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Top Deck: Drive Dial & Flash

On the top of the camera, moving our way around, we do have a movie record button that can be pressed at any time. Now, you do have to hold it down for about a full second to activate it, they don't want you to accidentally shoot movies when you're not intending to and so, that is something you do have to hold down for that one full second. And, if you want to get in and control the particulars about how the movie is set up you can go into shooting menu number four, into the movie set up mode and there's gonna be a number of controls about what type of movie you are recording in there and we'll talk more about that as we go through the menu system. Now, this movie record button, is also a dual purpose button. If you don't like to shoot movies, you don't care about shooting movies with your camera, you would rather utilize that button for something else, you could reprogram it because it is the function one button and a function button is a button that you get to program. And so there's...

a whole bunch of different things that you get to program it to do so it's a shortcut to getting into as many other features of the camera and that can be taken care of in set up menu number two. There's a whole functions setting in here where you can program a variety of buttons on the camera and this is just the first of many to choose from. Alright, over on the left hand side of the camera we have our Drive Dial and this, we talk about drive, that's kinda the motor drive in the camera moving film through it. But, in this case it means a lot more. So let's talk in depth about the Drive Dial. So the standard setting is S which stands for single. And this is where you press down on the shutter release and the camera will take a single photograph, which is usually fine for most of our photography. And if you want to take another photo you're gonna have to come off of the shutter release at least halfway, press back down and then you'll be able to take another photo at that time. And so it's just one photo with each full press of the dial. Next up is the Continuous Low and the Continuous High setting and this is where the camera, when pressing all the way down on the shutter release, will take a continuous series of photos. And the low setting is gonna be for roughly three frames per second and the high setting is gonna be for roughly around eight frames per second. Next up is the Bracketing One and Bracketing Two options. So, bracketing is where you take a series of photos that are slightly different cause you're not sure which one's gonna be the best one and there's a variety of ways that you can do bracketing and they have two here that you can program in so that if you want to have your two favorite, you have kinda two options you can go to very quickly. Far and away the most popular type of bracketing is what's known as exposure bracketing, where you are shooting a picture that's a little lighter or a little bit darker than the camera is recommending or that you were trying at first. And so this camera has a number of different ways of bracketing up to one stop below and one stop above the recommended setting. Now there are other ways of doing bracketing, For instance you could bracket the ISO that you were shooting at or the type of film simulation or the white balance. But as I say, far and away the most popular type of bracketing is exposure bracketing. And you can go into shooting menu number five into the bracketing advance setting and you can program which settings you have for bracket one and bracket two. For instance, you could have exposure bracketing programmed into bracket one and you could actually go in and fine tune whether it's third stops, two thirds or full stop brackets that you're doing. And then for bracket two, you could choose something like film simulation where it would shoot three photos with different film simulations and I'm gonna talk more about film simulations coming up here very soon. And this are ones that would be used in the automated type modes like Program, Shutter Priority and Aperture Priority for the most part. So those are the Bracket modes. Spinning up to the other set of the dial is the Advanced Filter One and Two. So just like the bracket ones where we could have two favorite settings, you can choose favorite filters, ways of tweaking the colors and contrasts of your image different than normal, and so these are a little bit like Instagram filters if you're familiar with that. Let's take a look at some examples. So here's our standard photograph on the left and then we have a Toy Camera which kind of plays a little bit with the funky colors and adds a dark vignette to those corners, a Miniature one which blurs out the top and bottom to make it look like a scale model. We have ones with more saturated color or design for a little bit lighter or darker subjects. Playing with the contrast on dramatic tone, we're defocusing the image with Soft Focus, Partial Color doesn't look too good here with red but there are different colors that you can choose. You can see that green grass and the green trees are a little bit more prominent, everything else goes black and white in the Partial Color-Green. You really notice the blue one though. Everything's black and white except for the blue sky. And so those will have various effects depending on the colors that you're shooting. And so there's a lot of, kind of fun, quirky things that you can put in here and you can have your favorite put into one and your second favorite memorized into Advanced Filter Two. And once again, we're gonna look in the menu system as to where we actually enter this information. Next up, we have Multiple Exposures. This camera allows you to shoot multiple exposures on one frame and you can go ahead shoot a photograph, it really helps if you have a lot of dark area because that's where the subject can be moved to and then you can combine those images into one multiple exposure image and so they'll be some notes on the back of your camera as to shooting the photo and then do you like the photo you take? Then you can go to the next one to shoot the next one or you could delete the first one and reshoot it to see in case you didn't quite get it right. Finally is our Panorama mode. And so panorama is a pretty cool mode on this when you have a really wide stretch in front of you and you want to show as much as possible. This is much, much wider than the widest lens available for these cameras. And so if you are in an area where you really like everything you see, 180 degrees from side to side, the camera will shoot multiple photos in order to get this. Now there are four different types of set ups that you can have for panorama mode. There is a medium and a large panorama. You can have the camera pan either horizontally or vertically, and as you can see in these examples the left side is pretty much the same in all of them. And if you look at the mediums, if you turn the camera vertically, it stretches a little bit more up and down and so you get a little bit bigger image than horizontally and if you look at the large one you'll notice that the height of that lowest image is a little bit taller because you have the camera in the vertical position. And so if you do want to do the panoramas, in my mind it doesn't make any sense to pan with the camera in a horizontal position because you're going to be able to get more information by doing it vertically. You can also pan vertically as well if you want. Typically it doesn't work very well with moving subjects but with a waterfall you don't really notice the movement quite as much as you would with a person moving for instance. And so on your camera you're gonna have all these different controls and this is a good time for us to do a little live demo and I'll show you how, how it's done. And so what I'm gonna do is, one of the other things to note is that the camera will take care of the exposure in this case. You're not really in a manual exposure that you have to worry about, the camera's gonna figure that out for you. And so, as far as the angle of view I can choose either medium or large and the large is really big, it's 180 degrees and so there's a lot of panning. I usually leave it in the medium. And as far as direction goes, I don't want this cause I don't want to pan the camera horizontally. And I don't want to go horizontally to the left. And I prefer to hold the camera like this and so I'm gonna need to disengage the camera here and we'll wanna get off the camera, do maybe a wide shot here in the room and so, there is an arrow on the back of the camera and I'll show you quickly if you can see it, right here that I'm gonna be panning this direction. And well, maybe I can do it like this for you guys and so I'm gonna start over here. Kenna, you're probably in the shot. (camera clicking) And so it's shooting multiple shots and you can see down at the bottom the little scale. We have to keep on panning. (clicking) And there's our screen. And my wrist is getting really tight here. (laughs) Alright. And let's see if that works, let's play it back. Let me get the camera locked in here. Alright, and so one of the cool things about a panorama is that if you press down, there's a little down arrow there, you can play this image and so here it is, automatically scanning and it does look pretty cool when you are doing a really, really wide one. But because we're shooting multiple images and if you look at that screen, I'm gonna see if I can, let's see, let me go in a little bit. Let me show you the downside to this panorama. If you'll notice the screen here, and, screen's a little broken here. It's not exactly the way it looks because it's shooting in multiple photos and I was not real careful about my spinning of the camera there, objects that move or even are stationary might get a little mixed up and so this is probably a panorama, if it was important to me, I would want to redo it again. But just press down and you get to play through it like that which I think is kind of a neat little scanning thing. So, as I said you don't need to worry about exposure, the camera's gonna jump in and automatically take care of shutter speeds, apertures and ISO on that as well. Alright, so that is the panorama feature. And that is your Drive Dial. So, as I say, most of the time I'm leaving the camera in the single frame mode 'cause I just want to get one good shot at a time. Alright, what else do we have on the top of the camera? Well, we have a flash and there's a little flash lever kind of buried underneath the drive dial and that will pop up the very well disguised flash in there. We also have a Hot Shoe on the camera in case we want to add more flashes onto the camera because the built in flash is good for about 10 feet maybe three meters or so, not that much further than that. So it's very good for helping add a little bit of fill light to subjects that are pretty close in front of you. Let's talk about some of the other flashes that you can put on the camera. Right now, I have to admit that Fuji does not have a good collection of flashes that I would recommend for this camera. The smaller X20 and EF-20 are not too much more powerful than the built in flash here. The EF-42 is quite a bit more powerful, it was not really designed for this camera but it will work and it will work totally fine there. What I would kinda look for is a new one that's not out as of the recording of this class, is the EF-X500, it's been announced it should be available in the coming months at least for where I sit right now and this is gonna probably be the choice to get when it comes out. And so, I don't know the price on that one but it's probably likely to be in the $ price range but if you needed a lot of more power or faster recycling time, that would be the one that I would most want to look at. The EF-42 would be the second most interesting one to look at and you might be getting some good deals on that one because they might be discontinuing that one. So, adding a little bit of flash can be very, very helpful, the built in flash and the add on flashes work with the system called TTL Flash, it's an automated, through the lens metering system, which does get you pretty accurate metering system, however with people photography pretty much all photographers have found that these automated systems put out a little too much flash for skin tones. And so it's highly recommended, if you can, is to do some flash compensation and power the flash down a little bit by a stop or two stops as we see here. And it just takes the harshness of the flash off and you can do it with this camera by jumping into shooting menu number four into the Flash Set-Up and adjusting the flash composition. Once again, we'll be doing that in menu section later on. Depending on how dark or light of clothing your subject is wearing and what the background is like, adding in that minus setting on the flash can really be a huge help in many situations. And so in this particular example I think TTL- has much better skin tones than any of the other settings and so that's something that you'll want to play with if you wanna use flash on a regular basis. Especially for people photography. Over on the left side there's a little symbol that looks a little like the planet Saturn and this is the focal plane, this is where the sensor is in the camera. It's highly unlikely, but if you ever need it to measure the exact distance between your subject and the focal plane, say perhaps for scientific macro photography, that's where it is in the camera and all cameras have that listed on it somewhere. So I think that pretty well covers us on the top deck of the camera.