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Button Layout: Back Side Part 1

Lesson 3 from: Fujifilm X-E1 & X-E2 Fast Start

John Greengo

Button Layout: Back Side Part 1

Lesson 3 from: Fujifilm X-E1 & X-E2 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

3. Button Layout: Back Side Part 1

Lesson Info

Button Layout: Back Side Part 1

We're going to go into the back side of the camera, we got the top covered it's pretty quick and easy, so we obviously have the flash, but I'm not a big fan of the little on camera flashes, but it does tuck away into a very small little area here, so let's talk a little bit about the whole flash thing. There is the option of auto flash, which will fire win and where necessary way have a slow synchro option, at least in the program and aperture priority modes, where it will use a slow shutter speed to let in the background light potentially to blur the background. If you would like to do that, there is the option of hooking this up two other fujii flashes and having this as a commander, so it triggers other flashes that you could be firing off camera, which will get you much better lighting. You also have the option of doing second curtain sink, and this is essentially a slow curtain, with the flash triggering at the tail end of the shutter speed rather than at the front end, which coul...

d be very good for special effects type shots. You can also force the flash on so that if it's normally fairly bright out and it wouldn't need the flash and you want a little kicker light in there, it will just go on any time you pop it up, which is the way I prefer to use it and I haven't completely figured out why you'd want to do this but you could suppress the flash even though it's in the upper position normally if you don't want the flash you would just push it down but there might be a instance where you need to have it up but you don't want the flash to fire and so that's a very, very recent upgrade to the firm where on this camera now there is also an option for red eye removal and it works a little bit differently between the sexy one and the exit to the sexy one system uses a pre flash systems what fires a flash ahead of the picture and then takes the picture now what it does with the j peg images on the xy one is it also does a digital removal of red eye if it khun see it and understand it within their on the x see to it does a digital removal of it so it the xy two does not have the pre flash would bothers me on ly in that it delays the taking of the picture by a second or two it gives your subject of warning that the picture is going to be taken and with certain types of creatures like kids and animals they get confused they blink their eyes, they churn away, and you miss the really good moment. And so for capturing great moments, you are gonna want to turn off the red eye removal it's, so easy to fix red eye in post in a variety of programs that I would highly recommend not using red eye reduction, but that's kind of a personal choice on my part. Now the camera has a sink speed of one hundred eightieth. We saw that on the fuji xy two, but if you set your camera to one to fifty of the second, the camera will work just fine with the built in flash. I have not tested it with other flashes, but you, khun sink at one two fiftieth of a second, and I have noticed no problems at all. Officially, you're only allowed to do it up at one eightieth, but this is one of the first cameras I have seen in more than twenty years where you can set the wrong shutter speed if you set this to fire flash at five hundredth of a second, in fact, let's, just do a little demo here. I'm gonna pop up the flash, and we're going to take a picture of the wall here, and I'm going to fire this at one five hundredth of a second, and then I set a little high are high rise so just so that this works out properly and let's take a look at our image and hopefully they can see this on the back so we turn off some of this information so you can see the flash was obstructed on the bottom half of the image by the shed a release or by the shutter kurt let me go to a thousandth of a second and what's going to happen here is probably just the top is going to be up just the top got the flash and just to prove my point even further I'm going to go to two thousand which might end up being totally black no we got just that sliver along the top now I'll come down to one eighty eighth of a second so this is where it's supposed to be and we play back so nice clean no shower curtains and I'm going to go up to two fiftieth of a second to prove my point and play this back and although this is the bring up a little bit of information that I can prove to you here were at one two fiftieth in one one eighty and there is no difference between them as far as the coverage of the flash so you can fire it to fifty if I don't know why they gave it the one eightieth it might be because if you use they ad on flashes they're at a slightly different synchronization or a different speed, but with both cameras you can fire seemingly a to fiftieth one to fiftieth of a second and not have a problem. Let's, touch on what those other flashes that air out there, you're gonna have a tough time buying this flash. This is a flash that gets supplied with the new fuji x t one and yes, I will be doing a class on the x team one, probably later this summer, but that gets supplied with it. You might find it after market. You should be able to just plug it right into the top of the camera. It's not going to do much for you because it's about the same power as the built in flash for kind of older generation fuji's, they made an e f twenty, which is probably two or three times more powerful than the built in flash. They have a much more powerful f forty too much probably about three it's a two, two and a half times as powerful as the e of twenty. So if you needed a lot of power, this is the most powerful flash that fuji makes that would work fully automatically on the x see one in the exit, too designed form or the x pro one was this new e f x flashed the x twenty and so this will be a couple times more powerful than the built in flash and so if you wanted more flash but you wanted to keep it small and fit it right on the camera, I would look pretty closely at the x twenty. To be honest with you, this is a this is a weak link in the food system. They don't have aa lot of flashes available, and I suspect that they will address this in the upcoming years as their ex system kind of fills out, you might say, but all of them will work, they can work automatically. Some of them can work manually, but most of them are just automatically so. That's some of the flash features features will be going in to some of the menu items on how to select these flash settings, because I kind of just gave you a hint. This is what it can do, but I didn't tell you how to do it. This is on purpose, folks. We will get to that in due time. Jim, do we have a question? Yes, sir. We dio this came in from bill in boca. One of our regulars saying, do you feel that the xy two is an adequate camera to do studio photography with andi? Are there any specific considerations or modifications to do so properly? Studio photography I haven't had a chance to do studio photography maybe did a little product photography with it, but I would say that you it is capable I would think so I think that you need to kind of dial in the focusing system, how it works, and this is one of things areas that I've had a little bit of frustration because there's a number of options where you have focused magnification, where magnifies the image or you have focused speaking, I'm going to explain all of this in due time, but you need to be able to figure out how to manually or auto focus your camera because the autofocus system on it is a little different than the systems that a lot of us have come from from nikon and cannon. And so once you can get your focusing system dialed in, you should be fine now, there's some people who just aren't going to like the way it works and they're going to get a little frustrated, other people are going to be able to adapt and be totally fine with it, but I would think that other than that, yeah, image quality is gonna be great on it, okay, moving forward, we need to go side by side xy one xy two they've decided to move a lot of buttons around, which made this class very challenging to make so first off there are function buns. We talked about one of these before ah function button is a button that you can re program to do almost whatever you want on the x see won the a f button over on the lower left side is re programmable. As is the downward button on the little selector on the back of the camera they've decided to adm or function buttons to the xy two so the downward button which kind of by default is thie auto focus area can be reprogrammed for something else. The a f button has been relabeled the function to button, and you can set that up however you want, you can also reprogrammed the a button for auto exposure for changing the exposure meter and so that along with the function button on the top, gives you four different controllable buttons that you can change on the xy two as opposed to the three on the sexy one. Now, on the xy one, they have a combined auto exposure lock and auto focus lock button and what they've diet decided to do on the xy two was split those out so that you can have two separate buttons for controlling the focusing lock or the exposure lock on the camera. Now the cuban, which is the quick menu access on the xy one had to get relocated into what was the view mode button and so what happened with the x e too is that we gained a button and we lost a button. So we've separated the a e, l and the nfl button. But that forced us to lose the view mode button which controls what happens between the viewfinder and the lcd. And unfortunately for the xy two users, you would then have to dive into the menu if you want to set up the viewfinders a little differently from time to time. And I found this very, very frustrating until the latest firmware release, which allows you to program that into one of the function buttons, and it is something that can be very frustrating to switch back and forth between. So I have a program that in into one of the, uh I think the function number two button on my camera because it's something pretty important that I like to change around quite a bit. But that's. One of the great things about these function buttons is that you are able to re program the camera so that it's good for what you like to d'oh so that's some of the button layout difference. And so if you have an extreme one, just be aware that buttons maybe in a different spot on your camera. One of the differences between the two cameras is that they increase the resolution of the lcd on the back of the camera by quite a bit they kind of brought it up to modern standards it's just going to help you look at your image is a little bit more clearly it's not a make or break, but I definitely prefer the higher resolution they've also changed the size of the monitor from two point eight to three point two inches and there's going to be a subtle little difference in the way the information is displayed because they actually changed the aspect ratio as well. One of the other differences is while the elektronik viewfinder has the same number of pixels in it they have read they have changed the refresh rate as to how fast the images is refreshed and there's a lot of issues involved with the elektronik you finder first and foremost is probably resolution there's also contrast which they don't have a specific number on there's the size of the viewfinder which isn't exactly clear looks to be very good in the fuji sixty one much bigger viewfinder there is the refresh rate how fast it can refresh and and show what this sensor is actually getting and then there's the frames per second that it's showing it to you and so the twenty frames per second can seem a little jerky, especially as you're panning back and forth with action the sixty frames per second is going to be much better anytime you're panning the camera are shooting action and shooting action is a bit of a weak point on the fuji, so if you're going to do sports photography, I don't know that these are the best cameras they can't be done and I've shot boxing and cars, driving up and down the street and other types of sports with it, but it could be a little challenging because that elektronik viewfinder is not quite the same thing is an optical viewfinder of an slr as far as the viewfinder on the camera there is also a dye achter on the left hand side. This is to adjust the viewfinder for eurovision it has nothing to do with final focus of the image, but just adjust the dye achter so that you can see the viewfinder clearly and you can read any sort of text or information that is going on in there. These viewfinders also have a nice sensors so that as you switch from the lcd monitor with the camera held at a distance from your eyes and as you get up close to your eyes that automatically switches over to the v f. Now this could be controlled by the vue mode button on the x see one or if you dive into the menu system on the exit too, you can choose between just having the lcd on just having the e v f on or having the eye sensor go back and forth between the two the problem with the x one is that if you put it in the ice sensor mode or if you put it excuse me in the e v f mode the elektronik viewfinders turned on all the time and as you take the camera away from your eye and perhaps you swing the camera over your shoulder and you walk down the street, the e v f is still turned on because the cameras against your side and that's drawing and wasting battery power so on the new xy two they've added a new e v f plus I sensor mode, which means that it's on lee going to turn on when it's up against your eye so you do have to be a little bit careful if you're going to hang the camera over your neck or over your shoulder because the eye center will be blocked by your body but if you're so it's looking for anything that's right up next to the camera but if the cameras on a tripod it'll onley, turn on when your eyes up to it so my preference is either to leave the camera in the ice sensor mode or the e v f plus license or mode depending on which camera that you were using now the way that this information is presented to you you've got a few options here the standard view is going to show you shutter speeds apertures down along the bottom along with focusing and exposure along the left hand side, there is a custom mode where you get to go choose if you want to have the rule of thirds built in there whether you want to have your history, graham, what type of focusing scales you want to have in there? There is a detailed view which does not show you an image and just show you shows you detailed information, which is what I like a lot, because I don't use the camera held out away from me. I use it up to my eye and the xy two has a new version, which is all the information off, and it has to do slightly with a different aspect ratio they're able to show you information below it, but you can just turn off all the information so that you're just looking at your image and I'm always in a little bit of conflict on this because part of me wants to have the biggest image possible, but I also hate things in front of my image. I want to be able to see my image corner to corner for compositional reasons, and so I wish they would design these cameras so that we can see her image nice and large and have our information off to the sides now that display button does something unique for all u x c one users if you hold that button in for about two seconds, what it's going to do is it's going to put your camera into a silent mode? It's so it's one of these little secret operations just press and hold it for about two seconds and it goes into this silent mode, which means the flash won't fire. There won't be any beeps thee autofocus light won't come on, it goes into stealth mode, and then you would press it in two seconds to come back out. Now there is a stealth mode on the x see to you just got to get into the menu system in order to do it, so be aware for the xy one users that's out there, and so for the xy two, you've got to jump in to set up menu number one in order to turn on that silent mode, and I don't recommend the silent mode, and I will explain that later in the class, when we get into the menu section, I like the concept of it. I love stealth, I just don't like this the silent mode. Ok, next, the display system. By pressing the display, you're going to be able to change what you see and how you see it s o in the back of the camera, one option is just good old information and it's going to show you you're shooting information. It's going to tell you about which focusing mode you have in which will get into explain a little bit more later it's going to show your exposure indicator over on the left hand side any special mode that you might have your camera and either dealing with focusing or macro or the self time remote? And then I'm not going to go into all of these but there's a whole bunch of other general settings on your camera that are going to control whether something has turned off for the way that is particularly set and so there's no image on the back here camera just this information I think this is one of the most useful ones because I think the camera is best used with it held up to the I and this is what would appear on the back of the camera if you do want to have the image on the back of the camera, the standard display is going to show you your image it's going to show you you're focusing area and because of the shape of the lcd on the back of the camera it's able to show you the shooting mode down below and not have it interfere with the actual image area once again the colors that you're going to see the teal colored means that you are manually setting something on the camera white means that you have something automatically set shutter speeds or apertures yellow means you've altered it. We saw this in the program setting, where the camera will choose a shutter speed in aperture, but you can adjust it with the selector on the back of the camera or read if you are out of area, you have gone beyond what the camera can handle. You've chosen a shutter speed too fast in the camera doesn't have an aperture to choose from, for instance, and so we'll also have for the xy two users, a little green dot in the lower left hand corner, just as a visual confirmation that your subject is in focus, I much preferred this over the little beep beep chirp chirp that a lot of cameras will give you, as I say, I like that stealth mode, being quiet and unobtrusive with the camera. Now, between the xy one in the xy two, they made a larger size screen, and they also change the shape of the screen, eh? So it's a little different. And so with the xy one, they're able to put that information down below the image without it interfering it the xy two it does interfere, so they've added a new mode where you can turn that information off, and at first I thought, well. I like this because I get to see my image, but now I can't see what shutter speed anapa try man, but actually when you put it in this mode, what happens is that when you press lightly down on the shutter release, you can briefly see your shutter speed aperture and iess so information so I very much like the offsetting for the xy two camera, so back on the displays, the final one is the custom one and you get to go in and choose how much stuff you want over laid on your camera so one of my favorites and fuji did a great implementation and this has changed in firmware upgrades, so it may look differently if you do not have current for firmware running on your cameras, but I've always wanted a camera that showed me in the viewfinder where I was focusing and how much depth of field so as we change where we're focused, you can actually see the depth of field on the scale, grow and retract depending on where you are and what aperture you've chosen very helpful guide and then along the top you're going to have all these sorts of other little warnings a lot of these cannot be controlled as to whether they're in the viewfinder some of them were just inherently there, but there's a lot of different stuff that you can choose to have on top of your image and I all I can say is start with nothing and on lee add exactly what you really want to have on there because you can get your image to be very, very cluttered up. I love checking the history graham to see if I got the right exposure, but I just don't like the fact that it takes up so much space over my image I will typically leave that turned off one of the kind of fun little modes that it has is the elektronik level, which tells you if you've tilted the camera left or right and when it gets to be perfectly level, it will give you a nice green line. You know, if you want to control these, you will see these when we get into the menu system under the display customs setting, and you can check off all the items that you want displayed when you put your camera in the custom mode when you put your camera in the playback mode, there are additional options as well by hitting the display, but and so the information we have an information mode, which is going to give us the most pertinent information about the image the date, the time the file number, whether you shot raw or j peg, for instance, if you want to turn all that off and just look at the image on its own I like that one as well. Next one is the star rating system and I always thought this was a bit of a joke but it's sometimes helpful when you're trying to do a little in camera editing little pre post production you might say you khun rate your image is different stars and then if you want to see the history graham there is a history graham mode where you can see the detailed history graham about your subject if you don't know about history grams, I cover that in my fundamentals class it's a great way for checking exposure to make sure that you got the right exposure for a particular situation and so all of these air useful just be familiar with them by pressing the display button on the back of the camera so in the playback mon obviously hit the playback buttons so that you can play back an image we've just talked about hitting in the different display options. One of the additional things kind of hidden feature is that you can go up and down on the control the selector on the back of the camera to bring up or take down additional shooting data about how the camera was set up when you go left and right or using the command aisle in the back of the camera will change you from image to image you can also zoom in with the plus magnification and the minus magnification I'll do a live demo here in just a moment and another little secret control is if you just punch in on the dial on the back it's actually a button and a dial so you can push in on it and it will zoom to the focusing point that you were at and then finally you can throw your images in the trap now if you do have a movie that you have recorded and we'll talk more about movies in a little bit you can play your movies you can fast forward, you can rewind them and you can also control the volume on him, so I've already taken a few pictures, so let me just come over here to my xy two and I just want to show you some of the features so let's make sure the cameras turned on going to go into the playback mode and let's get to some more interesting pictures that we've taken and so we're playing back an image if we hit the display button you can see we can just kind of cycle through the different screen modes I'm going to turn this off and so back to claim out we can zoom in you see there's a little plus for zooming in, we can zoom in and then we can move around this image and I'm gonna come back, try this one here yeah one of the things that has frustrated me since day one on food on the x see one is that I did exactly what I just did and I thought to myself, but we didn't really get to zoom in very far did wait now we did it wrong again don't look, I'm going to make a secret little change here and ok, so we should be fine I'm going to take a picture generally take picture of you hopefully can we get a model release? Okay, I think by taking your picture, you have agreed to my model release okay, so there's a picture of jeb, and if we zoom in we're going in much, much closer right now then we did on the previous image, and the reason is is if you select law on ly on your camera, it won't allow you to zoom in, but about halfway you have to have a j peg set in order to zoom all the way in in the playback mode, and I find this really frustrating because when we get to it, I normally recommend shooting and just raw. I like getting the raw images, but because of this reason it's the first time I've ever shot raw plus j peg just so that I could get this feature toe work so that I could actually zoom in and check focus and so once again we'll take this image we can zoom in now we consume in nice and close and we can pan around the image you can see how I'm using the controller to go left and right, but if we go back all the way out remember the secret shortcut button was the dial up here if we punch in on this, it immediately shows you exactly where I focused and so I'm doing is I'm going to go to another let's go to some other images that I shot so right here I just punch in you can see exactly where I was focusing we go left and right punch in we can move it around to see how sharp the focus is and so that's one of my favorite features is is the punch in just to see how sharp we're doing by going in and out now I did have a video here so let's play the video clips totally hit the wrong button okay, so here's our video and so we composite weaken rewind it, we can fast forward it and folks I'll let you know this is handheld this camera is incredibly good at the stabilisation let me do that again and so the video on this the stabilization mode when you're shooting video I mean it looks like a fluid head it is really quite nice and if while you're playing this video you want to control the volume. You would hit the ok in the bit in the middle, and you can go up and down on the volume. And so, any time you're playing, you want to adjust it. Just hit the ok button in the middle, and so let's. See, it takes care of pretty much all the options. And, of course, if you want to throw it away, you can throw it in the trash. So that's a little bit on the playback.

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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