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Shooting Menu

Lesson 8 from: Fujifilm X-T1 Fast Start

John Greengo

Shooting Menu

Lesson 8 from: Fujifilm X-T1 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

8. Shooting Menu

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu

All right, this is kind of the big core of the class, you might say is we're going to be going through the menu system, it seems honestly, it seems a little nerdy and tedious going through the menu, every item getting it set, right? But you know what, you really only need to do it wants to get it right, and so let's let's do it, get it done with so we can go out and shoot pictures. All right? So the menu system on this camera is a course activated with the menu button in the back of the camera. Once you do this, you're going to see a bunch of tabs over on the left hand side, and they have grouped information into different categories the shooting tab, things to deal with, shooting pictures and the setup tab, which is general set up of your camera. Now there is a third series of tabs that air kind of secretly hidden from you, and in order to get to them, you have to hit the playback button, play back an image and then hit the menu button, and that will get you access to some of the spec...

ial playback tabs, but we're going to start right now with the shooting tabs and so go ahead and hit the menu button on your camera. And you're going to navigate left right up and down and in general as you go to the right, you're digging deeper into that particular feature and if you go left you're backing out of it, you can always hit the menu button or you can hit the shutter release button halfway down if you kind of want to kick yourself out of the menu and of where you are. So the first item in here is the bracketing in advanced setting option, so you remember the dial on the top of the camera for adjusting the motor drive? Well, this first section is into that our deals with that whole issue it there, and so it dives into a sub menu, and when you get in here, the first option within it is choosing. If you're going to bracket, how do you want to bracket? Do you want to do it by exposure? Eso film, dynamic range or white balance? I think most people all are going to want to be doing the auto exposure bracketed, so you're adjusting the brightness of your image lighter and darker and on screen you will see my recommendations and of course, and in your hand out you will see my recommendations as well, so I think for most people you're going to want to leave it in e some people might like that film simulation I could see some people playing around with the dynamic range, but I just don't think white balancing and isil bracketing are used by ah large percentage of the population ok, next up on the camera, if you are going to do auto exposure bracketing how big of increments would you like to do it? You can do it in one stop two thirds of a stop or just one third of the stop. One third of a stop is a really, really small amount, and I think most people would probably want to do this at a full stop because then you're so you'll notice a good a significant difference in exposure but set it to whatever you need to if you have it set too I esso exposure bracketing you have the same option one third, two thirds or a full stop difference and I would probably do it full stop difference unless you had a very particular thing that you were trying to do with the film simulation brackett, we had a question in class on this one. If you do want to do it well, first off you would have to turn the brackets select to the film salute simulation bracketing and then you would come in here to film simulation bracketing and you would choose which film you wanna have as film one film to and film three and so if I was going to do this I might do one it's standard pro via maybe one as velveeta sylvia and the vivid option and for me I would probably do a third option of monochrome justcause I kind of like black and white every once in a while and so choose whatever you need to there but that's where you would choose those three films next up if you are going to be doing the white balance how big of increments would you like to me hey there and it's the same one third two thirds and a full step difference after that we go into the advanced filter select and if you remember the advanced filter was kind of the fun goofy modes that the camera shoots in so you could select the camera to shoot in these different modes here and there's a bunch of different options that you can choose from and so I never really use these now once again let me clarify don't if I said that correctly this is not bracketing anymore this is just simply shooting a picture with the advanced filters and so when you flip it over to the advanced mode which mode is it in and frankly I don't see anything in here that I would use pictures on a regular basis so I kind of wish they would have none just in case my camera got slept there when it pictures in a funny way but enjoy that if you have if you like that. Okay, next up is the auto focus setting in when we go into this one and go a little bit to the right or ok, it's going to dive us into yet another sub menu so let's dive into this sub menu for auto focus settings. First off is our focus area, and we can choose where we're going to focus, and this is just foolish because you shouldn't dive this far into the menu to make the setting. This is normally done with the downward button on the selector on, I would leave it in that mode for the function setting. You can reap program it somewhere else on the camera, but they allow you to do this in the menu system as well. Next up, if you recall the function number three button, was the access to the macro mode, and if you don't have the macro lens, you can turn it off use use that function three button for something else, but if you do need to get into the macro, you can do it in the menu system here is well, and that just allows you to shoot from very close up to very far away, when normally they restrict the macro lens it's a, focusing on things in the distance. Next item release and focus priority and this is one of the first ones where I'm going to recommend that you go in and make a change from the factory setting. Right now, I think it probably be better if you change the f s option to focus priority. And what this means is that when you try to take a picture, it will not take a picture until the camera is in focus. When you are using the single focusing moment. This is the way most all night cons, cannons and every other camera in the market. Art from women when you get him from the factory in this one, for some reason is in the release mode, and so I would recommend changing that, and it might prevent some out of focus pictures from people who were closely paying attention to their camera. Now I would leave the fc in the release priority when you are shooting sports modes in a continuous sports action scene, there's going to be a few out of focus pictures and it's better that your camera just continue firing through the moment and it will hopefully catch back up and focus on the next image and so it's normal that the a f c is left in the release mt instant a f. Is going to be dealing with the button on the back of the camera. We had someone asking about this in a question in class, and that is, is that when you press this button and urine manual focus, the camera will focus. But does it focus in f s or a f c? And this is where you khun designate? Would you prefer it in single focus? Or continuously, most people like the single focus, I believe, but if you want to add the continuous in here, it would be understandable because you can shoot, you can press down on the button for focusing, and if you want it to stop, just raise your finger off of it. So it's, very easy to work with. Next up is the f mode, and this is where we get to choose between a single area for the entire area. And so the question is, do you want to choose one area which would be multi or excuse? Excuse me? Mrs again, if you want to choose one area, one one particular focusing point, that is the area or if you want to let the camera choose through all forty nine focusing points, that would be multi, and I think most photographers who are kind of discriminating on what they're shooting, we're going to want the area option next up. Is the face detection mo? This is something that I will usually just leave off, it does work quite well, but I just don't like it pre auto focus, this one is what you want to turn off. Most likely, what happens here is that the camera's auto focus is constantly looking for focus, whether you're oppressing half way down on the shutter release or pressing any button on the camera, it's just always focusing and that's a good way to run your battery down and really doesn't seem to be necessary for most situations. The eliminator is that light on the front of the camera, and I don't like being a nuisance, and I don't like drawing attention to myself as a photographer, and so I don't want this coming on for two reasons. Number one it's, not a very good auto focus eliminator, it doesn't really project a light very far out, so it does very little good to help you. Auto focus it's kind of annoying to people, and it just kind of like, what are you doing what's going on with your camera? And if you know where to point your focusing brackets, you really in my mind don't need to use this, and so I like turning this off, at least for myself, all right, continuing down in shooting menu number one, we have our s o auto setting, and I talked about this towards the beginning when we're talking about the uso setting. This is where you get to control the specifics of how the camera operates when it's in the auto hi s elmo default sensitivity for most of you are going to want to set that at two hundred the best quality setting in the camera, the maximum sensitivity set this to the highest number that you feel comfortable shooting. We have been getting nice results for may. I think thirty two hundred is still pretty darn good on this camera and so that's, what I'll set minimum shutter speed, you kind of have to determine what sort of activity you're shooting and how steady you can hold the camera and set it to whatever it needs to be within their for hand holding the camera, this camera in the lens, the stabilization system on these lenses is pretty incredible. I've got sharp pictures down to one full second, and so I really don't mind setting this down and around in eighth or a fifteenth of a second for general handheld work, but if I'm photographing people moving around, all need a little bit faster shutter speed, a good general recommendation would be around the thirtieth of a second, I think most people could do pretty well at one thirtieth of a second. Next up his image size we dealt with this before when we were in the quick menu, and this is the size of the j peg image and the aspect ratio that it's recorded. And so for most people, I think you're going to want to be in l a large and a three by two aspect ratio, which means we're using the entire sensor. Next up is image quality. We already talked about this in the quick menu. This is where we are dealing with jay pegs versus raw, and so I would prefer to shoot raw, but I'm shooting in plus rob because I'm getting a normal j peg, which allows me to zoom in after I've taken a picture too judge for sharpness. If you are going to shoot jay pegs on ly, I highly recommend shooting the fine quality because it's the best quality j pegs that you can get out of the camera. Another one that we saw and talked about in the quick menu is the dynamic range option, and in here you, if you do want to set the dynamic range to two hundred percent or four hundred percent, you need to be at a higher price, so and so you need to be at the higher I suppose if you want to get to these next up is our film simulation and in here it goes to hear with technical problems, film simulations we talked about this, we can simulate different types of film in the camera, so this is if we just wanted to set it up for a specific one ofthe shot, we could set it here. Normally I would leave this in standard because that's, where we're going to get kind of a standard color look to our images, some of these questions go back tio a little bit a previous section if you're okay with that and this one was from giller mod g c who says johnson earlier that win aperture and shutter are set to auto the front or back dial can also be used as a program shift function correct just tryto and it doesn't seem to be desert. Where did I hear wrong? That is correct, there are and I don't have my secret notes up right now, so I don't have to go from memory on this one there's a number of things that will conflict with that doing it. And I was driving myself nuts just yesterday because it wasn't working for me, and for me it was because I had the flash attached and it won't switch and if you have the flash on and I would normally have the flash on now, it won't switch as well I believe if you have the dynamic range option turned on, and there is a third reason why and I'm trying to remember, and I don't think I'm going to come up with it on, but there's something else set that conflicts with it in some some manner of speaking and so trying to think, do I have it in my notes? I might have it in my notes, let me take a look. I mean, I don't think I don't think so, and so it, zoe, probably the dynamic range turn on, so we're moving through the shooting menu. We're now on page two of the shooting menu, and our self timer is right here if we need to get to it, we saw it in the quick menu, and for those of us who like to use this a lot, we can set it up as a function that we could get to with one press on the outside of the camera. One of the new things for fuji is they have put in an interval timer, and so if you're not familiar with interval timers and time lapse photography, it's a lot of fun because you set up the camera and you shoot a picture every five seconds or ten seconds or whatever the case may be, and then you take all those frames and you compress him into a video like I have here. Now I've added a slight zoom in this one you can see I'm zooming back in this one and that was done in post that was not done with the fuji camera at all but that's what a time lapses and so you can go in and do the time lapse and set up how long the interval it is between the images how many frames we're going to take and when you want this whole interval siri's to start and so fun thing to do you will go through lots of images make sure you have a charge battery and a memory card ready to go next down on the list is white balance we've talked about this a couple of times already it's just in here yet again find it a little bit more quickly and easily in the quick menu so more items from the quick menu the color controls and the sharpness all these sorts of settings I'm going to leave it zero I don't want to try toe alter my images in the camera this is something I will do later in a computer if you're not getting the good images that you want out of the camera that j pegs are not quite to your liking you khun go just the look of those with these four different settings in here but for anyone who shoots raw anyone who works on a computer I would recommend generally just keeping these set at zero and were quickly on to page three. This is where we deal with two different types of noise reduction. One is just kind of standard noise reduction and what that is forest for using for use at high I esos. And then we have long exposure noise reduction, which happens when you shoot with longer shutter speeds, for instance, one second and longer what happens here is that the camera goes in and tries to reduce the noise in camera, and it does reduce the noise, and it does look better when you have this turned on. The problem is, is that you can do and even better job if you have the right software. So if you have the right software, I would recommend setting these at zero and just turning off the noise reduction. One of the downsides of the noise reduction is that let's see long sees me. The long exposure and noise reduction is that when you do a ten second exposure at nighttime, for instance, you do a ten second picture. The camera will then spend the next ten seconds processing that image before you can look at the image or before you can shoot another image, and I found that this slows up the process of shooting at night, often times when it's. Cold and you want to get shooting and get done with it, or the lights changing very quickly, and you don't really wanna wait because you're going to miss shots in that time, and if you're shooting raw, you can always do a better job of noise reduction with the right software next up, lens modulation, optimizer and what this is where the camera knows about slight defects in the lands, and it can compensate for, and so generally what it does, who will make your images look a little bit sharper and it's gonna adjust for diffraction and that's going to mostly be happening at the edges of the frame, and so you're likely to get a little bit better quality of images by leaving this turned on, and this will effect both raw and j peg images and so there's. Not a lot of good reason to turn this off, but if you wanted to, you could select custom setting. We saw this in the quick menu, and this is where you can have seven different profile set up for your camera, where you have different color modes, you could have black and white modes film film mode set up, and you can quickly jump from one from custom one two to three and onward and that way it's very simple to change one setting. Rather than maybe as many as ten different settings that you would set up in your camera. So you, if you have several different modes in which you use your camera, there would be kind of shortcuts here to getting to your favorite settings. And so this is where you would select them. But when you actually want to edit and save them there's a separate setting where you can go in and you can adjust, for instance, the dynamic range, the film, simulation and onwards, all these different settings are ones that you can set in there for each of those seven different presets. The mount adapter is for those of you using that mount adapter, for instance, with like a lenses, they have presets for lenses, twenty one millimetres through thirty five. And anything longer than that, you can go in and adjust the numbers yourself. And what that's going to happen here is when you set this number in that focal length will simply be inputted to the metadata of that particular image on the meta data. So it's not something many of us will use, especially those of us who don't use adapters if you do use the m amount adaptor or any other adapter because there's some aftermarket ones out there as well. You want to be able to shoot without the lens, and so you would want to normally turn this on. If you plan to just use the fuji lenses, you can turn this off and what it does is it it simply prevents the camera from firing a picture if there is no lens on the camera, the danger in doing that is that this this the sensor is exposed and the shutter blades are exposed, and if anything gets in there and interferes with it, you could end up with a serious problem. And so it's just kind of preventing your camera from potential damage while the lens is off. Okay, moving down to page for in this manual focus assist and so when you are in manual focus, assist what happens when you start manually focusing there is the standard, which is where I'm going to leave the camera. Most of the time, we do have a digital split image, which I got pretty excited about when I first heard, because it's like, is it like my old nikon fm to where you would use the split image to get here focusing set properly? It doesn't quite work exactly like that. I'm not a big fan of it. A lot of people have been real big on focus peaking, and what this does is it kind of adds a shimmering light in fact you know what let's do a live demo it's time for a like so let's go ahead and flip our camera on and I need to dive into this and turn this on because I don't know that it's turned on let's see before we're going to go down and let's do it focus and we're going to do we'll do it red high so it's either really high intensity or low intensity we're going to do red high intensity and we're going to need to make sure that our cameras in manual focus and let's focus on our lenses over here we'll zoom in a little bit more and watch what happens when I manually focus you can see those little red it kind of shimmers of light in fact let me bring in a little bit more of the table here kind of blown out a little bit on screen let me adjust brightness so maybe you could see it a little bit better and so here you can see it on the table really well you could see exactly where I'm focused at and if I want to focus on the lenses I bring it back to write about here and I could tell that those lenses aren't focused or if my little remote here in front of me want that in focus bring it forward and I'm focused on that and it's a great way to see where exactly the focusing is but it's really irritating when you're trying to look at the quality of the image it's just knowing as all get out and so it's not something I leave activated my cameras technically good as it is aesthetically it's very, very annoying in my mind and so there will need to be some sort of compromise between the technical and the compositional and esthetic side of it. So I just generally leave my camera in standard vote it's fine adapt place next up auto exposure auto focus lock mode. And so this is that a f l button on the back of the camera would you prefer this to be activated by pressing and holding or like a light switch where you would press it once it turns on and then press it again and it turns off I kind of like the pressing because then I know it's it's on if I used it a lot, I would probably use the switch mode, but I don't use this button for that feature very often and so it's not that important to me, so p is kind of the standard place to keep it the auto focus lock mode will this let me double check my notes here so one of the options when you press the autofocus lock is that it would lock the focus that's what it's supposed to do or locked the focus and lock the exposure and there's some people that like it toe lock both and so if you wanted to do that you can do that but just leaving it in the nfl's kind of the standard mode flash mode we've seen this a few times before this is in the quick menu like the forced flash which is forces the flash if I ever was to put it on the camera slow synchro is a kind of a nice second option on there is well not a big fan of the auto at all flash compensation we talked about this earlier this is where we can power down the automatic flash that's firing on the camera and I think if you are going to use flash one of the best times to use it if you would photographing people and you want to add a little fill light to their face generally you're going to want to turn down the tl automated flash I'm thinking around to minus one is a pretty good setting minus two thirds is a very, very safe setting some people are gonna want slightly different numbers but something right in there just to get that flash balanced a little bit better it's my recommendation red eye removal on this camera works a little bit differently it only works on j peg images and what it does is it looks for faces and it can actually recognize faces and it can recognize if there is red eye if there's a face if there is red eye, it will make those red eyes much darker and so it looks like they don't exist now. It depends on how much of a problem you have with this. I just leave this turned off, I just don't even want this operating if you were photographing people with flash a lot and you were getting a lot of red eye and you wanted the camera to fix it for you, well, this is where you could do it. Next up is everything to deal with the movie set up of the camera, and so this is where you get to set your resolution and frames per second for standard video. I would choose nineteen twenty by ten eighty, which is full hd, and I would probably go with thirty frames a second if you're here in the united states or many other countries, the standard system is twenty five frames per second and I would probably stick with that if you will plan on doing any sort of slow mo or editing with it, you may want to go with sixty frames per second because it gives you a little bit more data to work with, but for those of you who are just trying to shoot a basic video, you don't need it at sixty frames per second the mike level I believe has already set for you, but you can power it up or you can power it down a little bit and then, of course, on the mic remote, which is the socket on the side of the camera. Are you planning to use a microphone in there or remote? And this is where you can make that choice. If you do need to use the remote in there, you need to come in here and flip it over to remote. So what do you most likely to use a microphone or a remote? All right, we're on the page five of the menu, the image stabilization mode and we have two options, one is continuous, which means it's whenever you press down on the shutter release it's constantly trying to stabilize the camera lens system on number two it on lee does it during shooting, and some people might find this easier to work with when they're panning with the subject, for instance, or with certain telephoto lenses, it might be just easier if the stabilization is not on while they're framing the shot, but on lee when they're shooting it, I think most people will be happiest with it. With this in the number one or continuous mt wireless communications was basically the same thing is the wifi button I pressed on the top of the camera that's a fun function button which means that you could re program it for something else and so if you do need to activate the wifi system, you would do it here in the menu aperture setting now this onley applies on ly applies to those lenses that do not have apertures or aperture rings on them. And so like the twenty seven millimeter lens is so small they don't have room for a nap it's a ring and this controls if you can control the manual apertures as well as the automatic apertures, you could have your lands forced into auto aperture mode all the time or two on ly have manual apertures available and so this is on ly in the non are lenses lenses that do not have an aperture ring on them so a plus them allows you to turn it to the different aperture settings as well as to the full automatic setting very simply and easy and we're out of the shooting menu and we're going into this setup menu of the camera so this is just general set up the camera, but before we do that we're going to take a short q and a break just a quick question for somebody who's ias mode is grayed out any reason why that might be the king? I would probably be because they have a lens that doesn't have a nice move on it, it it could potentially be because they do have a lens. That is, that is, has thie turned off. But my guess is that they have a lens that does not have the ice melts. So let me just check my camera real quick isis mode if I turn, oh, yeah, my ice mode is great out now, because I have the switch turned off.

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Outline
Firmware Update
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Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

I've purchased a number of John's courses and recognise how well he delivers complicated facts. Having just purchased a new X-T1 buying his fast start class was an obvious step, especially having looked at the manual. It was really well presented and made the switch from Canon so much easier. The inclusion of the notes was an excellent, additional support.I set up the camera as recommended and took it on a photo-shoot with my camera club a few days later. The content of the course and the settings suggested made the day. Now that I understood the camera it was easy to use and delivered great results first time. The course was the best 'accessory' I could have bought. Creative Live and John are a fabulous resource and so reasonably priced.

Jim Panzer
 

Great course, I received the X T1 and the first thing I did was see to if there was a course on CL I could use to get more aquanted with this awesome little machine. I have seen other course from John and he really knows his stuff, this one was no different. As a late comer to this camera, it would be nice if CL could update the course by adding a video going over the big 4.0 firmware updates, as that's the current one now. Thanks CL and John for helping me feel more at home with this camera!

Debra Robert
 

Great class! The learning modules are well structured and allow enough time for the viewer to absorb what is being shared. After completing the course I feel much more confident in understanding the X-T1, not a comfortable as with Canon (yet) ... there is definitely a learning curve moving from DSLR to mirrorless. So wish I would have taken this course a few months ago! Thank you!

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