How to Take Good Photos With Fujifilm (and Avoid Bad Photos)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] I found a picture of [Music] you well hi everyone and welcome to Pal detch today we are talking about how to take better photos with your Fujifilm camera or I should say how to avoid taking bad photos and for for those there are two categories the first are bad photos because of technical reasons usually from the camera for example this photo right here is out of focus and as you know that would be one of the main reasons a photo would be considered bad this one is Overexposed and that's because Too much exposure prevented the camera's sensor from adequately capturing all of the necessary image data and this one too much ISO noise and that's most likely because the value on the iso dial was set too high now these photos all have something in common they are all objectively bad because of clearly defined quantifiable technical problems and they can all be prevented by simply improving your technical proficiency with your camera and I'm going to give you a good few tips for this later on in the video but for now just know that this is a straightforward path forward to prevent these types of mistakes learn about your camera learn its settings how it interacts with the exposure triangle and study all of its built-in tools that will help you to control focus and exposure now in the second category of bad photos are photos that are artistically bad this is a lot more challenging to Define because of course it's a lot more subjective as the photographer you need to know more than just the settings and functions of your camera you also need to learn all of the other tools that you work with all around your scene right to Capt your creative and your artistic vision and that would include lighting composition lenses framing techniques like the rule of thirds leading lines and just altering your angles to name a few obviously these are huge topics that are way outside the scope of today's video but just to show you a quick difference have a look at this photo here it's technically okay but it's artistically bad but why well it's kind of boring but why is it boring because it fails to tell a story Express a feeling or convey an emotion I mean come on you could hand this camera to a Reese's monkey and he would pretty much take the same shot but what if we had done just three simple things at the time we took the shot first we change our angle up by getting the camera lower to the ground changing our angle and not just taking every shot like this second instead of just taking the shot we include something in the foreground so now you have something in the foreground and something in the background it makes it more interesting and lastly we would apply the rule of thirds perhaps and not put that something right in the center but just off the frame a little bit look at how we went from this to this improving the artistic quality of your photos Takes Time study experimentation and above all else patience if you first learn the settings and the technical parts of your camera your creative mind will break out of that camera setting frustration Cloud that you can often be trapped in when you're out and about shooting and you'll have less distraction and you'll be better able to focus on the artistic side of your photography so now mainly for the Fujifilm beginners here are a few simple technical tips to help avoid bad photos you'll want to use these as sort of a quick start to help you get up to speed while you're learning your camera number one is to avoid bad Focus now notice that I didn't say out of focus I said bad Focus because you may sometimes want your shot to be out of focus depending upon your artistic Vision what I'm talking about is when the camera didn't Focus where you wanted it to if you are brand new to Fuji try putting your camera's Focus mode into s then go into the menu under AF MF and I would set your AF mode to single point then go down to pre- autofocus and turn that on and then I'd make my green single point Focus spot area about this big remember this is just a starting point then when you want to take a shot and not have it be out of focus aim it at your subject and place the square over what you want to be in focus and then half press down the shutter release button until you see the square turn green that means you're in Focus or you keep holding down the shutter release button halfway and then recompose the shot to wherever you want once you have it where you want press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the shot most of the newer Fujifilm cameras are equipped with face eye autod detect and if you're shooting people at all I would recommend turning it on go into your menu where it says face eye detection setting and choose IE Auto to get you started now one other thing with autofocus that a number of new Fujifilm users Miss and that is boost mode go down to the wrench on the camera where it says power management and make sure that under performance you have Boost turned on that will help improve your camera's autofocus once you're ready to graduate from that let's move it to continuous autofocus move the focus mode lever to C for continuous I would then go to AF MF and set my autofocus mode to Zone and maybe I would make my green square about this big as a starting point one important thing though is don't forget to turn off face eye autodetect if you're not shooting people because some choices for autofocus and other functions of the camera will not be available to you until you turn it off and as a final tip for this if you are new to using fujifilm's autofocus I would avoid using the wide tracking feature when shooting stationary objects the reason is that with wide tracking particularly with stationary objects the camera if you're not sure what you're doing and even if you are the camera May sometimes inadvertently focus on the wrong area of the scene as you continue to gain more experience with autof Focus try using the more advanced features of continuous autofocus as well as manual focus number two is how to fix subject or motion blur your shutter speed dial will be the tool that you'll use to prevent this as a general rule if you are handholding your camera you want to keep your shutter speed dial set to a minimum of 160th of a second however this really depends on your lens focal length for example this lens has a 90 mm focal length this one is a 35 mm and this zoom lens is between 18 to 55 millimet depending upon how far you zoom in so what I recommend is that you set your minimum shutter speed to one over your lens's focal length multiplied by 1.5 for example if I'm shooting with the 90 mm prime lens okay I would then take 90 * 1.5 and my minimum shutter speed would be 1 135 of a second and so forth now you also instead of deal dealing with a 1.5 multiplier you could just double the amount so for example if you're shooting again with a 90 mm lens 90 * 2 would be 180 Therefore your minimum shutter speed would be 1 18 180th of a second and when I say your minimum shutter speed I mean at least that you could certainly make it faster than that if you want to if your camera also has an Ibis feature you can use a lower shutter spe than what I just mentioned also if you avoid drinking you know too many of these you may be able to actually lower it down by an extra stop or two but remember something Ibis okay Ibis on the sensor will only prevent camera motion blur caused by you know shaking the camera the other type of blur to watch out for is subject blur and that is when the subject is moving faster then the camera's shutter speed can capture it without blur people or pets can be unpredictable and if someone is jumping up and down or running around I would go even higher to maybe 500th of a second or maybe 1 1,000th of a second to just be sure that I am freezing that action and not getting a blurry photo remember that these are just starting points and as you get to know your camera better you're going to be able and you're going to want to modify them to best fit your shooting needs number three is having too noisy or grainy of a photo noise is often introduced by having your ISO dial set too high generally above 6,400 ISO particularly when you're shooting in low light so to fix this I would simply recommend that you don't shoot at higher isos than 6400 for darker scenes in fact I would stay below 3,200 or even 1,600 I mean if it's possible you may sometimes find it impossible to do this because you cannot modify your lens aperture you can't open it up any wider and you can't go any slower on your shutter speed to let in more light you're stuck with that final part of the exposure triangle the iso and you must increase it and in that case go ahead and do that because it's better to have either a noisy or a grainy shot than a blurry one or one that's completely dark and you can't see anything speaking of too dark of a photo number four is incorrect exposure like everything else in today's video it's a big topic for right now I cannot recommend enough that you both enable and use the histogram go right into your camera's menu settings where you control the screen usually that's in the wrench under screen setup go to where it says disp custom setting and inside there you'll see histogram go ahead and select it and now on the screen have a look at this there it is right here that is your histogram I have a whole video just on the histogram and you should check that out if you're not familiar with the histogram but just just to get you started today you read the histogram from the left to the right it starts on the left with pure black or 0% brightness As you move this way toward the right side you will see the brighter tones in your image represented here on the graph now when you finally get to the furthest right side if you happen to see pixels there this means that there are areas of your scene in your image somewhere that are 100% brightness meaning there's no data that's going to be captured on the camera it's completely washed out and that is the area depending upon your scene in your subject that could make for a bad photo if you're not careful let's say you're out shooting you're framing your scene just like this and through the LCD screen on the back of the camera it looks pretty good however have a look at the histogram notice how there are some pixels on the right side indicating 100% brightness and that would be from this area right here so if you didn't have the histogram and you weren't paying attention and you went ahead and just took the shot if you open up your raw photo right here in Lightroom or Capture One have a look at this this is awful look at all that detail gone now I could certainly try and bring it down right with the slider but there's only so much I can bring it down but there's still areas right here that just can't be recovered however now you've liked this video and subscribed to the pal detch Channel and now you're outshooting again but this time you're paying attention to your histogram and before you take the shot you would adjust your exposure so that you bring down those highlights a little bit now if I go to the background again where it's really bright and I bring down my highlights you've got much more detail than we did before but be careful because in high dynamic range scenes you can go too far in the other direction in my final shot I set the shutter speed to 164th of a second to bring down my exposure even more of course in doing so if I start to bring down my highlights some of the area of my foreground may end up becoming too dark now there's one other tool in the camera that can help you and I don't use it personally but it does act as an alternative or a supplement to your histogram and it's located in the same area of the menu that your histogram was in screen setup disp custom setting and it's called live view highlight alert and what happens is when you're getting to an area of 100% brightness you'll have parts of that image that could be affected by that flashing you see that right here so try it out and see how you like it but I would definitely recommend checking out the histogram as well for our number five tip we have incorrect color balance of course this becomes more important if you're shooting in jpeg only format if you end up shooting in raw format then you can fix those issues in post- production nevertheless you really want to get it right in camera and I want to show you something that can definitely trip some people up the white balance setting is located in the IQ section of your menu and by default it's on auto and and auto works very well on the Fujifilm camera and so when you go into the white balance area you have a number of options where you can set custom settings adjust the Kelvin directly and some pre-selected shooting scenarios generally for still photos I'll keep it on auto but here's the little gotcha that can trip people up if you put it into Auto there's an additional menu option and you'll get to an area where you can fine-tune the auto setting you see so let's say you accidentally do that i' listen I accident fumble through things all the time if you can't tell so sometimes you might accidentally you know whoops you know get and you don't even notice it it just kind of Fades over here right and you don't even know it's set that way and have a look at this you see the tint to it now and that's a real problem because you'll see this weird tint and you'll go oh my color balance or white balance is off and you'll go into your menu and you'll look at it and it'll say Auto and you'll go wait a minute Auto it should be right and you don't notice these little numbers right here these tiny little numbers right here so remember if your white balance is set to Auto and it still looks a little weird you go into Auto and then use your joy stick or your d-pad to Simply move it back into place right in the center ah much better you see that because you've all been such great students today I am going to give you a bonus tip I call it Saint ISO and it stands for shutter aperture immovable now trust ISO once again shutter aperture immovable meaning they're fixed values they're not set to automatic now trust ISO let me tell you something this one really helped me to avoid bad photos when I was just starting to learn the Fujifilm camera system here's how to set it go into your menu into the camera icon and look for ISO Auto setting you see it right there and I just go ahead and choose Auto one and what I do here is I change the max sensitivity all the way up to 12,800 I don't worry about my minimum shut shutter speed and I'll tell you why in a second then what I do is go to my ISO dial and I set it to automatic now when I'm out shooting I'm going to maintain complete control over my shutter speed and my aperture I'm going to be setting them to fixed values so for example let's say I always want that nice background so I'm going to set my aperture all the way wide open to say F2 and that's going to stay at f2 and then my shutter speed I can sort of change depending upon what I'm shooting if a dog jumps out in front of me and I want to C that right I'm going to turn the shutter speed dial to make the shutter speed faster okay increase the shutter speed and what's happening is that whatever I'm doing with my aperture and my shutter speed the camera is automatically choosing the best ISO for the best exposure so for example right now I'll put my shutter speed to 1250th of a second my aperture in F2 and I'm going to put my ISO in automatic I'm going to go ahead and turn the camera around and aim it at a subject and the camera is choosing an ISO of 800 or here it's at ISO 200 one little tip I want to tell you is that in order to see what that automatic ISO value is right when you're moving the camera around you have to half press down the shutter once you half press down the shutter at what your subject is your camera will then show you the iso value that the automatic ISO is going to choose when you take the shot and a very significant contributor to how well this will work is back in the cameras menu under photometry and to start out I would choose either Center weighted or multi now is it possible that the camera is going to choose sometimes too high of an ISO absolutely this is for getting that distraction out of the way so you can get out and learn all the other aspects of how for example aperture shutter speed the focus tools and all that other good stuff and I personally find that sa ISO is a wonderful technique to use from time to time to to just not have to deal with anything and just safely get a number of shots with a minimum of fuss before I conclude today I want to point something out we talked about all of the artistic and Technical guidelines that would help you to avoid bad photos but the message I want to leave you with is that photography is often very personal and sometimes it's the emotion the story or the feeling of the moment that's being captured that can elevate a photo beyond all of those technical flaws for example I shot this photo right here in 1988 on a ashika FR camera using kod Chrome 64 slide film it was shot in a small Village near Lake ball in the former Soviet Union and frankly from both a technical perspective and probably an artistic perspective it's a bad photo right but the color off and the background could have been better I should have probably opened up the lens a little wider blah blah blah blah blah I blew out my high highlights right on the bike here you see that but this photo has a whole story behind it and an emotion that maybe I'll share in an upcoming live stream but in ending today's video I invite you to always be looking beyond the pixels and Beyond the settings and Beyond the rules in your photography because while tips and settings are always important I promise that you will get better over time no matter what type of camera lens or other gear that you use so long as you keep capturing you keep creating and you keep connecting with your passion well thank you so much for watching and I really hope you found the video helpful or at least entertaining and if you did be sure to give it the like And subscribe I am going to be signing off now but have a wonderful weekend and I will definitely see you in a video next week take care if you haven't subscribed don't forget to get the if you haven't subscribed don't I'm so sick of talking about if you haven't sub subscribe just thank you very much hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you soon

Channel: pal2tech

Views: 43,452

Keywords: fujifilm camera, fujifilm camera settings, fujifilm, fujifilm xt4, fuji camera, fuji xt4, fujifilm xt5, fuji xt5, Fuji xh2, fuji gfx

Id: fipwALIYza4

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024