Learn how to Optimize the Panasonic G1/GH1 for landscape scenes in this digital Photography tutorial from LBGuides.
Tags:Panasonic G1/GH1 - Landscape,Better Pictures,camera setup,digital camera guide,digital camera tutorial,Digital Photography,g1,gh1,landscape,panasonic
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Transcript
If you’re taking a picture of a landscape, setting up your camera is really quite simple. The only thing you want to keep in mind when taking pictures of landscapes is having a long depth of field to have everything in focus. So there are couple of ways of doing this. Turn your mode dial to the landscape scene mode right here and what that does is either choose between few different landscape options.
The difference for example between normal and nature is the color algorithms that the camera is using to generate the color in the scene. With nature, there is more emphasis, put on the greens and blues in your picture. If you’re taking a picture of a waterfall for example and you want to get that smooth fluid effect, then you can choose creative. Go ahead and press set and now you can use your left and right navigation buttons in order to move the slider that sets the shutter speed.
Right now, you can see my shutter speed is set to one second. It's flashing at me in red, which means, the camera sees that there is way too much light in the scene for there to be a one second exposure. So, I’m going to move over to increase the shutter speed until my shutter speed turns yellow. Now, when I press the shutter button halfway, it chose an appropriate aperture and I know I can take this shut and it’ll come out properly exposed. The only problem with the automated scenes is that ISO and the white balance are automated.
For the most part, it's okay. White balance is set to automatic. Outdoors is really just fine. You will get a little bit better color, however, if you set that to daylight. So the other thing you can do instead is choose A from your mode dial. Just turn your mode dial to A, this stands for aperture and what this allows you to do is set a custom aperture. I’ll use my dial in the front to set the aperture. I move that up to something like F16. This will get me everything from near to far in focus. You don’t necessarily have to have it all the way up to 22. Keep this on 14, 16 should be just fine and now, go ahead and press the shutter button halfway just to make sure that the shutter speed is still fast enough for me to handhold the shut.
Right now, it's set to 140th of a second, which is okay but not great so I will change the aperture a little bit more. I’ll go to F11 and now my shutter speed is 160th of a second, which can easily be handheld, especially, considering I’m using the image stabilization mode. Now, my ISO is set to 100. This is great. Again, we’re outdoors, there is plenty of light so this should not be a problem and my white balance is set to daylight. To change either one of these settings, just press either the ISO button or the white balance button right here.
For example, if this was not set to daylight, I can just press WB and use either the right or left navigation button or the dial in the front to move the selection to the appropriate white balance option. If it's cloudy for example, I’ll choose cloudy which will help warm up the tones in the image. I’m just going to stick to daylight for now and press set to escape this function. Remember, the focus dial should be set AFS or auto focus single shot which means when you press the shutter button, the camera locks focus on the target which allows you to recompose the image and take the picture.
Now, just as with every picture, I want to make sure the focus brackets are over my subject. In this case, anything that’s really a great distance such as the horizon or a mountain in the landscape, press the shutter button halfway, the camera will sound a double beep. The brackets will turn green and there’s a green dot in the top right corner indicating camera has locked focus at that distance. Now, you can recompose the image and press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.
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I've tutored thousands of digital camera users since 1998. I love this subject and want to share the knowledge I've gained over the years with as many as possible. I hope you enjoy my video guides.
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