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Button Layout: Top Deck

Lesson 2 from: Fujifilm X-E1 & X-E2 Fast Start

John Greengo

Button Layout: Top Deck

Lesson 2 from: Fujifilm X-E1 & X-E2 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

2. Button Layout: Top Deck

Lesson Info

Button Layout: Top Deck

Every time you turn, the camera on the camera goes through an ultrasonic vibrations sensor cleaning system it vibrates at get this eighty thousand times a second to try to knock dust off the sensor. And, you know, I'm thinking right now that I've had these cameras combined total for about twelve months, and I don't know that I've had to seek to clean the sense of once in that time, so it seemed to do a very good job, and one of the issues is that when you take the lens off, the sensor is totally exposed, there's no mere or shut or covering it up, and they've done a very good job being able to keep the dust automatically off the sensor. But back to the basic controls, the dial on the back of the camera is called the command. I'll I will sometimes refer to it as the back dial as there is no other back dial on the back side of the camera, but that is officially the command dial. There is a selector, which I will sometimes forget the name of and call it the up down four way mouse on the ba...

ck of the camera. This is going to be used for navigating through the menu system as well as making selections in some of the menu of options as we go through it. The button right in the middle will give you access to the menu and it's also the ok button it's kind of the confirmation button when you have made a selection so now that you know those we can get started and we're going to start on the top and just work our way around so the camera's shutter release is of course necessary for focusing for me tearing and for taking the picture when you press halfway down, you should get comfortable pressing halfway down and not fully taking a picture which is going to activate the meeting system and the auto focus system you'll generally wanted press down lightly, get it focused and then press all the way down to take the picture. But resting halfway down on the focusing is what I am doing a lot of the time that my camera is from my hand is on the camp now note that when you do press halfway down on the shutter release here it does stop the aperture down so that you can see the depth of field that you will be getting in the final image. So if you haven't stopped down to f twenty two, you'll be able to see that through the viewfinder now the shutter release on this is kind of unusual it actually takes the good old standard threaded cable release and so if you haven't if you're not familiar with these young kids, this is a mechanical cable release reminds me very much of the brakes on my bicycle and it's got a cable that we just simply push and it pushes a nice little pin out and that's going to fire the shutter and it's got a little lock mechanism on this so that I can see if I could do this properly lock it in so that I can do a bulb exposure if I want to leave it turned on and the batteries in this never wear out it's incredible ahs long as you have a little bit of energy and your finger, you're going to have power and your cable release and I'll let you know out there that there are cheap cable releases and there's good cable releases and back when I was shooting a lot of medium format, I I thought it was kind of ridiculous that anyone would pay one hundred dollars for a cable release, but yes, you can spend one hundred dollars on the cable release this one is probably a fifty dollars cable release, but on the cheaper ones what will happen is as you get him bound up a little bit title like this, they just won't work and the cable will start framed and they'll wear out but you can get him is cheapest just a few dollars, but if it's going to be something you use a lot nice to get a good cable released they don't tend to wear out or get outdated technology wise anytime soon. All right, on the top of the camera, we're going go through exposure control first controlling the shutter speeds it's pretty obvious there's a big old shutter speed dial on the top, you can set it to any one of the settings from four to four thousand, and this is your shutter speed in a fraction of a second, so four thousand is, of course, one four thousandth of a second on down to four seconds now they've added onto the sixty to one eightieth, which is a flash sink mode, and so if you are using flash and you want to get it at a high but safe flash sink mode, you can set it to one eighty it's not on the x one. There is an a setting that you could move it to where you can let the camera decide what shutter speed in order for you to choose. Now one of the things that we lost when we went to a mechanical shutter speed on the top is the third stops. If you want to get very precise in between these, you're going to go to the selector in the back of the camera and you can go to any shutter speed and you can go up or down well I can't say any center speaking you can't go up from four thousand but you could go up or down from most any of them excluding four thousand or one eighty eighth of a second to get those third stops to be very very precise on the shutter speeds if you need to once you need to go longer than that you will go down to t which stands for time in which case you have to go exclusively to the selector in order to do that so if you want to set a shutter speed of two seconds you said it t and then use the selector in the back to go left and right until you get to two full seconds and of course everything from one seconds and longer will have the little quotation mark afterwards to indicate that it is a full second now if you want to go even longer than thirty seconds you can do that by putting the camera in the bulb mode and in which case you would need to use the cable release and a stopwatch and so we'll be doing a siri's of in class demo so let me just do my first demo on and so what we're going to do on this is going to show you the bold mode you know we have there we go one of the cameras so I would switch the camera all the way down to the bulb mode and then I would stick the cable release in and screw it, and and then I would basically hold down and the shutter would stay open as long as I pressed down on the shed a release and it helps if I put it all the way in v rather than in t there we go so we can see accounting and I can leave this hell down. I could lock it in if I want, so we'll turn it off and it's going to go through processing for another twelve seconds so that's how you would set it up for bulb or for long exposures. Now the only difference between the x e one and the extra two in this regard is theoden shin of the one, eighty eighth of a second, and the fact that they move the a a few millimeters away from four thousand just to have a little bit greater separation between those and so that's, the minor little difference between the one and the two okay, for controlling the apertures on the side of the camera, you're going to have a little switch that can go between manual control and auto control, so it's pretty simple to flip that switch back and for it now you do have to pay attention as to what lends you have there are our lenses, and I'm going to talk more about the len's designations, but many of the lenses are are which means they have a ring for controlling the aperture on them. Now some of the lenses which I really like having actual aperture indication on it. So on my eighteen to fifty five there's no indication it's just elektronik on the x see one. I have a fifty millimeter or excuse me, a thirty five millimetre lands, which has it indicated I really like these that have the actual indication because you can see where the aperture is, even if the camera is turned off, the other elektronik apertures, they work the same it's. Just you have to look in the display to see where the aperture is. Now there are some cameras or some lenses, I should say that are known as x c lenses, and they do not have aperture control on the lens itself. You have to do that on the camera with that rear controlled ill on the back of the camera. And so the x c lenses will not have the ring on it, and you'll just be controlling it with the dial on the back of the camera. And so you can set the shutter speed or the aperture in manual or automatic, or mix and match him as much as you like the program mode on many cameras, you would need to put your camera in a in both places both the shutter speed and on the lens itself so it's pretty simple so it's that so that is called program, so you simply flipped the switch on the lands over two a and then on your shutter speed, flip it over today in your cameras and automatic control and your cameras going to figure out shutter speeds and apertures and if you just want to get a quick, simple basic shot, this is the fastest way to do it. Now, if you do move these both into the a setting, you could do something called program shift by using the tabs on the back of the camera selector on the back of the camera and you can choose shutter speeds or apertures. There are a little different than the standard chosen ones for you, and one of the things you'll notice in the camera is the coloring of the shutter speeds and apertures white is kind of the normal pre set this is what you get setting and then if you change it it's going to go to yellow to let you know that you've altered the settings and if it's in the red there's a warning that probably means you don't have enough light or possibly you have too much light for any given setting that you might have, so pay attention to those colors because they'll keep you alert has to where you are so you should feel perfectly comfortable in the yellow make sure that you have an appropriate shutter, speed it for hand holding the camera all right? So if you are in program or shutter priority or aperture priorities of what this basically means is if you have either the aperture control or the shutter speed control in a for one or both of them, one of the things that you can also do is exposure compensation and what this does is it allows you to take a picture that is darker or lighter, then what the cameras meter is recommending for you. And so if your picture comes out a little too light or a little too dark and you just want to simply adjust it it's that very simple manual control right on the top of the camera with that dial now it is right up there on the edge of the camera. It could be kind of easy to get bumped, so do pay attention and generally try to keep this on zero unless you are specifically using it someplace else. When you look at it in the viewfinder or the lcd, you're going to see a little chart on the left hand side as you dial it down to minus three or you dial it up two plus three and you will see right in camera your images getting bright, brighter or darker realize that your camera thinks everything is eighteen percent gray and there are many cases where you're going to need to dial this up a little bit or dialect down a little bit between the xy one in the to the xy one goes to two stops and the xy two goes to three stops ah little bit of an improvement but to be honest with you I don't know that I have ever shot a picture atmore than plus two or more than minus two so the xy one is in a fine place for me in that regard but just be aware if it is knocked off any place other than zero now if you want to control the camera manually and I know a lot of people who use fuji's who liked to control it manually you're going to want to flip the switch on the lens over to the manual control aperture away from the a you're going to make your controls on the aperture ring right on the lands for most lenses and then you're going to turn your shutter speed over into the shutter speed range and what a lot of people will do is they'll adjust what aperture they want and then they'll turn the shutter speed dial until the light meter is indicated that it's a normal exposure which is generally going to be towards zero are pretty near zero and so that's the way you work with the camera manually next up on the top of the camera is the function button and with the new xy two they've added the words wifi on there but it's sze completely an option this is the first button on the camera that you get to control what is in there and so the function on this camera can be any one of the featured features that you see listed here there's a lot of different options that depends on what is most important to you. You know as we go through this class I realized that a lot of you are gonna want to jump ahead and make adjustments so throughout this class I'm going to give you a bunch of little shortcuts and you can see that there is one for the xy one and there's one for the xy two so just pay attention to what camera you have the one being in blue one being in red and so if you want to jump ahead in the menu and make this setting you can stop the video, look at the little shortcut and go ahead and make that setting adjustment and so he's you can see between the one and two they have moved where these function controls are in the camera but you can jump ahead and go in and set whatever setting you want in there now what it kind of comes as default for the xy two is a comes to fall as a wife I which is why they listed wifi there? Frankly, that bothers me because wifi is important but it's not the most important thing I prefer to have ice so in that button because it's nice and quick and easy to get to but let's talk for a little bit about wifi so the xy one does not do wifi they've added wifi into the sea two it is somewhat limited you might say you can view images on your smartphone and you can download images to your smartphone you do need to pick up the fuji film camera application now if you hang out with a lot of friends who you want to send pictures to, they can get the fuji film photo receiver and this has less control. They can't quite get into your camera to control it the way you can with the fuji camera application, but that would be for friends that you could send images directly to from your camera. And if you want to do an auto save option on your computer, there is a auto save thing that you can download from fuji. I haven't played around with this third one I'm more than happy just taking the memory card out of the camera and putting it into my card reader or directly into my computer and you can find all of these at the places that you find aps so let's go through a little bit about how this wifi works and we're going to do a live demo here much to the chagrin of the creative life folks I have my phone right here ready to receive a call I've actually put it into a safety melt so it won't receive calls and let me just do this on screen on the keynote and then I'll run through it in real life and I'll just let you know right now that wifi does not like me and it likes to perplex me so it's likely not to work but we'll give it a try so what we'll do is we'll need to start up the wifi system on the camera we're going to need to go over to the phone and choose the fujifilm wifi signal and then we're going to need to open up the fuji app which I have already downloaded and once we get in there we can receive an image so we can basically go to the camera and push an image to the phone or we can go to the phone and just browse the images we've already taken on the camera we can also do geo tagging and weaken tell a friend that we have an image so let's go to the cameras and I got my food g exceed two let me turn this on we turn this around so I'm going to go into the menu system and I'm going to go through the full menu system later, I'm just going to go straight to the wireless communication right now and now I'm going to go to my phone turned my phone on, and I need to go to my settings and I need to find the wifi system for fuji now. It's already picked food because I was playing around before class today, so that's the fuji system, we have that selected now I need to get out of here and go in and open up the fuji application him. We'll go ahead and open that up and let's see if we can browse the images on the camera and it looks like we're getting some connections and holy smokes, folks, it worked so now on my phone, I can see images that I took with just before class started so let's, take a look and see actually going to go into the magnify mode and irritatingly, this doesn't work in horizontal format, so I can't see this image larger and I can't swipe back and forth, so I got to use the arrow to go back to a previous image. And so I need to scroll through my images here and I don't have that many images let's see, let me take the picture of the lenses and let's import this so it's going from my phone to my camera the image has been saved, I'm going to jump out of the fuji application and I'm going to go over to my photos. I don't keep a lot of photos on my phone folks so here's our picture there it is large now this is working and I can zoom in and I can see my image is large and move around. And so if I want now, I can take this and I could email at facebook at twitter it send it off from here and so it's basically just for downloading images and I know your question for everybody no, I cannot shoot pictures with my phone of what my cameras pointed out and I am told or I have read I should say that fuji is looking at adding that feature into future upgrades to the camera and so that's one of the reasons to always check for the upgrade because I would love to be able to have my camera set up in one location and then come over makes setting controls and shoot the picture at the same time and I believe that will be an option at some point in the future of the xy two that is not possible in the xy one it does not have a wifi system built into it, so that will never be able to be added to that camera but with the exit to downloading pushing images from the camera to the phone you can do that now cross your fingers knock on wood I got a nice wood desk here they will be able to shoot images remote control captured in the future so jim I don't know is there by chance any questions we have on the wifi settings of the camera or anything up to this point you know so far we're in pretty good shape john I know we have so much to cover today aa lot of folks are asking about the basic comparisons between the xy one in the xy two but I know you'll sort of be talking about that incrementally yeah throughout the day yeah so as we as we go through the day I the class is mostly centered on the xy two so if you haven't xy one was that you gotta pay extra attention because there's little annotations like the xy one doesn't have this uh the image quality is the same between the two they've added to feel nice little things to the exit to I'll be honest with you folks so if I had an xy one I would probably not upgrade to the xy two unless there was something that I really used a lot and I think for most of the type of picture taking that you take with this it's not a big enough difference from most people the upgrade xy two is a better camera flat out that's the truth, but it's not not that much better in my opinion. Okay, moving back onto the camera itself so the function button you can have that set up as a direct linked to your wife. Fine, but I think it's much more valuable having that go to your eyes. So setting now even shorter of a shortcut, if that is possible is that if you hold down on the function button for two full seconds, it will automatically kick you into the option of selecting what you want to have programmed in here. So this is one of those secret function controls on the camera. Just hold it for two seconds and you can re program it to do something else which I think is a great little way that it works. So many people do like setting this up as I s o, so let's, just talk for a moment about s so they have made some changes in this since the earlier firmware versions with both the xy one and the xy two. So if you don't have the latest from where you may be saying what I don't see all these options in here, you got to get the new firmware for so vucci is a little frustrating to me. Because they have ice owes that range from two hundred to sixty, four hundred if you are in raw. But if you were in j peg, you can go to a low setting of one hundred or high settings of twelve thousand and twenty five thousand. But you can on ly get to those high and low settings. If you are shooting j peg images, one of the additions that they made in the firmware upgrades is in auto eso control. This is where you get to control the default sensitivity. So this is the sensitivity that it wants to start working at. And for most people, you're going to want to leave this at two hundred. The maximum sensitivity is where you want to draw the line. How high of ice. So do you want to let it go to this is going to depend on your needs. Many people is going to choose somewhere between sixteen and sixty four hundred mode. Maybe most importantly, is the minimum shutter speed on option. This is how low of shutter speed will the camera use before it starts bumping up the I s o and you need to assess how steady you can hold your camera, you need to assess whether your images are stabilized and what focal inc they are. And so this you might have anywhere from one sixteenth of a second down teoh one fifteenth of a second. To be honest with you with stabilization built into these some of the lenses it's a really good stabilization system and I have gotten sharp pictures down to one second, not on any sort of consistent basis a little bit more consistent around an eighth of a second, but with the stabilization you can hold these cameras very, very, very still under low lights. So did a little test on the ice, so just to show you a quick little view of what it looks like, so I shot my standard little test scene and to start with here this is a raw crop and two for eight all look fantastic. We start to lose things a little at sixteen get it does get a little chunky at sixty four and thirty two, so I try to stay at sixteen hundred and lower. I still can throw this through a little bit of noise, clean up and fix some of these issues. The camera shoots j pegs with a little bit wider range. I'll show you just the higher ends in this case, even sixty four hundred looks pretty good because they do a little bit of processing on these j picks clearly twelve thousand twenty five thousand are only for extreme emergencies, you might say but up to sixty four hundred looks pretty good in j pegs having said that, I still think that I could take a sixty four hundred raw image and make it better than the sixty, four hundred j pink so in no way am I saying that jay pegs our long term better than rob straight out of the camera. They do look pretty good for people who need a quicker, faster workflow rather than going through the ross, which we will talk more about as we get into the class and so I normally don't use auto I so control I like having the controls right there on that function button at my fingertips but it does have pretty fine tune control so make sure you have the latest software in order to do this if you have an extreme one, you do need to have firmware upgrade to point one in order to get to this next up just taken a tour around the camera a couple little holes in the top of the camera that is for the microphone stereo microphone in there the little symbol that looks like saturn up there that is where the focal plane is in the sensor. If you ever needed to measure say if you were using your camera for film making or macro photography and you need to measure the distance to the sensor that is where the sensor is in the camera we have a built in pop up flash and we have our ad on hot shoe. We're going to talk about that more in just a moment. And something you may have noticed about my exceed two on the tripod over here is that I have a little addition. This is a non fuji accessory. This is a thumbs up little gripper on the camera and it's, just this little metal piece and it's got a couple of little rubber bumpers on it. It slides into the hot shoe and rests right up against the camera and provides a very nice rest for the thumb. And I have found it kind of addicting to use its it's got this really nice grip on the camera. And so if you want to hold the camera, it holds really quite nicely. I also have the additional grip I'll talk about in just a moment now these air not cheap, they tend to be fairly expensive. You can find them at match technical and they they are different for each camera because of the the distance on the back and exactly where they put the rubber seals. There are a little different. They make him for a lot of like asses, and I think some olympus and pretty much all the fugees it's the same one for the fuji xy one in the two, but I'll tell you the truth is, is that I like it a lot, it's not perfect, and the problem is, is that I do something called back button, auto focusing and for focusing, I like to use the a f l button and we'll get to this in due time, folks. But normally without it, I would just kind of rule my thumb over and focus with it, and with this on there, I got to go all the way around the end of it over to focusing so it's a little bit more effort to go into the focusing. I got to go all the way around the end of it, but it does provide a really, really sure grip, and I sometimes I use my camera without a tripod with without a strap, and it just gives me a very good grip on it. So that's, one of the better ones, I think there are some cheap knock offs on ebay and various other places that you can get for maybe fifteen or twenty bucks, and they might be pretty good. The workmanship on this one's quite nice, and I've noticed recently, you know, if you guys consume in really close, I'm starting to get some brass ing on this. And that's just so cool, it's showing the brass come through and it's starting to look like a well worn camera because the cameras and perfect new shape, but I've been using it to fear a bit, but I'm starting to get this little glimmers of gold coming through technically brass, but nice look to it. I think we have a question in class. I have used the lens mate version, I have not used the lens. Me do you have the leads may know I'm trying to find out which one I would. Which one you haven't committed a herd of lens made, but I haven't had a chance to use it. I like having something on there, and so I think anything is better than nothing as to which one's better. You'd have to put him in your hand to know for sure. So it does make big a bit of a different let you try it out. Okay, great time and you, khun you, we'll get your opinion on this, okay, thank you.

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.

Student Work

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