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Camera Controls: Back Side

Lesson 6 from: Fujifilm X-T3 Fast Start

John Greengo

Camera Controls: Back Side

Lesson 6 from: Fujifilm X-T3 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

6. Camera Controls: Back Side

In this lesson, John demonstrates how to access and configure controls in the electronic viewfinder and LCD touchscreen, as well as how to access and reprogram the auto exposure lock and auto focus lock.
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Lesson Info

Camera Controls: Back Side

So it is time to dive back into the camera and we're gonna be moving ourselves under the back side of the camera and looking at a number of those control. So let's do that now. So few options. Obviously, you have the big LCD on the back of the camera. We also have our electronic viewfinder, which has been upgraded. I think, once again, in this case with 3.7 million dot. So the view in this is a very comfortable, easy to seaview good magnification, pretty good refresh rate so you can track action and so forth with it. The Diop ter on this is on the top left. That's very important for controlling the focus in the Viewpoint Finder. So what you want to do is you want to look through the viewfinder. Don't worry about the image. You want to look at the information, the line at the bottom of the screen that's going to show you shutter speeds and apertures and then turn that dial to make sure it's in focus. And what you need to do is you need to pull that dial out away from the camera so that ...

you can turn it and then push it back in tow. Lock it in that position, which is something that I think all cameras should do. But extremely few of them actually work that matter. They usually just turned, and they always get bumped. And so this is one that is less likely than other cameras to get bumped. We have our rubber I cup, and there are additional and optional rubber I cups that you can get whether you want them larger or smaller and size. This is kind of the medium size one, but if you do need to replace the I cut because it does wear after a bit of time, you can get a replacement. I cup for that over on the side, not really visible from the back is the view mode, and this is going to control what you see and where you see it. And so let's go through the options. The first option is the eye sensor controlling where you see you either seating the viewfinder or on the LCD on the back of the camera, depending on if something is obstructing that I sensor now, it's possible that if your hand is real close to the camera that could trigger it so that you can only see the camera only see the image through the electronic viewfinder. Next up is the electronic viewfinder Onley, which means the E V F is turned on all the time. Or you could go to LCD all the time. And then there's a couple of kind of automatic ones Elektronik viewfinder. But it's on Lee, triggered by the eye sensor. And so what will typically happen in this case is the electronic viewfinder will only turn on when you hold it up to your eye, which is really good for a lot of different types of of situations. Then there is the eye sensor. Plus, you get images played back on the LCD screen on the back, so it works a bit more like traditional DSL ours, where you would look to the viewfinder, compose, take a picture and then hold it back so that you can look at look at the image on the back of the camera. That way you can actually look with both eyes or show it and share it with somebody else. And so that is all. Just by pressing the view mode button repeatedly to cycle through the different options, so the display button on the bottom back of the camera will control what you see. You'll either see information, different lines of information in there, and you compress that one repeatedly to cycle through different amounts of information. Looking in the viewfinder itself, there are lots of different options. So let me clarify what's going on in the viewfinder itself, so the viewfinder frame is approximately 100% accurate. I dont know that its pixel for pixel perfect, but it's very, very close. The focusing frame. You can use the little joystick on the back of the camera to navigate where that is throughout the frame, and you'll see a focus indicator down in the bottom left that will indicate that state of focus. Either the camera is actively seeking focus. It's been locked on its tracking a subject, or perhaps it failed in figuring it out. Or you might even have it in manual focus. There are optional grid lines that you can turn on that can help for composition reasons, and these were the grid nine, Grid 24 HD framing. Now to choose which one of these you want to see. You can go into the set up menu and select these guidelines, and you would go in. It's kind of a student two step process. The first thing is selecting which one of these three you like. The next option is to decide whether you wanna have that in the screen or not. There's a whole area in the set up menu, which is screen set up page two of three display custom setting, where you can pick and choose all the options that will be seen in the viewfinder. Next up is the Elektronik level. This is a pretty interesting way of determining that you have gotten a straight horizon. Anyone who flies planes will like one of these, I think, because it's very similar to some of their controls. And it will tell you if you're pitching forward as well or tilted upwards. And so the lines go green when you are correctly level, and this is once again something that you would turn off in the custom set up display. Next up is the exposure information along the bottom of the frame. This is the most critical exposure information that you're gonna need day today, very cleanly laid out, and so you can keep a good eye down there on your settings. And remember the colors that we talked about earlier as faras the blue, white and red, each having their own meeting, whether it's manual automatic or if there is a problem with that particular setting, it's something that you can't set or something that's causing an exposure problem. The exposure indicator over on the left hand side, of course, indicating what the overall exposure is. And that's just going to go up and down and so that you can literally be overexposed and under exposed. And that line will be in the appropriate place. You have the option of turning on a hist a gram, which will show you a graph of the tonal distribution. You can see that down in the bottom right hand corner, and you can choose to turn that on once again in the set up menu for the custom display recording information for which card are you recording to what format and so forth is going to be in the upper right hand corner and along the bottom. One of my favorite features on the Fuji is this distance indicator. This will tell you where your lens is focused at, but it will also give you an estimate on the depth of field. So it's got a white mark where you're focused at and that will adjust as you change the focusing of the lands, whether it be automatic or manual and the blue will indicate your depth of field and that will adjust whether you're closer or further away and what lens you're using and gives you a good feel for where the depth of field is gonna lie in a particular photograph. And this, of course, is another one of those options that can be turned on or off in the set up men you. Now there is two options for the depth of field scale and talk a little bit more about this later on. But you can have it either based on a pixel basis or in a film basis when it comes to sharpness. And so, if you want it a little bit tighter standard to make sure that everything is as sharp as it could be. You can set that toe pixel based, and we'll talk about that in the menu said it. And then there's a bunch of general settings along the top. I'm not going to go through each one of these, but this indicates that a particular feature is either turned on or turned off or where it is set in there. But you'll see those along the top of the frame. Now the screen on the back is, of course, a touch screen, and they do have a flip out screen. And I did want to show that for anybody who maybe is watching the class that doesn't have the camera in their hands quite yet. And so this is, Ah, flip screen, and there's a couple of little Nubbins over here on the side of the camera that will enable you, and I typically put my fingers in this position so I can kind of wrench it out a little bit like that. So it's a good waist level finder, but you can also tilt it from the top, coming out like that and coming out in this way. Now, the thing about this screen that's unusual is it's got a button on the side enabling you to go like this and the great thing about this is if we put this in a vertical position now I can have the camera very low to the ground, and I can see what's going on. So for landscape photographers, this is a great system because you can get the camera really low and still see what's happening without getting your face all the way down in the dirt, and you're not gonna be able to see it from there. But when you tilt the lens, the LCD out this far, the serial number is written on this general information sheet that's on the back side here. And so the serial number is pretty well hidden in this camera, right back in there. And so the button press to get this camera in its vertical position is a little bit easier. On the previous versions of the camera. You had to push in and push over, and it was a little bit fiddly, you might say, and this one's become just perfectly smooth, and it's normally locked in, and that one button will get bringing out. And so it's a great system. I love that if you're shooting video, it doesn't have the full flip around for, you know, blogging and so forth. But for general shooting photography, it's It's a great screen on their. In my opinion, as I mentioned before, we do have a touch screen on here, and so there are a variety of ways that you can have. The touch screen set up as it comes from the factory, like mine is right now. The touch screen is turned off. You have to go in and turn that on, and from there you can touch the screen to take a picture. You can touch the screen to select where you want the camera to focus. Or you could have it actually focus in that regard. And there is a whole set of movie controls that you can control independently in the screen. That is different than what your photo controls might be. Set on the top of the camera, which could be very handy cause when you go from shooting stills to video, you often want different shutter speeds, different apertures, different ISO settings and so you can set the camera for video very differently than stills and just conveniently flip back and forth. If you do want to turn on the touchscreen controls. They will give you the options of doing all the common gestures that many of us have become accustomed to with our phones by zooming in pinching to zoom in and zoom out. You can double tap on an image to playback and zoom in on it. And to set this up, you need to go into the set up men, you buttoned. I'll setting in turn on the touch screen, setting So very simple, easy to work controls coming pretty standard practice on most cameras these days. There is kind of in a usual touch option on this camera. Is that normal operation of the camera, the touch screens not really doing anything. So it has become an additional area for a function options, and so we have touch functions one through four. So by swiping on the screen in any one particular direction, you can cause the camera to enter a certain mode or do something in particular. Now, the way that this is programmed right now is if you swipe up, you'll see a hist, a gram swipe to the left. You'll get the sports finder mode or go to the right. Large indicators are going down will give you the Elektronik level. Now, if you don't like these or you want to customize thes, you can, of course, go into the Senate menu and pre program these. Right now, though, if your cameras like mine back it factory default settings, it's not going to work because those tux touch functions are not turned on. All right, let's talk about playback. So when you enter playback, we're gonna obviously play back. The last image and a lot of controls on the camera change a little bit when you are in this mode, obviously, the garbage can next to it. The playback button is good for getting rid of your images if you know you don't want him out in the field. If you want to go through your images, you can use the touch control on the back of the camera to go left or right. We also can use thief front dial to go to the previous or the next image, so you can use whatever system you prefer in there. You can also use the little Focus joystick, which now works in playback for going back and forth with the images. So one of the things you're going to see in this class is this yellow shortcut sign, and this indicates that there is an unlabeled function of the camera, and it's a shortcut in order to do something. In this particular case, if you press in on that focus switch, you can switch cards. And so if you want to press it in once in the playback mode, it's gonna give you the option of switching from card number 12 Card number two. It's not labeled. It's not very clear in the menu, but I will be continuing to point out these shortcuts as we go throughout this class. If you want to turn the rear command, I'll on the camera that is going to enable you to zoom in or out. And then you can also press for a focusing area. So let's go ahead and do a little demo with this. I'm gonna put my camera too pretty automatic mode and just shoot a photo to start with. So let me get an image on the back of the camera first so that we can see what's going in. Let's zoom in. Let's focus on something and take a photo. So when we play our photo back, we can, of course, go left and right through our different photos we can go through on the front dial and see different photos that we've been taking Go back to our last one. If we want to zoom in, we can zoom in on our subject and see it very clearly. But if we go back to the starting position, one of the things we can do is we can just press to zoom in and it automatically zooms in for wherever that focus point happens to be. Let me see if I can move this focus point over here to the left. And so if I take a picture over here and I play this back and I zoom in, it zooms in over to where that focus point waas over on the left side of the frame. And so that's a quick way to check. Where did we zoom in or where? Where did we focus in? Any particular photograph is just to press in like that. So I thought that was important to show. Show you how that worked on the back of the camera when you are in the playback mode. The display button on the bottom will cycle through a variety of different displays, depending on how much information you want to see. Their one of those options is favorites where you can rate your photos with stars. You can use that, actually for filtering it later on. Teoh. Look for just those start images, and you can also see your shutter speed aperture information, as well as a variety of other controls about how the camera was set up. I don't know why Fuji has separated these two controls, but on the up of the four way controller on the back of the camera, you can go through and find different types of displays over here, and so you might want to press the display button. Or you might want to plus the up button. But you will get additional information by pressing that up button over the on the right hand side, as you can see there and so you get a little bit different, hissed a gram, and you get a different info display that gives you more information about various settings on the camera. So be aware that there are two different ways for seeing different sets of information on the back of the camera. Now, when you are playing back an image you can enter into the queue mode and the Q mode is a quick menu, and it we're gonna be going through it in the normal shooting mode in an upcoming section. But when you're in the playback mode, it allow you to do something called raw Conversion, and this is where you can take a raw image and you can make a J peg right in camera. Not only can you make a J pig, but you can do a lot of adjustments to it. You can crop it. You can make it a little bit brighter. You could make it a little bit darker and a variety of other changes to it, and so will play around with that a little bit later on. But it is an option in case you do need to make a JPEG, and you don't have your computer with you, and this could be really handy if you shoot raw and you say one uploaded JPEG image to your Internet account or email it to somebody or posted on a website they're not going to allow you to post on it with a raw image. And this way you can make a JPEG right in camera. All right. Another little secret shortcut for you is by pressing and holding the playback button for two seconds, and you will switch back and forth, playing back images on card one or card, too. I'm gonna talk more about recording to the card because you can either record simultaneously to both. You could have a record to one card and then when its full record to the other cards, so you could have very different different information on those cards. And if you do want to switch between the playback of those cards just holding on the play button for two seconds when you are playing back videos. That is, of course, a little different than playing back a still image. And so are four way controller will allow us to stop and play back any particular video we can fast forward and Brevan rewind through that video as well in the middle. If we press the okay, button will access the volume settings, And so if we want to listen to the movie that we've recorded. We can do that as well. And then you can also do all of this through the focus controller as well, using the same directional controls. And of course, deleting your videos is very easy. So one of the things about that delete button is that you can also format your card with that. And so what you do is you hold down the trash button for two seconds and you push in on the command. I'll remember the command. I'll is also a button, so it is a two button affair, too. Format the card, but that way you do not have to dive into the cameras menu in any way to format the card. Another shortcut for you is when you press play back and then you hit the menu button. You get to a special menu dedicated to playback, and so we'll be going through all of this in the second half of the class when we're going through the menu. But in order to access the playback menu, you gotta go hit playback and then hit the menu button and then you're in auto exposure lock locks. The exposure when you have the cameras set to aperture priority shutter priority or program mode. Let me do a quick little demo here for you right now. I think I have pretty much everything at least shutter speeds and apertures in an automatic mode. And if we look down to the bottom, we can see our shutter speeds very according to exactly what's in the frame. And if it any point, I want to lock the exposure in. What I would do is just press and hold in on the E l button, and as soon as I release, it starts to meet her again in a just a meter. And we can select this button to work in a variety of ways. First offense, a function button that we can change, but of what? Another option we can have is we can turn this into a switch style button, which means we press it once to engage it and wants to disengage it, and we don't have to keep our finger on it right now. What it's doing is it's simply locking in the exposure as we move the camera around. Now the thing is, is that some people use their cameras in this manner, and some people don't. I typically don't. I pray typically prefer to have exposure locked with shutter release, and we'll look at doing that later on in the class. So if you do want to re program this button to do something else, it's in a nice, convenient spot. So it's a pretty valuable real estate, you might say for a good button placement. So if you want to get into the function settings, you can re program this button for doing something else. Whatever you might like, as I mentioned before, if you want to re program it on the way that it works with lock mode on it, you can either have it as a pressing button or a switch button, where it's one press to turn it on and one press to turn it off. The command I'll we've been using for a lot of different things and so turning it is going to be used for a lot of different aspects of the camera, depending on which mode we happen to be in. Primarily, I kind of think of it as the shutter speed, but that's just one of the many options that we can use it for. It's also a button. We're going to use that for zooming in like we did in the playback mode. It's also a function button that we can re reassigned to do something else. It's also used as far as a button goes for zooming in and checking when you when you're live when you're just looking through the viewfinder or looking at the LCD in the back of the camera and a secret little shortcut is if you hold in on it for two seconds, you can switch between these four different modes of focusing. In fact, let me give you a quick little demo of that in operation on here. So as we have our camera set up, if I pressed the button once, nothing's gonna happen. But if I press in and hold it, let's make sure my cameras in the right focusing mode on this so that it actually works. Okay, maybe I need to be in a slightly different mode here in just a moment. All right, so when I press in on this, it switches from the digital micro prism. Focus, peak highlights and standard, and so I'm in the manual, focusing mode, and it's using a different system. I'm going to go through each of these focusing modes and a little bit. But for right now, all you do is you just hold it in for two seconds and it switches to the next mode. And so I'm gonna leave it in standard. And I had to be in manual in order to make that work properly and in order to go in and change the functioning on this is the section that I keep harping on again and again, which is in the set up men, you the function setting where you can go in and re program all the buttons on the camera. Next up, we have our auto focus lock button. Now, this is mainly going to be used if the camera is in the continuous focusing mode. So on the front of the camera there is the M. C s focus mode dial up there and in the minutes in the sea mode, the camera is continuously focusing by pressing in on the autofocus lock button. The camera automatically will walk. Focus as long as your finger is left in on that button. When you have the focus mode turned over to the manual setting. This becomes switches, functions and it becomes a back button focus, and that is a simple way to get into back button. Focus because then in manual focus, you have this one button for focusing. When you press down on the shutter release, it's not going to auto focus because the camera is in manual focus. And so that's the easiest way to get into back button focuses. Just select manual focus and press the A F L button any time you want to focus. But of course, this is a custom but button that could be reassigned and so you can go in and reassign it. If you do want to keep it as an auto focus lock. But you can have it either as a pressing button or a switch button where you press it once and it locks in and it locks that focus, even though your finger is no longer on the button and you would press it a second time to release it from that next up, we have a little tiny indicator lamp that will light any other green or orange or will blink if something is going on in general with cameras, anything that blinks is a warning that something is not right. Anything that is steady means that it's probably going along OK. And so there's your Kias for us. What's going on? And so it may turn on for many reasons. The reason that it seems to be on most of the time is once you shoot photos, it's downloading those images to the memory card. And that's just kind of a precaution that you don't want to take the battery out of that camera out of the camera while it's still on. You can also use this, interestingly so as a tally light. So when you are recording, it will turn on on the back of the camera so that you can see that the camera is actually recording. Next up is the cue button, which stands for quick menu. Now the camera has a regular menu, and that's something that will be spending a lot of time in this class going through in great detail. But the quick menu allows us to get to some of the most common features very, very quickly with the single press of the button on the back of the camera. It's just simply one page of information, and it's all very visual and graphic right there so we can get in there and make adjustments very, very quick and easy. So in order to use this, you can use the focus stick. You can use the four way controller on the back of the camera to navigate through the different rose in the locations of it.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Fuji X-T3 Recommended Settings
Fuji X-T3 Shortcuts

Ratings and Reviews

Justina Tumaite
 

Thank you it's super helpful. I loved it :)

Eric Geerts
 

I've been with CL for quite a while and I pretty much got used to (all of) John's top quality classes. Kinda been waiting for this one over the last months. So thanks again, John, for your consistent 5 star quality standard!!

Robert Felice
 

I loved this class! How much did I love this class? I loved this class and I don't even have an X-T3! I have the Fujifilm X100V, a camera similar enough to the X-T3 that this class easily covered 85% - 90% of the features on my camera. It's also a camera new enough that there isn't much available on how to use it. This class got the job done for me. Well done, John!

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