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Back Side Part 2

Lesson 5 from: Fujifilm X-T1 Fast Start

John Greengo

Back Side Part 2

Lesson 5 from: Fujifilm X-T1 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

5. Back Side Part 2

Lesson Info

Back Side Part 2

Over on the right hand side where there's that little thumb rest we have a bunch of lights that will come on that will warn you about different features of the camera the focus is locked ah warning perhaps maybe the camera has to slow a shutter speed if you are recording a video if something's kind of locked in or if there's an air you'll see that blinking generally green is good and flashing and darker red is more of a problem okay, next we have our selector on the back of the camera and these aren't just buttons for going up and down. These are function buttons that you get to program to do a variety of cool things and if you want to get in and control these it's under menu setting set up number two function settings you can go in and control these functions, which are known as the three, four, five and six button now to start with as you get your camera the function number three button on the top kicks your camera into the macro mode and this is not going to do anything unless you h...

ave a macro lens. And right now they only have one of macro winds of sixty and so that allows the lens to focus from infiniti all the way up close and normally it doesn't do that so that it can focus a little bit more quickly and so since I don't own the sixty, I've reprogrammed or I will re program my function three to do something else that I find valuable function for is films simulation and I wanted to see exactly what these different films look like so here's a little example of what some of these films look like so raw shot in neutral and then pro v a is just ah standard amount of contrast in color enhancement that you would expect for most pictures v a is a very vivid setting that you might use for nature or landscape photography where you want that very vivid colors in the sky or in the trees asta is more of a portrait setting for having a little bit more subtle colors not quite as intense when you're shooting skin tones is generally going to look a little bit better. There is also a high contrast in a standard contrast for various uses where you're just looking for a little bit different look for things now there is also a number of different monochrome votes we have ones that are just straight monochrome ones ones that enhance greens, yellows and reds as well as a c p a toned which adds a little bit of a dark brown I tend to your images which adds that aged look to your photographs and so these are all things that could be done to the jpeg images in the camera jane br who's asking if you khun bracket with the film simulation so she says howdy, bracket and can you set it up to bracket using probative? Elvia asked yes, you can you can choose three films in which to bracket and you can choose that and what you would do on the camera is that you would choose the bracketing, but you have to go into the menu and you have to do two things. Number one, you have to set the bracketing to film simulation. And then secondly, you need to set up film simulation to choose the three types of film that you want to do. And we will do that in the third segment of this class where we go through the menu cities. Okay, great. Thank you. All right, but right now function for is set up as your film simulation, and so if you don't use it, you can reprogramming. Okay, he saw me playing around with this earlier function. Number five is the focus area. And so what this does is it allows you to change your focusing bracket two one of the different forty nine areas within the frame. And so this is covering a very large percentage of the frame, and you can adjust the size of the frame by using that back dial and then using the selector to move where about it's in the frame that you want and so I'll do a little live demo here a swell I did a nice little slide on it but let's go ahead and do ah little live devil here and so this is the downward facing button on the camera make sure my cameras on there we go so if I hit the downward aero, you'll see it's kind of hard to see the white brackets but allows me to change the size of the bracket oh wait I'm in manual I have to be an auto focus mode to be able to change bracket sizes that was that was kind of frustrating as well if you are in manual focus, you cannot change the bracket size for focusing because it doesn't really matter that much, but it does matter where using man in any case we pressed downward we can turn that back dial to change the size you know I think we have five different sizes and myself I I prefer the middle size I think the small ones air a little hard to work with, so I kind of like the middle one but then we can move it to any one of these different points all around the frame and they're all equally is good, but I generally leave it in the center it's just easy to work with in very general it's where the lenses the sharpest and nice, easy place to get to now something to note about the focusing points on the camera. Is that the ones that you see those, I think there's, forty nine of them. That is the contrast detection area. So what happens is the camera looks at contrast, and it figures if it's not contrast, he changed the focusing of lands until it's sharp and that's, when things were in focus. In contrast, detection has two characteristics that are important to know about. The first is that it's very, very accurate. It's really good at determining if something is sharp or not. Now, it may have a problem with something that has no contrast, like a white wall, and so there it will still have problems in that sort of situation. If there's no contrast. But if there's something like the texture of this wood desk here it's gonna be ableto figure that out and be very, very accurate, the second thing that you need to know about it is that it can sometimes be a little bit slow on this has been a grape, not only with this camera, but all the marylise cameras that use a contract taunt contrast detection system is that it's a little bit slow, especially for high speed action. So what this camera utilizes is a small area within the center most of the frame the inner nine brackets and this is the phase detection area where the camera has eighty six thousand phase detection pixels which can determined sharpness in a different way than the standard pixels can. And this is a total of thirty six percent of the area. This is one of the things that's kind of unique aboutthe center on this camera is that it can do contrast detection which is very accurate and face detection, which is very fast and what it does, and so it's working with both of those systems in order to focus as fast as possible as accurately as possible. Now I haven't used this camera for a lot of action, but I did need to go out and try test so yesterday I was doing a test was just somebody walking down the street towards me and using the focus tracking system on this using the continuous focusing mode and it wasn't perfect but it was about eighty to ninety percent right on the frames it's getting them properly in focus and so for a mere elice camera in this day and age it's pretty darn good it's not quite as good as the top of the line es el ours, but it's it's pretty darn good and so feel free to take this out to the sporting events it should be able to handle those pretty well but if you get into super high speed action, you're very close to your subjects or they're very erratic and their movement that's when you're going to probably start seeing miss shots on here, where the pictures are slightly out of focus, remember to try to keep your subjects in the center of those nine crosshairs because that's, where your camera has the phase detection area, kind of you had a question? Yeah, we had a few questions building up about focusing, so I was saving them for now. One was from steve mccowen, who said, if you focus and recompose does the duel, and I think this is what we're talking about locking it. Does dual display zoomed in screen show the center focus point or the recomposed area? The in the duel area, the little magnified focusing area is wherever the focusing frame is and so it's going to move. Okay, it's going to move, so that would be a good case for moving the focusing frame to where you want it to be in the composition. Gotcha. Ok, cool. So from d j j carol, the question is regarding focus points. If one moves the focus point off the center there's a button that one compress to bring it it back to center automatically. Instead of moving the focus point back to center, my nikon d seven hundred offers this capability so I guess the question is is there is there yeah and I was very confused at first because it was like I don't know how to do that and to my knowledge that can't be done you have to activate the focusing system and then remains they bring it but let me just try one thing on my camera here, let me move the focusing point off to the side ok? So if I activate the focusing point and I hit ok, that was my only hope is that okay would send it back to the middle and it doesn't, so I have to activate it three words and so yeah, I mean the worst case is one, two, three or five you have to hit it seven times potentially if you're way off in the corners gotcha, yeah, all right another one another suggestion for food you there perhaps yeah and then one more about focusing is there a way to change focus points using the front dial rather than the selector function button? No there isn't and so that's you get you have to use that selector in the back of the camera and I think you know, there's a function button on the front we haven't talked about yet would be kind of cool that have a secondary favorite focusing point that you could activate with a button press and so come on, folks, let's make our own camera will do a great job with everyone's input, we'll have, we'll have a fantastic camera, ok, continuing onward on the camera, and so these are all the function buttons, and we have one more to go, and that is the function six button, which is to the right, which from the start, as you open the camera on the box, it's going to control the white balance, which is something we haven't talked about yet, and so the white balance controls the color of light controls the color of your image according to the light that you are shooting under and so fine, which is a really strange word for sunlight, but that's their word that they choose that sunlight on shade or going to be kind of this ones that you're going to choose for natural lighting situations, the one that is most different is for tungsten lighting. And so if you're shooting inside your house and tungsten with tungsten lights, you're going to probably want to change your white balance over for that, there is also a number of different fluorescent settings, because fluorescent lights come with a number of different temperatures that you could choose. And it's the only camera in the market that I know of that has an underwater setting for the color balance this does not mean you can take the camera under water it's just for the color balance now also in here is going to be a selection an option for you to manually select the color temperature by choosing the kelvin temperature yourself and so if you knew what it was you could dialling in we have also the option of custom which allows you to shoot a white piece of paper and calibrate the camera according to the light that you are in and then finally we have auto white balance which allows you or allows allows the camera to go in and make that setting on its own and frankly the camera does a pretty good job in auto white balance so I leave it there a good portion of the time if I see that it's noticeably off I'll go in and adjust it myself but I mostly shoot raw images with the cameras so if the cameras a little bit off I know that I'm able to adjust it later without any damage to the subject at all so that's the right hand button there and if you want to change any of those once again you can go into the function setting option in the menu and change those if you are not using them or if you don't like where they are follow up question there. Well, I just want to follow up from some folks in the chat room ultra gravy and mike kay, who are saying that you can go back to the center focus point. Okay. And if you want to try and see, you're sure? Yeah, I mean, I forgot about they're saying that you can press the display back button to re center. Ok, so let's, move this focusing point off to the right hand side and just say ok, if I was to hit display that's going to change the display, so maybe I have to hit the focusing and then hit display back. And that does do it. Cool. So thank you very much. I missed that. I am at fault. I should have mentioned that before. I will give myself three lashings with a cable release later today, people learn something new every day. John it's it's, not a workshop, unless the instructors were learning as well. So, thanks. Very good. You know, got a little secret things on the camera. All right, anything else I miss, write it in, and we'll let everyone else know and give you credit for it. Okay? The menu button, of course, will dive us into the full on menu of the camera, but I think for the most part, once you get using this camera, you're not going to be using the menu. Once you've gone through it and set it up, you'll just be using the quick menu. The quick menu is a small collection of a few features that you are most likely to one again to get in and quickly change and that's what we're gonna be talking about next it's the q button and the quick menu, so you will activate it by hitting the q button, and you'll, of course, be navigating with your control pat on the back of the camera, and you'll make your changes by turning the back dial of the camera, so you'll set the features of that particular feature that is highlighted by just turning that dialogue. You don't dive into any different screens, it's just this one screen, and you'll just kind of shuffle through the different options for that particular setting. So let's, go through and take a look at what we have here, the first one where it says base, which is a little weird because they don't really talk about base in the instruction manual much at all, but that is basically whatever mode your camera currently happens to be if you have seven different customs settings, and there are a number of different modes that you can set up on your camera so for instance, if you wanted to have a black and white mode, you could set it up as custom setting number four, and you could quickly change to that without having to put your camera the black and white mode you're just simply changing the custom setting. Now, I have found this to be less of less use on this camera, then on other cameras that have a similar moz a system to it, and the reason is this this camera has physical controls for shutter speeds, apertures and ice owes, so you cannot set any of those in the custom settings. And so if you wanted to have your camera set up for action photography, where it goes to s o eight hundred aperture of two point eight and five hundredth of a second in the shutter speed, you can't do that because those settings have to be manually set with the various styles on the camera you can on lee go in and set up a certain number of parameters in these settings. And so personally, I don't use thes at all, but I could see how people would have slightly different settings for these they're just not the major controls shutter speed aperture and I sl now, if you do have one of these set up let's say you have customs setting number six set up and you decide to go in and make an adjustment on the auto focus the dynamic range of the white balance you'll notice these little red dots, which indicates that you've made a change from your selected setting. They're so just be warned that if you see the dots, that means you've made a change to something now these other little controls we have the auto focus control we haven't talked too much about this one yet, but we have the choice of multi and area multi looks at the entire area of the focusing points and it's going to look for whatever it can to focus on in there and it's going to choose it on its own without any input from you area allows you to choose a specific area in which to focus and I think area is a much better option for most all types of photography. There is some cases where if you're shooting hi action that's moving around quite sporadically, then the multi would be better but for basic photography, I would highly recommend the area mode. Next up is the dynamic range option on the camera. This is kind of unusual for fuji, and it increases the dynamic range that you can capture on the camera, but in order to get to these dynamic ranges of two hundred and four hundred percent, you need to go up to four hundred and eight hundred s o or above and so you can't get to these by shooting at the lowest isil and so an example of this is those picture here and if you notice I have the history graham listed down below and this is your standard picture and I'm going to change it to dynamic range two hundred let me just go back and forth between these two and you can see how the history graham has slightly changed and now we'll go to four hundred and it's compressing the tonal range slightly between one hundred two hundred and four hundred now notice the yellow box in the upper right hand corner as I go from one hundred to two hundred two four hundred and I don't know how much this shows up on your screen but as we go from the one hundred to the two hundred percent I'm able to seymour of those branches in that highlighted area part of the sky and I go to four hundred I'm able to see even mohr and so it's compressing the tonal range so I can seymour of those highlights and while I like to be able to see more of those highlights I don't like shooting at I s o eight hundred in order to get to that and so there is a bit of a compromise and so if you're in a very wide exposure latitude and you will don't mind using a little bit higher I sell this does work out quite well, and you can get some very good results from it. It's may not be right all the time, and so this is going toe potentially require a little bit of working on your part little bit of testing to see if it works for your photography. For me, I normally just like to shoot with the camera at ice of two hundred, which means that the dynamic range is at one hundred percent, which is the normal setting, and I don't really play with this that much, but I could see turning it on in a few special situations. Next, we have our white balance, which is something that we just talked about a few minutes go, it has that shortcut button on the back of the camera currently because it's set up as a function button. And so if you want to read, reorganized those buttons and you want to reassign the function of that button, feel free to because the white balance is not too far away here in the quick menu, moving down to the next line of information we're going to be dealing with for new items there we g o so first up is noise reduction you know, I guess the first thing to note is this is on ly going to refer to images shot inge apec this does not refer to images shot in raw what noise reduction does is it takes a look at images that are shot that have a lot of noise and it's going to try to reduce that noise with its own built in algorithm on how to reduce the noise and it doesn't okay job. The problem is, is that for shutters, for longer shutter speeds, it might take some processing time while it's working on the image from what I've seen, I think most people can do a better job than the camera can given a computer in the right software program. And so using something like adobe light room, you can play around with the noise reduction in there, and I think you can outdo what is built into the camera because you get to really look at the image and adjust your settings for that particular image. And so this is something that I will generally leave turned off or at zero on the camera. Next up is image size. This is very important and most likely you're going to want to have this set to l three two, which means large image size in a three by two aspect ratio kind of strange place to choose aspect ratio, but you can shoot sixteen by nine, which is the format of hd tvs. You can also shoot square, which I like square images. To be honest with you, I used to own a house a bladder night. I'm in sync. I kind of like the square thing. I'm hip to that, okay? Uh, but I usually want a crop it later, the advantage of doing it in camera is that you actually get to see it in the viewfinder, and that might be kind of nice for compositional reasons. And so there is a reason for that, but in general, you're going to want to have this set to l three two because that gets you the full information off the sensor and the largest size, and this is dealing with j peg images. If you have your camera set to raw images, this might be great out, and you may not see this as an available option. Next up is image quality a little different than him agent size. So image quality is where we get to choose between j peg and raw, and so you'll see fine and normal. Those air j peg options normal is a lower quality version of fine fine is a better quality version we have raw, plus a fine quality j peg or raw, plus a normal j peg and finally, a straight rock. Now my preference would be to set for raw images because I think that's what you're going to get the best image quality, nice clean information and you can work with it in good software programs, however, and this comes to my biggest gripe with fuji, and my biggest gripe with this camera is that I normally I don't like to shoot in raw plus j peg, because if I have the raw I can make any j peg I want the problem was shooting raw on this camera is that if you play back an image and you want to zoom in to see how sharp it is, when you do that with a raw image, it doesn't zoom in as far as it does with a j peg image, and if I really want to check sharpness, I want to zoom in as close as possible, and for some reason, fuji doesn't allow you to zoom in on a raw image, so as I work around the way that I shoot with this camera is I shoot with it in raw, normal j peg and the on ly reason I'm shooting normal j peg is so that I can play back the image, zoom in and see if it's sharp when I download to my computer at home, the first thing I do is I select all the j pigs and I delete him and the only reason I'm shooting them is for that one aspect of checking sharpness out in the field and my fingers are crossed I'm not going on what I'm hoping that fuji fixes this at some point in a firm where fixed down the road at some point in the future, but right now I'm shooting rob plus j peg, now there is another reason to shoot rob plus j peg and that's because you need immediate j p hey straight from the camera, you're going to shoot your friend's wedding and they want really high quality images, so you're going to shoot rhyme and just for that. But they said, could you do a slide show at the reception? Okay, well, you're thinking I'm going to download two hundred raw images, I got to turn him into j pegs and then I gotta put him into a slide show and that's not gonna happen if you shoot rob plus j peg, you take the j pegs those become the slide show, the raw images are the ones that you print or work with later on and so that's that's the reason that I would normally shoot rob plus j peg, but I dish it, ron, I want to be able to check images out on the field and I don't need very good quality images, which is why I'm choosing the normal quality j picks for that you know, if you don't have the right software right now and you're just kind of getting into photography and you haven't got the whole photoshopped light room thing worked out yet you can shoot j pigs and the camera does shoot beautifully very, very good j pegs and so that's not a bad place to start but I would highly recommend for anyone he was going to spend this much money on a camera I can tell you're taking photography kind of seriously I suggest that you start shooting rock or at least make plans for it in the near future so that's mine dialogue on raw j peg ok finally the one on the right side here is film simulation and so you can go in and choose the different types of film we looked at this before there was the film simulation shortcut button one of the function buttons on the back of the camera but it's here in the quick menu as well moving down a line these air all set to zero for me this is going in and controlling the look of your image. I like to keep these all straight across neutral any adjustments I do are going to be in the computer later on these on lee effect j pegs they're not going to affect raw images and the rovs are what's important to me, so this doesn't really matter but if you shoot j pegs and you're trying to get good, clean, perfect j pegs for your purpose and they're not quite right right now, this is where you can go in and adjust the look of those j pecs moving down a line we have our self timer finally, this is where our self timer is, and so I use the self timer a lot not because I'm taking pictures of myself, but because I have the camera on a tripod and I like to use the two second self timer, so there's no vibrations next up, we have something that is turned off all the time for me, which is face detection, you can use the camera to focus on faces, which works pretty well if you have a single face to work on. Next up, we have our flash, moz. We talked about some of the many different flash modes in the camera. This is probably the quickest and easiest way to get in and change that. My preferred setting is forced flash under most situations I don't mind slow synchro if I'm using slow shutter speeds as well and then the one on the right hand side is for controlling the brightness of the elektronik viewfinder or the lcd on the back of the camera most of the time you're going to want to leave this set to zero the potential reason why you might want to change it is if you're trying to view in very bright sunlight, you may need to increase the brightness the lcd on the back of the camera, the e v f will probably be fine at zero the entire time, but you might need to raise the brightness of the back one background or the let me strike this from the very beginning, you might need to change the lcd on the back of the camera if it is very bright outside way had a question on that coming in from folks at home, and that was can the extra one worked just like an slr with the f b f on and the display turning on just er v the pictures for a few seconds? No. Okay, the problem is, is that you need to turn on the elektronik viewfinder or the lcd in the back of the camera, and they don't automatically switch back and forth, which I think is a great idea, and I I kind of wanted the same thing myself tried to figure it out. What happens is that if you have the dvf turned on it's going to play the back, the image back in here? Okay, now this in theory makes more sense because let's, let's think about this I'm preview the image, I take the picture I see the playback image right in here. Why do I want to do this? Well, I might want to show somebody and that's that's kind of where it comes in, you take a picture, and then you have to kind of fiddle around changing the displays to show somebody, and so it would be kind of nice to have the option of playback in either one and so there's some more customization that could be done on fuji's part, and so that option is not available. But I think it's a great idea, and I totally agree with you. Awesome! One more quick one from photo ben, if I if I'm in a rather dark surrounding and want to use the flash to light the picture, not balanced like the screen, the picture is so dark that I can't see what I'm doing. I hope you understand my question, is that something where he could pump up the brightness on the okay? So I think what they're getting to is is that there was a feature that I talked about before, where the viewfinder mimics with the final picture is going to be like, right? And they would want to turn that feature off because if they are using flash on their image, they need to adjust it so it just looks good for them. At that point and then everything it just for the flash photo and so there's a feature that we're going to get to in the menu setting and let me grab my handy dandy little ally because I don't remember where this is off the top of my head let's remind people that that comes with the course when you do purchase it and so it's going to be in set up menu number one under screen set up and that's going to be let's see preview exposure in manual mode that may be the thing that they're causing they may have got that wrong on them pretty good sleuthing john I think that's it cool thank you okay, ready to move on okay, so the camera has a few different little kind of secret things going on if you press and hold the menu button it turns kind of an electronic lock on some of the buttons that selector, for instance on the back of the camera and let me do a little live demo this on my camera and I turn it on here for you yeah let's make sure we're got cameron ok, so I'm going to hold down on the menu and you'll see that we get this lock switch it's now turned on so some people have a hard time with this lock is turned on ok, so now if I could go up or down. We get the lock switch if I tried to do the focus assist that works. If I go to the q menu, it locks up the q menu as well. I don't. Why it locks up the cubana, which seems strange to me, and now to unlock it, I will go ahead and hold down on the menu button again for like, what, three seconds. Normally, if you press the menu button once, it just goes in there very quickly. And so it's. Just a little lock feature. Some people don't like toe, accidentally press those buttons and it's, a way of electronic locking them and turning them off.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Outline
Firmware Update
Keynote Presentation

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

I've purchased a number of John's courses and recognise how well he delivers complicated facts. Having just purchased a new X-T1 buying his fast start class was an obvious step, especially having looked at the manual. It was really well presented and made the switch from Canon so much easier. The inclusion of the notes was an excellent, additional support.I set up the camera as recommended and took it on a photo-shoot with my camera club a few days later. The content of the course and the settings suggested made the day. Now that I understood the camera it was easy to use and delivered great results first time. The course was the best 'accessory' I could have bought. Creative Live and John are a fabulous resource and so reasonably priced.

Jim Panzer
 

Great course, I received the X T1 and the first thing I did was see to if there was a course on CL I could use to get more aquanted with this awesome little machine. I have seen other course from John and he really knows his stuff, this one was no different. As a late comer to this camera, it would be nice if CL could update the course by adding a video going over the big 4.0 firmware updates, as that's the current one now. Thanks CL and John for helping me feel more at home with this camera!

Debra Robert
 

Great class! The learning modules are well structured and allow enough time for the viewer to absorb what is being shared. After completing the course I feel much more confident in understanding the X-T1, not a comfortable as with Canon (yet) ... there is definitely a learning curve moving from DSLR to mirrorless. So wish I would have taken this course a few months ago! Thank you!

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