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Shooting Settings Menu

Lesson 15 from: Fujifilm X-T20 Fast Start

John Greengo

Shooting Settings Menu

Lesson 15 from: Fujifilm X-T20 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

15. Shooting Settings Menu

Next Lesson: Flash Settings Menu

Lesson Info

Shooting Settings Menu

All right. We're moving onto the new tab, Shooting Settings, and so these are general shooting parameters for the camera. The Scene Position mode. Well, we saw this before when you had the camera in the Auto mode and you turned the front dial on the camera. You can also do it from the menu section. The Drive Setting. We've seen this before, but this is kind of the subcategory of the dial on the top of the camera. This is where you get to choose what's in those different brackets. And so, if you want to have exposure bracketing under number 1, this is where you can go in and select. What do you want to have going on under bracket setting number 1? Personally, I would probably choose Auto Exposure bracketing. Then you can get to choose...well, how big a bracket do you want to have? 1-stop, 2-stop, 3-stops? Kind of a...1-stop is a good start. Maybe 1 and a third, 2. Depends on what you're doing. Do you want to do ISO bracketing? If so, how big a bracket do you want to do? And so, here's j...

ust where you get to choose what bracketing setting number 1 is going to be. You get to choose which films are simulated in the Film Simulation mode. That might be a good second option. White Balance. I don't find this one very useful, especially for people who shoot RAW, because you can adjust this so easily later on. And so, I'm not going to go through them all on bracket 2, because it's the same as bracket 1, but you can go through and make those same changes. The Continuous High is where you can choose from 8.0, to 11, to 14, but if you do want to go to 11 and 14, you're going to have to use the electronic shutter. And we haven't talked about that yet, so we're going to be getting to that section in just a very short period of time here. 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 are your options for the Continuous Low. And if you do like using the Advanced Filters, you will have two filter options on the dial and you get to save one as number 1 and one as number 2. So save your favorite one here, and your second-favorite one down here at number 2, and you have the same number of options available in here. And so, that's the Drive Setting, so you're really kind of setting up the Drive dial on the top of the camera to function the way that you want it to. Next up is the Self-Timer. We saw this before in the Click menu but we also have it here. If you use this a lot... I do, sometimes, because I like to use a tripod. I set one of the function buttons to the Self-Timer. I think sometimes I do the AEL button, because I don't normally use that button. I'll use that as a self-timer button. Interval Timer Shooting. This is a feature we're seeing on more and more cameras now, and this is a great option, a different style of photography. And this is where you shoot a series of photos. I usually like to shoot 300 or 360 photos over the period of 30 minutes, maybe having 10 seconds or 15 seconds between images, and then, combining all those images into a video using a separate video program. And here's where you get to program in the interval between the shots, which for me is oftentimes 10 seconds to 1 minute, and then, how many times you want to shoot. Usually, I want to shoot around 300 or more shots, but what you're doing can vary quite a bit in here. But it's nice to have that all built-in on the camera. Photometry is the metering of the camera. We haven't talked about this one so far. The camera has four different modes that you can use. The first one is known as Multi metering. There's 250 segments and this does a really good job balancing out mixed lighting conditions, and so, this is where most photographers will leave their metering system because it is so versatile and so good in so many situations. It does have some traditional systems. Center Weighted system is a very old system, the oldest of the systems, which is just a large, big blob right in the middle for average brightness subjects. If you do want to use that Spot meter, remember we talked about linking that with a focusing point earlier on. And so, that's reading a highly concentrated area if in...wherever that focusing point is if you link it up with the focusing point. So if you want to read light in a very small area, it's a very good option, but it's a little bit tricky to use. And then, finally, we have an Average, which is just straight across the frame, and that tends to be very consistent between shots of landscapes and portraits. And so, I haven't really found out where it's better than Multi, but it is a different option if for some reason you're getting erratic results with the Multi, which doesn't happen very often, so most people stick with the Multi pretty much all the time. Under the Shutter Type, we've mentioned this before. If you want to get up to 14 frames a second, you can do it, but you have to use the Electronic Shutter, and there are some drawbacks to using it. So, let's talk about the difference between a mechanical shutter and an electronic shutter. Okay. So, a mechanical shutter uses four different shutter blades...actually, eight in total, and it has a first shutter curtain that needs to first, close, prep the sensor for the image. It opens up and sometimes, it has a little bit of shutter shock because it opens up so quickly, and that's right during your exposure. And then the second one comes in and closes. And so, that's the way a normal mechanical shutter will work on a traditional camera. So, this camera has the option of an electronic shutter where it basically turns the pixels on and off and scans the sensor from top to...or from bottom to top, recording the image. Now, it can turn each pixel on and off very quickly, as quickly as 1/32000 of a second. The problem is is it can't do all of the pixels at exactly the same time, and so, what happens is it does a scanning system where it's scanning from the bottom at the top, and while it may be able to set a very fast shutter speed, the scan time takes a little bit of a time. From my estimates, it's around 1/20 of a second. And so, what happens is anything that moves during that 1/20 of a second is going to get distorted because it's being recorded in different places. And so, I shot a test chart with the camera stationary, and then I was panning the camera right to left, and I was getting straight lines with the mechanical shutter. And then I was using the electronic shutter at 1/250 of a second as I was moving the camera. You can see what happens to that grid. And so, I went to a faster shutter speed to see if that would solve the problem, and it just made it clearer, but the same problem was there. Now, the way this manifests itself in the real world is if you're panning a car down the street, the buildings are all going to be slanted to the side. If you're having your camera point straight ahead and an object is coming across in front of you, it's going to get distorted and round wheels are no longer going to be round. And so, if you're going to be doing action photography, I cannot recommend using the electronic shutter, and so, you have to be very careful about choosing that 11 or 14 frames a second because there's a lot of problems with it. Now, the electronic shutter is really good if you do need those really fast shutter speeds, perhaps for shooting portrait photography with a fast lens and bright light. If you need to shoot silently, like in a theater or a courtroom, or any time you want vibration-free, maybe you're using a high-magnification lens or, like, a telescope of some sort. The problem is that there's lots of cons when doing general or action photography, so it's not something that I would generally use on a regular basis. It's one of those tricks of the trade that I would pull out when and where necessary to fix one of those problems on the left. So, that is the Shutter Type. Now, one of the options is that you can set it to Mechanical+Electronic, and it only goes into the Electronic when you get up above the 1/4000th of a second, or is it 1/8000? 1/4000 of a second. When you get up to 1/32000 of a second, it'll switch into Electronic, but it'll stay Mechanical for all those other times. The IS Mode on the camera. So, the lenses will have image stabilization, but you can kind of control the IS Mode, the exact specifics of it, here. We have two options, for the most part, Continuous and Shooting. And so, the Continuous mode is when you press halfway down on the shutter release, the camera will kick in its image stabilization, and you'll see it in the viewfinder. Some people don't like that, makes them a little bit on the woozy side, and they turn it on only during the shooting. So, it only stabilizes while the shot's being taken. Then, we have the option of +Motion, and this is really creative, and I don't know of any other camera that does this on the market today. That is, when the camera notices that there's extra motion going on in the frame, like, there's somebody, a soccer player, out there moving around, it's going to notice that there's extra motion. And it's going to know that the image stabilization of the camera, while it might stabilize your movement, is not going to stabilize their movement. So, if the camera's in Auto ISO, it's going to raise the shutter speed by two stops to help stop that action. And so, that seems like it's a very interesting option to use. And I haven't used it a lot when shooting motion, but if you do like to use image stabilization and Auto ISO, I think that may be a very good option to give a try in there. But for general purpose, the Continuous option, I think, is a good one. We have our ISO settings here. We've talked about changing this before, and so, this is something that I would probably program to maybe the Function button on the top of the camera or one of the other buttons on the back of the camera, because that's something you're going to want to have access to changing on a regular basis. All right. Second page in the Shooting Settings. So, you can use an adaptor to mount Leica lenses on your FUJI camera. If you do so, you can help pass along some of the metadata from the lens as far as what lens it is, as well as some other distortion correction and color shading correction information to the camera so that the camera can fix those issues with those other extra lenses that you can program in. All right. Wireless Communication. So, you can hook your camera up so that you can do a remote viewing, you can download to your phone. And so, let's walk through the steps that you need to go through, and then we'll do it in the real world. So, first off, there's a lot of things that you're going to need to do with both the camera and the phone to make sure that it's ready to do this. The first thing is, with your phone, you're going to need to download the appropriate app from FUJI, which should be coming up right here. And so, the FUJI app is the FUJIFILM Camera Remote, and they've had a number of apps in the past, so make sure you're getting the most current one. So, you're going to want to have that installed on your phone. After that, on your camera, you're going to need to start your Wireless Communication system, which is right where we were talking about in the Menu system. From there, you need to make sure, on your phone, that you got the Wi-Fi turned on, it's reading and connecting up to the X-T20 Wi-Fi, and then, you can open up the Camera Remote application from FUJI, and then you can start selecting what you're going to do. And then, you're going to need to go back over to your phone to say, "Hey. Yeah, I really do want to connect up with this phone." So, we're going to leave this up on screen for me to use as reference, and now it's time to do our live demo. And so, for right now, I'm going to leave my camera in a nice automatic mode, and let's set this here. And so, I need to go into the Menu, and I need to navigate down to where we are in the menu. Wireless Communication settings. And so, now, I've kind of started the wireless signal coming out from the camera. So now, I'm going to take my phone, and I am going to go into my Settings, and I'm going to look under my Wi-Fi, and what I'm looking for...actually, I better turn it on. That always helps. I'm looking for FUJIFILM-X-T20. There it is. And, actually, I'd set it up before I [inaudible] just to make sure this thing worked. And so, normally, I would just check it. And now it's checked, and so, they are communicating back and forth. So, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to open up my FUJI app, which is right in here with all my Wi-Fi apps, and here is my FUJI app right here. Turn this on. It's connecting up. Now, I can choose Remote Control, or I can choose Receive, where I'm receiving images from here. I really like being able to use this as a remote control, so let's go with Remote Control, and I think we're getting it. So, right now, we are seeing what the camera sees in here. So if I wanted to get in the photo myself, I can simply hold this, and I can make a few different control settings in here. I'm not going to go into all these, but all I can say is explore around. You can change ISOs, camera settings, a variety of other settings. There is a video record, there's a playback. And I just simply want to take a picture over here, so I'm going to walk over here by the table, make sure I'm in the right spot, right between the spots here, and look at the camera, smile. And got my shot. And so, my shot has been recorded to the camera and I should be able to see it if I come back. Let's see. Yeah, so let's see if I can see it here. Playback mode. Oh, do I have to disconnect? No. Let me just playback down here. And so, I can playback images that are on the camera. I can check this one off as one I want, and I want to import that one. And so, now it's downloading the image from the camera to the phone, and hopefully, it's here. So I'm going to exit out of the whole FUJI system. I'm going to go into my photos. And let me cancel that. And let me go back to my photos here, and hopefully, here it is, right there there at the end. So, there's my photo, and now, I can post away as need be. So, it's a very quick and easy system to use. Encourage you to get in there and play around with it. You can use this to get the camera in a lot of different creative places, and it's just... I think it's a great feature, and I'm glad it's on so many different cameras these days. So, that is your FUJI remote option. And we're going to see this again in the playback menu, so don't be surprised when I say deja vu.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Fuji X-T20 Recommended Settings

Ratings and Reviews

James Beaumont
 

Excellent class, well structured and easy to follow. Although following this class to get to grips with my Fujifilm X-T30, the functions and menus are near identical, so this class is perfect. As a relative newcomer to photography, the explanations are incredibly helpful and helped me to gain confidence in operating my camera. I am also following John Greengo's Fundamentals class and couldn't recommend him highly enough.

Jenny Mummert
 

This was just what I needed to become more familiar with my xT30...cousin to xT20. Fast start is right. My mind is spinning with information, but that's OK. Very useful information here and valuable handout. Instructor is so knowledgeable and explains things well. I enjoyed his photography 101 course as well. Would also love to have a fast start guide for the Ricoh III. PRETTY PLEASE.

Paul Reid
 

Excellent classes. Well structured. Easy to follow. Great explanations and practical tips. I've learned so much about my Fuji X-T20 since watching!

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