Lawrence Ripsher

Part 3 – Live View

I’ve always liked the idea of Live View but also wondered
about the practicality of it in the field. Although I’ve tried it out, I was
not a significant term user of previous Olympus DSLR’s with this feature so
this is my first time using it properly. Live View on the E-410 works as
follows: 

1. Press the Live View button, you hear the mirror flip and the LCD shows you what you would have seen through the shutter.
2. If you want to focus, you have to press the Focus / Exposure lock button. Once you do that you hear the mirror flip back down, the LCD goes black, the camera focuses and then you hear flip again as the mirror rises and you get the LCD view back
3. Hit the shutter to take a picture and you’ll hear the mirror flip back down again, the LCD goes black, the camera focuses (if not focused already) and then you hear flip again as the mirror rises to expose the image

The most significant point in that description is #2, as it
means you don’t get continuous AF while in Live View. This makes using Live
View to target anything that’s moving to be extremely difficult. So with that
in mind, and given the fact that there’s a viewfinder on an DSLR, what are the practical
uses of this feature? I set out to answer that question this week and here are
the answers I found: 

1. The view you have of the image is as it will be recorded. So changes to white balance, exposure and aperture will all appear accurately on the LCD before
   you take the image. This is cool when you have time and want to experiment
   (e.g. I shot all my sunset shots in the pics below using Live View for this reason)
2. Some kind of portraits work well when you don’t have to stick your face behind the viewfinder. I found this to be the case when shooting portraits of (my) dogs. There’s something a little more disarming for the animal about being able to slide a camera towards a dog without having to get in right behind it. It also means you can continue to maintain eye contact and keep their interest.
3. When in a difficult position where it’s tough to get behind the viewfinder (e.g. lying on the floor), Live View can be beneficial.
4. Manual Focusing. When you need highly accurate focusing (e.g. shooting Macros), want to validate the AF accuracy or are using Manual Focus then Live View is great. I purchased a OM to Four Thirds adapter this week and took a number of portrait shots using an old $20 OM 50mm f/1.4 (100mm f/2.8 equivalent when mounted on the E-410). At first, I found it practically impossible to focus this lens using the small viewfinder of the E-410, as I do when manual focusing on any cropped sensor. However, after switching to live view and using the zoom feature, I was able to get incredibly accurate results. 

I find items 1, 2 and 3 to be relatively niche and something
that can be overcome through different methods. They’re benefits but not
necessarily groundbreaking. However, for the case of being able to accurately
manual focus, I was so pleased with this that I think it alone justifies Live
View. I know plenty of people who use adapters on their DSLR bodies to get
access to old manual focus lenses from Olympus,
Nikon, Contact, Leica and I really like the idea of being able to do that.
What’s put me off to date however is the fact that manual focusing through
cropped sensor viewfinders is simply too difficult to get reliable results. In
contrast, I found that more than 90% of my manual focusing was bang on with
live view and its zoom feature. This for me is a great and very exciting
benefit. As I say, for Olympus users it means being able to access a range of
low cost, classic OM lenses with beautiful,
dreamy bokeh and which look might cool mounted on the camera. I have examples
of this later.