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Lesson Info

Drive Dial

So the Drive dial over on the left side of the camera controls what happens when you press down on the shutter release. And so, let's take a closer look at what this button or dial does. S stands for single frame, and this is kind of the standard mode on the camera. When you press in on the shutter release, it takes a photo. If you want to take another photo, you can release halfway back off and press back down again and get yourself another photo. And so this is good for basic photography, so that you don't just reel off a whole bunch of shots right away. Next up is Continuous Low and Continuous High. Obviously they're pretty related here. It's just a different speed rate at how fast it is capturing images. So Continuous Low will be somewhere between three, four, and five frames per second. The High will be either 8, 11, or 14. Now notice that you can only get to 11 and 14 frames per second if you have chosen to use the electronic shutter over the mechanical shutter, so you're going t...

o have to go into the menu system to select that. Now obviously more frames per second is better for capturing a variety of points of action, but there is a notable change in the way that the camera's viewfinder works going from Low to High. When the camera's in the Low setting, the camera will have a live view between images, so after it takes an image, it's going to show you what's really happening in the viewfinder before it takes the next photo. And that can be really important if you're following a subject that's moving. If you go to Continuous High, the camera's a little too busy taking photos to show you a live photo, so what it does is it will show you the image that it just took rather than a live view image. And so, if you are trying to pan with a subject that's moving, you might find it a little bit more challenging in the Continuous High setting. You are getting more images per second, but it's a little bit harder to follow the action, so it's something that you may want to test with to see which works best with the types of sports and action photography that you do. Now, how do you change between 3, 4, and 5 or 8, 11, and 14. Well, once the camera is in the Continuous Low or Continuous High setting, you would press the function button and then make a choice between the options that show up on the back screen. And so you can choose it at three, four, five, whatever fits your needs. And so, as I say, the warning is that on the Continuous Low setting, you get live view between the shots, with the High setting, it's an image review between the shots. Now, you'll also see this Drive setting when we get into the menu system, and so there's going to be a lot of features that we will see in multiple locations on this camera. Next up is bracketing one and two. There's one and two so that you can have two presets in here so that you can have two different things that you can quickly turn the camera to do. And when we talk about bracketing, what we're talking about is we're talking about taking multiple photos that has something changed between them because you're not really sure which one's going to come out right. So you take three different photos, something's been tweaked between them so that you have different versions to choose from. Now we have five different ways that we can adjust our images and each of these has their own reason why they're here. And so you can control which one is in bracket one and which one is in bracket two by going into the shooting setting menu in the Drive setting and choosing which one you want for bracket one and which one you want for bracket two. From that, you can use the Drive button to control the subtle nuances of the way each of these is controlled in there. So let's take a look at what some of these controls are doing. Far and away, the most popular choice in here is going to be auto exposure bracketing. And this is where the camera will shoot three photos over a variety of exposure ranges. You get to choose how big a range. It can be as little as a third of a stop, it can be as much as two stops. It's going to shoot three frames so that you make sure that you get the right exposure by having the choice of three different images. And so one stop exposure bracketing is pretty common, you want to do it a little bit more extreme, try the two stop. The next four modes in here are less important than the auto exposure in my opinion. This next one is really only valuable for JPEG images. It's not going to work with the RAW images. And so what ISO bracketing does is it shoots a single photo and then it saves three photos by artificially just making them brighter and darker in software. And so it's not really adjusting ISO and changing it in three different images, it's just doing it in post-production, which is something that pretty much anyone can do with any sort of software afterwards. It's just brightening and darkening your image in post. Film simulation will simulate three different film modes, and Fuji is pretty well known for a lot of their different film modes. We'll talk more about these as we go through the class. But if you want to shoot three different photos or three photos of the same subject but with three different looks to them, you could have three different film looks programmed in to this setting. And so you could just quickly turn it here, it automatically shoot a photo and then save three different images that have three different looks to it. The white balance bracket, another JPEG only situation that you would be working with. And what it does is it saves three images, one that has a little bit of a cooler look, one that has a little bit of a warmer look, and one that's a normal tone. You can also change the range as to how extreme it's going on these colors that it's kind of adding into it. And so if you want to little different look, you can do it very quickly here. Finally, and also with JPEG only, is a dynamic range bracketing. And so what it does here is it's shooting three different photos and it's making some adjustments in the way that the picture is saved to try and control the Highlight situation. And so what it's doing is it's holding back some of the exposure so as not to over expose some of the area. We'll talk more about setting this because this isn't the only place that you can shoot with a dynamic range option on this camera. You'll be able to make specific settings rather than shooting three photos together, but this is just an option where you can shoot all three with one press of the shutter release. And so once you have one of these set into the bracket one or bracket two setting, you can use that function button so long as you still have it programmed for controlling the Drive settings. You can go in and you can change a lot of those bracket settings in there. In fact, let's take just a quick look on my camera. I'm not even sure what I have programmed in here. I'm pretty sure I reset everything, but I'll set this to bracket number one, and I'm going to press the function button over here and we can see we can have this in exposure compensation, and I can see how big a bracket series. I'm going to choose a two stop bracket series and I'm going to do an auto exposure bracket of two stops right there, and let's see if this will do this as expected. So it just shot three photos. Let me play these back. That one looks like it's the dark one, and we can see right down here at the bottom minus two, this is the bright one at plus two, and this is the normal exposure, one. And so if I want to go into the function button again, I could come over here and I could say, "Well, let's do the ISO bracket or the film simulation bracket and then I can choose which films I want in here. And let's just say that I like that. I'll take a photo and play it back. And, oh, it looks like I still have this set up in exposure bracketing. I did not fully exchange that over. Let's see if I can fix that. So go back here to film simulation, that's fine. I hit OK, I think I forgot to do that last time, and hit set. And so, I think we're good there. Oh no, it only allows me to change the kind of secondary factor. This one is locked into auto exposure bracketing. Let me see if I have bracket two set up at something different. This one looks like it's the film simulation, so let me try that one, there we go. This one was programmed as film simulation and it doesn't look like I really changed the films around that much there. No, I do not want to go into the wireless mode, I pressed the wrong button there. Let's try this again. Standard Velvia, let's change this one to black and white. That will be clear. And we'll go the ACROS mode there. And so we'll have Standard Velvia and black and white. Our three images, play them back. There's our black and white, there's our Velvia and there's our standard color. It's not that much but you see you get a little bit more color with the Velvia and definitely our black and white mode. And so you can go in here and you can say, "You know what? I want to change those film modes I'm using." Instead of Vlvia, I'm going to change it to Classic Chrome, and then you'll have a different series of pictures that you can use with that. The Drive setting is just kind of a subsetting change of what those are already programmed in to the bracketing one and bracketing two modes. At the bottom of the list is the movie setting. So if you want to shoot movies, this will turn the camera and get everything into the movie setting mode. So let's talk a little bit about shooting movies. And so you only use the normal shutter release to start and stop the recordings. So you press it once to start and you press it once to stop. You can use the SR auto mode to just throw the camera in the auto mode and it will just take care of all the movie settings for you if you want to record basic movie modes. If you want to get in and make more controls yourself, we're going to see more of this in the menu. There is a whole tab for movie setting features. One of the most important is the movie mode which is the resolution and frame rate of the video that you are recording. This will record 4K video, also record full HD as well as standard HD. So we have a lot of very high quality options that we can choose in here, and we'll talk more about that as we go through the class. One of the things that changes when you put it into the movie mode is the frame that you look at. It gets a little bit narrower and that's because movies are shot in a wider format than the still photos are taken, and so we go from a 3 by 2 aspect ratio to a 16 by 9 for all three different recording modes in the video function. So you'll see that change when it gets changed to the movie options. We're going to talk more about focusing points here in a little bit but for right now while you're in the movie mode, it is somewhat limited. You have the choice of something called Multi, which looks at pretty much the entire area and all the focusing points in which to get focus. If you want to have really simple basic focus, the Multi's a good option. The area option is where you get to choose a small box and you can move that box around up, down, left, and right, and it's going to focus only on what's in that box. And so if you have a lot of chaos in your scene and you want to focus in a particular area, you might want to choose the area option. And how we do that is something we're going to get into more in the rest of the class, but just a note that you are limited between those two in the movie mode. All right. Advanced filter one and advanced filter two. So here is where you get to have two favorites set into the camera so that you can quickly shoot in your favorite two filters. Now, these are kind of Instagram-like goofy, fun filters. It's not where you're likely to leave your camera set for a long period of time, but if you want to get in here, you can have a number of different modes set. And the way that you do it is that you would press the function button and you can go in and choose some of the different options in there. So let's take a look at some examples. Using the different Advanced Filter modes, it's controlling the focusing, the color, the concentration, the contrast, the saturation, and getting you lots of different looks in your images. And so this is something that is worthy of a little bit of experimentation. There's some interesting partial color ones which will only allow in a particular color. And so if you only want to allow in the red color, you would put it to the red, and only things that are in the red spectrum will be allowed through it to be color. Everything else will be black and white. So that one can be kind of a fun one to play around with. And so, when you're in that mode, choosing which ones you want, you can do that by going into the menu setting, shooting setting, the Drive setting into the Advanced Filter selecting what do you want programmed in to be advanced one or advanced two and then you can press the function button up on the camera for controlling the specifics. Next up is a multiple exposure mode, and this is going to combine two photos into one photo. And so what you're going to do here is when you shoot a photo, you're going to want to confirm that yes, this is a good photo to be the first part of this two part photo series. And if you want to retry it, you can go to the left or if you want to exit out of it, you just don't want to do it, you can exit out as well. And so I went out, gave this a try a little while ago. And so I shot a cityscape and then I shot the moon with a slightly different focal length and it was in a different part of the sky, and the camera combined it all into one photograph it looks like the moon is in a position that it would never be in, in Seattle. No, I'm not condoning this or saying this is the right thing to do in a photograph, but it is possible and that is how you do it in the camera. And so it is just two photos, and in this particular case I wanted to move the moon and I wanted to make it a little bit larger than it actually was and shows shooting with a zoom lens and I zoomed out to get the city and then a zoomed in to get the moon on the second shot. And so if you want to do kind of creative double exposures, well, it's got a mode right there in the camera for you to do that. Finally, we have a panorama mode. And this is a simplistic way of getting a very wide format wide coverage image. And so, we have a number of options. You can choose a medium sized, which is going to be a 120 degrees and you can shoot horizontally or vertically, and you can see vertically, you get a little bit more stretch up and down. You can choose a large 180 degree where you are going from side to side, and you can shoot horizontally or vertically. Now when I say that this is a simplistic way of doing this, what it's doing is it's shooting lots of photos, it's stitching them together in the camera, and the software that it's using is trying to produce a quick result. And I think if you want to do a professional quality job in your panoramics, you're going to have to shoot individual photos and either stitch them together manually or use better software. Because part of the problem that I found in this, let me show you in this one photo, and enlarge the section, you'll notice a bit of banding. It's not really smooth tones as we go from the dark blue to the lighter blue. And so it jumps a little bit with each image that was taken. And so I wouldn't use this for any photograph that was really, really important, but if you just wanted to do a quick one, then I think it's probably perfectly fine. So once you put it in the panoramic mode by turning the dial to the end, you can control the angle and the direction, and that's going to change the size of the image that you're going to get. And so, usually I'm going to recommend getting that camera vertical so that you give a little bit more reach from side to side. So let's go ahead do a little panoramic here in the studios at Creative Live. First thing I did was put the camera into the panoramic mode on the top dial of the camera. Turn the camera on a little bit and we're going to get some information down here about where to turn the camera. So let's not do the 180 degrees, so that's the large one. Let's do the medium sized one. And when it comes to direction, you can choose any direction and normally I would recommend one of these two to get the camera horizontally, but I've got it on a tripod right now, so I'm just going to try to keep things simple for me. And I'm going to go left to right. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to get the camera a little bit wider scene here and I'm going to come over here and pan around the room. And it should stop there. Now, the fun part is playing back this image so when we come back to playback the image, give you guys a little better view here, we can see the entire image. You can see our wonderful studio audience, they seem to be very small into the background there. But you'll notice the downward play, okay? So if you press down, it plays through the image. And so there's our wonderful studios there and my gigantic hand on that camera. And so you can play through your images, you can also pause it at any one particular time. So if you want to pause it right there you can press down to pause and then press play again to keep going through it. And so, it's a great little tool when you want to capture a quick scenic. Just be reminded that you're going to possibly get some banding and anything that's moving like waves, or somebody walking, or cars driving, you're going to end up with let's just call them creative results. And so you could have some real good fun with that. I mean, I was playing around with it and I had somebody walking so that they were in every single shot of the frame. They looked very very distorted and it was an unusual photograph, but like I say, it's creative photography. But it's a good fun mode to have, just I would probably not do it with your most serious photographs. All right. So those are our modes. So I'm normally keeping my camera in the single mode, sometimes I switch around to the Continuous modes, every once in a while I'll use bracketing or the movies. And so nice to see a quick easy to use dial right on the top of the camera that gives you very easy visual display about what you are doing.