Lessons

Lesson Info

Camera Controls: Drive Mode

Over on the left side is the drive control and there are a lot of options on this dial. So let's go through what these do. First and foremost the basic setting is the S setting for single frames. So when you press down on the shutter release you get one single photo. And that's usually fine for most basic photography. And that's probably where most people will have their camera kept most of the time. Next up is Continuous Low so if you wanna shoot pictures with a little bit more rapid nature you shoot up to five frames per second in this mode. Now if you want you can also adjust this to shoot four frames or three frames per second it just depends on what type of action you're shooting as to how fast you want that frame rate to be. Now one of the advantages of having this in the Continuous Low mode is that each time it shoots a photo it then gives you live view of what you are seeing through the viewfinder. So if you are tracking a subject that's moving in front of you you'll be able to...

shoot a photo and then see where they are so you have the camera positioned right for shooting the next photo. And this is the easiest way to track subjects in any sort of action type photography. Now if you want to change from five to four to three frames per second you can press the function two button which is on the front of the camera 'cause that is currently controlling the drive setting. So once you have it set to CL you can press that front button to make those additional changes. You also go into the menu system and control that as well. Which we will see when we get to the menu section. Next up is Continuous Medium and so as you might guess this is gonna be just a little bit faster in firing rates. This is at six frames per second. Where you are also getting live view between the shots. And finally we are at Continuous H and so in this case we're getting up to eight frames per second but there are additional options in here. You can get up to 11 frames per second if we are using the vertical power booster grip which we will talk more about or the electronic shutter. If you wanna get up to 14 frames a second you can do that with the electronic shutter. And with this if it's gonna be about as fast as you get on any of the camera. So if you really need the fastest action you will need to use that electronic shutter. But there is downsides to using electronic shutter because it's using a scanning system and it's not always the best system for shooting subjects that are moving quickly because they might become distorted. I'll fully explain this as we continue to go through the class but eight frames per second for a lot of basic action is the top number that you would want to think about in most cases. You can change between eight, 11, and by changing the drive settings by pressing that front button on the camera and that will allow you to go in and see those changes. I can show you here on the camera right now. We have the camera in the continuous low setting. And then as I press the button on the front of the camera which I will turn around and show you real quickly, it's just this little button right in here. So I'm just gonna come in here press that button and we'll look on the back of the camera you can see that when I press this button it basically jumps into the menu system so that I can jump between these different settings right there. If I jump to continuous medium and press this button, nothing happens because there's no options there. If I go into continuous high, I can press this and these other settings are grayed out because I don't have the electronic shutter selected or I don't have the vertical grip attached at this time. So eight frames per second is as fast as I can get right now Let me just quickly jump in and change the shutter type to electronic and then I will press the button and now we can get up to 11 and 14 frames per second. And I'm gonna change that back just in case that changes something else about the way the camera works. That's one of those changes that can really change how the camera works. And I will once again I will explain that in all due time. You can also change these continuous high settings in the menu system under the drive setting which we will fully explore a little bit later. Now one of the things to note about using the continuous high motor drive on this is that the normal 325 focusing points is then limited to the main 49 points in the middle. The camera is working very hard to get all those pictures taken and it is a little bit limited in the focusing system. So be aware of that if you are tracking subjects you're gonna wanna keep it in that large middle square area of the scene. Next up is BKT which stands for bracketing which generally means shooting a variety of pictures at slightly different settings. And there's a variety of ways that we can do that in this camera. So let's go through the different options. Now once again, to change the sub-setting on this you would use that function two button on the front of the camera as well in here. There's also a place to make that change in the menu setting. First up is auto exposure bracketing. This is the most common type of bracketing. This is the most likely that most people are going to use. And the idea here is that you're suiting a variety of exposures. Some a little bit lighter, some a little bit darker. If this seems familiar, it's very similar to exposure compensation. The difference is that in exposure compensation you are manually setting up each and every shot. In this case the camera is setting up a group of shots and will fire through them very quickly and automatically make those changes in exposure for you. And so you can do a one stop bracket. You can do a two stop bracket if you need a wider range of tonality between your three photos. And you can actually do this for two to nine photos. You can do it third stops all the way up to three stop increments and so there's a lot of fine grade changes that you can make by going in and doing this. And so if you wanna get in and do this you can go into the menu system and you can make those adjustments as to where and exactly how you want you bracketing to work. Next up is ISO bracketing. And I'll be honest with ya this one doesn't make a lot of sense to me. This is generally designed for people who are shooting JPEGs only doesn't gonna do anything to do with raw and the way it works is the camera takes a photo and it save three of images. It takes one image and it boosts the brightness by a stop. And then it takes yet another one and it reduces it by a stop. And so you have three different images one a little bit brighter, one a little bit darker. If you had taken a single image with a raw you would easily be able to do this in post production yourself. But in some cases you wanna do it in JPEG you wanna do it in camera. Yes the camera can do it. Film simulation bracket. One of the things that this camera will do is it does film simulation. Fuji is long time film maker as we all know. And they have a very good color science. And so they make some very interesting different looks for your JPEG images so you want them to look in a particular style with a contrast and saturation to it. And so in this case you are shooting a single photo that has three different looks to it. And you can choose which one of those looks it gets. So for instance velvia which is a very vivid look to it classic chrome which is very subdued colors and then sepia which is a monochrome using kind of a brownish tint to it. And so this is just an example. They have about, guessing here, maybe about 10 different film looks that you can choose and they're constantly adding to their collection as time goes on. White balance bracketing is another one of those for the JPEG shooter. And this varies the color that you are recording an image in Once again if you shoot raw you can adjust this infinitely without any destruction of the original image and so it's not real necessary here. And so what it's doing here is it's shooting an image that is normally balanced and then one that has little bit of blue to it and one has like a little bit more of a warm feeling to it. And so shooting one getting three images. Dynamic range bracketing is trying to control highlight and shadow areas so that it is within the range of what looks good in a typical photograph. And so in some shooting scenarios have a very wide dynamic range. The darks are dark and the lights are very very light. And this going to try to control that in some manner. And so once again it's gonna save three different images that is gonna be trying to protect those highlights and make 'em not quite as bright. So the main one that I think most people are gonna be using is the auto exposure bracketing. That is most frequently used by landscape photographers perhaps architectural photographers capturing tricky lighting scenarios. Next up we have the movie mode so this is the best of the Fuji cameras when it comes to shooting movies. And we have quite a few more controls. The menu has grown about three fold in the camera for the number of options that we have when we shoot movies in this camera. So if you wanna shoot a movie you gotta flip it all the way over here to the movie mode to start with. In the menu we will talk more about this later the different options that we have for the data rate, frame rate, and the resolution you shoot through the camera. Camera does shoot 4K video. It has actually two different 4K modes. Let me talk a little bit about the different aspect ratios. The standard frame for still photography is a three by two or one by one and a half aspect ratio. The full HD coverage is 16 by nine. The 4K crop, there is an ever so slight 4K crop on this, it's about a 1.17 crop. You so you're losing a little bit of light angle when you are shooting video with this. Now it does have the standard traditional 4K I know 4K is still kinda new to some people. But the standard is the UHD 4K coverage. But there is also DCI 4K format which is a little bit of a narrower format so it's a little bit more widescreen. So this camera has both those options built into it. Alright, so when you are working with the movie mode there is a limited number of autofocus options and I know we haven't talked about autofocus yet but you'll notice that once we do and then you go into video you'll notice that you don't have quite as many options. One option is multi which is looking at the entire area of the scene. If you are looking for very simplistic video making it very very easy the multimode works quite well. The area is a smaller setting that you can direct in the frame where you want that to be. And so if you're a little bit more precise about your focusing you'll want to choose the area option. And this can be selected by going into the movie settings menu. Into the movie mode, and movie af mode and choosing which one you want to use. So there is a number of other things to know about there is a 15 minute limit when shooting 4K on the camera. To my understanding what's happening is the battery is getting heavily used and gets very, very warm in that case. If you do use the VPBXH1 vertical power booster the camera can then use three different batteries and it can cycle through the different batteries which distributes the heat a little bit more easily and widely and so you can record up to 30 minutes with the vertical grip. The camera also something known as f-log and logarithmic curve to the color that you are shooting which is a very flat scene. And this is designed for color grading or adjustment in post production. So if you want to shoot as wide a dynamic range as possible you can put the camera in f-log you can color grade it afterwards and get a very nice punchy that has retained as much of the highlights and shadow regions as possible. There are number of interesting recording options where you can slow down or speed up time with the video options so you can record at two, four, or five times motion for basically a time lapse. And we also have a slow motion as well. And so if you want to slow down time we can do that. The recording format is a movie h. which is a very common format these days and so that should work in most all different players and editors. There's a variety of different movie shutter speeds available. You can actually get exactly to 1/48th of a second. For those of you who know about movies and TV and filming and stuff you'll know that that's a good shutter speed for doing a lot of different types of filming. We can get exactly to a 24th or a 96th of a second. So Fuji has a very wide range of exact shutter speeds that you can get to that many other cameras do not have. They can get pretty close, like 1/50th of a second but not exactly that 1/48th. Next up is the advanced filter. And this is for times when you wanna have a little bit of fun. And wanna have an image that looks a little bit different. So there's a whole bunch of these advanced filters which you could say is kinda like Photoshop on steroids. And so it's going to be making a lot of changes to your images this only with JPEG images. And it is a very strong filter effect. It's gonna have a lot of different fun options in here that you may want to play around with. I don't know that I would be using this for my serious photography. Because this is kinda hard to recover from some of these drastic changes that it's making here. But when you are wanting a different look. You're wanting to do it in the camera. You're not wanting to do it in the computer later on. As I say these can be kind of fun to play around with. But do be careful about accidentally moving the camera to this because you're gonna be getting very different results then what you would probably expect. And to change those filters you can press the button on the front of the camera. In fact let's do that right now as a little demonstration. So I'm gonna move the camera over to the advanced setting over here with the dial. Press down on the shutter release to wake the camera up. And we can already see that there is a little different look to it. 'Cause it's in one of those modes right now. It's in the toy camera mode. And so you can see how this changes the look of the scene quite dramatically. There's a number of black and white modes that I do think are kinda fun. But it's one of those things that you gotta be careful about accidentally bumping the camera. 'Cause that is right next to the S setting and just a little bit of a bump and you're gonna be getting some very very different photos. This does have a lock on it. That might have been a good idea 'cause it's just very close and easy to get to that advanced setting there. Alright last on the list is the panorama options. So if you do want to record a scene that is very wide in nature. You can do that with this camera. This is a JPEG only version, it's not a raw image. And what it's doing is it's shooting a lot of photos and then combining it in camera. It does a very good job of combining them in camera in my opinion. Now for those of you who have done more serious individual stitching of images where you shoot individual images and then compile them later in post production this does not fully compete with that in quality. It tends to be a little bit quicker on the assembly process you might say. And so it's more good for snapshots and that type of memory shot. Rather than a really important panorama that you're gonna blow up large and you're gonna look at every fine detail to it. Because sometimes it doesn't match those things up perfectly. If you do want the higher quality panorama you want to take individual images and work with them later in post production. But you know for a traveler just a great view point that wanna record something it works quite well for this. Now there are four different types of panoramas that you can get. Depending on whether you hold the camera. It's horizontal or vertical position and whether you choose a medium panorama or a large panorama. Now there is no real sense in holding the camera horizontal it typically doesn't work as well you're not covering as much area so it's generally better to hold the camera vertically and use either the medium or the large. And the large is very wide. It is going over 180 degrees. And so as you're panning back and forth make sure that you have your body in position for turning quite a bit with the camera. And so you might want to do some practicing on that. And so those can be fun and they do work pretty good. As I say they are not absolutely perfect. And don't forget you can pan vertically as well. This is a great way for covering scenes that are just wider than the lenses that you might have. And so you will use the control on the back of the camera for controlling how you want your panoramas to look. And so let me show you on the back of this camera here what that looks like. I will first off move camera over into the panorama mode here. And so you can see the directions right down here. Which direction and angle. And so if I want to change the angle I have the medium and the large option. I'm gonna go with the medium option right now. And for direction you can change which direction do you plan to pan. And so if I was planning to pan vertically what I would do is I would move the camera vertically let's see if I can hold this here for ya. And then I would choose one of these different options right here. So that I can pan the camera in the line of the in the direction of the line. And so that's gonna get me as much top to bottom and then a fairly wide shot as well. And so it takes a little practice. So just be aware that that will come up when you move the camera into the panorama mode right there. And for now I'm gonna flip it back to the s setting 'cause that is the standard single shot mode. Which is exactly what we're gonna do right here. And so this is where you're gonna probably wanna have the camera most of the time. And so that are all of the settings on the drive section of the camera.