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Shooting Menu Part 1

All right folks, it is time to dive into the menu on this XT10. This is a great time to take the PDF for the class and print it out, and kinda go down through it. 'Cause we're just gonna be going top to bottom through this. Now as we go through this, some things to think about. There are roughly, I don't know, like 125, 150 different features in here. And there is a good portion of these, at least half of them, that really have very little to do with what you do in photography by chance. Most of these things are just very nuanced little subtle changes that we're gonna make. So half of them almost don't matter. Good portion of them are ones that you're gonna wanna tweak and adjust right now for the way that you shoot and the way that you always like to shoot. And then there's a few others beyond that that you're gonna wanna come back to on a regular basis. So just kinda keep that in mind as, is this something that's important me? I need to get it set right once. Or this is something I'm...

gonna come back to on a regular basis. Let's go ahead and jump into the menu system. Obviously we're gonna be hitting the menu button on the back of the camera. And the menu is broken up into three different sections. Primarily, you're just gonna see two sections. It's the shooting menu and the set-up menu. There is a hidden third section, the playback menu, that is only accessed after hitting the playback button. So you would have to hit playback and then the menu button to get into that playback menu. And we're gonna be going through all three of these. So we're gonna start off at the very beginning at the shooting menu. The first one is simply telling us what exposure mode we're in, or what scene mode we're in. If we happen to be in the auto mode, we can change which scene mode we are in. But normally it's just gonna simply say program or or aperture priority. It's a bit of information, but it is a way for you to also change the scene modes in the camera. Next up is our autofocus setting. And this is the first of many different settings within the menu that leads to a sub-menu. In some cases they will lead to sub-sub-menus. And so in here we're gonna dive into the autofocus setting menu. First up is the autofocus area. Where do you want to focus in the camera? Now this is also done via shortcut buttons on the outside of the camera, so this isn't the first time that we've talked about this. But you're gonna change the size of the area, or you can move the focusing area from one to another of the 49 focusing points. Next up is the AF mode. If you recall the shortcut was the front dial button press to get to this. But this is where you can change single zone to wide/tracking area. Release and focus priority. All right, so on this one, we have two different operations: single focus and continuous focusing. The AF-S priority selection. When the camera is in single focusing mode, what's most important? That you get the focus right, or that you can release the shutter any time you want? The default system within most cameras in the world of photography is that in the AF-S section, the camera must be in focus. So that's why it's in focus priority right now. So I don't recommend any change there. In the AF-C category, the priority changes to release, which means it's more important to be able to take the photo than to be 100% positive it's in focus. And that's because action photographers really wanna make sure that their camera fires when it's the best moment, even though focus may not be 100% on. And then if it's 98 or 99 percent, it's okay to go out and shoot a photo. You can tweak this if you want, but I don't know that I would recommend it for most people. Next up is instant autofocus setting. So you recall we talked about this earlier. When your camera is in the manual focus mode, you can use the AFL button on the back quarter of the camera to focus. And here is where you get to decide how it focuses. Is it in a single mode, where it focuses and stops? Or in the continuous mode for tracking subjects? I leave my camera in the AF-S mode, it just kinda depends on how much action photography you do. Autofocus plus manual focus. This, when it's turned on, will give you the option of manually focusing after the camera has autofocused. You will autofocus like normal, the camera will give you the little beep beep, it'll have the green box that turns on. You can then grab the focusing ring and adjust as much as you would like. And then take the picture. Normally, this doesn't get in the way of anything, and so that's why I would recommend leaving it turned on. There is a facial detection system here that will detect faces and focus on faces. It works very good, but if you have more than one face in there, it can be a little bit particular about which face it chooses. And so if you are doing people photography, portrait photography, and there is one dominant face on-screen, then this is not a bad thing to leave turned on. It's just not something that I would leave turned on by default. So it's something that you might wanna come back to on a regular basis to turn on when you need it. On top of the face detection, you can have eye detection where it actually can detect the eye. You can choose a left eye or a right eye of priority. And once again this is something that would probably be best chosen once you've gotten yourself into a particular shooting scenario. Normally I would leave it off. Pre-autofocus I would leave turned off, because what it will do is it will continually focus the lens whenever the camera is turned on even though you're not pressing halfway down on the shutter release button. This is gonna waste a lot of battery power, and it's really not that hard to simply press halfway down on the shutter release. That's why I would recommend turning this one off. The AF illuminator is this cool piece of technology that will shine a light on your subject so that you can see it more easily and the camera can focus on it more easily. It does help for about 10 feet, but unfortunately it's a little annoying to subjects and other photographers out there. And so my preference is to leave this turned off. The camera's pretty good at focusing under low light, and it doesn't really need this very often. And it does very little help when it is dark. So those are the features within the autofocus setting sub-menu. So we're gonna continue along our route on the shooting menu. And we're gonna probably encounter things that we've seen before. We talked about setting the ISO here. But one of the things that we're gonna be able to do here is if you'll notice down on auto 1, 2, and 3, there's some arrows off to the right hand side. If you go to the right with your selector buttons in the back of the camera, that will allow you to go in and customize the controls for the ISO. You can change the default sensitivity, which in most cases I would probably leave at unless you have a specific purpose that you're using this for. You can select the maximum sensitivity, and you could decide what's the highest ISO that I would want the camera to go to. And then after that you get to choose the minimum shutter speed. And here's where you have to make a little bit of a decision as to how steady you think you can handhold the camera or what's a reasonable shutter speed for the type of action that you're shooting. And you can select in a wide variety of different shutter speeds in here. This is a great way to really customize the auto ISO so that it's falling right within the requirements that you want to have. Image size, we talked about this earlier. Large size will get you the 16 megapixels. The three by two aspect ratio will be getting you the full image area on the sensor, which is what I would recommend. Image quality, this is the difference between JPEG and raw. I think our more serious shooters are gonna wanna choose raw, but if you're more of just an enthusiast with the camera, then the fine quality JPEG will get you very good quality images for sure from the camera. Now as we are going through this list, both in the keynote here and in the video of the class, as well as on the PDF that you get from the class, you're gonna see my recommendations over on the right hand side. And my general recommendations are in gray. For the advanced user, someone who's got a little bit more experience, who wants a little bit higher level of performance from the camera perhaps, I'm gonna make my recommendation in red. And so you'll get to choose among all of the choices of course, but that's just how I am breaking up my choices. Sometimes I just can't choose one recommendation. The dynamic range, this is where it's holding back the highlight information. But it does force you to shoot at higher ISOs. I think it works pretty well, but it forces you to shoot at those higher ISOs, so I'm gonna recommend just keeping this on DR100, which allows you to shoot at the lower ISO numbers. The film simulation, once again is for the JPEG users to tweak the colors, a little bit, of your images to give 'em a slightly different look. And I'm gonna leave it on standard for most of the time, but there's some other options in there I could very well easily see people changing it to on a regular basis. And that completes page one of the shooting menu. Onto page two. First up is our self-timer, we also saw this in the quick menu. Two seconds is a real good self-timer for using the camera on a tripod. Interval timer shooting. Okay, this one's kind of interesting. So built into this camera is an intervalometer which allows you to set the camera to shoot a specific number of shots with an interval between the shots. And these images can then be used with an extra program to be put into a video program. As an example of a time lapse, this is Mt. Hood in the middle of wintertime. I'm also using a slider here, a motorized slider to move the camera from side to side. Another one of my favorite time lapses is from India. I did a little bit of zooming on this one in post production, a little Ken Burns effect. This is a photograph taken about every 10 seconds over about a half hour period of time. And as I mentioned before, one of the things that I like about the Fujis is the incredibly fine increments that it breaks up in the shutter speeds in order to adjust for any change in brightness, which is gonna give you a little bit more even brightness levels during the intervalometer series. I wanna always have a Fuji camera around, because it's really good at doing the intervalometer work. And here's where you can go in and set those specifics. Now, when I do intervalometers, just as a side note, I usually shoot JPEGs just because the raw files get to be so plentiful and so large that JPEGs usually work out just fine. And that's one of the cases where you may not need to shoot a large JPEG, you could shoot a medium JPEG, 'cause it's more than enough resolution for the HDTVs. Next up we have our white balance. We've seen this, there's a shortcut in the Q menu. There's also shortcuts on the buttons, function buttons of the cameras. And so set this appropriately, but generally auto is gonna work fine for most situations. We're gonna go through a number of image manipulation modes here. So for the raw shooters this stuff doesn't matter. For the JPEG shooters, I wouldn't make any changes unless you're really sure that you wanna make these changes over most of your shots, 'cause usually you're gonna wanna leave things pretty neutral and adjust things in post. But we can adjust the color, which is essentially the saturation of our images. We could adjust the sharpness. And the reason we don't wanna go to an extra high sharpness is it adds a bit of unusual contrast that doesn't look too normal in some cases if we send it up to plus two hard in all cases. More on a case-by-case basis of how you need to sharpen your JPEG images. Controlling the highlight area is done with the highlight tone. And then the shadows is controlled by the shadow tone. And once again, zeros across the board in most cases unless you're getting JPEGs that are not fitting your needs. If they're not fitting your needs, you can come in here and make some tweaks with these. We talked about noise reduction before. Do we wanna let the camera do it or do we wanna do it ourselves? Once again, not effected on raw images. Long exposure noise reduction. Clearing off the, trying to correct for the noise for exposures longer than one second. The previous one, noise reduction, is for high ISO. And so setting higher ISOs like 3200, 6400 and so on, that's where it corrects. And so it separates high ISO versus long exposure noise reduction, that's the difference between the two.