Lessons

Lesson Info

Top Deck Part 1

Okay folks, it is now time to get into the actual controls the camera this so this is kind of the real beginning of the class all right? So let's talk about this control system on this camera let's talk first about the basic controls obviously we have our on off switch on the top of the camera one of the things that's going on when you turn the camera on or off is the camera goes through an ultrasonic vibrations sensor cleaning system that vibrates at eighty thousand times a second in order to knock dust off the sensor and you can choose this to be done either on or off when you turn the camera on or often later when we get into the menu system will show you where to make that adjustment. The camera has a rear dial and it has a front dial and unlike a lot of other cameras on the market, these dials don't get used nearly as much because this camera doesn't change sever speeds and apertures in general with these dials a cz kind of the main way of changing him we don't use them as much th...

ey're kind of more used for secondary things like zooming in on a playback image or changing images in the playback mode we have a selector on the back of the camera I may forget that name and just call it the thumb pad or the mouse on the back it's mostly going to be used for navigating through out the menu system, will also use it when we magnify into an image and want to zoom around and check sharpness in different areas and then there's the menu or ok button. So when you want to confirm a setting, you'll often just hit the ok button down there, and I guess I shouldn't mention that the display back button down below that if we want to back out of the menu, you could hit that all right, focusing on the top deck of the camera. The main button, of course, is your shutter release, but now this is a two stage button, which means that when you press halfway down, it's going to initiate auto focusing and need ary when you press all the way down and we'll take a picture now, there are some adjustments that we can make to this, but that's generally what's going to happen, so get used to that halfway feeling. The other thing is, is that when you press halfway down on that shuttle release, no matter what mode the camera is in, it kicks it into a shooting mode, and so if you're in a menu system or you're in the quick menu or you're something doing something, you're playing back an image and you're like, I just want to get out of this just simply press halfway down on the shutter release and it will kick you back into that shooting position. The other thing that this camera does that's a little different than most cameras is that when you do press halfway down the camera goes into depth of field preview so it stops the aperture down to the working aperture so you're going to see that amount of depth of field that you would get in the final image and so that's kind of an interesting little extra advantage so that you can really preview how much step the field of my getting in that particular image ok, the big dial on the top of the camera controlling the shutter speeds is kind of cool for us who've been in photography for many years and this is how we learn photography is with the shutter speed dial on the top of the camera so most of this is going to be pretty obvious it's going to have a maximum shutter speed of one four thousandth of a second kind of new on the fuji cameras is the one eighty x and this is the flash think mode where the camera can safely flash sync with strobes and so if you're going to put on the the ad on flash that comes with it or hook it up to studio strobes or something like that you can link it and put it in there one of the things that I would love to talk to a technician at fuji about is why do you have a one eighty x on the shutter speed dial when the camera seems to sink perfectly with flashes at two fiftieth of a second? And so I've done a number of tests and I haven't noticed any significant difference between two fifty and one hundred eighty is so if you need flash it a little bit faster of a sink speed, give that to fiftieth to try. There may be situations in which it doesn't work, which is why they've put their fastest saying get one eightieth and that's their official stance on it, but from my testing two fifty seems to work pretty good. It doesn't work with radio triggers from what I've seen but like with a little flash that comes with the camera a little the e f x aid, it seems to work just fine, and I get the exposure is looking real good, and if you need that slight edge in shutter speed, there's a little bit of an override option. Now, one of the things that you could do on this camera that I haven't seen in a while is that you can set it to the wrong shutter speed, so if you put your camera at four thousandth of a second and fire it with the flash, you're going to get a clear indication that you're not going to get a full image what's happening is the shutters are closing and the light's only going to light up a little portion of the sensor it's it's kind of interesting if you want to see how things work but it's not going to result in good pictures for the most part now one of the downsides of having a shutter speed dial on this camera is that you can't get to third stops of shutter speeds on the dial itself. You have to use the front diallo the camera in order to go up or down, and so any time you go to a shutter speed with the exception of the flash think it one eightieth. If you want to get to a third faster or two thirds faster or slower, you're going to just click that front dial a couple clicks to the left or culture a couple clicks to the right on, so be aware that you need to find tune it with the second dial. Now there is a tea setting which stands for time and then the front dial will be enable you to dial all the way down to thirty seconds is so if there's something longer than one second that you want to d'oh, you can go from two down to thirty seconds without now thirty seconds is not long enough there is yet another mode and be stan it's for bulb and this allows you to leave the shutter open as long as you want it left open. You should have the elektronik cable release and I'll give you specifics on model numbers and price and where to plug that in in a little bit, but you can leave the shutter open first. Long as you want. Now, I would recommend not leaving it open for longer than maybe ten minutes. What happens is the sensor will heat up on, and I don't know what what happened if any damage would happen if you left it open for hours and hours. But I can't imagine the battery lasting much more than an hour because there's a lot of energy going being used by the camera when it does that, but if you do want to do those longer exposures, you can use the bulb, but generally from somebody who does a fair bit of nighttime photography, very rarely do I use anything longer than thirty seconds, so it's unlikely that you'll need the bulb, but the tea settings will be really handy for anyone using nighttime photography. Let's talk about the apertures on the camera. There are none captures air on the lenses in these case, at least for the most part, most of the lenses they're going to have a little aperture switch. On the side of him and you can see on the camera here in front of me, we've got a little switch that we conflict between the manual aperture or the automatic aperture, and so be aware that there's another switch for image stabilization and that's a separate switch. But manual apertura is just the a diagram of the aperture and a means auto, which means the camera will figure out aperture for you on the camera. And there are a lot of cameras that have these aperture rings on them and these air known as our lenses. I'll talk more about this in the lens section, but there is a few lenses that do not have apertures on them, and they are known as x c lenses and so there's they tried to lower the costs, and so they simplified a and there's no aperture control on the lens. And so in order to control the aperture, you have to use that die along the back of the camera and that's there's only think three lengths, I think there's only three lenses in the current setup of lenses that have that option. Most of the lenses they're going to have the aperture right on there, so one way that control the camera is in a program mode, which means that the aperture is in the automatic setting and the shutter speed dial. Is going to be in the automatic setting as well, and this is where the camera will figure out both shutter speed and aperture for you at the same time. Now what the camera is doing is the cameras looking at how much light is coming in and it's trying to determine if you have a fast enough shutter speed for hand holding the camera. It has no idea if you have the camera on a tripod and so be aware if you're trying to get a tripod shot, you may need to make an adjustment and you can make that adjustment by turning either the front or the back dial to do it's called a program shift that way you can get two slightly different sets of shutter speeds and apertures that might fit the subject that you were shooting better. And so if you make this adjustment, you will notice a slight adjustment in the colors of the shutter speeds in the apertures either in the viewfinder or on the back lcd and so here's kind of the little guide to those colors if you see him in white that's kind of their normal setting. If you have done program shift, you'll see those shutter speeds and apertures change color to yellow now, once you've kind of lock something in and usually this will often happen when you have pressed halfway down on the shutter, they'll change to a teal colored and if they're in red it's a warning that you've kind of gone out of range, for instance, if you're in a dark room and you select for thousandth of a second and the camera doesn't have an aperture that's going to work with it, it warns you by turning those to read as a warning that something is about to go wrong. And so that is the program note on the camera. Now the program, along with the shutter priority and the aperture priority, have something in common, and that is, is that whenever you take a picture of the camera is determining how bright and how dark your images, and in general it's trying to get a nice balance between light and dark. But if you would like to adjust your image to make it brighter or make it darker, you would do so with the exposure compensation dialogue right there on the top of the camera, right where your thumb may lay on the camera, and so if you want to make a darker, you would go to the minus side. If you want to make a lighter, you would go to the plus side. No, it will go as far as plus three and minus three, and I have never shot a picture in my life over plus two. Or under minus two so I'm not sure what needs you might have but they're there in case you need to do that the only time I've done it is just for practice testing shooting as an example generally I am frequently when I'm shooting a lot of nature shots and there's a lot of maybe green trees or dark rocks will be going down to minus two thirds or minus one stop if I'm in a really bright environment maybe with snow or lots of sky I could be in the plus two thirds category be aware that this dial does not have a lock on it it's got a pretty good feel to it so it takes a pretty noticeable click in order to move it around but that could get bumped and one of those things to keep your eye on to see if you've adjusted in my mind in a perfect world this dial would have a lock on it that you could lock it into one and not having adjusted but maybe that will be on the x t too so that's the exposure compensation anytime you're using aperture priority shutter priority or program keep your eye on that dial use it when necessary when you do use it in there you'll see a little exposure indicator come up on the viewfinder over on the left hand side and you'll be able to see the image as well as the indicator go up and down in brightness to the money from the minus to the plus side, a cz to whether that picture is getting brighter or darker. So just be aware of that on there. You know, if you want to get in and control things yourself manually, you'll need to flip the switch on the lands to the manual mode on some lenses, like the fifty millimeter lens. Let me show you this, lands. If we could get a close shot on that camera off to the side here, you'll see that we have apertures in particular on this lands, but we also haven't a setting here where we would flip it, so this this lens doesn't have the little flip switch. Some lenses have it, someone's is don't, and so any time you see a number, that means you're in the manual setting. If you see it at the a, that means the camera's going to take care of it there, but most of those lenses are putting the switch on him, or fuji has the switch on most of those lenses these days, so get that flipped over to the manual setting that on my camera, and then you're going to be able to change your apertures by just turning the aperture ring on the camera and looking at where it's set at in the viewfinder, you'll then get the shutter speed dial out of the a setting and move it over into one of the manual shutter speeds, and then you'll need to use the light meter in the camera in order to follow the light meter to see where even exposure is and it's fairly easy to do. You'll also notice that the image itself will be a preview of what your final image is going to be, and this is something that you can adjust. So let me introduce you to my short cuts every once in a while up on screen, you're going to see a little shortcut like you see appear in the bottom right hand corner, and I know some of you that are watching this class in the taped version of it will say, hold on, I want to go adjust this right now, and so this allows you to pause the class and it's a little preview on where to go on the camera. So in this case, what you do is you would go into the menu and you go to tool section number one under the set up number one look for something called screen set up preview exposure in manual mode. Now most of us want to have this in the mode that it is the way we get it from the factory. If you were working in a studio with strobe lights, you wouldn't want this because your camera would be very, very dark because you're using lights to light up the actual image and when the lights aren't on it's really dark. And so there are some people, as I say, working in studio photograph, studio situation, there's, some potential other situations as well, where it may not be convenient, but I think for the average user, you want to leave this turned on. And so, uh, from time to time, you're going to see these little short cuts come up on screen, and if you want to stop the class and jump ahead and make an adjustment right then and there feel free to do that that's one of the benefits of online learning and watching the tape to class, all right, next up, the dial on the top left of the camera with its dialogue is how we change esos it requires a little bit more work than some of the other cameras, but I do like it because I can see what s so I'm set at even when the cameras turned off so it's very, very convenient. Now the numbers will go from two hundred to sixty, four hundred, and this is where we can set the camera, whether we have the camera set in j peg oren raw to get to those extra extremities, the low setting of one hundred and the high one in high two settings which can get us up to fifty one thousand two hundred weaken set those on lee if we have a j peg setting turned on and so high one and high two can be customized, and so you can jump in and there's a certain next shortcut and you can adjust what high one is in high too. I think for most people high one is going to be fine to leave it at twelve thousand eight hundred and high too will be a twenty five thousand six hundred and for those of you who don't want to go jump ahead and get this set right now, we will get to this towards the end of our class as we go through the menu setting because I'm going to help you set up all the different settings and these air one of the ones that we will go through the shortcut is here for people who want to race ahead. So there is an auto setting in here, which will allow the camera to automatically go in and set this isil. How does it know what s so you should have sat? Well, what it does is it looks at the shutter speed you have said, and it tries to give you a shutter speed. Appropriate for handheld use it's not looking at whether you shooting sports it doesn't care whether you're on a tripod so it doesn't really have a cz much information as you have and this is one of the reasons why I don't like auto oso in general but it is pretty good on this camera because you can go in and you can customize it with the I s o auto control and this is going to be found in the shooting menu under isil auto setting now the first thing that you can set is the default sensitivity what's the base sensitivity that you would like it to go to most of the time for most of us that's going to be two hundred what's the maximum sensitivity in s so that you would want it to go to and here is where you have to kind of do a little bit of a judgment call as to what's the highest acceptable eyes so that you want the camera to use if for instance at sixty four hundred it's unacceptable and noise and you don't want it to go there you could set it to thirty two hundred the third setting is what's the slowest shutter speed that you would like to use and the two things that you would think about here is number one what's the slowest shutter speed that you can hand hold the camera at and that might be a thirtieth of a second or if you're really stable, or if you have the lenses with the stabilization, you might get down to a fifteenth or even lower, or you might think about minimum shutter speed as to the subjects that you're shooting. If you're shooting sports and action, you might need one five hundredth of a second as your slow a shutter speed or whatever shutter speed for depending on the activity that so you can really go in and customize the auto I so if you do want to use it, I still like using manual I so because it's, so clear and so easy to change from one setting to the next as I go from modem mode, but it is nice to be able to customize the auto eso setting. Now the image sensor on this is really not much different than the ones on some of the previous cameras, as faras resolution it's very similar to the x e to image quality, because it's basically the same sensor when you are shooting raw it's going to be extraordinarily clean, too, for an eight hundred, you might start to see a little bit of a break in the smoothness. At sixteen hundred, I think sixty four hundred it's starting to get a little bit chunky thirty two hundred pretty good, and if you use a little bit of noise reduction software there's a lot of independent companies out there I just used adobe light room for managing my photos and it's got some pretty good noise controls built into that and so I feel pretty comfortable with this camera up to thirty two hundred but I can take a sixty, four hundred image and I can work a little bit and it's it's a very usable image, which is the highest I so that you can shoot with raw now he should j pegs the camera is going to put in some of its own noise reduction on these images. Now this is something that you can control in the menu setting we'll get to that later but it actually looks pretty darn good at sixty four hundred in j picks because it's putting in its own noise reduction software now I think that you can still get better results by shooting raw and adjusting it yourself. And so the question is, do you want to adjust it yourself, eh? So the camera has probably one of the best reputations for kicking out really good looking j pegs and so if you want to shoot j peg, this might be the best camera in the market for you, but you're still going to get a little bit more if you shoot rod so I definitely like to shoot rock because I like to get all that original data from the sensor can we have a question? Yeah, I'm just gonna jump in actually feel the rob versus j peg can you tell people who might be newer to photography what the difference is and when you would use wrong when you would use j peg right so raw as the name indicates is the raw information coming off the sensor and things that that are raw are sometimes not so refined and so the j peg image starts off with the raw information but then it goes through some compression it goes through adjusting of the color some sharpness settings and it's trying to find two in the image to make it look right. And so the cameras doing the software built into the camera is trying to do the best job it can giving you a nice refined finished product but sometimes their idea a perfect image is a little different than yours and being able to go back to that raw information is very valuable for a serious photographer who says, oh no, the shadows air to darken meaning to lighten up the shadows and if you wanted to do something like that or oh the highlights or too bright I need to bring those back a little bit you're gonna have a lot more information to work with with the raw image and so the raw image requires a little bit more work but you're going to get a better product, mohr tuned exactly the way to that picture should look than the j pegs and so that's kind of the basic difference. And so there is a bit of a compromise should do this, or she didn't do that and kind of for long term, highest quality benefits. You want to shoot the raw, but I will address this further as we get into the exact setting in the robber, says jay pick because there's a very particular thing about this camera that I find very frustrating, and I think they need to do a quick fix on and it's what I hate most about this camera, so stay tuned, all right? So that's, how you set the isil on the camera? All right, next up on the top of the camera is a little function button, and the function button allows you to program in whatever function you want. Now, the one that is pre programmed is the y five, which is why they wrote it on there, but it can be changed him any of these, I think there's about eighteen different functions that you can put in there now, one that fuji forgot to put in there, in my opinion, is none in case you didn't want to have it do anything, so you do have to choose one of these things. For this button to do and right now it's in the wifi now if you do want to change it, you need to go into set up menu number two and look for the function setting option and you can go in and you can change this as well as the other five different function buttons that are available on the camera. But seeing how this does wifi let's go ahead and dive into the wifi section of what this camera can do slightly confusing with fuji is that they have several different aps that are available. The one that you want to get is called the fuji film camera remote app and that will be available at wherever you get aps at now this is going to allow you to view download the images as well as control shutter speeds and apertures on the camera and trigger the firing of the camera or recording movies and so it's that wireless remote control that is unique about this one so that's the camera remote that you want let me just let you in on what the other acts that are out there and what they're for there is a camera application app from fujian this was mainly designed for the exit to this is for viewing images and downloading them but notably not controlling them. There is also a fuji film photo receiver and what this is is kind of designed for a friend that if you wanted to shoot an image to a friend from your camera, but you didn't want your friend to have access to your images and be able to control your camera, it's a simple out that anyone can have just to receive the images and then there's another app for pc users for an auto save option, where you could have your camera automatically say saving images to your computer. S o four different apse the one that you want most likely is going to be the camera remote app for controlling the camera and that's what we're going to try to do here in a live demo if it all goes smoothly. So the first thing that we're going to need to dio I guess I better get my phone out and get over here on the camera let's, turn the camera on, and what I'll be doing is going to start the wireless system and in this case, it's, just the function button on the top of the camera. If you have turned this off because you've reprogrammed the function button, you'll be able to do it in the menu system, and I'll show you where that is and a little bit. The next thing that we're going to need to do is we're going to need to go to the phone and we're going to need to choose the fujifilm wireless signal, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my settings, turn this on and I'm going to go toe wifi and because we were playing around here, I've actually already selected it, but you can see here a creative live we have a whole bunch of other wifi hot spots coming up, but I want to make sure that the fuji film x t one is selected as my wifi signal, then I need to get out of that and go over to the camera remote and as I do that, I can see that my camera has kind of lost communications, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit ok to retry this, and I'm going to open up the camera remote thing is, is I've been talking and I haven't been fast enough going over here to the remote control, and it looks like we're getting a live feed now, so my camera is on a remote right now. So what? I'm gonna d'oh it's not gonna point this up at cana, use this to let's, get this set up here and make sure it's composed properly and let's see if that's going to focus here and what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go crazy and I'm going to run up here by cana on and, uh I don't know can you get can you capture a close shot of this because we should be able to see this here and so if I want to take a picture actually don't look at that camera you got a look at that carol because that's the video feed but that's where we're taking the picture and and so there we go and we'll do one more here we go okay, so I'm gonna take this back to the desk and we'll see how this works nothing like a little last minute ok, so back on the camera, here s o I'm not going to go completely through what we can do here on the app, but like, if I wanted to take a picture if we got yeah, there we go, we're on, so if I want to shoot a picture, I can take a picture can wave so there's our picture of cannon waving now I can go back and if I wanted to actually some other things here, if I want to go in to make settings, I can go in and I could change the isil and just kind of scroll through this and say that I don't want I so four hundred I want I so eight hundred and I could select that and then hit ok, but there's a whole list of features that we can change in here and go back here we can control apertures appear and if I want to record video let's, let's record some video canada move back and forth. Give us some video. Wave your arms. Yeah, there's a business. There you go. Very good. And then we can turn that video off now what we can do is we can go in and hit play back. And then now we have our different images up here and let's, go take an image with ken and I and let's take a look at it here. Hit the plus button up here. Come on. Plus button. There we go and there's us. And so now we can use your common. What is it going over there? And so we can move around. Check sharpness. Looks like it's very sharp there. And if we want to import this file, we can import it. And so now it's being sent from the camera into the phone so that image is saved. And let me open up my photos hope I don't have any terrible photos in here and there we go and there's my image on my phone and if I want to send this out or email it's I can just open up my email there we go got my standard options for e mailing and sending it out and can nelson this to you later awesome great okay so that's kind of the basics of it of how it works it's it's pretty good it's a neat way of getting the camera into unique position and getting yourself away from the camera it's a fantastic way of draining the battery both on your phone and on the camera very quickly to it tends to use up a lot of battery power and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn this off just gonna press the function button appear actually I'm going to go let you see what I'm doing I'm going toe turn on the remote here and I'm going to go back and I'm going to go back and I'm gonna press disconnect okay and so I have disconnected from the camera so the wife I say wifi has gone off on the camera now I could go back in and some other things that we could do is well we kind of played around with receiving images you could browse the camera so you could browse images that are on the memory card and look for an image that you had on the camera you can also do geo tagging so using your cameras a gps device you can add geo tagged information to images on your camera I've probably when it bother doing this because it sucks down so much battery power that your phone and your camera going toe die, will it you're out there for a long period of time and generally the catcher, the I guess that's kind of a catch twenty two the thing that I don't like about that is that usually when you're in an area that you really want to geo tagged your very far away from battery power sources and that's exactly where you need to be the most efficient with using the battery and so with the uae, fine, just go through a few things. We got the remote control, we can receive images, we can browse the camera, we can do geo tagging. When we received the image, we're not getting a full on image in resolution, we're getting a smaller size image and you can adjust what size image that you are getting, and so I would probably try to it will figure out what works for you and adjust the size so we have small, medium, large and actual size and actual size is not the actual size of the image, but it's the largest image that it e mails, which I believe is about a three megapixel image and so be aware of that and be aware that the geo tagging is going to be recording this wherever you are at that point, and so you need to kind of have it turned on when you were actually shooting, and so that's a little preview on the wifi. We're not going to be going into the full details, but I think it'll become pretty clear once you open it up and use it. I'm just impressed, john, that you're using your iphone well, have I? To tell you the truth, I had the camera for a while, and I have not used it other than for the thing of, well, let's, just see if this works and how does it work? So for those of you who don't know, john john is anti iphone, ah, graffiti, but using it for a remote control, so, yeah, cool, it's got potential. We'll see. We'll see what we can actually do with it.