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Button Layout: Back Side Part 2

Lesson 4 from: Fujifilm X-E1 & X-E2 Fast Start

John Greengo

Button Layout: Back Side Part 2

Lesson 4 from: Fujifilm X-E1 & X-E2 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

4. Button Layout: Back Side Part 2

Lesson Info

Button Layout: Back Side Part 2

Well, jose finally brought his camera in and he's trying out the thumbs up little adapter thumb grip that I had and I just want to see what you think of it and how it feels in your hand it feels really solid um one of things I like about it it has that berber what were the thumbs up? Actually context the camera yeah, he protects the cameras well, um solid b field I I told you about one online it felt really weak thie only contact point was at the flash is on the hot chicks have like this little extra support because yeah, that'd be a problem because if if you don't have that extra support, you're going to be kind of wedging and twisting that hot hot shoe and this one's got the nice support in there so it stays in there, it stays in there and then I found out the other one and actually slid out a couple times. Really? Yeah. So there are some that you can get and I'm not sure if it's the one that you mentioned earlier that has a screw in it. This one does not have the screw, but I've nev...

er even had it slipped a millimeter out and and I wouldn't like printing the screw on it I would be nervous I didn't end up damaging the hot shoe right but you know, it feels really nice I really like it and it even matches pretty well even though it's black in black and silver it goes very well yeah I'll get all right so I think we just need to kick back over to my keynote and we're going to continue along the back of the camera which is where we left off all right so we're at the drive but next and they have added and put in even more stuff in the xy two and so there's some differences between the one and two and I will try to keep this as clear as possible so to start with the camera is in the still image mode which means when you press down on the shutter release it takes one picture at a time so the next mode is the continuous mode and you have two options high and low we have either three or seven frames per second with the two if you haven't singh won in two b six frames per second if it's in the low load with the xy two it will do focus tracking so it'll be able to track subjects as they're coming towards you or away from you and predict their movement now I did not use the focus tracking for this next example but as I had mentioned earlier I took both these cameras to cuba and we had a chance to go shoot a baseball game and so I put my camera in the high seven frames per second, and if you haven't shot baseball, one of the gimme shots in baseball is when a player steals second base baseball, when it comes to auto focus in sports, photography is pretty easy because you know where all the offensive players are going to be, they're going to be at the basis and so let me just switch over captured a nice siri's of a runner coming into second base. This is with the fifty five to two hundred at seven frames per second and able to cat captured pretty good siri's of action in that. And so I do like shooting at those faster frame race when shooting sports. Now this was manually focused, I just focused on second base and I knew that's where the action was going to be, so it was not a demonstration of the autofocus system, but simply the motor drive. Next up is something called a bracketing auto exposure bracketing one little complaint to fuji is that they should have whiter amounts that we can do. We can only do these brackets in very small increments. One third, two, third and a full stop on what this is for is we're capturing a syriza pictures very quickly at different exposures. This is something that you would do an aperture priority. Time value or in the program mode and you can do as much as one stop difference between them which is what a lot of people would be doing but there is the smaller one third two third as well next up is something that I have never used in the camera but you know it's there in case you need it it's called ice so brackett e and it's where it would take three different pictures at three different esos and this is on ly going to be available in the j pegs you need to have j peg set in order to get to that on the x see one if you do this if the raw is set thie isso bracketing is in j peg it doesn't give you a warning and this dives into a little bit of an issue I have with these cameras there's a number of other cameras that have the same issue and these are a little bit frustrating in that if you set x whatever x is and you come over to why and it's great out or you don't have access to it or it's not there or it's doing something differently than it normally does it's because you changed x and there's a lot of little things that I'll be going through the menu and I know these cameras pretty well but I'll look at it like why can't I do this something has turned on, something has turned off, and the two things that will change the parameters of the camera more than anything is whether you're sitting in j peg or raw and whether you have your camera in the silent mode, it seems to really kind of not allow you to do a variety of other things, so just be aware if you're getting locked out those air too quick areas to look at, so if you have an xy one, you can do I sell bracket e, but it's only going to be in j peg, even though you've set wrong now, if you haven't exceed two and you have it set too raw, it doesn't even give you this as an option, and so it just kind of blocks it off so that you can't use it at all, so different cameras, they're changing their system for it next up kind of related to this is a variety of other types of bracketing film bracketing and dynamic range bracketing, and so I'm going to give you a visual example of film bracketing here in just a moment, but it where it shoots with def for types of color looks for your images it looks like different types of film were used we also have a dynamic range set I will show you as well important to note that if you haven't seen one and you have ross set these bracket ings will be done in j peg not in wrong and if you haven't xy two and you have it set too raw these things they're just not available and you won't even see those these as options in your camera which is why you may not be able to see him right now so there is a number of different films simulations and depending on the monitor you have and the broadcast that this is going out on you may or may not see much difference in the color the saturation and the color tone between these standards if you want to do your own test I would highly recommend it to see how things look to you normally I like to shoot things very, very standard in neutral and I'm going to play with these images in photo shop and light room when it comes to different colors. One exception to that rule is that if I do want to shoot a black and white picture I will often shoot it monochrome out in the field because one of the great things about the xy one is that you can see monochrome as you are shooting the image right in the viewfinder which is something you can't say about an slr camera and so the monochrome images that you see on the bottom of the screen are basically playing around with the green yellow and the red channels it's as if you were using a colored filter when you were shooting the picture. When you shoot in rock, you can shoot in raw and black and white and get the color image that you can work with the full color later on, and so feel free to change it to monochrome if that's what you want to d'oh. But the bracketing siri's will allow you to shoot with a number of different film styles so that you can get three different versions very quickly of one particular situation. And so if you said I want a black and white version, I want a vivid word version, and I want kind of a muted color version. You could do a film bracket with those three films selected, and it would quickly shoot through those three. Next up is an advanced second section for doing panoramas and multiple exposure. If you haven't xy one, you're going to need to go into shooting menu number four to shoot with multiple exposures and once again and this one a little. Another little lockout mode is that you have a max s o of sixteen hundred. I took the c one with me up to alaska last summer, where I do a photo tour on a boat. Which by the way there is available spacing for this year's crews up in alaska I'll talk more about that at the end of the class and we go up to this is ford's terror it's a beautiful area bye we take about doing a panorama stitch and so it's stitching multiple images together to shoot across a very wide area we go right up to I think this's dawes glacier and this is actually down in oregon doing a vertical panorama now there's a couple of different ways that you can do your panoramic image it depends on whether you were a panning horizontally with the camera or you have the camera in the vertical position you can see the megapixel size and the resolution rates on screen that you will actually get a bit more resolution if you put your camera into the vertical mode there is also two options in the size of the panorama you have a medium panorama which is going to be about one hundred twenty degrees from side to side and you have a large panorama which is going to be one hundred eighty degrees from side to sign and so you'll be able to change which direction that you are panning when you get into the panorama mode but I go back and forth between the medium and large the largest pretty big doing one hundred eighty degree turn so the standard one that idea who is a medium vertical it's a very good option for most panoramas now the other advanced option we haven't here is multiple exposure I typically will do this well I typically don't do this but if I am going to do multiple exposure I would be far more likely to want to do it in photo shop but you can do it in camera which is kind of nice because then you get to see an overlay of where the previous image wass and it just kind of a handy thing so that you can line things up in the field now the weird thing is if you have an xy one you can shoot this in j peg or raw and if you have an xy two you can't shoot it in raw please do not ask me why I do not understand these sorts of questions I have the same question is you but that is the fact and that I do know okay back to the drive mode what else do we have? We have another advanced filter and this is only in the xy two and this is where you get to play photo shop with your camera so I decided to throw my camera through the different options the toy camera gives us a slightly blurry havel even yet id look we have the fake miniature look which blurs the top in the bottom of the scene we get a little bit of a pop in colors the scene is not the most colorful so it doesn't show it off the best bright, dark dramatic look what it did to that sky there made it seem like it was going to rain here in seattle that's just not the case soft focus wonderful you can shoot all your brides with this setting so those are some of the little advanced filters enjoy have fun I don't really use them with my serious photography but if you want to goof around you khun play around with them and then finally kind of in an awkward position let's face it with the fuji cameras the movie mode is not the most important setting on the camera. Most people do not buy these cameras in order to shoot movies and so in order to get to it you need to dive into the drive system and go all the way down to the bottom and you can get into the movie setting so let's talk about movie mode on both the xy one and the exit too so you gotta hit the drive button, go down to the movie mode and then hit ok to get it. Even in the mode there are slightly different settings that you can get between the two listed on screen. The new xy two can shoot at sixty frames per second in full hd that's something that most people aren't going to need to do but if you do want to slow your footage down you'll be able to slow it down to half speed and it will work on standard tvs and most video programs so there are some limitations in how long you can record twenty nine minutes with the xy one and then depending on what resolution you're at either fourteen or twenty seven minutes with the xy two be aware that when you put it in the movie mode there's no shutter speed control or eso control there is very limited control on the camera you get to control the aperture and what you pointed out I'm not a big fan of the focusing system changing while I'm shooting video so I will typically shoot videos with manual focus because when you put it in auto focus its constantly wanting to adjust to whatever it's looking at and you may or may not want that depending on what type of video you're shooting it does shoot in a fairly standard format it's the dot movie format it's an h dot to sixty four formats so it's going to be pretty easy to work with on all the computers these days you're going to press the shutter release to start and you give a half press to stop so you khun started stop whenever you want and of course with the memory cards with the higher resolution and higher frame rates in the x c two, you'd want to class ten or faster card with the x e one a class for or faster would do the job. And so those are some of the most important movie fax, and, as I did mention earlier in the little video that I played and some video that I've recorded outside the classroom, the stabilization system does work very well in camera so you can get some very nice handheld shots with this camera with with lenses that do have the stabilization, not all lenses have that we'll talk more about that when we get to the land section, okay, so that pretty much covers are dr mode, so we have a lot of little options in here. One of the personal gripes, if I if I knew somebody from fujii was watching, why don't you have the self timer in this mode? Here? They decided to put the self timer, which every other camera on them planet has in the dr mode, they've decided to put it someplace else, and it's taken me a long time to figure out where that spot is and get used to it on. So I don't know why that's not in here, but for the most part, I'm jumping back and forth between still continuous and occasionally into the movie mode as I go through the drive study jim I see your your hand is on the switch do you have a lot less? You were on the hot button. Yeah, you've been around long enough you get you got that cute things, john this is from bill in boca and he says that one of the things that he's frustrated with is that they have the cameras have there limited their auto bracketing function toe only one or two or one stop in order to do good hdr on other techniques I need two stops do you know if there's a work around manual exposure? Okay, yeah, no it's not really designed with that and it's just a software fix so food you could fix it like that? Yes, I understand the frustration I'm not the big hdr guy but I understand that and they should be able to have one two stops between frames and so potentially just shooting at one stop increments maybe doing a little exposure compensation so you do like up plus two compensation do a shot, do three do a three stop siri's and then maybe do a minus one that might be a work around as well okay going back to the back side of the camera that was the drive button next up the fa tom a tree button and this is controlling the media ring of the camera the way it reads light multi uses multi spots two hundred and fifty six segments, so the spot is going to be using the center to port two percent of the area and an average is kind of an average of the whole thing by far and away. The safest one is the multi for general purpose photography if you're trying to read the light in a very specific area going to the spot one. But for most people, I can keep it pretty simple here and say I highly recommend the multi works very, very well for pretty much all situations, moving our way down the function to button, and this is a optional button that you get to choose what you want it to dio you're going to press and hold that button in so that you can re program it to do any one of these things and probably my favorite of the ones in here to do let's, see if I could see it on the list is the view mode button or excuse me to be alone? Sometimes I like to do white balance with that s o that white balance could be a little bit quicker to get to, but you can change it to whatever it is that you need to change it to, which is quite nice, be aware that will also be able to set these functions to the a f button or the downward positioning button and I realized that the xy one does not have the function to button, but everyone can re program that downward button, the down selector for the back so let's talk a little bit about focusing because that downward, but normally does the focusing, and I usually leave that one as is, and we're going to jump around a little bit on this because we're going to talk about the different focusing systems, so in the front of the camera is a dial that we haven't gotten to yet that controls the way camera the way the camera focused. This is kind of how single continuous and manual focus and so yes, of course, for single c for continuous and continuous is slightly different between the one and the two camera on an xy one it means it's continually focusing all the time, and with an xy two, it means it can do tracking if the motor drive is not in the high speed motor drive, it needs to be in the low speed motor drive and continuous autofocus if you're wanting to track subjects and then of course there is full on manual focus, and I actually leave my camera in manual focus most all the time for a reason that I will let let on to a little bit later. Next up is the auto focus mode, and we have two choices we can choose all of the focusing points, which there are forty nine or you can choose one focusing point you can choose some slightly different sizes, but any one of those forty nine different points for being specific and knowing what you want to focus on, you want to choose the area that way you can be very precise about you're focusing if you're not sure about what you're focusing on or maybe you're going to give the camera to a family member who doesn't know how to work it and you just want him to pick up focuses quickly and as easy as possible, then the multi would work, but I think for the discerning photographer you're going to want to keep this in the area mode, I'll explain. Well, explain right now on how to change it, you're going to need to go into shooting menu number four to choose whether you want it in multi or in the area mode. Finally, the focusing area can be chosen by the way f button on the camera. This is slightly different position between the x e one in the exit, too, but it's pretty obvious there's an a f button, and when you do activate that you can adjust the frame size by turning the command aisle in the back of the camera and something else to be aware of for the sexy one user this focusing area is only available if your camera is in the single a f mode you cannot use it in the continuous mode continuous must be in the multi a f mode or all the focus points and so normally I'm gonna leave my camera in single auto focus going to leave it in area and then I will adjust the focusing box two probably about the middle of the sizes I think there's about five different sizes that you can choose from and I usually just leave it in the middle, but occasionally I'll move it off to the side if a particular situation warrants that the other option that I will do is I will use manual focus which has a neat short cut on the back which allows you to auto focus with one of the back buttons and I'm going to talk about that here in just a moment s o I don't use the camera in continuous very often now both of these cameras do have and used excuse me use a contrast detection area system there are forty nine points and it needs to be within this area so it can't be way off to the edge but what's really different one of the big substantial changes with the xy two is that the center nine points are also a phase detection which is much better for tracking action and so if you are trying to track subjects moving forward or away from you or towards you, you're going to want to make sure that you have them within the center nine points because that's what it's doing there's eighty six thousand phase detection pixels, which are judging the distance and trying to help you focus auto focus as quickly as possible to keep subjects in focus. Now, these cameras were a little frustrating to me when I was in cuba and I was photographing boxing where the boxers air moving around the rink. We were shooting ballet dancers, we were shooting cars driving down the street and the focus tracking on these cameras is a little on the slow side, and I didn't really like it and went back it's kind of studied up and I went to a track meet on the cameras do ok, they don't do great when it comes to focus tracking in sports, so yes, you can get some very nice sport pictures, but that is probably not the primary reason that I would buy these cameras there. More good for general purpose photography great for street photography, candids, portrait but when it comes to high speed action, it can be done, but it's at a lower percentage rate than I think you're going to get with most cannons and night cons at this time. Question john mitch would like to know do you happen to know if the ex dash t one is any better at this particular lack of performance I have not fully dove into the x team one I haven't got that class feli going yet? Okay I I think it's no worse okay but it's not significantly better if any better than the xy two at all great. Okay sorry I wasn't able to be more precise about that ok so that's a little bit on the focusing system so when you do press the a f button you'll be able to use use the selector too move it around to anyone of the different boxes you can't have it anywhere it does you need to be kind of centered around one of the boxes but you can adjust to have different size sensors and so whatever sensor size or area you find most appropriate works just fine a little shortcut for those of you with the xy one if you press the ok button in the middle it takes the focusing point back to the center why doesn't it do this one with the xy two it's another question you should not ask me because I do not know these things they just changed it and this is one of those little things that is a little bit better with the x e one ok, there is a macro button which confused the heck out of me when I first got the camera before I really dove into the instruction manual because I pressed it and it did nothing, and it was because I do not own the sixty millimeter macro lands. What happens is that normally, when you put the camera on, it has a normal focusing range, and if you want to focus up really close, you need to put it in the macro mode for it to get really close. It doesn't go there because it would waste a lot of time focusing or looking in that area for focus with most subjects who are three feet to infinity way. This simply allows you to get into the macro mode with any lens that has that feature, and so far, none of the lenses that I have with me have that feature, so I haven't really been able to utilize the macro mode. Nevertheless, you can turn it on, and it didn't do anything s so it really doesn't matter for many people unless you have this particular lands or any new macro lens that they might come out with in the future. All right, as I mentioned before, the x one and x e to have slightly different button layout on the back on the one exposure lock and focus lock is all in one button. Now this button is how you can focus with your camera if you put your camera in manual focus you press this button in the back of the camera your camera will do back button focusing which I really like it's a great way of working with the camera so that you can focus with one button and with a completely separate button you're taking pictures now if you want to control how this button works, there is a little bit of control in the menu setting for controlling whether it just locks the exposure, locks the focus or locks both. It depends on how you use the camera in the normal auto focus mode of the sixty one I don't use this button ever on dh, so I would just leave it on the e e l f lock it locks both the exposure and the focus, but if you only want to lock one, you can go in and customize it to your needs with the x e two they've broken this into two different buttons and the auto focus lock when you have your camera in manual focus autofocus lock when it do you any good so they flip that over to work as an auto focus in manual focus, which is a great way of working back button focusing you know and this you can also go in and customize this a little bit to control the auto focus lock or you could haven't do auto exposure lakas well, so that you can have a combined button just like you do on the sexy one, but you do have the separate button for a l if you do want to lock the exposure, how much you use these buttons depends greatly on how you have your camera set up with manual exposure or manual focusing. If you do a lot of manual exposure, manual focusing, you're not ever going to use these buttons, and it just depends on how much you do. Lock and exposure and changing the subject are changing the composition of your subject, so there are definitely work arounds if you don't want to work with these buttons now. One control that both cameras have is the nfl lock mode and what this particular thing does is it controls how the buttons work in the two options are first one p where you have to press the button in order for it to work. You take your finger off, it stops working, the other one is s and it works like a light switch that you flip it on. You press the button once and it's turned on and you press it again and it's turned off. This might be really good for people who get tired leaving their finger on that button for a long period of time, and so you can control what what the buttons do and how they do it and we're going to come back and we'll cover this again when we go through the menu system, but they do have a lot of button customization in this camera for you to really get it tailored to the way you like it toe work, which I like okay, the command I'll we've talked about this, we do a lot of changes with this, it does a lot of different things. One of the cool things we can do is we can magnify in manual focus, and I think I'm going to do a demo on that here in about thirty seconds if you are in the s mode you khun magnified to see what your image looks like, and if you're in manual focus, you can switch between focus speaking the digital split image and normal, which will be talking about as we go through a little bit more in the class and then in play back we did this earlier when I did the demo on playback, it automatically jumps straight to the point that you focus, so let me get over to the exit to here and turn this on and I'm gonna put my camera in single auto focus and if I press in on the button right now you'll see how it jumps in and I can flip back and forth and if I press the actually he was my focus I'm going to flip into manual focus and you know what I'm gonna do is I'm going to set this lens down here to give me something to focus on so anywhere close let me zoom in a little bit and so I can zoom in I can manually focus if I want with me brighten up the exposure so you can see what's going on here and I can turn for either five or ten times magnification let me get this centered now there we go that's pretty good and so I can manually focus now the actual image is this image back here, but if I press it once and then if I rotate I can go five or ten times magnification and this is with the camera in manual focus so I'm gonna go back here and I'm going to come and hold it in for two seconds there's a digital split image which I am not really find out and it's ah we'll break images up left and right and you're supposed to align them up I don't find it really easy to work with and then there is highlight which we adjust the exposure maybe see this a little bit better it's going to kind of shimmer a little bit with what's in focus and so you can see that I'm focused in the foreground and you can see those that shelf in the back glimmer a little bit because I'm in the background so I focused now back to the foreground and you know, if this will work too well, try moving this map out here because that's got a nice texture to it and I'm going to focus there. You can see it really moving along the map as I focus near and far, and so that is the hind focus highlighting which can be turned on and off by just kind of pressing this for a couple of seconds, the focus peaking right there so that some of the focus options I like to leave it, as I say in manual focus and then when I want to focus on something, I will press this button in the back of the camera. Two focus over there over here. Once again, you can press the button you can tell wait can't do that in manual have to be an auto focus. Let me try this again, press the a f and choose different sizes when you're in manual focusing, you can move where it zooms into so now I'm up here for focusing, but you can't change the size of that area so that's, one of the changes that I wish we could make. But we can't. So that's a little bit of a live demo on focusing on this camera. Once again, lots of options. Get set it up, how you like it. I love that.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

X-E1 0utline
X-E2 Outline

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

This course was outstanding! I recently acquired an X-E2. I am still an amateur, though I used a Nikon D-90, for the past few years. I was a bit confused on how to translate the dslr controls to my new Fuji. So, this class is exactly what I needed. The way the course is designed and the clear instructions were great. I love going back to see something over and over until I truly understand. This was my first CREATIVELIVE course and I know that I will take more. Thanks.

user-98587b
 

I found this course completely by accident. This class is not listed in Photography under "Fuji". Or under "Hardware", where many other camera courses are featured. This is a good course. I appreciated the thorough explanation of each dial, button, and menu item. I also liked that John described how he, as a professional, would set the camera for his own use. That helped me understand how the camera would likely be set up for use by a professional. I was disappointed, though, by John's dismissal of JPEGs output by the camera. As he notes, the only benefit he has of JPEGs is to check the results of the shot he just took. But the JPEGs that the X-series cameras produce are widely acknowledged to be excellent. John says he can always exceed this quality by working over RAWs in post production, and surely so. ...But he'll spend quite a lot of additional time doing that, and he likely owns the software needed to do so. It's just odd that he did not acknowledge that there are some benefits to the in-camera processing of JPEGs, and that it is due in part to Fuji's unusual sensor design. This was an issue only because there are a lot of settings that deal with JPEGs that received next to no attention in the course. I was also dismayed by his dismissive attitude regarding some of the camera's setting limitations. For instance, he was mystified and bummed out that the benefits of the Dynamic Range settings could only be realized by a requirement of minimum ISO settings of 400 and 800. But I easily found an explanation for that: DR reduces exposure to capture highlights that would otherwise be blown. Then it uses those extra stops of ISO headroom to enhance dark shadows and midtones. I don't believe there's another course like this one. It does present a lot of valuable information in a very easily digestible format. That xe2 is a lot more familiar to me now that I've taken the course!

DMargulies
 

Nice one. Just an easy and refreshing way to review all the buttons and function for an east start. Built nice with extra tips and views comparing to reading the user manual.

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