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Backside: Auto Exposure Lock and Focus

Lesson 10 from: Fujifilm X-T2 Fast Start

John Greengo

Backside: Auto Exposure Lock and Focus

Lesson 10 from: Fujifilm X-T2 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

10. Backside: Auto Exposure Lock and Focus

Learn how to use the autoexposure lock -- or how to reprogram the button for an entirely new purpose. See how Fujifilm recognizes two different types of button presses. Discover the many adjustments possible using just the rear control dial -- which doubles as a button.

Lesson Info

Backside: Auto Exposure Lock and Focus

Next up on the camera is the AE-L button, the Auto Exposure Lock button. And what this does is it's gonna lock the exposure in when you have your finger pressed to that particular button. Now right now, the button doesn't do anything, and that is because, and let me go ahead and throw my camera into an exposure mode and let me just show ya real quickly, so I'm gonna throw it into an everything exposure so we're in full program mode, and I'm gonna do a dark exposure, 'cause I don't really care what we're pointed at. I want you to see the screen, and so I just want to make it dark, so we're gonna go minus three stops on this so you can see what's going on. So when I press down halfway, the camera goes into an exposure lock feature where it locks the exposure in no matter what I point the camera at. And to be honest with you, this is not how most cameras work. Some cameras do, some cameras work where the camera is constantly updating the exposure. The camera is currently locked in on the ...

exposure. If you prefer, you can turn that off on the shutter release. In fact, I will turn it off right now, and so I need to go into, I think, the camera settings. We're gonna go through this later, folks, so not to worry too much about this. I think I threw the camera in the... Camera mode. It's down at the bottom if I recall this correctly. I keep going too... Alright, so... I think I may have misplaced it. Focus release priority. Oh, did I... I forgot it's down here in the button setting menu. Shutter AE, Shutter Auto Exposure lock, I'm gonna go ahead and turn this off. And so now, when I press down on the shutter release, the shutter speeds and apertures are changing. It's constantly updating. Now the AE-L button kinda comes into its own so that if I go, "That's the exposure I wanna lock," it's gonna lock it in as long as I leave my finger on that button. And so as it sits right now, it's kind of a wasted button until you turn off the auto exposure lock on the shutter release, or you want to reprogram that to do something else which is, of course, something that you can do. It's really a matter of personal preference on how you like to work. I don't use auto exposure lock very often. In fact, I practically never use it. It is something that you would use in aperture-priority, shutter-priority, or the program modes, locking in for an exposure that's a little bit off 'cause maybe there's an unusual lighting situation that you're working with. And so, lotta people, I think, are gonna wanna reprogram that button to do something else. And if you do wanna reprogram it, you go into the setup menu under the button/dial setting and you can find it, which is what I should've looked at before I dove into the other settings, 'cause I work with a lotta different cameras and things are confusing. Alright, and so if you do want to adjust the way that the button presses, 'cause there are two different ways you can press a button, surprisingly. Did you know that? You can press and hold the button, or you can press it once and it kinda turns that feature on. And so the lock mode controls whether it's a pressing button, or whether it's just automatically locked on. And in order to turn off that feature, you need to go into the button/dial setting under Shutter AE, which is what I went in and turned off. If you want to reprogram it, you go into the button settings, and the AE-L/AF-L button settings and you can reprogram it. And so lots of little reprogramming that we can do in here. Alright, next up, the Rear Command Dial. We've been talking about using this for doing a number of controls, so I just wanted to do a summary of all the things that it does. So you're gonna turn this to do the program shift. We did that earlier. You can do shutter speeds. We haven't gotten to the quick menu settings, but there's gonna be a shortcut menu that we can get to, and we can just kinda navigate over something, turn the back dial and adjust those settings. We're gonna be able to change the focusing frame. We're gonna talk about focusing in an upcoming section. You can zoom in and out on playback. We did that earlier. Now, it's also a button that you can press in. We can zoom in to check the focusing area. And if you wanna use a little shortcut, you can change the way that the manual focusing is done on this camera. So I wanna show you a quick little example on my camera for that. So I'm gonna throw this back into kind of a normal exposure mode here. And so if I wanna check focusing, I can just press in on this button, and I can actually dial in closer, and I can start adjusting focus. Well, actually, it's in auto focus right now, so that doesn't help. And so now I can manually unfocus, and I can see if I'm close up, and press it again to bounce back to the full screen right here. Let me turn off some of these displays here. Now the shortcut is, if you press and hold this button which is a dial, you press and hold in on the back dial for two seconds, we can go to the digital split image, we can go to focus peak highlighting. I got some good displays that I'll share with you in just a moment. Let me got up here on the clock and you can see this. As I focus, it's gonna shimmer in red when I get it in focus. And so that looks like it's pretty much peak focus right there. And so it's a different aid in focusing. And then press it in again. It's standard, which basically means when we go to manually focus, as soon as we turn the focusing ring it jumps in, and then when we press the shutter release halfway down, it'll punch back out on that. And so what we did there, just in review, is we pressed and hold in on the button, and it changes to the next option. I'm gonna leave it in standard for right now. Next up is the Auto Focus Lock button, which is very similar to the Auto Exposure Lock button, and this is locking the focus in. And this is not inherently turned on on your camera, but you can adjust for that in the setup menu if you want; you can control the way it works in the lock mode. Once again, it's either a press button or press-and-hold button, which is the way it normally works, or you can press it and just lock it in with a press, and then you unlock it with another press. And then you can also, you're gonna need to turn off the Shutter AF in the camera, or that's gonna be one of the other controls that you might wanna use with this. And just so, as an example, let me do a little demo on this one. And so I need to have the camera in, if I have it in single focus, what happens is the camera focuses, and that's focused there, it'll focus and it will lock in, and so auto focus lock doesn't make any sense, because by pressing halfway down on the shutter release, it's already locked in. If I move the camera to single, and as I flip the camera around I'm gonna go down to continuous here. Now let me move our focusing point back to the middle and try to focus on something a little bit closer. We don't have a lotta great distances here. Let me grab a prop from the prop table and get something to focus on really close to the screen. Move a few things around. Sorry about this, just gotta adjust a few things. And we're gonna go a little but wider angle. So now we can focus on something close and something far away. And so you can see the camera continually adjusts from forward to back because my finger is halfway down on the shutter release. If I said, "I want you to lock in right there," you can see AE-L comes in here, and even though the focusing point is now on the closer subject, it's not refocusing 'cause maybe I wanna take that photo there, and if I normally press the button here, it would refocus there. And so if I wanna press in and hold that focus, I can move it over and get that photo. And so this AF-L button is mainly gonna come in handy when your camera is in the continuous mode right there. And so there ya go. You can also use this button in the manual mode for focusing. And so this is the simplistic way of doing back button focusing. We actually have two different manners of setting up the camera here. This one is the one that we've been using on Fuji cameras for some time now. When the camera is in a manual focus mode, you would never use the Auto Focus Lock button. And so what they said is, "Well, let's just make that "a shortcut button for back button focusing." And so if you like manually focusing from time to time with a auto focus override, which is what I really like quite a bit of the time, I'll leave it in manual focus, and then I'll just press down on that thumb button when I want to focus. And then when it gets focused on what I want, I release my finger off the button and I can compose however I want, I don't have to press any buttons down, and I shoot the photo. And so it's one of a number a different ways of just controlling the exposure of the camera and separating it from the focusing system. And so, in order to do that, you would need to turn off the Shutter AF in the camera. Next up is a little indicator lamp, and it blinks or shows you a green or orange light depending on what's going on. And so it's just kind of a status of what the camera is doing. Generally, blinking things are a warning, oranger and redder things more of a warning than anything else. But those are what those little lights indicate.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Fuji X-T2 Recommended Settings

Ratings and Reviews

John Simpson
 

I highly recommend this class! Been shooting Nikon for 40+ years and decided to give my Nikon gear to my daughter and go the smaller and lighter Fuji X-T2 for travel. Excellent camera and this course was outstanding in helping me learn how to use the camera. I have watched a number of Nikon oriented instructional videos. This video by John Greengo is the best organized and informative presentation I have ever watched.

Monroe Nevels
 

We all learn from different methods. I, for one, learn best by watching you while teaching, and being able to work along side you, with my camera in hand, and then follow you. I highly recommend this class if you really want to know how to use your camera. Thank you John for helping me to relive my film days, and integrating into Digital. I now have my Fujo X-T2 programmed and I LOVE IT!

a Creativelive Student
 

Really appreciate John putting these Fast Start Series together. Went through part of the training waiting on my Fujifilm X-T20 to arrive, which did today. That allowed me to dive into the menu settings and get the camera ready to use. I found that we are on Firmware 3.0, so, I have some updates to get installed. The training was great and informative as always. Don't hesitate to look for his Fast Start for your particular camera, and the in-depth training on Photography Fundamentals. It is well worth your time and money to get this training, especially if you are an amateur like myself, but, thanks to John Greengo I am quickly learning to use my camera in Manual Mode, most of the time.

Student Work

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