Lessons

Lesson Info

Menu Button and Bottom of Camera

The middle button obviously does the menu, and we're going to get into that in full detail in a little bit of time and that's where kind of everything is buried in there. But in order for you to make quicker decisions on just the important stuff, the quick menu is gonna have about sixteen items that you can quickly go through, and that is what the quick button is. Fourth, so let's, talk about what we're going to find in here, so hit the cue button and it will activate. You're going to be using the controller on the back of the camera to navigate, and then you'll simply turn the control dial. You don't actually dive in and see anything different here, you're just going to see a change in the little tiny area that we go to, so work our way from top to bottom. We have customs settings, you can have up to seven custom settings in this camera, which means you can go in and set the camera with all the different settings that you might like. If you shoot sports, you might have s o eight hundr...

ed and a particular meeting pattern and the drive turned on and a number of other things said on your camera, you can set that as custom number one. And then you shoot landscapes, and you change this and that and all these different features you go into custom to, and you save those settings in there, you could do that for up to seven different settings, and you can that way, you can quickly change between settings one through seven, which is really potentially changing dozens of other features within the camera. Now, if you were to say, change it to customs setting number four, and it was at I s o four hundred, but for some reason you wanted to shoot it at two hundred. Yes, you can go back and change that I assad or two hundred and you will notice this red dot in the upper corner of that little indicator that lets you know that you have made an adjustment from the default setting or the one that you had saved for that particular cussed. I'm setting a pretty cool way of making radical changes very, very quickly with the camera. The thing that you need to narrow nail down that I have not been able to d'oh is what are those seven settings that you want to have a change to? I keep changing what I'm doing with the camera, and so I just keep getting. Changing feature by feature I don't do any one thing enough to set the custom settings but I like the concept of it because there's a lot of little things that can catch you if they if you get the wrong thing turned on at the wrong time next up is the ice so we talked about this before this will be your basic settings between two and sixty four hundred if you're shooting raw you'll have the expanded range if you should j peg next up is the dynamic range and this is a little complicated but what this is doing is it's playing a little bit with the dynamic range that you can capture in the camera so of course I had to go out and do a little test with this so in this particular scenario I am shooting at s o eight hundred and in the first picture I met issa r the dynamic range of one hundred which means I'm basically just shooting him eight hundred now I say I changed its eye a dynamic range two hundred and four hundred and you would be probably hard pressed to see the difference and I think I can go back between one two and four but if you look very closely in the yellow box as we go forward at the dynamic range of one hundred two hundred and four hundred, you'll notice quite a bit more detail at the dynamic range of four hundred and what it's doing if you also want to look at the history graham at the bottom as we go from one hundred two hundred to four hundred is it's compressing the tonal range? We're getting more highlights and we're actually rescuing some of those lost highlights and so if you lose highlights in a particular scenario kills me to say this but it might be better to shoot at I s o eight hundred and change the dynamic range two, four hundred so if you have a very wide range exposure, this dynamic range can really help out it's just that you have to shoot it higher isos to do it you can't shoot at dynamic range four hundred percent if you shoot at I s o two hundred you have to be at the higher I esos and so if you need it, play with it, it doesn't really change a lot of the way that I will shoot photography but if you are shooting those highlight and those highlights are getting blown out, try using the dynamic range four hundred and if you use the four hundred the lowest eyes so that you can get to is eight hundred if you should hit the dynamic range two hundred which is an in between step you could shoot it s o four hundred if you're a tie so two hundred the only option is dynamic range one hundred and so nice little feature but I wish they could figure out how to work make it work with s o two hundred or even one hundred fourth in that top line is the white balance of the camera haven't really talked about this and so there's a number of different white balances that you consent to and this is the color of light that you were shoot shooting under so they have two settings for natural daylight basically sunny and cloudy they call sunlight fine I don't know why fine is sunlight tung stone is the one that is the most off and different from everything else they have a number of different fluorescent lights because depending on the type of fluorescent light it can very quite a bit in its color temperature this camera is not an underwater camera but if you do decide to put it in a housing they do have an underwater mode for you and then you have some other more manual options you could go in and choose three specific kelvin temperature that you are shooting at you could shoot a white piece of paper and get a custom type of white balance and what you need to do there is you need to shoot something that is neutral in color and then go into the white balance mode and kind of say this is a neutral object and then it would fix the white balance for you and then there's auto white balance where it will automatically look at the scene try to look at the highlights and the brighter areas to see if there's a color tint in one direction or the other and adjust for it and to be honest with you the camera does a pretty good job in auto white balance I don't worry too much about auto because I generally shoot in the raw mode which allows me to adjust the color later on but if it is clearly wrong I would jump into the white balance and get set for the situation that you are shooting but as a default I think auto is a good place to start until you have your situation dialed in tow where you're at so that is the white balance section in the white balance options all right moving down the line we have noise reduction and this is what I had turned onto my camera earlier which is when I was trying to do that bull of exposure I took the thirty second picture and then it spends thirty seconds processing the image which drives me nuts now the good thing is is that it is trying to reduce noise which is helpful nice thank you fuji but I can also do that in software afterwards and so this is an option that if shooting is very important and you don't want it to slow down the shooting, turn it off if you don't like working with photo shop or photo programs and you just want it to be right in the cameras then you could leave it turned on image size will allow you to control the size of the image large, medium and small most people are going to want to shoot large as well as the aspect ratio ratio and so the sensor is a three by two aspect ratio so if you're trying to get all the information off the sensor which you should be trying to do for highest quality images you'd wanted large three by two there is the option to get it matched up to hd tv which is sixteen by nine or you could shoot squares in it but for the most part better to crop later unless you have an immediate need for it in which case it's nice to have because you could see it in the viewfinder and then the next one is where you get to change the image quality and this is where you get to shoot raw or j peg j pegs they call fine and normal and in this case I would I would like to recommend just shooting raw which is the bottom of the list down here but because I like to get those larger zoom ins on the playback I generally will shoot with my camera with raw find so shooting a raw image and a fine j peg and I'm just shooting that j peg so I can zoom in on the back of the camera and check sharpness when I get those images back to my home computer, I just select all the j pegs and I delete them and it seems like kind of a waste to shoot that and waste the space on the memory card, but I use a thirty two gig memory card. I get roughly a thousand raw images off the camera when I shoot raw, fine, I get roughly nine hundred fifty images, and so it only takes just a little hit off of the number of images that I could get in the card, so I think it's perfectly acceptable. The only thing I don't like is having to go back in light room or whatever program and delete all the j pecs. And so for most people, I think the raw plus fine is going to be a popular choice. If you don't really have your software game in place, you don't have photo shop or light room or anything that can read the raw fuji images, then I would shoot in the fine j peg, and you're going to get some very nice image quality out of the camera, but long term. I would either plan or really look hard going and shooting at the ross because it's just going to give you more and more capabilities down the road because you're going to be able to do more with that true full information off the sensor finally we have films simulation and we talked about this before in the bracketing section this is the same stuff but you can individually go in and choose to shoot at a particular setting most part I liked leaving its standard I don't need to change it if you were shooting j pegs this might be a little bit more important because this is going to determine the quality of the look on the color in the tone of what you're shooting I do like the monochrome setting because then it will I will then have a black and white view finder and I can look at the world in a black and white manner and so it's just going to help you compose choose subjects a little bit better if you do want to shoot in black and white moving down a row we have a lot of things that I do not touch and so this is controlling the look and style of your jpeg images and so you could go in and adjust the highlight tone in the shadow tone the color and the sharpness of your j pegs most for the most part just leave these zeroed out and allow a program later on to control these because you'll have much better fine tune control from picture to picture the last throw in here. This is where they are hiding the self timer, and so if you want to get to the self timer, I use the self timer a lot because I use the camera occasionally on a tripod, and I used the two second self timer so that I don't have to pull out the cable release and it's just a quick way of not bumping the camera when I'm actually shooting a picture that can also be rerouted to one of the function buttons. If you have an xy two, we have our f mo to remember the two different ways or choices we have is multi, which looks at all the focusing point it's, an area which chooses just one area to go into and with the sexy one. If you're in the s mode the single focusing mode area on you get to make sure that it is you can you can on ly get to it when you are in the s mode. Next up we have flash control, flash boat. We're going to have this duplicated when we get into the menu system, but this is kind of a short cut to it here and here you can change through these different settings. Now if you look at your camera right now and you go through the flash mode, you might be saying, hey, john, these aren't all there and that's because you have something turned on or turned off that doesn't allow you to shoot that particular type of thing for instance, there's a lot of red eye options for reducing red eye that on ly work in j picks so if you have your camera in raw, you may not see any of the red eye options on there and so if you have your camera in the silent mode, you might not see any of these features available to you so there's a number of reasons why you might have a shorter list than this but this is the kind of the ultimate long list of what you might be able to see in there. The final little one is controlling the brightness of both the e v f the elektronik viewfinder and the lcd on the back of the camera you can change the brightness of these so that it's easier to see under bright sunlight for the most part these should be left at zero and only changed on an as needed basis so that's what's going on in the quick menu all right let's see where were going to next okay little secret control here if you press and hold the menu button you will lock the selector or you will enable the selector remember the selector is the four way up down tab some people just don't like bumping it where it talks about the macro and the feature, so if you just press and hold, it can turn it on and off. So it's one of these little secret button modes that you need to know about normally I want to leave it enabled because I want to be able to get and had to have access to that a f button, which I think is very valuable on the back of the camera there is a little tiny speaker, so when you play back your movies, that is where the sound is coming from. There's a little indicator lamp on the back that tells you about the status of the camera, whether it's focusing whether it is focused, whether you're shooting video, whether you're downloading to the memory card and it's still trying to get all the images onto the memory card or if there's some sort of air and in many cases it'll be blinking sometimes it's steady, so if you have it in the video mode it's coming, I kind of have a light on so that you know it, you know you're recording, so just be aware that's what the indicator lamp is showcasing okay, over on the left side of the camera is we have a little port door that we get to open up and we get to plug stuff into the camera at the top, we have frustratingly a two point five millimeter microphone. Jack fuji does make their own microphone, which mounts into the hot shoe, which is kind of nice that's going to sell for a little over one hundred bucks. And if you're like many of us who have a three point five inch microphone because that's kind of the standard for a lot of on camera mike's, you need to buy a little adapter, which really doesn't cost much money. It should be less than ten bucks to get that now. You can also use this jack for hooking up elektronik promotes that are non fuji there's kind of a generic system out there. Cannon has won. The rs sixty three sells for about twenty five dollars is a way to trigger the remote because this is a microphone slash remote jack you can shoot with one or the other. Velo, a company kind of a third market manufacturer, has one that's going to be only about ten bucks is that you can plug in there to trigger your camera electronically. Now, because this handles both microphones and remote, you need to tell the camera what you are plugging into it, and so this is going to be in the menu setting will drop by this when we get to the menu setting of the class but you need to either decide what's most important to you that your frequently going to use either elektronik remote or a microphone next up is your hd I port so if you wanna hook your camera to a tv for doing a slide show or showing your movies you would do so through the mini hd my output now there is another electronica connection that is different between the xy one in the exit to usb mini versus micro usb they're both two point oh but they have slightly different connectors to them and this is why they have two different fuji elektronik remote so this is where fuji has their own proprietary remote the r r ninety and the are art eighty or for the two and the c one these air going to sell for around forty or forty five dollars anyone who does a lot of nighttime or long time photography might want to look at investing this but if you're like me and you have one of those old school manual cable release is well you can use that as well. The electronic ones though have nothing physically moving which is kind of nice so that's the advantage of the elektronik okay let's make our way to the front side of the camera we have our lens alignment mark that's what the little orange is for on the lens mt and on the camera, we have our focus mode. We did talk about this earlier in the focusing selection, my camera is normally in the manual mode just because I like to manually focus and I like to use that back button for focusing, remembering on all the ones and twos you can use that nfl button that top righthand button for focusing when you are in the manual mode and if you want to magnify press in in turn side to side on that command, I'll we have a slightly different sensor in these two cameras there the same number of pixels it's the same image quality it's just that the new c'mon sensor in the c two has those face detection points for focusing, tracking. So if you're going to shoot sports, the xy two has a bit of an advantage in that regard, the lens connections matching up with the lands we have a lens release for taking the lens on and off, obviously and then we have a little lamp on the front that works to fold its for auto focus assist so under low light conditions, this will turn on which I personally find a little irritating and not very powerful it's also a self timer lamp which lets you know when the picture is going to be taken, which is kind of handy if you don't like this illuminator you can turn it off in both of these cameras you just need to dive into the appropriate setting and turn off the illuminator help putting your camera mohr into a stealth mode moving to the bottom of the camera all right there's the serial number of my camera maybe you'll see it for sale someday. All right standard tripod socket where you can hook up everything frustratingly it's off center and it's very close to the battery door so if you have a plate that you put on your camera so that you can take it on and off the tripod very quickly quick release plate you've got to take it off to get into your battery which has been frustrating. And then fuji made this h g x e one grip which sells for about one hundred thirty dollars and gave you a little bit more of a finger grip on the camera but completely blocked access to getting into the memory card and the battery which was very frustrating so they came out with a new m h jane x e and the beauty here is that it's got a hole in it allows you for battery access and so on camera here on my camera here the exit polling and take my tripod off I have this extra grip which gives me a nice little grip for the fingers here especially combined with the thumbs up in the back it does give me a door here so that I can get access to the battery and to the memory card in here without taking the grip off. And if I do want a mounted on a tripod, it has relocated the center of the camera so I can mount it and it's right in the middle, lined up with the lens and in addition to that it has a little dove tail on it which fits the arc a swiss style plates which is very common in photography. A lot of tripod heads out there used this ridge system and this is the first camera that I've ever seen that has a built or not quite built in but a manufacturer's grip that fit on there and so you would be able to just slide it onto your tripod. I think it's just wonderful because it has less bulk than any other camera to have that on there, which is really nice. So I'm gonna go ahead and mounted back up on my little tabletop tripod so that I can have it on the table right here and so that's a nice little grip especially combined with that thumbs up grip gives you a very, very nice solid feel on the camera. Ok, next up, if you open the battery door, you can get access to the m p w one twenty six battery sells for around fifty bucks always nice to have an extra one of those and it's got this great little orange alignment mark and so it's very easy to figure out which way didn't mount your battery in the camera I've always had a problem figuring out that this way or that way and this one just makes it very very simple the standard charger comes with a camera and it'll have a little green light when it is charging and it will turn off when it's done if there's a problem with the battery it will blink it's you within the same door is access to the memory card uses the esteem memory card system be aware that these cards have a little right protection switch on the side of him and if that gets flipped you will not be able to reformat or delete images from that card so just be warned of that as I mentioned before if you are going to shoot video the speed of the card is very important xy ones you want to have class for or faster xy two's you want to have class ten or faster now it's pretty rare these days to find anything less than class for there is the new u es jess class the one pictured here the sandis card on screen that's a you a chess class one which is even one step higher than class ten and so there's these you hs class one in class three cards that are starting to come out that will work just fine in the camera potential that some road somewhere down the road in the future there's you hs class eleven or something I don't know that may not work in this camera but just be aware that there are some limitations on memory cards but everything currently out as a recording of this class work in the camera for downloading images I am not a big fan of plugging the camera into the computer it tends to be very, very slow in its processing and sending of images much faster is getting a card reader in or just plugging the card directly into the computer if you have that option on your computer it's going to be much faster on the download okay I told you that I was going to have a special slide for all the secret controls on your cameras so here's a wide variety of things I've told you about these many before but this is where it's all in one place in the hand out on the pdf file also have a little shortcut to all of these as well so the function button press and hold to change the function you can choose something else I liked the I sew up there if you press and hold the display button at least with the xy one you can put your camera into a silent mode or turn it off of it. If you hold that display button while you are turning the camera on, you'll be able to check which firmware version you have in your camera the back but the back dial on the camera when you press that it does all sorts of great things, it'll jump you into magnified view if you're in manual focusing, or if you're in f s with an x e, too, it'll also magnified during playback as well. If you press and hold it, you'll be able to enter into the focus peaking or split image options and on the x see one on lee. If you hold down on the q button it's going to be a short cut into your customs settings, you gotta hold it down for about two seconds in order to in order to get to it. If you hold down on the menu button, it's gonna lock the controller so that you don't inadvertently go in and out of the macro mode or start changing the focusing system. And so final one, you can press and hold the a f button, and you can change the function of that as well. And so here is all these little secret controls that aren't really well listed or marked in the instruction manual, or just frankly, a lot of people don't know about these all right, let's, talk a little bit about the lens is possibly the best kit linds I have ever seen. Packaged with a camera. I was so happy to see that it was a decent and not a throwaway lands it's got a good, reasonably fast aperture of a two eight teo slip, steph or I don't like that variable aperture bit, but at least it's about it's a half stop faster on the white in and a full stop faster on the telephoto in your typical standard cannon or nikon kit lands, it also has a metal lens. Mount it's got great manual focus field on it's gone aperture ring on it too. So you have your aperture control. We have a stabilizer mode theirs a number of lenses there zoom lenses, notably have the stabilizer built in on them. There's a lot of the prime lenses that do not have the stabilizer built in stabilizer works very, very well on this camera. I prefer the lenses that do have the aperture ring for direct control. Some of the lenses will have zoom lens, zoom rings. And then, of course, you're focusing. Ring is out towards the front there's a little ridge where you can mount a put and so on our camera here we have a little hood mounted on it this is to block light from the side so that it's not causing glare or flare problems from hitting the front of the lens or lens elements and bouncing around the filter threads on the eighteen to fifty five fifty eight frustratingly with fuji, they have a lot of different sizes, filters, and so my little thirty five millimeter lands is ah fifty two, the fifty five to two hundred is a sixty two and the ten to twenty four is a seventy two seventy two, so I've had to buy all sorts of filters, police, new lenses because they're all different than the other stuff that I own. Ok, so let's go into some of the different lens options, so if you get a chance to get this lens with the eighteen to fifty five, I say go for it, it's a very good lands, it's, very sharp. I'm very happy with it. It keeps the camera small, lightweight and highly versatile. I recently picked up the ten to twenty four lands, and it is an amazing lands fantastic for constant aperture throughout the range. I thought I was really going to like being able to go all the way down to ten, and I do, but I kind of, as my rule of thumb is, I try not to go wider than twenty four and I'm going to show you something that I did on my ten to twenty four if we get a close shot right down in here is I put a little white mark and I just put a little piece of tape that shows me what the equivalent of twenty four millimeters is and I have a I have a fondness for twenty four millimeters I like twenty four and my rule of thumb when using this lands is don't go wider than that mark unless I have to because things get really really wide on this lands and it was really great having this lands and be able to go down to ten millimeters on it shooting on these very, very narrow streets in cuba it's just fantastic I love being able to get down that white and I know when this lens came out they were complaining on the internet well doesn't everyone complain on the earth it's so big it's huge well, here it is in a side by side with the eighteen to fifty five yes it is bigger than the eighteen to fifty five it is bigger than the fourteen millimeter lands but in the big scope of things it's still a pretty small lends toe have what I consider three or four very valuable focal links in a nice, relatively lightweight package and it still feels very comfortable and normal on the camera and so it's big on ly by comparison to something else that isn't doing what it's doing if you compare it to virtually any other lands in that focal length aperture range it's going to be smaller so highly recommend that lands I when I got the system one of the things about the x e system that I like is the elektronik viewfinder so that I could have telephoto lenses beyond ninety millimeters or eighty five millimeters which is the limit of a lot of range finder cameras like the likas and the expro one and so the fifty five to two hundred you're going to see exactly what the lenses recording because you haven't electronic view of it. Frankly, this was a little bit more my dream telephoto lens still does not exist and it would be a fifty five to one thirty five f four which would mimic the seventy two, two hundred f four I think you could make this a little bit smaller and a little bit lighter weight and have that range in it. This is a little bit longer than I need, but it's sometimes nice to have that little extra length and once again this is a three hundred millimeter lands it's not that big in size and so those three zoom lenses make for a very nice, very versatile range. One of the things that's fujii does not have a lot of is a plethora of cheap plans options they do have two lenses that are on the cheaper side of things the sixteen to fifty which gives you a very nice general purpose zoom range and a fifty two to two thirty which gives you actually even mohr telephoto the most telephoto capability of any of their lenses now you'll notice that there's a lot of letters being attached to the designations and so here's your cheat sheet on what all these letters mean and so notably about the budget zooms that I just talked about there the ex seal ends and it's I don't know that they use these words but I would call it the economy lenses they're not as expensive they're made a little bit lower quality on the constructions they don't have the ring for setting the aperture you have to do that in the camera so they've kind of cut back the manufacturing costs on this I really like lenses that have the are for the aperture ring the linear motor that is in the eighteen to fifty five and fifty five to two hundred allow that those lenses to focus very, very quickly and very, very quietly also the serious zooms they're all have the optical image stabilization which works really really well as I had mentioned before so let's take a look at some of the primes that air out fuji has developed just some of the most beautiful prime lenses available ultra wide fourteen millimeter lands the eighteen which and not quite I mean optically I think it's very good I haven't shot much with it, it doesn't have the same feel of some of the higher end primes like the fourteen in the twenty three twenty three came out not long ago a lot of people just raving on this one they love it if you want to really cheap small lens, they do make an exception twenty seven millimeter comes out to around forty millimeters very close to a normal lands. One of the original lenses that came out is the thirty five it's the lens that I have here on the x e one it's ah, nice lands it doesn't quite fit into the same category as the fourteen, the twenty three or the new fifty six but it's smooth and manual focusing you get the apertura ring where you can see exactly where you're set on there, but you'll find that it's it's it's not quite the level as that new twenty three and one that's coming up next on street on screen is the fifty six millimeter lens the portrait lands one point two is their fastest land's great for portrait work it's going to have the ring on it's going to have a very nice manual focus feel and it's going to give you the equivalent depth of field full frame of about an eighty five one point eight lands which should be more than enough for anyone who likes to shoot shallow depth of field under normal conditions can you get more than that with full frame systems? Yes you can but it's going to be able to fulfill I think most any portrait photographers needs on that and then right above that we have a sixty macro which could also be a pretty good portrait lens but is the on ly macro lens in the system right now along with fuji lenses zeiss has made a number of auto focus lenses for fuji and kind of unusual having to make these auto focus lenses cause ice doesn't do much in the way of auto focus they haven't ultra wide twelve millimeter their normal thirty two and they just brought out a new macro and you'll find just a group of people that really like the zeiss glass so there's some nice options they tend to be a little bit mohr these air going to range between seven hundred thousand dollars for these lenses and finally if you would like to put like a range finder lenses on your camera you can with fuji's own em mount adapter the adapter sells for about two hundred bucks the lenses are much, much more there is also a actually another function button on the m adapter so that you can assign yet another function to the in this case the lens and so this allows you to use those range finder lenses and if you do decide to use those lenses there is an adapter setting which can go in and you khun set which lends you're using so that that metadata is sent forward under your image or under the metadata attached to your image so that you knew what lends you were using whether it was a twenty one or thirty five or fifty or whatever you happen to have their cem presets standards that are set in there or you could choose your own focal inc that you could make as faras lenses go one of the great things about fuji is they tell you where they're going they tell you what they're thinking about and they're planning next there they're not always exact in the timeframe that things were going to be out, but right now I know which lenses are going to be available in the next year and so lenses that are not out yet that will be coming out next up I believe is theseus presume that is the equivalent of a twenty eight two, two hundred millimeter lands I think the actual numbers are eighteen to one thirty five they have also showcase their new fast zooms the equivalent of a twenty four to eighty five which I think they're having at eighteen to fifty five they're also going to have a fast telephoto zoom seventy two, two hundred range and a high speed wide angle. I'm guessing it's going to be a twenty four millimeter equivalent, which would make it a sixteen. I think it's going to be a sixteen one point four. And then finally, they're going to have a super telephoto something in the range of a one to four hundred. So anybody who does bird photography or I don't know surveillance photography. I once that longer lens that's going to be out there and available.