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Lesson Info

Shooting Settings

Next up is our shooting settings. These are some general shooting modes, that aren't specifically related to focus or image quality. First up is the drive settings. It's the button on the front of the camera that is currently programmed right now for most cameras. But this allows up to go in and choose the specifics, for instance with bracketing settings. Within here we have another sub menu, within a menu. We can choose when we bracket. What are we going to bracket? Are we going to bracket exposures, or ISO, or film simulation. Most people are going to be doing auto exposure bracketing, because that's where the camera actually shoots three different photos, rather than emulates three photos with processing in the cameras. This is going to be the most valuable one. Then you're going to be able to choose, if you are doing auto exposure bracketing, how much bracketing are you doing? Well a third of a stop is a small amount. Very few people are going to choose that. Most people are going ...

to go with one full stop. Something between there and two full stops. But one stop is a pretty good increment to work with. So that's a good place to start. If you are going to do ISO bracketing, how much of an ISO are you going to adjust it? This is only going to apply to JPEG images. The next bracketing option is the film simulation. This is where you get to go in and choose three different films that you want to shoot all with one picture. So this could be a very fast way if you know you like to shoot something with a black and white and acros, and then maybe a real vivid velvia shot all at the same time. You could set that up to work very, very quickly here. Not something that a lot of people are going to dive in very much. Next up is a white balance bracketing. Completely unnecessary if you're shooting raw. But if you're shooting JPEG and you want to get different tones to your image, it'll shoot one image and then save three with the different processes applied. Next up in the drive settings, we have the continuous high speed burst. So how fast do you want your motor drive to work? The reason we're putting eight frames as the recommended setting here is because when you go to 11 or 14 it's going to go to the electronic shutter. If you do have the grip, you can go to the 11 here. I don't recommend the electronic shutter in these cases for reasons you will see about here in just a few minutes. The continuous low speed burst, I would set this on five. But if that doesn't work right for the timing of your subject, feel free to adjust as necessary. The advanced filter settings, allows you to go in and put an Instagram like filters on your JPEG images. It's fun for playing around but not something you're normally going to leave turned on. We have a self timer option. So this can be programmed to one of the other buttons on the camera. I use the self timer a lot so I plan to program one of the buttons on the camera, I'm not sure which one yet, but I'm going to program one of them so I can quickly access that self timer without diving here into the menu, or without even diving into the quick menu which is where it's currently located. Interval timer shooting will allow you to shoot time lapse right in the camera. You can set the camera up to shoot a number of pictures at a interval between them. An example of a time lapse, this is from Oregon. I think this is Trillium Lake down there. Obviously in the winter time when the lake's frozen over. The camera is on a slider here so that's one extra thing you don't get in camera. Another one of my favorite time lapses comes from India and the little bit of pan back movement here was all done in post production. It's a Ken Burns move, if you will. Interesting aspect or way of seeing photography. It's the opposite of of still photography. It's taking a large time period and compressing it into a short frame here. One of the things that's unique about this Fuji camera that I haven't seen with other cameras is that we have shutter speeds of 125th, 60 and a 30th of a second. Of course we have those third shutter speeds like 100, 80, 50 and 40 in between those. With a normal camera, as let's say, the sun is setting, and it's getting slightly darker, the camera needs to adjust exposure. Maybe the camera's in shutter priority or it's in aperture priority. What would happen is you would be shooting a series of photos that would look a little like this. Were there's a few pictures at 125th of a second, and then it drops down to 100 and then it drops down in these stair steps. The problem is that when you put your time lapse together, there's these jumps in the brightness of your image. What Fuji does, is it used incremental shutter speeds, that you will sometimes see that you don't see in other cameras. It's going to be a smoother gradation as the light is changing. I wanted to give this a try, so I went out and did a little time lapse of Seattle as the sun was setting. I had the camera set to aperture priority and it's getting a little bit darker and the camera is being very good at selecting slightly different shutter speeds and it's getting darker and darker. Fuji's make really good time lapse cameras. Also because it's built in and they're very small cameras, and all the other great things they do. This is just one more thing that they do very, very well in my mind. We've been talking about the this a little bit and it's time to get into the shutter type. We have two different types of shutters that we can use in this camera. The mechanical shutter versus the electronic shutter. First off, the mechanical shutter is going to be comprised of lightweight metal blades that close and then open for the exposure time and then, they do cause a little bit of a shock, sometimes when they do that. Then the bottom curtain will close and end the exposure. That's what's happening mechanically. The downside is that there's a lot of physical movement. There's a little bit of shutter bounce which might cause some vibration. There's a new type of shutter called an electronic shutter, which is actually a terrible name because it's just the sensor turning on and off. As you can see in this example, what it's doing is it doesn't turn them all on or off at the same time. It scans them one row at a time. It's just the way the cemo sensor works in this. Now the scan time from bottom to top takes about a 20th of a second. Now it turns the individual pixels on and off as fast as it needs to up to 32 thousandth of a second. But the scan time causes a little bit of problem when anything moves. Let's take a look at this movement problem with the electronic shutter. Using a test chart, I moved my camera, panned it back and forth on this test chart to see what it's going to look like with a mechanical shutter versus an electronic shutter. You can see the scanning process has warped these lines. Now you might think, well if just use a faster shutter speed it will freeze it. Well it does freeze it but it still has the scanning problem on it. How this manifests itself in the real world, is if you panning with a car down the street, the buildings in the background are going to be scanned in at slightly different times and they're no longer going to be vertical. If you're shooting a subject going past you like a bicycle, the wheels are no longer round, they become ovals. It doesn't look very good for action photography. The electronic shutter is not good for action. That's what I would avoid using it with. The benefits of using the electronic shutter, is that you get up to 32 thousandth of a second. You might think wouldn't I want that for sports and actions? Well eight thousandth of a second will be more than fast enough for most sports action stuff. The reason it's there is if you're shooting a one point two, one point 4 lens under really bright sunlight, you need a 32 thousandth of a second just to get proper exposure. But your subject is stationary. The reason you're doing that is because you're getting that shallow depth of field. Another benefit of this is silent photography. If you need to be totally silent, you're in a courtroom, you're at a stage play. Any sort of environment where you just don't want to intrude on the noise levels, put it into the silent mode. It's extraordinarily quiet. Of course because there's no blades moving, it is vibration free as well. If you are on a high telephoto lens, if you're working with macro photography, or some sort of scientific setup, it might be a good option. Now the downsides of using the electronic shutter, are many, unfortunately. It's going to distort any sort of moving subject as you've seen here. The ISO is limited. We do not have the low or the high options that we normally have available to us. We're not going to be able to use the flash either. We're also not going to be able to use the bulb mode. We're not going to be able to use the long exposure noise reduction. And finally, possible banding or fog under certain lighting conditions. It's hard for me to predict when and where those are going to come about. For those reasons I recommend using the mechanical shutter most of the time and the electronic shutter just for those special purposes that you might have. The great option on this is M plus E. You get to use the mechanical shutter from 30 seconds up to 8 thousandth of a second. Then it will use an electronic shutter if you need to go up to 16 or 32 thousandth of second. You can leave your camera in this mode. It's going to work with flash. It's not going to have distortion problems unless you go up to those electronic shutter speeds. The only time I would switch it from this is when I want a silent, vibration free shutter. Then I would go down to the ES setting on this. Image stabilization mode. The camera does not have built in image stabilization. This is controlling the stabilization that you may have in the lens attached to the camera. Continuous means it's on all the time. Shooting is only when you shoot the photo will stabilization turn on. Some people find it uneasy to look through the viewfinder with the stabilization turned on, because it's adjusting the framing of it. If you don't like that you can put it into the shooting only mode. I mentioned at the beginning of the class, that the camera has and auto ISO setting. In fact it has three. So we're going to dive into a bit of a sub menu because we can program the specifics of how auto ISO sensitivity works. The first option is the default sensitivity. For basic use, you'd want to have this at 200, because that's the base sensitivity of the camera that would make sense. But if you know you're going to be working under lower light conditions, you can set that to a higher number just because you know that you're going to get that. Next up is the max sensitivity. You can decide at what ISO you want to camera to push it no further when it is automatically selecting the ISO. I think 6400 is pretty good and pretty clean. I would prefer not to go to 12,800 unless I really really have to. 6400 might be a good choice here. Now the way it chooses a higher ISO is, it waits for your shutter speed to drop down to certain number. Once it goes below that, it bumps the ISO up, so that you always have a minimum shutter speed of a particular number. For basic photography, one 60th of a second is going to be fine. For somebody who is really good at handling their camera, you set this all the way down to a fifteenth of a second or slower. If you know your going to be photographing action and you need a specific shutter speed like five hundredth of a second, set that in here and that's when it bumps the ISO up. It's kind of according to your needs. I will note that there are other cameras that have one additional feature that this camera does not have. That is an auto option for the minimum shutter speed where it looks at the focal length of the lens. Maybe we'll see that on some future version of Fuji cameras, but it is not currently available on this one. For anyone who wants to use the M mount adapter, there's going to be a sub menu here. Where you can basically program in, different lenses. You can choose from different lenses. This is for use mostly with leica lenses. You can go in and there's preset choices, 21, 24, 28, 35, 50. With the 50 and 75 you can go in and customize the settings on here. You can choose what focal length you're using. How much distortion that lens has. That information is put into the camera. It's part of the meta data. Any sort of color shading, that's a vignetting or darkening around the edges. Color shading, I'm sorry, if there's different colors. And the peripheral illumination if it's darkening the corners, you can have the camera correct for that. That's going to be exclusively for people using that mount adapter with those leica lenses. Finally in here, we have our Wifi connections. In order to hook up Wifi, you need to do a number of things with your camera and a number of things with your phone. These are the things that you need to set up and the order that you need to set them up. Very first and foremost, on your phone you need to download the appropriate Fuji app. Currently, it is known as the Fuji film Camera Remote app. They do have some other apps out there for a variety of things and earlier cameras. Make sure you get one with this logo and this name on it. I've already done that on the phone, so we are not going to need to worry about that. Next up, in the camera, you're going to need to turn on this wireless function. So you basically go right where we were in the menu system and then you press OK. You'll see me do that in just a moment. Next up is on the phone, you're going to need to turn the Wifi on so that you're receiving a Wifi signal. Then you're going to need to look for the Wifi signal coming from the camera. At that point you'll go back to the camera to say yes I do want to hook up to a camera and just press OK. Then you can go back to the phone and open up the camera app and start operating the various controls. The most notable one is the remote control. I'm not going to go through a full detail of the app, because the apps change frequently, but I will go through some of the basics of it. Let's go to my camera here. You're going to get this turned on. We're going to go down to the bottom of the camera to the wireless communications. Now we need to go to the phone. Let's get the phone in the frame here. I need to go into my settings and make sure my Wifi. Let's go back to the beginning. Let's say I have the Wifi turned off. I turn the Wifi on. Down here you can see there's a lot of creative live websites. I have an XT2 that I'm hooking up to right here. That's the one it's connecting with. I can get out of the settings, and I'm going to my Wifi connections. I'm going to go to my Fuji app and now I'm going to open the Fuji. I'm going to want to do the remote control on this. Now my camera, if all goes well, now you can see, on my camera what I'm looking at. I can shoot a photo. I can make a number of adjustment on here. I can go in, almost anything that you can touch, so I can get in here, the auto ISO setting. Let's get a better view of this over here. I can choose different ISO settings. I want to choose, what do I want, let's go with 6400 in here, I can press OK we can playback images that we've seen. Here are other images we've shot during the class. I can scroll through these different images. It's a little bit slow, because it's got to pull all this information wirelessly from the camera. It's not like it's in the camera. We can import this photo into my phone if we want by pressing that button. I'm going to go back to shooting. Get me back to the camera mode here. We can go into a settings tab over here. We can change film simulation if you want I'm going to cancel out of that. Go back to my shooting mode. We can also record video by moving this switch over here. Now we are recording video. Come back in this. This is really handy. If you want to get in the picture yourself, what I would do is bring the phone over here and then I can see myself. I'm not in the frame, here I am. Let's go ahead and shoot a photo. So now I have a terrible photo of me. Let's go into playback mode and see if we can see our photo here. Here it is at the top. There we are, I can input that photo into my phone. So now when I go into my phone's pictures, there it is, and I'm ready to send that up on Facebook or Instagram, or what have you. That's the basics of the Wifi remote. There are a number of other options I'm not going to go totally into here. Let me go back, disconnect, cancel. I don't want to do that. The other modes where you can receive images, do geo tagging, so if you want you can have the GPS information from your phone, send that to your camera and kind of like where were you at that time. These photos were taken at this time, this is where you were. There's going to be a number of communications and these apps change from time to time, so if you want, go back and take a look and see if there's an update on them. I just wanted to give you the basics on how to set it up. This is one of the easier setups on all of the cameras out there. Thankfully they've made as few steps as possible. When I'm done I'm going to hit my home button, and I can just turn the camera off. That's going to reset the Wifi and turn it all off. That is a little bit on the Wifi section. Very good if you want to get the camera in a unique position.