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Exposure Controls: Aperture & Exposure Compensation

For changing the aperture that is done on the lens. And Fuji has a lot of different lenses with some slightly different styles. So let me explain what the different options are. Some have a ring on them with the numbers with an additional a setting for automatic aperture. Some lenses will simply have a switch that goes from manual to automatic for controlling the apertures. They both have the same effect, they're just used in different manners. It depends on if the lens has an aperture that has specific numbers on it, which is most commonly gonna be on prime lenses that do not have a zoom with them. But it varies with Fuji. They do also make a series of XC lenses. And these are kind of lower end, very simplistic, economical lenses. And they do not put apertures on those so you need to use the back dial of the camera for controlling the aperture with those. There's not too many of them. There's only about been two, or three, or four of those in total throughout the system. Now the apert...

ures are used of course for controlling light. And controlling the depth of field. If you set F22 with most lenses you are gonna get a very great depth of field so that you can have the foreground in focus as well as the background, especially true with wide angle lenses. With a wide open aperture of 1.4, you'll get shallow depth of field. And so this is great for portrait photography or anytime you wanna have a subject that really stands out from the background as it blurs into a nice smooth background there. So, one of the other little things is that when you press halfway down on the shutter release your camera will go into a depth of field preview mode, which means the aperture closes down and you'll be able to see how much depth of field you are getting in any particular scene. And so when you press down, if you were to look straight in lens or through the view finder this is what it looks like. And so you can see how much depth of field you'll be getting with a particular lens. So I wanna show you a little demo on my camera here about some of those settings. And so if I wanted to set the camera up in what is traditionally known as an aperture priority way, that is where I would take the shutter speed dial and I would put this in a so that my shutter speeds are taken care of automatically. And over on the side of the lens, I'm gonna flip this down to the manual setting. Now this particular lens, which is the standard 18 to 55 lens, has a ring for changing the aperture. There is no indicator as to what aperture I'm at. So I have to look at the back of the camera for that. Let me turn this on right here. Point it over at my subjects. And we'll see down at the bottom that I'm at aperture F4 down here. Let me go ahead and make some changes. Let's put this right over the clock there so you can see that a little bit more easily. And so let's go ahead and press down on our shutter release. And now we can make our changes so that we can shoot at different apertures. Now you'll notice as I go from one extreme to the other I have blue numbers and then white numbers are the ones that the camera is automatically taking care of. And at any point I take a photo here, let's go ahead and play this back, you'll see that I'm getting a proper exposure on that. Now let's go ahead and switch things around. So what I'm gonna do is over on the lens is I'm gonna move this to A for automatic apertures. But now I'm gonna choose shutter speeds myself. And so let's start with a pretty basic shutter speed of 1/60th of a second here. And, and I better make a little change here on the ISO. I'm gonna just change it to 800 ISO. That's a good one for the indoors here. And so now as I point it at my subject, you can see that I am at 1/60th of a second. And the camera is choosing an aperture of 5.6. Take a photo. Let's play it back so that we can see it. Looks like a good exposure on that. So as I change my shutter speed up you'll notice that my aperture becomes red at a certain point. Let me go back down to 1/60th. And suddenly it becomes red. And that is a warning. Anytime you see a red indicator in here that is a warning. So if I try to take a picture at 1/2000th of a second, let's take a look at what that picture looks like. Little on the dark side there. And that's because we didn't have enough light coming in. And the camera was warning us that we were underexposed here. And this can also happen with long exposures as well. Let's, let's go down, put it in T. And change our shutter speeds. Let's see, let's go the other direction on this. Go down to a really long shutter speed. Let's see what shutter speed so we can see it right down here. So now we're in full seconds. And you can see that if I wanna shoot an eight second exposure, the lens can stop down to F22. But it's still not enough. And so if you are using shutter priority, what I'm truing to say is, watch out for the red indicators 'cause that means that you are out of range and you are gonna get either an overexposed or an underexposed picture. This is why I prefer to set the shutter speed dial in the A setting. And set the lens in manual setting. And then I can control it with the lens. And I never get one of those red indicators because there's always the shutter speed to accommodate for that aperture setting. At least in most all possible lighting scenarios. And so that's aperture priority verus shutter priority. I'm not saying doing use shutter priority. It's just that you need to be careful when you do use it. Program mode is what is known on most cameras as the fully automated shutter speeds and fully automated apertures. And so in this case you're gonna set the shutter speed dial to A. And then over on the lens you're gonna move the switch over to the A setting. So the camera will figure out both shutter speeds and apertures for you. And so you'll be looking down at the bottom of the screen there for your shutter speeds, your apertures, your ISO information. And if you have a different screen set up you'll see that same information a little bit larger. Now one of the options in the program mode that make photography a little bit interesting is the ability to change both shutter speeds and apertures at the same time with the back dial known as program shift. That way you can adjust if you need a little bit faster shutter speeds or you want a little bit more depth of field. You can just turn that back dial to adjust both of those shutter speeds and apertures in unison together. The view finder colors once again blue means that you are manually setting that feature. White is the camera is automatically setting it for you. And red is some sort of warning. So red is an easy warning sign to remember in that case. And so if you're getting a red warning look out and you might wanna adjust your settings in that case. Over on the left hand side is the exposure compensation scale. Which is what I wanna talk about next. There is an exposure compensation button on the camera. You will press that button and turn the back dial for changing the exposure in any case where the camera is automatically taking care of one of the particular features. And so this is great when you're not sure what is the best possible exposure, or you might wanna take a few different exposures for working with HDR for another reason. And so with this you might wanna use this in aperture priority, shutter priority, or program. And if you want you can actually dedicate one of the dials on the camera to being an exposure compensation dial rather than having to press the buttons at all. But let's go ahead and do a little demonstration on that. So I have the camera in manual aperture. Automatic shutter speed. So I'm controlling the aperture. The camera is controlling the shutter speed. I'm gonna change my aperture to something a little bit more reasonable for the light in here. And so at F5.6 we're getting 1/60th of a second. And if I wanna take a photo, that looks like it's pretty well exposed. That's fine. But if I wanted it a little bit darker I'm gonna press the plus minus on the top of the camera. And then watch the exposure indicator over on the left hand side. I can make it brighter by a stop. Let's go by two stops here. Make it a big difference there. I'm gonna press in down on it again. And I'm gonna dial it back down to zero. Let's go down to minus two. And do another shot. And let's go ahead and take a look at these shots here. Let me pull up a little bit of different display. Well actually we can see it right here. If, let me just adjust the camera, well actually, right down here you can see it's at minus two. Let's go to the previous shot. And that one's at, a little hard to see there 'cause I shot a very bright subject. But that's plus two. And the previous one was at zero. And so you can see those results. And let's see if we can see it in any other screen. Yeah, that's as good as it gets there. Okay, and so one of the most important things, well actually the most important thing about exposure compensation is to reset it back to zero after you've been playing around with it. You don't wanna put your camera away with it left at a minus or a plus setting that's really strong 'cause when you turn it on the next time you may forget about having that setting. And so that does not reset on its own. You need to manually reset where that needs to be. So once again, you just press the button, turn the dial. If you want you can go in and you can customize the unused dial, whatever that happens to be, the front or the back of the camera, and that can be your exposure compensation if you use that a lot. And I'll explain more about that as we get to the menu system. All right so for full manual control you're gonna be setting shutter speeds, you're gonna be setting apertures, ISOs, and you're gonna be using the exposure indicator. The light meter in the camera to measure light. Over on the left hand side the light meter will go from plus five to minus five. If it's at minus one that is one stop underexposed. The little marks in between are for third stops. So 1 1/3rd, 1 2/3rds for instance. Minus two stops. Minus 2 2/3rds stops in this case. And most of the time when I'm shooting manual I am shooting for an even exposure for my first shot and then I may need to make an adjustment, depending on how bright or dark that subject is. A little up or a little bit down. So manual exposure is really good for a couple of very important reasons. Number one, it's good for consistent results. If you wanna shoot a series of photos that are all under the same lighting and you want them to have the same look to them, the same brightness levels to them, you wanna be using manual exposure. And so that's one of the reasons, that's my top reason, for using manual exposure. Another reason is it's very good for tricky lighting. And so subjects that are a little bit darker than normal or a lighter than normal will fool traditional light meters in cameras. And so by doing a few test shots, figuring out what you like as far as exposure, you can set it manually and it's exactly where you want it in these tricky lighting scenarios. So let me show you on this camera a little bit about manual exposure. So we'll wanna make sure the lens is set to the manual aperture setting. On the side of the lens. Some lenses of course will have numbers that you will set this at. On this particular 18 to 55, we just have it right here. On the top of the camera, we can set it to any of the different shutter speeds we want. But I'm gonna set it to T because then I can change shutter speeds on the back of the camera with the dial at anyplace I want. Now let's say I would like an aperture of F11. I'm gonna turn the dial on the camera to get to F11. Let's just say that I wanna shoot at ISO because that's the best quality setting on this camera. And so you can see that number changing as I turn the dial over here. So that's ISO 200. And now I'm gonna set the final setting with the shutter speed by turning the back dial. And you can actually see the little indicator next to the shutter speed, that indicates that's the back dial of the camera. So I'm gonna move this down. And what I'm looking for is I'm looking over here at the indicator on the side and I'm gonna try to get that little indicator up to the zeros. And so you will notice the light changing as well and we're two stops away. One stop. And proper exposure right there. Which is 1/3rd of a second. And so there is our properly exposed photo. I play it back. And that does look like a properly exposed photo. If I decided you know what, that seems just a little bit on the bright side for me, and I really liked the ISO and aperture setting I would just change my shutter speed so that it's a little bit darker. Maybe I like it just a third under right there. And it's perfectly fine to shoot photos that are not at zero exposure. That's just kind of an initial good starting point. And so maybe that is my best exposure right there.