Lessons

Lesson Info

Left Side, Bottom, Card Reader, Front, and Lenses

Working our way around to the left side of the camera, we do have a microphone jack. Fuji does have their own microphone but you can stick in other microphones as well. It does use a smaller size jack, so you may need an adapter to fit in a lot of the standard microphones designed for still cameras. Now this jack can be used for either microphones or remotes and you need to go into the menu system to choose, would you rather use a microphone in here or a remote control. Now the interesting thing is that you can actually buy a Canon remote or other brand remote 'cause it's a very common little mini-jack that is used on these cameras for triggering the cameras. And so there's some very cheap options for electronic releases of the camera. We have our port for hooking up to the HD TVs, which is the HDMI port. And then for connecting up to your computer or connecting up to Fuji's own electronic cable release, the RR-90 is the Micro USB port. Working our way around to the bottom of the camer...

a, standard tripod socket, gonna fit all your tri-pods, and mono-pods, and so forth. We've got our serial number you can mark for insurance reasons. And strange location for the speaker, so when you play back movies that's where the speaker is on the camera. And there's the little alignment hole, so if you want to get a little bigger grip for the camera, if you have bigger hands or you just want to have a little bit more secure grip on the camera, the MHG, which stands for metal hand grip for the XT10 is available for about $120. And then we have a little door within the door for the battery, if you have one of the DC connectors, it's got a cord that comes out. Which is why that has a door there. And then we have our battery latch and our battery compartment. Now one of the things I love Fuji for is little details. This is the only camera company that has a square battery that is very easy to figure out how to install the battery. I never install the battery wrong, 'cause they got that big orange block that goes right there next to the battery latch. It's very easy to figure out. Alright, and so one complaint I have about the Fuji charging system is that they have a nice little small charger, but they have a gigantic cord on it. And there is a way around this cord, and that is if you want to purchase what's known as a Duck Head. And this is a little Apple style adapter, but you can get 'em, Apple doesn't sell 'em. I don't know why, but Apple doesn't sell 'em. And this is something that you can buy to replace that gigantic cord that comes with the adapter. And so what I did is I went on eBay and I found somebody who was selling these generic Duck Head adapters, and I bought three of them, 'cause I figured I was gonna lose 'em and they were like $2 a piece. And so I've got three of these things now. There not as nice a quality as the Apple ones but it's a very simple device. And so none of them have stopped working and I haven't lost any of 'em either. And so you plug that into the adapter and I forgot to bring that up here. I will bring that up here and show you in the second half of the class. And then we have our memory card compartment which uses of course the SD Secure Digital memory card. Be aware that these have a lock switch on the side and so if they are unreadable, or you can't write to your memory card, check that lock switch. The size of the card will determine whether it's an SD, or an SDHC, or the XC version of it. Not super important, but the speed of the card is how fast the camera writes information to it and how fast the computer can download information off the card. If you're a heavy sports shooter, you would want to have a faster card. For the video shooters, people who shoot lots of video, the minimum speed of the card is a little bit faster, and for those of you who do shoot video I would recommend a CLASS 10 card or faster. Which means CLASS 10, UHS-1, or UHS-3. You can plug your camera into your computer for downloading. It does work but it is a little bit slow so I do recommend using the card readers or plugging the card directly into the computer for the fastest and simplest downloads. Working our way onto the front of the camera, we have the focus mode switch up here. Let's talk a little bit more carefully about this one for a moment. So we have three different options, manual, continuous, and single focusing. Most of the time your camera is likely to be in the single mode for basic photography. Which means when you press half-way down the camera will focus on a subject and then once it figures it out, it stops focusing. This is perfect for portrait, or a standard landscape, or just a lot of general photography type subjects. And then you would take the picture by pressing all the way down. Put it into the C mode, is continuous focusing. This is where the camera will continuously focus as long as you are pressing half-way down on the shutter release. Now the camera is pretty good at focusing on moving subjects but it's not as good as some of the other top-end SLRs. And so it's not the world's best sports and action camera, and so have a little bit more modest expectations when shooting action with this camera. But if you are shooting subjects that are moving, you would definitely want to have it into the C setting for continuous focusing. And then finally you do have the manual focus option and remember if you do put it in the manual focus option you do have that auto-focus override on the back of the camera with the auto-focus lock button, the back button focusing. We have our image sensor on the camera, 16 Megapixel camera or Megapixel sensor. It's the APS-C size sensor on it. We have lens contacts which match up with the contacts on the lens itself, and we have our lens release. And let's do just a quick little demo for those of you who haven't played taking the lens on and off. So we have our lens release right down here, and what we're looking for when we take our lenses on and off is the orange mounting mark on the lens and the orange mark on the camera itself. We're gonna match that up and we want to make sure that there's nothing obscuring or blocking the contacts, 'cause these are what's communicating all the aperture and focus information that gets applied to the metadata, and we don't want to leave our cameras with lenses off because that sensor is right there. So we're gonna go ahead and match up the orange dots, and give it a little twist, and listen for the click. And we've got it securely mounted onto the camera. And so look for those lens line marks. Those will be on all the lenses. We do have the front dial of the camera, which is also a button press. Did you know that? You can not only turn the dial but you can press in on it, and that is technically the function two button on the camera. And what it does right now is it changes from single zone to the wide tracking area, and that is something we already talked about when we were in the quick menu. But if you want to reprogram the function two button, you can set it to do a bunch of different things by diving into the setup menu number two, going under ButtonDial Settings, and changing the function of that particular button. But I think that's a pretty good function to have in there. And so that's one that I use a lot, so I'm gonna keep it programmed in on my camera. Next up we have an auto-focus assist light that comes on. Which will help you focus under low-light conditions. Unfortunately it only works for about 10 feet and it can be a little annoying to the subjects you're photographing and other photographers that might be photographing the same thing you are. And so I recommend turning it off, and that is something we'll be able to do when we get into the menu system. And then finally we do have stereo microphones up on top on either side of the lens. Speaking of a lens, we have just a little bit of information on lenses here. So the standard lens that a lot of people will have is the 18 to 55, which does have that automated aperture switch on the side. It does have stabilization built into it and a switch that you can turn it on and off. For handheld photography I always leave it turned on. We have our aperture ring, our zoom ring, focus ring, and then we have up on the front, the hood mount, where the specified hood for this particular lens will mount and rotate on. Filter threads on this particular lens are 58. Different lenses have different sizes. You can choose different UV, polarizing, and a wide variety of other filters, that'll work on there. It's a very standard size. Just a quick note on some of the lenses available from Fuji. They do have some budget zoom lenses. These have not proven to be too popular and they are the XC version there, 16-50 and the 50-230. The more serious zooms would be the 18-55. It's probably the best kit lens that is out on the market right now. The 55-200 which is a very popular telephoto lens, and then for those of you that don't want to switch lenses, kinda getting it all into one lens, the 18-135. Now Fuji has a lot of letters that they're gonna throw on to tell you a little bit more information about the technology involved in each of the lenses. And here is little code to understanding what each of those letters mean. Prime lenses are lenses that do not zoom. They are fixed focal length lenses, and Fuji, although they have not been making this camera system for really that long, have really produced a lot of very nice lenses very quickly. And so all of these lenses are really quite nice. The new 35 F/2 R lens is a weatherproof lens. The camera isn't weatherproof but the lens would be weatherproof. But it's proven to be a very popular, very small, simple lens for those who like a fixed focal length lens. And then if you want a great portrait lens, take a look at that 56 1.2, gives you some very, very shallow depth of field. They've also been very busy with some other little accessories. They also have extension tubes if you want to get closer. You can add those to any other lens. They work best with the lenses that are about 35 millimeters in focal length and up. And they've also brought out some Pro Lenses, some real serious guns you might say. These are the fast aperture f/2.8 lenses on the normal zoom as well as a telephoto zoom. They do have an ultra-wide and they just brought out a brand new 100-400 super-telephoto lens for bird, wildlife photography and other very long lens work. And so they got a great little collection of lenses. We didn't talk about all of 'em but all of 'em are quite good in their optics. So there you go folks. That is the tour of the outside of the camera.