Lessons

Lesson Info

Top Deck: Drive Mode

Moving over to the left side of the camera we have the drive dial and we've got a lot of things to talk about in here. So let's dive in and take a look at the different options. The normal place that most people are gonna have this is in the S mode for single frame. When you press down all the way on the shutter release you will get one single photo per press of the shutter release. You want another photo you can press down again. So, for basic photography that should work out perfectly fine for most people. Next up is the continuous low setting. When you press down on the shutter release the camera will continually fire in photos as fast as it can for as long as it can but it maxes out here at a low setting of five frames per second. That too fast for you? Well, if you want you can go in and you can have it set to shoot four frames a second or three frames a second. Now, the advantage to having your camera set to continuous low or what we're gonna do next, continuous high, is that liv...

e view between shots means that you can see what's actually going on in front of your lens when you are shooting this. So if you are panning with the subject, moving around, you're gonna see exactly where they are or maybe where they've kind of changed position to. And so for following sports photography and viewing them, this is really nice. Now, how do you choose between five, four and three. Well, there's actually a couple different ways of doing this. Right now if your camera is kind of factory fresh out of the box, the function two button on the front of the camera will allow you to go in and customize the controls. And so when you press that button you'll have a sub menu that comes up that allows you to make those changes on the camera. And so, it just brings up a little menu and then you're gonna use the up, down control on the back of the camera to choose three, four or five frames per second. Next, oh and we'll also be talking about this again in the full menu setting because that whole little choice of three, four and five is also gonna be in our shooting settings under the drive setting under continuous low speed burst. And so we'll see it again in the class. All right, the continuous high setting. This is for people who wanna take a lot of photos in a short period of time. The camera can shoot at eight frames per second. Now, your numbers may differ than mine but I was able to get 24 RAW or 97 JPEGs in one burst at eight frames a second. The camera could still shoot after that but it slowed down to lower than eight frames per second. If you have a faster memory card than I had and I think I was using 1000x card on this, you might be able to get more images in the RAW and JPEG shooting. Now, you can actually get faster than eight frames per second on this camera. You can do up to 11 frames per second however there's a couple little caveats in here. This is only available, as the camera sits right now, with the electronic shutter which is something we can turn on in the menu system, and we don't have the mechanical. We're gonna talk more about the mechanical versus the electronic shutter in a little bit. But you can do it with the mechanical shutter if you have the vertical power booster grip. And so, there's a vertical grip, we're gonna talk a lot about and if you have that it can send a little bit more battery juice in order to shoot, to the shutter mechanism and it will be able to fire at 11 frames per second. Now, you can get up to 14 frames a second with or without that vertical booster but you do need to have the camera in the electronic shutter which will have its little issues as we will talk about. But you can get 14 frames per second straight out of the camera right here, right now. And in all cases I was getting about 24 RAWs and 35, well, it was shorter in this case, I don't know why I was only getting 35 JPEGs on it. Now, when you have it in the continuous high setting you are not seeing a live image of what your camera is pointed at. What you're looking at between images, they show you the image you just took which is pretty close to live view when you consider you're shooting eight to 14 frames a second. But it is not what is actually happening, so it's a little bit more challenging to track erratic subject because they are changing direction and you don't get to see that updated for a fraction of a second. And so if you can use continuous low to get the shot you'll probably prefer that. If you really need the higher frames per second I would go with eight frames a second and I would avoid the 11 and 14 with the electronic shutter for reasons that we will talk about in the future in the menu section of this class because there are some caveats to using it. So, eight frames per second is what I recommend for continuous high in most situations. Now, how do you change between eight, 11 and 14? Of course it's that function two button for right now because that is a sub control for your drive settings. However, you can reprogram the function two button and it might become something else. So, if you've reprogrammed your camera this may not be working but this is how it comes from the factory. You can also see these settings in the menu setting which is where we will talk about these things again. We're gonna talk about a lot of things repeatedly in this class. Now, a side note. When you are in the continuous high setting and you are auto focusing and we haven't got to the focusing section of the classes, just a quick little note here is that you have the center 49 area focusing points are active when the camera is in continuous high. Now, you'll have many more choices if you are using the continuous low setting. And so as I said before, if you can use the low setting to get the shot there are more things that are gonna work in a normal fashion you might say. And so, if you are using the continuous high setting, the camera will auto focus, it will try to track your subjects and so forth but it is using that center box of an area of 49 focusing points. Next up is bracketing and this is where we get into a lot of different things because when we say bracketing, we're talking about shooting a series of photos or getting a series of photos that has something adjusted from one to the other. A lot of these is a group of three images with something different between each of the images. All right, so on all of these you can use the function two button if that is still programmed for drive settings or you can dive into the menu setting under drive settings, bracketing setting to control the specifics of this and we will do more of that when we get into the menu system. First up is the most valuable of all of these in my opinion at least and that is auto exposure bracketing. Now, you remember a little bit ago we did a manual bracket on this, well you can let the camera do it for you by turning this feature on and it's able to shoot through those three photos much more quickly than you could even just turning the dial. Now, we used to just have one stop exposure but now we can do third stop controls all the way from minus two to plus two. Now, we are still limited to three frames and so, we can't do five or seven or more frames and we can go in third stop increments all the way up to two stops. Most people who like to bracket typically are gonna be doing it in a one-stop or two-stop fashion. If you need more than three frames, the common technique is to shoot three frames at either one or two stops and then do an exposure compensation to minus one or minus two. And then do a plus, do a minus one or two and then you do a plus two, one or two, and so you're shooting two bracket series, one for the darker images, one for the lighter images. And there's a variety of little ways of getting that set up so that you can get six different shots or five different shots and you throw one away. But you can pretty much cover anything you need by doing those two combinations together. Next up is ISO bracketing. And I find this one a little less useful and here's another symbol that you're gonna be seeing throughout the class and that is this little JPEG only sign. Which means this feature only works when you are working with JPEG images, does not work with the RAW images and we'll get into RAW versus JPEG when we get into the menu system. But if you have it set up for JPEG it'll only work here. And so, the idea is is that you're gonna be shooting a photo and the camera only takes one photo but it saves three images. What it does is it artificially goes in and it brightens and darkens the darker and the lighter image so that you end up with three images. Now, this is pretty much the exact same thing that you could do in any post production program by just bumping up the exposure by one or lowering it by one. But if you wanted or needed to do it in camera you can do it here. Next up is a film simulation bracket. This is once again a JPEG only thing that we're doing here and there are many different looks to your images, the way the colors and the contrast and the sharpening is. And you can choose three different film looks from the Fujifilm era like Velvia or you can have a sepia, kind of a black and white look. It's gonna shoot an image and it's gonna save three images from that with that different process applied to it. And we're gonna talk more about those film simulations much later on but it's something that's kind of fun a lot of people from Fuji like. I just don't know that this is the best use of it. Next up is a white balance bracketing and this is something for JPEG users again only. And what it does is it's gonna shoot an image and it's gonna vary the color of the image a little bit on the blue to yellow spectrum. And you can choose whether it's an increment of one, two or three and how much it's changing the colors of it. And so, this is once again something that you could do very easily at any post production program but if you needed to do it in camera, there is the options for it. Finally, dynamic range bracketing and we're gonna talk about this dynamic range here in a little bit. But for right now what it does is it controls the highlights from getting blown out. And so, if you are shooting JPEGs it would save three different images at the different DR100, 200 and 400 settings potentially saving highlight information. And so, if you are shooting JPEGs and you couldn't shoot RAW, you didn't wanna shoot RAW for some reason and you wanted to be a little bit careful about overexposing the highlights, this would be a valuable way of doing it. So once again, all of these options and the sub menus for them can be activated with the function two button right now. We'll see it again when we dive into the menu setting when we get into the bracket settings under the drive setting. Next up is the movie mode, the movie capabilities on the X-T have increased quite a bit from the X-T1. Press down on the shutter release for starting and stopping. We're gonna have a whole menu section that we're gonna go through in the second half of this class where we're gonna go through the specifics. One of the most important things is choosing the resolution and the frame rate and we have many different options from standard HD to full HD, to of course 4K, and a lot of different frame rates according to what we need in here. So, let's take a closer look at what's going on when we shoot movies in this camera. First off, the movie frame is a narrower frame, it does not have that top and bottom strip in there because it's shooting on a 16 by nine aspect ratio. So for HD or full HD, you're gonna get that 16 by nine frame. When you go to 4K it's still a 16 by nine or excuse me, it's a 17 by nine frame but it is cropped in a little bit. And that's because it's using so much data it's hard to read out the full frame and compress it and store it to the memory card. A lot of manufacturers will crop in a little bit. And so, you don't get quite as much wide angle, it's gonna be a little bit more telephoto which is kind of a 50/50 thing. For some people it's gonna be good if you're shooting video of birds and wildlife, that's nice, it's gonna get you a little bit closer to your subject. For people who are shooting wide angle you're gonna need maybe a little bit wider angle lens by a couple millimeters. And so, it is cropped by a factor of 1.17. Now, mentioning the auto focus, there are two major ways of focusing. You can have multi which looks at all the different focusing points and will choose whatever one it thinks you need. Usually it's gonna be focusing on whatever is closest to the camera. And then there is area which is what I prefer because then you can choose where the camera focuses and then you can use the little focusing stick on the back to choose which part of the frame you want it to focus on. Now, all of these options will be controlled in the movie settings menu setting that we're gonna get to and I'm gonna go through that with you one by one getting all these things set up. But if you wanna jump ahead this is where you're gonna find that information. Some other general information about the movie mode is that 4K as the camera sits right now has a 10-minute limit. It's just got a lot of data it's recording, however, you can extend it to 30 minutes if you get the VBP or VPB-XT2, the vertical power grip for the camera. You can now get 30 minutes of 4K shooting of footage. If you are shooting in the standard HD or the full HD you can get 30 minutes with that as well. We do have a new option in this camera which is something that they're calling f-log, Fuji-log which is a special very low contrast output. So if you are recording the video via the HDMI output you can get this very, very flat image set and designed for color grading for somebody who's pretty serious about their video work. Some other little specifics about the video, the camera is shooting 4.20 in the camera but when you record it with an external you're getting a little bit better sub sampling in there with the HDMI output. And finally, we have the camera recording to a movie mode which is a very common format these days and the audio is a linear PCM. And all of these settings are gonna be able to be controlled by going into the movie mode which we will talk more about when we get into the menu sections of the camera. All right, moving our dial over to the other side of the extreme. We have multiple exposures. Once, again a JPEG only feature and this is where you are doing in-camera compositing of two images. The advantage of doing it in-camera is you can see how the first image aligns with the second image. And there are a number of on-screen controls, I'm not gonna go through all of them but you can shoot a photo and you can say I don't like it, let me shoot it again. Or you can say, hey, that's good. Let's go on to the next photo and then it kind of combines them into a composite image and you can do all of that in-camera. And so, kind of fun to do but it is JPEG only. Next up is our advanced filter setting. And so, this is once again a JPEG only and we're gonna use that front button to choose that function two button to choose these different filters. Now, for anybody familiar with the Instagram type filters that's kind of what we're getting to here. It's kind of goofy, play around fun, it's not what a lot of people are doing for most of their photographs. But you can see the difference between the standard, the toy camera, the miniature. The toy camera throws on a heavy vignette, some funky colors. The miniature blurs out the top and bottom of the image so that it kind of looks like it's a miniature. We have intense color with the pop color. High-key and low-key don't really look good on these samples that I shot because they're more designed for either bright subjects or dark subjects. We have a very contrasty dramatic tone, we have a very soft focus image that's been blurred out. And then we have some kind of interesting black and whites that allow partial color through. And so, this one will allow a little bit of red through, you can see what's orange in the photo here. Not so much on these other colors. And so, you can see a lot of blue coming through on the blue but everything else in there is black and white. And so you can have a little bit of fun with here but I would be careful about leaving your camera in this mode when you're wanting to take serious photos because once these are written to the JPEG file they are pretty much impossible to undo. And so, have fun but be careful. Final section on this is the panorama which is a built in way of making very, very long wide prints. Now, this is a JPEG only feature and it's kind of cool to do this. When you get up to a nice place that has a really great view and it's a long stretch from side to side, and you don't have a lens that's wide enough to cover it, you can put it in the panorama mode, you press down on the shutter release once and you start moving the camera across the frame. And there's gonna be some different options that I'm gonna show you coming up here on this next slide as to how you do this. Now, there is medium size panoramas and there are large size panoramas. You can also switch which way your camera is tilted. Now, you can see when you tilt the camera vertically it reaches a little bit higher and lower and you get a little bit bigger pictures, so I prefer to pan with the camera vertically because it gets you a little bit more resolution. But you'll choose which one you need according to the shape of the frame that you want and the scene that you are looking at. And so, we are actually getting a lower resolution as far as the number of megapixels because the camera is inherently a 24-megapixel sensor but because of the way it pieces this together it's gonna be a little bit lower resolution. And so, if you are a serious photographer who likes to shoot panorama stitches, what you would want to do is shoot individual photos not use this one, not use this mode. This is more of a simplistic easy basic panoramic mode. And so, if you're not interested in getting something critically perfect, it's perfectly fine. And so, when I'm in my more casual state I will use this mode but if I'm doing my serious photography where it's like I'm gonna wanna blow this up and make a print of it, I would not use this mode because when you use the panning process it sometimes does not match up all of the stitched images properly. And so, once again, using the medium and the large I typically try to keep the camera in the vertical option so that I can get a little bit higher image. It's a little bit awkward if the image is too wide in that category. But most of the time I think most people's cameras is gonna be set to the single frame. So that when you shoot a single photo it just presses, and when you press down once you're gonna get a single photo. But a lot of good options and they're easy to get to and I like that type of physical tactile control on the camera. And so, that pretty much covers the top of the camera. All right, there is no flash specific white balance setting. When using third party manual flash, would you recommend auto white balance, daylight, or plugging in a specific temperature in the K setting? So, you could always plug in a specific temperature in the K setting. Let's do a little demo here on the back of the camera where we're gonna get into this officially in a little bit but I'll just do it right now just because they brought up the question. Believe the right hand side brings up the, you know, I'm gonna see if I can switch so we get a better screen here. No. Okay, so we have auto settings. You could go into the K setting and you could set your flash setting and that might be the best option because some flashes might be at 53, some might be at 56 or 59. You could go in and set specifics on that. If not I would use daylight. And so, daylight's gonna get you real close to the mark if you just want one simple setting. But you might dial in your own flash and figure out that it's a specific color. Or you could go into the K setting and you could warm up your flash a little bit so it wasn't quite so cool. It's a little bit warmer and dial in your own temperature but that's something we'll talk more about in the white balance setting. All right, good question. Are the focusing points all, focusing points all the strength? Same strength maybe. Do you have a focus and recompose like a Canon and Nikon? So when you do focus with this camera it is locking in on the focus. So, let me see if we can see, make sure we're in auto focus. And so you can, if I hold the microphone close to this. (beeps) Well, you can actually hear the beep (beeps) which I hate. You can hear the lens focusing. And so, I don't know if we. (beeping) And so, when you hear that little chirp, chirp it is focus locked and so, you can totally lock focus.