo styles. By default you're setup with the standard photo style but
if I press menu set you can see we can cursor through we've got standard, vivid,
natura,l monochrome, scenery, portrait and then a custom setup. You'll also notice
here in the standard photo style are four individual controls which once you
get familiar with the camera you might want to make some changes to now these only
affect the JPEG camera images - if you're shooting with raw as well you won't
change anything in the raw file these are only for affecting the JPEG output
from the camera. If you don't want to do any subsequent post-processing to your
images if you just want to take these images out of the camera then it's worth
coming down and changing the sharpness to +2 they'll give you a slightly
sharpened image as all JPEG images coming out of cameras normally require
some amount of additional processing. Additionally you might want to go down
to noise reduction and just take that back to minus 2 as that will stop the
camera smearing some of the very fine images that the camera is able to
produce - so with a sharpness of 2 and a noise reduction of minus 2 if you're
gonna use the images directly out of camera without any post-processing. If you
are gonna do your own editing then I found if I just leave those at 0 and
then do my own post-processing everything's fine. With the other photo
Styles the vivid one will give you extra intense colors the natural one gives you
slightly softer contrast so if you've got a very high contrast scene you can
use the new the natural mode and that will help you reduce the amount of
contrast in that picture. You'll see a chart in that new chapter 3 guideline
which shows you the conditions that you can use both the range of ISO's and the
types of photo style. Now we do get the option now to use the camera metering circuit.
Remember in intelligent auto control it always used the whole area to determine
what the metering was but in this particular P mode if I go into the
record setup menu and we look at metering mode by default it's in the
whole area but we can up what's called Center weighted. The center weighted
takes the measurement from the central area of the screen so it's better in
some respects than the whole area. If you've got someone standing in the
middle of the frame and you want the camera to expose them correctly rather
than taking in the landscape behind so center-weighted is valuable in some
operations. But one which is really important is the spot method so if
you've got an object that's been illuminated on its own in the subject
say the moon against the dark sky you can use the spot metering to actually
precisely measure one of the craters in the moon and get the right exposure it's
also useful if you've got a subject with quite a high contrast range you can
actually find the average by using that spot to determine what that shortest
exposure would be well the longest exposure would be and then roughly put
it between the two to give you an average between the highlight and the
shadow area - but that's an advanced measurement technique but for most
people using the center weighted or the whole area would suffice.
So I can show you how to use the spot meter now if I move the focus point by
using the f2 key I can change the position and you notice that the camera
is metering now from the background and if I have to press the shutter button
you see that we are 1/40th at 2.8 - if I press the function button 2
again and come to one of the shadow areas in the image and half depress the
button you see it's a 1/10 second at F2.8 so you can see the range of
exposures within that image. So for if I wanted to expose for the shadows I'll
put my measurement point in the shadow if I wanted the highlights then I could
place the measurement area in highlight and get the measurement for
the highlight and that's a1/30 of a second. So averaging out between the
highlight and the shadow I would get about a 1/20th of a second and that's
what the camera would give me using the whole area method so if we go back to
whole area we see we got about a twenty-fifth of a second which is the
average between the highlight and the shadow areas. If I felt that image was
still slightly underexposed I can use exposure compensation. We had that as
brightness control in the intelligent auto mode but is referred to as exposure
value compensation when we're in the semi-automatic modes. If I now press the
function button 1 it will bring up the option for me to change the exposure
value compensation or I can make the scene brighter by going to the plus side
of the scale or I can make it darker by going to the minus side of this go. So
depressing function button one you can see I'll bring up the adjustment scale
between minus 3 and plus 3 and I want to make this scene a little bit lighter and
I'm gonna go just by one third of a stop so I go to plus one third. When I press
menu set that will be locked into the camera. So now you can see the exposure
is 1/20th second where it was 1/25th so by using that Plus exposure
value compensation it's made the shutter speed go longer which makes my scene
brighter. So by using the Pmode we've made our first giant steps away from a fully
automatic giving you a lot more control over how that image is created so you've
got control of our you use the aperture or the shutter speed how bright the
subject is by using the exposure compensation
you've got the control of sensitivity so you can either shoot with a very low ISO
for low noise images or if you're forced to use a high ISO because of the
lighting situation then you can use that creatively. Well that's it for this short
video thanks very much for watching again in episode 4 we'll be looking at
the aperture priority mode and the shutter priority mode and they open up
some more creative possibilities for you for your photography, So until then
thanks again for watching- please do take care I'll see you all in the next
one. Goodbye for now.