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Auto Focus and Manual Focus Menus

The next big tab is the auto focus, manual focus, and first up is the focus area. Now, there was a shortcut button on the back of the camera, as well as another access to it in the Q menu, but you can do it here as well. This is kind of a roundabout way to get to it. It's here simply so that you can add that to any one of the function buttons available to the camera of which there are eight different buttons. The auto focus mode, this is where we get to choose single, zone, and wide/tracking point. And so once again, this is better done, this is done with one of the buttons on the top of the camera by default. It is, if I remember correctly, I thought it was the top button. And if I put the camera in auto focus, yes, it is the top button on the back of the camera that is currently programmed to it. And let me just clarify, the focus area, before this was simply choosing about where you wanted the box, moving the box from left to right, and that can normally be done just with the joysti...

ck itself. The AF-C custom settings. Okay, so this is something new for Fuji cameras. It's something similar to Canon, and what Nikon has been doing. And so, when the camera is auto focusing on a moving subject, there is a conflict of interest in a number of things, and it has to do with the speed, and the accuracy, and the focusing points. And, of course you want the camera to focus as fast as possible, but you also want it to be as accurate as possible, and then you have to be aware of, well, which focusing points are you using, and what if something new comes into the frame? And so, they have a number of different scenarios set up in sets one through five. Now, most of the time, you're probably gonna be able to leave it on set one, and be totally fine. Set two tends to ignore obstacles, and so if there's something that occasionally obstructs your subject, like a referee running in front of a field player, then that would be a good option. Changing speeds, how quickly do you want the auto focus system to read back data, and adjust how fast the tracking is going? Can be very important in events where players are stopping, and starting, and changing their speed very quickly. For subjects that are appearing suddenly, we have set four, which will try to track those immediately as possible. And then set five, for erratic movements. And what it's doing, and we're gonna dive in a little bit here. Let's talk about the three parameters that each of these are controlling. The first is the tracking sensitivity, and the question that this is really asking is, do I want to track a new subject? Sometimes yes, you do. If so, you would set it to zero. Sometimes, no, I wanna stick with my original subject. So, if you can imagine focusing on a subject, and a new subject comes into the frame, do you want to focus on that new subject? And so, for tracking a new subject, that might be like a race leader, where you don't care who you're focusing on in the sense of which person, you just wanna focus on who's ever closest to the camera. And so, this might be a good use at the finish line, it's who's ever in first that you wanna get closer to. If you wanna track the established subject, that would be for things like tennis, and butterfly swimming. If you think about tennis, they swing a racket out in front of them. Do you wanna focus on the racket, or do you just wanna stay on the face and torso of the subject? In butterfly swimming, the way that they swim, their hands are out in front of them, and there's a lot of water splashing forward that might catch the auto focus if you set, oh, wait, track this new subject. And so, it really depends on what type of subject you're doing, and these settings, zero, one, through four, is basically just how long a delay before the camera refocuses. If you set it to number one, it's about a quarter of a second delay. If you set it to number two, it's about three quarters of a second delay, number three is about a one second delay, and if you set it to number four, it's about a second and a third before it will refocus on the subject. The next one is speed tracking sensitivity. Question here is, does my subject have a constant speed? So, this is gonna depend on the type of action you're shooting. And so, if a subject is approaching you at a constant speed, then you would say, yes, and have it set to zero. If it's kind of more erratic, you would set to number two. And so, subjects with a fixed speed would be like horse racing, or marathon running. And so, unless the marathon runners are sprinting towards the finish, they're all moving at a very constant speed, and it's not changing very much. Sudden starting or stopping. My favorite example here is the long jump, because if you think about the long jump, they're stopped, they're looking at the runway, they then accelerate to maximum speed, they jump up in the air, and then when they hit the sand, they come to a complete stop. And so, they are accelerating and decelerating very, very quickly, and the camera, when set to number two, is gonna do a better job at adjusting the focus for their changing speeds. The third category is the zone area switching, and the basic question here is, is my subject in the middle of the frame? If you set it to center, it's assuming that your subject is mostly in the middle of the frame, which is how you're gonna compose most easy to frame type subjects. No, if it's a bit more erratic type movement. And so, if it's coming closer to the camera, the camera will actually track the focusing points as that subject moves across the frame. And so, you'll have to see which one works best for the types of photography that you do. And so, you can set one through five, and it's kind of all set up for you for those situations, but if you want to do a custom setting, you could go into six, and you can custom set the camera with those parameters. And let me do a little demo on that, because some of you may not be 100% comfortable with that. And so, let's go into the auto focus C custom settings. And so, you can choose one, two, three, or five, three, four, or five. Those are preset meals, you don't get to change any of the hors d'oeuvres on this one, but on number six, you get a wrench down here, and if, let's see, come on, and where is my adjust? And so, you can adjust these by going up and down, and you can move the front dial to select different options. If you wanna get into the details, you can press okay, and it will give you some additional information about it. I like that they have graphics, I'm not a total fan of their graphics, because it's not totally clear what it's doing, but here you can select. If you said, you know, sets the tracking sensitivity on the subject, and so if you wanted to set that on three, you'd set it on three, okay. And then you can come down to the next one, and you can hit okay, and maybe you wanna set this one at one, as far as the acceleration. You can come down to the final one, and choose whether you wanna have it in the center, auto, or in the front. And so, maybe, I always wanna catch something in the front of it. And so, you can get in there, and then hit okay, and then go back, and make sure that you have six set. You can adjust those as you need to be in here. I have not custom shot, or custom set the camera for every scenario imaginable, and the way you shoot, what lens you shoot, where you shoot from, your point of view all has an impact on how you might make those settings. And so, I apologize that I cannot get this set up perfectly for you, but there are so many different options for all the different activities out there. For right now, set it to set one, see how good a job it does, and then if you're not getting consistent, sharp results, try to figure out which one of those settings would you most help you in changing, and then go down to set six, or set one of the other, two through five settings, and if those don't work, then I guess you would go to set six. So, hopefully that explains what's going on here. Fortunately, most people aren't probably gonna need to go beyond set one. Auto focus point display kinda gives you a different version on the screen of how much information you see. If you turn this off, it's gonna leave just the brackets around the edges of where you focus. Using the zone, it's gonna use a bunch of boxes to help give you a better idea of where the focusing points are. As we go through the menu settings, my recommendations typically are to have the camera set to the highest quality, with the least amount of clutter possible, and so that's why I'm recommending the off. It's possible you may wanna turn it on, but I think in general, turning things off so they don't clutter up the screen is a good idea. The number of focusing points, we mentioned this early on, you do have up to 325 individual points that you can change. You can set it to 91, and you'll have a little easier time navigating left, right, and up and down, a little less flicking of that focus stick on the back of the camera. When you get to the zone area, or the wide tracking area, the camera's gonna have the same performance. It's still gonna use those other points in between, it's just not allowing you to select them as your primary point. Pre-auto focus will auto focus the lens before you press down on the shutter release. This may help you focus a little bit more quickly, because as you hold the camera up to your eye, it's already starting to focus. It is gonna use more battery power, and it is a little bit disconcerning for some people, just hold the camera up to the eye, and suddenly it's refocusing on everything they point the camera at, and so I think most people are gonna probably wanna leave this turned off. The auto focus illuminator is the light on the front of the camera that will turn on under low light conditions. I turn it off, because it really doesn't do much good, it's only good for about five or six feet, depending on how dark the environment is, and it can be kinda distracting to subjects that you're shooting that just kind of, I like to be a little bit low-key when I'm shooting, not have a lot of people, "Oh, what are you doing over there?" And so, I would turn that off. Face detection setting, we've talked about this I think two times before, and this is where it will do facial detection. It works very well, but I tend to prefer to use it only if there is a single person on in the frame, and so if you do a lot of portrait photography, you might program one of the function buttons to actively turn this on and off. All right, second page for auto focusing, auto focus plus manual focus. If you turn this on, pressing halfway down will auto focus like normal, but you'll be allowed to go to the lens, and manually touch up, or adjust the focus after the camera has auto focused. If you manual focus and then pressed down, it's gonna auto focus again, so you have to press down halfway, and then you can manually touch up. And so, if you like to manually focus, you got a good manual focus ring on these Fujis, you press halfway down, and then do a little touch up if you want to. If you don't want to, just don't touch the focusing ring on the camera. Manual focus assist. What's going on here is a little sub menu that we're gonna dive into. So, this is the first of many sub menus in the camera. A standard system is where it will magnify the image. Let's go ahead and take a look at a quick video of how this works. So, as we focus, it magnifies the middle part of the image, and I'm just trying to focus, and get it sharp. And if I, you know, still can't tell, I'll turn the back dial on the camera, and magnify even closer, until I get sharp focus. And then, it jumps back to the full screen. And so, for anybody who's manually focusing, it's really nice, because you get a really close look at what's in focus. And so, I very much like the standard focusing. And if you wanna change the size of the magnification, you just turn the back dial while you are in this mode. The next option is a digital split image. This can be done in black and white and in color. I'm gonna show you what it looks like in color. This kinda heralds back to the days of split image viewfinders when we had manual focus cameras, and you would try to line up vertical lines, as you can see us doing there with the film canister in front, and we'll do it for the film canister in the middle. We're just trying to line up vertical lines. To be honest with you, I have had a bit of trouble getting this to work in the field, just because I don't have a vertical line to work with. And so, not too many people use this system out there, but give it a try, see if you like it. And that is the digital split image. You can choose it in black and white if you want, I think it's fine in color. Focus peak highlighting. This can be chosen in low and high settings for different colors, and I'm gonna show it to you in red here. This shows you the area that is in focus. So, you can see, as I'm focusing this lens manually back and forth on the foreground and the middle ground subjects, you can see exactly where the lens's depth of field is gonna hold true, and what's in focus. And so, it's a very effective way of determining where your focus lies. The downside is that it's just kind of an irritating thing to look at, because you're not gonna get that in your final picture, thankfully, and so technically it's a nice help, but it's something that you may wanna turn on and off according to your needs. You can choose whatever color, and how high or low of intensity you like to see. A lot of people leave it on the white high setting, but that's, of course, perfectly up to you. Now, if you recall, we were looking at the shortcut of this, you can press and hold the back dial when you are in the manual focus mode to adjust between those three modes, and you hold it in there for a couple of seconds, and it will just change from the standard, to the split, to the peaking option. Focus check. And so, in focus check, the camera immediately will jump to a magnified image to show you what you're focusing on. So, let's do a little demo. Turn my camera on, and let's go into the, you know, we're in the black and white mode, I'm gonna switch back to my standard C1 setting here for the rest of the day. And we're gonna go into the menu setting under, where are we? We're auto focus, under focus check, we're on the second page, focus check, and so we can turn this and off. And so, we do have it on. I'm gonna turn my camera into the manual focus around the front of the camera. And so now, let's put the focusing bracket on the fruit down there at the bottom. And so, as soon as I touch the focusing ring, it jumps in, and goes to it. And then, if I wanna get out of it, I can just press the shutter release. And let's go down here again. And so, I have this set in standard, let's go ahead and just see, I have this set in standard right now. If I wanted to put this in focus peak, and I have it in red, now you can see it jumps in close, and has focused peaking at the same time. So, I have magnification and focus peaking simultaneously at the same time, simply because I have manual focusing set on peaking, and focused check turned on. And so, I like to manually focus from time to time, and I do like that jumping in to show me the magnification on that. And then, you can change the magnification of course by turning that back dial, if the camera is in AFS mode, not the other modes. Interlocking the spot and focus area, and I mentioned this earlier, when we talked about the spot metering. You can have the spot metering isolated to the green focusing spot. And I know some people are really gonna like that really tight control over where the focus, where that metering spot is, because it is very, very sensitive to wear that box is. And so, it matches the size and location of the auto focus point. And it only works though when you are choosing single points, so if you're choosing a zone, or the large area, it obviously will not work in that situation. Instant auto focus setting. So, when you have your camera set to manual focus with that dial on the front of the camera, the AFL button on the back of the camera is your auto focus override. When you press that button, do you want the camera to be in an auto focus single mode, or in auto focus continuous mode? Most people are gonna probably want it in the single mode, but if you do a lot of action photography, and manual focus, then you might wanna have that in the C, for continuous mode. Depth of field scale. So, lenses have depth of field scales on them, and most of the lenses that you will see out there, from Fuji and other manufacturers, have kind of an archaic depth of field scale that was designed, I believe back in the 30s or the 40s, and it was according to the sharpness of a normal print image back from that era. And so, when we talk about a film basis, you know, you can't see quite as closely, can't see quite as much detail, so it appears that you're getting more depth of field then you actually are. And so, we have the option of film basis or pixel basis. And so, if you were not too exact about things, you're like, "Oh, is it just kind of in focus," the film bases will be fine, but for those of you who are gonna pixel peep, you're gonna be looking at this, these images on a Hi-Rez digital monitor, then you're gonna wanna go by pixel basis, because that's gonna give you a little tighter example. Basically what it's doing, for those of you who know about it, is it's choosing a smaller circle of confusion, as far as deciding how much is determined in what your depth of field is. And so, it gives you a little bit tighter basis. And so, I would recommend most people set that on pixel basis so that you get a better idea of what is actually going to be in focus with a 24 megapixel sensor like this camera has. Release/focus priority is where we get to dive into a little sub menu. The first option is AF-S priority. So, when the camera is in the single focusing mode, what's most important, taking the picture, or making sure that it's in focus? Most cameras, most people are used to a focus priority, which means the camera has to be in focus. The downside to this is that if you are not careful about focusing, the camera will not let you shoot a photo, and you might be frustrated because you're pressing down on the button, and the camera can't focus, and won't shoot a photo. But, it's probably for the best, because it would probably be an out of focus photo. Now, with the AF-C setting, there we go, a lot of cameras have this set to release priority. And you can try, and if you do a lot of action photography, you're probably gonna wanna try out release and focus priority to see which works best for you. Under release priority, what's happening is that the camera is trying really hard to focus, but it's also trying to keep up with the motor drive shooting, and the priority is for you to get photos. And if something is little bit less than perfect, it's still gonna take photos. And so, it's gonna depend a little bit what aperture you're shooting, and the type of action you're shooting, as to whether that little bit out of focus really matters, because there are many cases where a little bit out of focus in a sports photograph doesn't even matter at all. If you find that the focus is not as quite spot on as you want, that would be a good reason to taking this down to the focus setting. And I believe it comes, I forget what this comes normally set to, but I am definitely making some changes here from the default system. And this is something that, as I say, you may need to do a little test on your own if you do this, but I think this is a good starting point for most people.