Lessons

Lesson Info

Back Side: Quick Menu

next up is the quick menu on the camera, and this is a shortcut to a number of the basic things that we're going to see in the full menu. But this allows us to get in here a little bit quicker and just change those things that we usually want to get to on a regular basis. And so let's dive in and talk a little bit about the quick menu on the camera. One of the things you may notice is a red dot that comes on in the corner of the particular feature, and this means that you have gone in and altered and changed it. Now, a lot of these there's gonna be a lot of presets, and so you might have a preset favorite for how you want to have a whole collection of feature set up. But then you go in and adjust that one thing, and that's when that little red dot is going to show up for you. So let's take a look and just kind of walk through the different options on this So first up is our custom setting, and we can have seven different settings in the camera for the way that we want our cameras to ki...

nd of deliver our images to us. And so we have a bunch of different looks, and if you have a variety of ways that you want your camera look, you can go in here and adjust the film style and contrast and the look of your images and have seven different presets saved. Now another little secret control is by pressing the Q button for three seconds to re program the setting. And so let's go ahead and do a little demo here in my camera and show you how this works. And so I'm gonna hit the cue button to activate the quick menu, and I can turn the backed. I remember I said that you could turn the back dial to change some of the settings in here. And so you can see as I go around Lucy, definitely between C two and C three, you can see I've made some changes in here. Well, let's go in and let's make C five a new setting. And so if I hold down the queue button for 123 seconds, I can now go into Custom number five and we can start making some changes. And so let's go in and change our film simulation. And let's choose Vell via which is a little bit more vivid of a color. All right, Do we want any grain effect? Well, that's just for fun. We'll add a little bit of week. Great effect here and white balance that auto is fine. Highlight tone. Let's let's pump this up a little bit, too. Plus one. And let's take our shadow tone down to minus two and we're going to talk more about what each of these do in upcoming sections. And I just wanted to make some changes here. And let's go ahead and change the sharpness. Two plus two. And then if I wanted to reset all of this, I could do it here. But I want to save the current settings here as custom number five. And so let's see. Oh, wait. I just recess. I'd see what I did. I reset myself to the current way. The camera is currently set, and so I'm just gonna make one change here. I'm gonna change this back to Belle via and then hit the okay button and hit the back button here and now I'm going to set this. I made a mistake earlier resetting everything. But we do have the set now in Val via so you can see that this is a vell via setting. And you could set whatever settings you want on your camera. I have this one said it a cross and this one at black and White option. And this is just a standard option. But I can go in here, and I can take a look at how my settings are currently set right here. And you can take a look at those and then I'm just gonna go ahead and back out, cause I don't want to reset anything in that particular one right now. And so now when I come back and I pressed the Q setting Aiken, dial this throughout my different favorite settings. And let's go to number five, which we set as the Where's our five, which is our ville via setting right in here. Now if I want to come in here and change any one of these things like I want to change Bell via to something else, that's when we get that little red dot showing up. So we have changed this one to something else. And now when I'm shooting, I've changed it. I go back to the Q setting. It has been changed, and so you can go in here and you can tweak. And this is going to be mostly for people who are shooting J pegs. And I know a lot of people who shoot with food. You do like the J pigs because they do have a lot of varieties and they're very clean J pegs in general. And so it's gonna have very little impact on those of you shooting raw. But any of you who want to shoot raw Plus J peg it is effect affecting all of those J pegs in the look and style of how those air delivered and processed in the camera. All right, next up is R A F mode. At least that's what Fuji calls it. It's really the area that you're choosing to focus, and we have a number of different options. And so let's talk a little bit more about that focusing system in this camera. So the A F mode or the area that you're focusing well, first off you're gonna have a little box that's going to show you where you're focusing, and when the focus is achieved, it will be a green box that shows you that it has confirmed, and it has locked on particular focus. Now there is a large coverage area of the focusing points uses 273 contrast detection points, and of those are also phase detection points. Now the contrast detection points are very, very accurate cause they're looking at information off the sensor, and they're determining whether there truly sharp or not. So it's the most accurate way Autofocus E. But phase detection works on a different system that is faster in his better for action photography. And so if you do a lot of sports or action photography, you're gonna want to try to keep your subject a little bit more towards the center, using the 169 face detection focusing points. So we have three basic options for focusing. We have a single point, but remember that single point has five different sizes and can be moved to any one of the points within the frame, and so in order to do that, you're gonna be changing the size by turning the dial and pressing that little focusing stick to activate that particular mode. And while it's activated, if you press the center point, it moves it back down to the center of the area. Or you can just move it up, down left and right to move it to the different various points. The next option is a zone focusing, which deals with either a three by 35 by five or a seven by seven area, and this could be moved left right up or down as much as there is room for it with the points. The final option is a wide tracking option, where it turns on all the focusing points and looks for focusing within all of those areas. Now. In that situation, it's always going to be grabbing onto whatever is closest to the camera. So you do have to be careful of obstructions that you might be shooting by. And so, for instance, if you were shooting a ski race where the skiers air going in and out of gates, it might try to pick up the gates, so you have to be very careful about where you position your framing and where you might have your subject within that frame. Now remember, the ones in the middle are the ones that are doing the phase detection tracking. And if you do want to use this camera at its maximum tracking rate, which is eight frames per second, you do need to have your subject in those middle friends, because that's what it's going to be using for tracking moving subjects and so three basic different areas. Single zone and wide tracking. I prefer single zone for most of my general photography, for a lot of the action will prefer Zone on Ben. Sometimes I'll go to the white and tracking if I know I'm not gonna have those obstructions that I'm trying to shoot beside or behind. Next up is the dynamic range option on this camera. This is kind of unique now. This does only work with J pegs, and this does not work with rahs, and the camera is shooting in such a way to try to protect the highlights of photographs. And so let's take a look at some examples of how it's trying to save these highlights And so this first images shot at ESO with the dynamic range, said it 100% which is the normal standard range for shooting. And if we look at where that highlight information is bunched up over on the right hand side, that is gonna change in subsequent photos. And so the next game. It's also all of these air shot at ISO 800 but the dynamic range is set to 200 so it's trying to expand the dynamic range, and you can see that information in the bright area has been expanded and you'll notice the color of the blue sky has changed a little bit as well. If we changed it to D. R 400 it's trying to increase that dynamic range, holding that highlight information in there and so you can see even more change in the blue sky versus the white clouds. And so it's trying to hold that information back. Now the downside to this is number one. It only works on J pegs and number two. You have to shoot at higher I esos you can't be at ESO 200 and so you have to be it I Either I s 0 400 or 800 to make this work. And at 400 it'll only work in the d. R 200 rage. And so this is gonna be good for people shooting J pegs that want to protect the highlights. And so it's an interesting option that you don't find on other cameras out there. Some people find it very useful. Some people don't use it at all, so it really depends on your workflow and how it works for you. Next up is our white balance, which controls the color of our image. Depends on the type of light source that we're shooting under. Camera has a number of different options for you to set on the camera. So on the left we have our natural lighting situations, normal sunlight and shade. And sunlight, for some reason, is called fine. That's just sunlight, folks. Over on the right hand side, we have our artificial light. The most common one you're likely to encounter is the incandescent, which is a very orange light, and our fluorescent lights, which tend to very depending on exactly the color temperature of those fluorescent lights. Because if you bought fluorescent lights. You know that you could buy him cool or warm or neutral or different colors. And so this camera has a variety of settings for accommodating those. We do also have an underwater setting, and then we have some more manual settings. You have a Kelvin temperature that you can manually set yourself. And so if you know the Kelvin temperature, you can set it in there yourself. If you want to set a custom one where you shoot a white piece of paper and the camera looks at the reflection of the color and records that as the color that you're working under, you can have three different presets for doing that. And finally, you have an auto white balance where it looks at the information coming into the sensor and tries to determine what color the light source is. And to be honest with you, the auto white source does a pretty good job, and it's where I leave my camera most of the time. If you are shooting raw white balance is something that you can change later without negatively damaging your photographs in any way. If you shoot J pegs, this is something that you should be a little bit more diligent about keeping set correctly. And so auto white balance is a good default place to begin with. And then if you see issues looking through the electronic viewfinder or in the back of the camera, that's a good time to switch it over. Next line of information camera has a built in noise reduction, and this is used for dealing with high I S O settings. And so if you're gonna be setting I s 0 6400 and things like that, the camera has a way of built in reducing the amount of noise. And so I'm always curious. Well, how good a job doesn't do. So let's take a look at an example, and we're gonna be going into this middle example mill portion of scene right here and as a default on the camera. It has a zero setting, and you can either go minus or you can go plus on this. And if you don't have a good view of your screen, there is quite a bit of noise at minus four were very little noise reduction. I'm guessing no noise reduction is done. And so the normal setting looks pretty good when you go up to plus four. It has less noise, but it's starting to lose a little bit of information in the details. And so that might be a little bit of heavy handed work with the noise reduction and so zero is not a bad place to begin. But if your JPEG images are not exactly what you want, you can either increase the noise reduction or decrease it to your needs. I'm always curious. Well, what about if I just shot a raw image? Am I able to match or improve on what the camera can do? And I would think that most people who shoot in raw with the appropriate software will be able to do better than the camera can do just because the camera is working off of a very limited set of options minus four to plus four. And when you go into a good program like light room and go into do noise reduction, you're gonna have several different sliders for controlling the exact parameters of noise reduction. So if you want to get the best possible noise reduction, it's probably best just to do it yourself on a raw image. If you want to have the camera do it, it does a pretty good job on its own, and you can tweak it in some various ways. I would went and did it at eso 25,000 just to see what it looks like at a really extreme I s so and so in this case, at the zero setting, there's still a fair bit of noise, and I think it looks better at a plus two plus four. It gets a little heavy handed, and it starts marring those detailed areas. And so I think that's a little bit too strong going in and shooting a raw image is gonna have a lot of noise on it by correcting it. This is something that you'll be able to adjust according to your own needs. And so if you're willing to do the work yourself, you're likely going to end up with a better product. But the camera does a pretty good job on its own. Zero is not a bad starting point. You may want a little bit more or less, depending on your personal taste in noise reduction. All right, Next up image size. This is dealing with JPEG images. We have a couple of different options on this. First off. Large, medium and small is simply the number of mega pixels that were recording with. Most people are gonna want to shoot this in the large size your 24 megapixels. The aspect ratio of the sensor is a three by two aspect ratio, and that's probably where most people are gonna want to keep it. You can configure it either 2 16 by nine or one by one, and it will then show you those frame line differences and the cropping effects in cameras. So if you want to see what the final image is gonna look like, that might be a reason for using those aspect ratios. But for most people, they're gonna want to capture as much information as that sensor can gather. Next up is the compression quality of R. J pegs or being able to shoot raw images. And so the options are shooting essentially raw or J. Peg. And there's a couple different types of J Peg. There's fine and normal or shooting raw plus J peg, and there's two different options on that and so traditionally on most serious pro cameras, most photographers were going to shoot in raw, but with Fuji cameras, they have really good looking J pegs and a lot of food users really like the J pegs. And so there'll be some J peg only shoe you shooters. But there's gonna be a large portion of people who are going to shoot in raw plus jpg because they like the J pegs and they're pretty good. But it's nice to get that raw in case you want to go back to the original information. Now there is one other good reason why you may want to shoot J pegs. And so I want to do a little demo here with my camera to show you what's going on. And so let's go ahead, turn my camera on and let's go into the quick menu and I want to start with shooting a raw image here. And so I'm going to go in here, and I'm going to select a raw image, a straight raw image right here, and I'm gonna zoom in a little bit. Just we can see our cameras over here, and I'm gonna give ourselves a little plus exposure here just because we have a bright background and I'm gonna go ahead and shoot this photo. Now I'm gonna play this photo back, and I want to zoom in and check to see if it's sharp. So I'm gonna press in and I'm going to zoom in and you'll notice what we get here so we can see a camera lens. We can see all four of the products. They're pretty closely, pretty tightly in the frame. All right, Now, let's go back into the Q menu, and I'm gonna change this to a fine quality. Jay pek. All right, I'm gonna shoot the same photo. I'm gonna play the photo back. I'm going to zoom in and you'll notice that I'm zoomed in quite a bit closer. Previously with Raw, it only allowed me to zoom into somewhere right about here. But now with the J peg, I'm able to zoom in a lot closer to check sharpness. And so this is one of the reasons why I like shooting J pegs on this camera. I'm not sure why they limit us in shooting rye. Wish we could just zoom in all the way on raw And so the trick that a lot of photographers dio is that there will shoot Raw and Indiana J pick. It doesn't rat matter whether it's a fine or normal. I'll go ahead and set normal here. And so when I shoot this, I'm shooting a raw and a J peg. I play it back. I zoom in and I get that zoom that close up zoom. And so mostly forgetting that really close examination in the playback of the image is why I'm shooting J Pecs now. Sometimes I'm also like to shoot black and white, and I like to shoot the black and white J. Peg and see how Fuji processes that black and white J. Peg. I'll then go back to the raw, which has all the color information, and I might make it match that original J pick or are kind of use that as a base point. And so this is one of the few cameras that I do recommend shooting raw plus jpg for a lot of users for a couple of different reasons. But if you want to change it quickly, it's right there in the quick menu. Next up is our film simulation and a lot of the foods you users have really liked that style and look of Fuji film, and they have a very good sense of color and tonality and contrast. And they have incorporated that in the digital sensor off this camera in the processing of your images and so you can have your camera set up in many different ways and so wanted to throw it through a little bit of a test. And I'll be I'll be honest with you. It's gonna be a little hard to see this on a lot of monitors, because it's something that you need to really see on your own monitor. But the raw image is gonna be your straight raw image and in the pro via is a very natural color, so it's gonna be very similar. You get a little bit more colors than with the raw image. Raw images typically are a little bit flat. They need a little bit of work done. Vell Via is definitely richer. It's gonna have more saturation to it. Asta is a very soft option, often very good for portrait photography. Classic chrome is a little bit on the de saturated side. There is a pro neg high in a pro Negm Low, which is designed for photographers working in studios, getting the right type of contrast, depending on the type of lighting and the like of the type of look that they like. And so, if you want to see how all these play out on a graph, we have low saturation in high saturation and then on the bottom. We have low contrast in high contrast, so Pro via is right there in the middle, so it's a very neutral, standard type of look to your image. Asta is gonna be a little bit lower, in contrast, and LV is going to be much greater. In contrast, and much greater in saturation. Classic chrome is very low in saturation, and then we'll throw in than pro neck high and the pro neg standard so you can see how these kind of fall in relationship to each other with this type of graph and so choosing the appropriate look to the film something you may want to change on an image to image basis. Now, if you shoot raw, this type of stuff doesn't really matter. It's only if you were shooting JPEG. Will this be applied to your final photograph? Beyond those color ones, we also have a number of black and white ones. We have a standard monochrome, but we can add yellow, red and green filters over them essentially, and the red is typically best for landscapes. Green is a little bit better for Portrait's. The A cross mode is another black and white mode, which is slightly different. They had a they had a black and white film, and it has a little different look than your standard monochrome look to it. And so, once again, reds good for landscapes. Green is good for Portrait's, so you have your standard monochrome. And the A cross, which is gonna look a little bit different in the blacks, is probably the most noticeable area. And then we're also going to be having a sepia option as well in there Now, I wanted to really take a look at the black and white, the monochrome versus a cross to see how much difference there is because I started noticing a bit of difference between the two of them as I changed the I s o upward. And so I just decided to go into a small area and magnify it and take a look to see How does it look at different I S O settings? And so I'm looking at areas of black and white in the areas between them, and you'll notice that there's definitely a very different grain structure with the A cross modes, especially as you jump up in I esos and so different people are gonna have different preferences. So I'm not going to say one's right and one's wrong. But just be aware that there are different differences and you may want to run it through your own test to see which ones you prefer for your style of photography. So that's our film simulations. Next line of information. Starting with our highlight tone, we're gonna be able to either increase or decrease how bright the highlights are. I'll show you an example of this in just a moment. We can also do the same with the shadow tones. And so, in my opinion, the plus and minus here our best not to think of as greater exposure or less and exposure. It's intensifying that particular look. So I wanted to go someplace that had dark shadows and very bright light, and a tunnel is a great place to do that. So I'm shooting in black and white just to simplify things here and on. The highlights from minus to plus two two plus for what I want you to look at is that area in the red circle. How much that how much brighter that has gone with the plus four setting compared to the minus two setting. Now, when we look at the shadows, I did the same type of options, and you'll notice the shadow area has gotten much more intense. And so, if you want Maurin tense, highlights orm or intense shadows. You'll add that on the plus side of the issue, and that's going to make your image mawr contrast. And that's gonna be once again, very much a stylistic taste as to how you like your images to look. Once again, these are affecting J pegs. They're not affecting raw images. Color is pretty simple. It's the saturation you can increase, pump up the saturation or de saturate your image a little bit on top of everything else. And so if you wanted Vell via and you want it even more saturated. You could do that as well, by choosing Vell via and then choosing a plus option. When it comes to the color, we have a sharpness option, which controls the sharpening that is done of the J pegs. And this is something that I often see and reviews about cameras where they will shoot images from the camera. They'll look at the J pegs and then they'll say they're a little over processed on the sharpening or they're not really a sharp is. I think they could be. Well, if you don't like the way it is, you can change it in this camera. So let's look at a test for this and so wanted to look at something that's got some nice little detail to it. And so we're gonna look at this nice little area right here in the foreground, and I shot this at minus four, minus 20 two and four. And as I look at this, I can tell you that I think that plus four looks over sharpened. It doesn't look quite natural. We've lost a little detail in trying to get this to sharp and so definitely minus four looks a little bit on the flat side, and it depends a little bit on how you want to sharpen your images. Do you want to do him in camera? Do you want to do him in post? So I think zero is probably a good default position to leave this. You might want to try, plus one or plus two. I think that's a little bit of tasteful sharpening that could be done without really ruining the J pegs. But I think plus four is going to be a little bit strong for most photos in most situations, the right final light of information. So this is something I'll be honest with you. I Fuji just kind of caught me off guard on this. Pretty much every camera on the market has a drive button, which controls the motor driver the camera, and that's where the self timer is. Fuji has not put the self timer in with the drive mode. It's different, and it's good not saying it's bad. It just catches some people off guard. And so it has a separate button here. If it is something that you like to have have have quick access to. You can program this to one of the other buttons on the camera one of the function buttons, for instance, and so if you want quicker access to it, you can get to it there. But here it's a two second, 10 seconds timer, and a little note that I've learned is that it resets when you turn the camera off. And so sometimes I'll be working with the camera from the tripod. I have it on a two second self timer so that I press the shutter release. Two seconds later it takes a photo, and then I turn the camera off to save battery power, and I go to the next shot, and I turned it on and the self timer is turned off. And so you do you have to have that turned back on every time you turn the camera off and then back on again, we have a face and I detection system. So if you want the camera to be able to focus on a face or even on a particular I, you can have it set to do this. And so it really depends on how much people photography you do. If you are working with multiple people or groups of people, it may be a little difficult to control where in whose face it's gonna focus on. So I think it tends to work better when you have a solitary subject in front of you. Normally, this is something that I would recommend keeping off unless you're always doing people photography. The camera does not have a built in flash, but if you do at a flash onto the camera, there are a variety of controls that you can tweak with on the flash. One option is automatic flash, where the flash will just automatically fire if it needs it, and this is only available in the program mode. You can have the flash fire with slow shutter speeds, kind of dragging that shutter so that you can get some ambient light behind you in the picture as well. And this will work in the program and the aperture priority mode. There is a commander mode where you can have a flash attached to the camera that triggers an off camera flash so that you can get Studio Stipe type lighting anywhere you want, so long as you have two or more flash units. The camera has a second curtain sink, which allows the flash to synchronize with the closing curtain, which will give you a little bit more interesting blur. With subjects that are moving, you could suppress the flash. I'm not sure why you would want to do that. You could simply just turn the flash off, but you could do it. Elektronik Lee if you need to, and you have forced flash where it's nice and bright out and the camera doesn't think it needs the flash, but you want to add it because you want to fill in the shadows. Cameron also has a rather unique red eye removal system. Ah, lot of cameras will have a flash system that fires multiple flashes in order to reduce red eye, and this one actually takes the image and it looks at the red eye, and it fixes the image rather than trying to do a pre flash, which I'm not a big fan of because it's disturbing to your subject and it delays the shutter from firing by about two seconds. And so I'm a big fan of turning off any sort of red eye reduction on most cameras. But this camera uses a different system because it goes in looks at an image with red eye, and it basically Photoshopped fixes the image right in the camera. Now the camera does have a top flashing speed of 2/ of a second, which is standard with most of the top of the line cameras out on the market. And so, if you have a flash attached, that will be your fastest shutter speed that you can use on the camera. And finally we have the LCD brightness, and this is just simply the brightness of the screen on the back of the camera. I would normally leave this at zero. The only time that I move it off of this is if I'm trying to show people photos on the back of the camera under bright light conditions. I will then bump it up to maybe plus 3 +45 whatever is necessary in order to see the screen. But if you do want adjust the brightness, you can do so right here.