Lessons
Class introduction
16:18 2Photo Basics
04:59 3Camera Controls: Basic Controls
04:22 4Exposure Controls: ISO & Shutter Speeds
10:32 5Exposure Controls: Aperture & Exposure Compensation
13:16 6Camera Controls: Top Deck
05:38 7Camera Controls: Drive Mode
19:00 8Back Side Controls: EVF & Screen
10:33Back Side Controls: Playback & Delete
07:51 10Back Side Controls: AE-L, AF-ON & Rear Command Dial
05:42 11Quick Menu: Top Row
11:59 12Quick Menu: 2nd Row
09:48 13Quick Menu: 3rd & 4th Rows
08:08 14Back Side Controls: Menu & Function Buttons
06:31 15Camera Controls: Left Side, Right Side & Bottom
09:38 16Camera Controls: Front & Lenses
12:58 17Menu Functions: Image Quality
15:19 18Menu Functions: Focus Settings
14:09 19Menu Functions: Shooting Setting Page 1
21:04 20Menu Functions: Shooting Setting Page 2
05:56 21Menu Functions: Flash Settings
05:55 22Menu Functions: Movie Settings
15:11 23Set Up: User & Sound Settings
04:23 24Set Up: Screen Settings
08:38 25Set Up: Button/Dial Settings
13:20 26Setup: Power Management & Save Data
04:38 27Setup: Connection Settings & My Menu
07:39 28Play Back Menu
08:21 29Camera Operation
12:56Lesson Info
Quick Menu: 3rd & 4th Rows
Working down to our next row. Highlight tone. This is, once again, this, pretty much it's, yeah, this entire row is for JPEG-only users, and so this is gonna control how your highlights are rendered, and so I'll show you some examples of that here in just a moment. Same thing with the shadow tone. You can make the shadows a little bit deeper or less deep. So let's take a look at an example of the highlight and shadow tones. And so highlights, if we're adding them, plus four, we're making them brighter. Notice how bright the sidewalk is when we go to plus four. And so a lotta times with these colors, you can see that blue, how close the blue sky is to the right edge of the frame is indicating how bright it is. If we pump this up to plus four, it's gonna make it very bright. If we do this on shadows, we can take the shadows and we can increase the shadows or we can decrease the shadows. And you can see when we do a plus four, we're crushing the shadows. We're making them very, very dark.
And so you have to be careful because plus two, minus two, it is completely different. In this case, it's exactly the opposite of the exposure compensation plus two and minus two. These are very different things. This is what are you doing with the shadows? Are you ligthening them up or are you making them more intense? And so this is something I don't usually play around with for color photographs, but I do like to play around with when it comes to black and white images. For the color, you can control the saturation of it. You can increase it or decrease the saturation. So here's an example, and you can see the red in the sky, how much more saturation you get when you pump it up to a plus four. And then finally, the sharpness can be controlled. And for those of you who are new to photography, you might be asking, well, wouldn't I always want my pictures as sharp as they can possibly be? Well, there's a downside to over-sharpening a photo in that you get halos around the edges 'cause it's increasing the edge detail. But let's go ahead and take a portion of an image and add a bunch of sharpness to it, and you can see that it does really make it a bit more contrasted when you look at it, and so it's another thing to experiment if you are playing around with the JPEG images. Working down to our fourth row of items in here. We have the self-timer, two-second self-timer, which is great for working off of a tripod where you don't want to move the camera when you're actually shooting, 10 seconds to get in the shots yourself. One of the little frustrations that I have with Fuji is that I use the self-timer a lot 'cause I'm working off of a tripod frequently, and whenever you turn the camera off, it resets the self-timer back to its off position. And so because I use the self-timer so much, I often program one of the function buttons to allow me to turn the self-timer on and off very, very quickly. Next up is face and eye detection on this. You can turn this on and off right here, and so you can choose to focus on faces or on eyes or particular eyes, left eye or right eye, and for portrait photography this can be very handy. Next option is flash. Now, the camera does not have built-in flash, so this item's gonna remain grayed out until you have a flash added onto the camera, and there is a lot of the very common settings that you are gonna find these days on most cameras that work with flash. Auto flash will fire whenever it needs it, and that'll be available in the program mode. TTL slow will allow you to work with slow shutter speeds so you can either blur the background or let in more light in the background to better balance your foreground and background subject. You can use the commander mode to use multiple flashes so that you can have light coming from many different directions to have a better lighting of your subject. You can do a second curtain sync which can have very interesting effects with subjects that are moving by synchronizing the flash with the closing curtain. Of course you can turn the flash off, and you can do TTL forced flash that fires even though it's bright enough it doesn't need a flash, but you wanna add it for the added effect that it would have. We do also have a couple of red-eye reduction options on the camera. There are two options. There is a pre-flash which will reduce it on the actual photograph, and then there is a removal which digitally removes it from the photograph. And so there'll be some more to talk about in here when we get into the flash settings on red-eye reduction and removal. Final item in the quick menu is the LCD brightness, which is just simply the brightness of the LCD on the back of the camera. Normally I would leave this at zero and that way you can judge the exposure of your final photograph by just looking at the back screen of the camera. However, under bright light conditions, you're probably gonna need to bump the brightness up a bit higher so that you can actually see the screen more easily, 'cause it can be very tough to compete with the sun. You may wanna set it lower if you're doing nighttime photography. The screen may be so bright it may be distracting or distorting your night vision of your own eyes looking out in the dark, and so that's the reason it's there, but most of the time you're gonna wanna leave it at zero. And once again, all of these features are available by touch. You can go in and adjust them as you saw earlier in the class. If you would like to reprogram this, you can press and hold the Q button for two seconds, navigate to the feature you want, press the okay button, and then select a new feature to go in that mode. The focus stick is gonna be used for a number of things. It's beyond just using it for moving the focusing point around. You can navigate through the menu, as well. Little shortcut on here is that you can press the focusing stick in for changing the focus point size by turning the dial on it, and you can also change the zone size, as well. And you can use it in the playback, as well, to activate a menu, and if you press and hold, you can reprogram it to lock it. And so let me do a little quick demo on this one right here. So let's get the camera turned on. And so if we press and hold the focus stick in, we can lock it if we want right here. And so when we, if we try to move the focusing point... Let me, so I'm gonna unlock it, press it on here, and let's make sure I have a focusing point that I can adjust here. Which, that I need to change to a smaller focusing point so we can see what's going on in here. So here we have a box, and I can just move the focusing point around. But let's say I wanna lock it in right there. I can go up here and I can lock it in, so now when I bump this, it doesn't move around at all. We do also have a middle setting on here. Let's move it down to here. I have to push it to unlock it. So now it doesn't work, but if I push it in, then I can move it around, and so it's kind of a set and lock mode so it doesn't move until I press it in. And so you get this by holding in by two seconds. Pressing in. That can't be activated. Press in for two seconds. Now I can reprogram it. Normally I like to leave it on 'cause it's not that hard... You don't bump it that often. So that's the controls on that little focus stick and another one of those little secret shortcuts.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Erik
I have been thinking about buying this camera. After watching this class I know that I have made the right decision. John is fantastic! Previously I have watched a random assortment of youtube videos by self-proclaimed experts. It turns out that many of the things that these so-called experts have said about this camera are simply wrong. John is the real deal. He goes in depth for every function and explains everything very clearly. His graphics are wonderful, he obviously spent a huge amount of time on preparation. If you have this camera and want to understand it better, or are thinking of buying it, I highly recommend this class which is taught by a true expert.
Mark Ballard
Well done! Worth every penny. Shined shoes too.
Mario Gravina
Student Work
Related Classes
Camera Guides