Dialling in the changes

It’s been a flat out couple of months (and my forecast for the quarter is rosey) hence there not being many posts of late.

I started this blog back in 2015 and I had already moved to the Fuji X cameras from Nikon. It’s the fact I came from Nikon that influenced how I set the buttons and the command dials on the X cameras and despite one or two tweaks to the function buttons over the years, the dial settings have remain unchanged… until now… (until last weekend in fact).

I was sitting in a hotel room (in Warwick) about an hour before leaving to shoot an event at the castle (dinner and awards), checking over the cameras. It dawned on me that I was getting annoyed using an X-T3 & and X-H2s and that I was unable to match the dial use between the cameras, so killing time, I did some digging on the inter-web (as you do).

Well what do you you know (or what did I not know!) Firmware 5.00 brought in the ability to add 3 options to the front command dial with the ability to assign a button to cycle through them (because unlike the X-T’s, the front dial does not depress).

Much frantic menu pressing followed. I had always had the Shutter Speed on the Rear command dial and the Iso on the front but it seemed (and I am not sure why now, looking at it again), that I could get more consistency by moving the shutter speed to the Front dial, along with the ISO and having the rear dial as Exposure Compensation.

Key key to this change is that on the X-H2s, the dial’s can be programmed to behave differently in the different (P, A, S M) modes.

So here are how my menus look now (excuse the poor iPhone shots of the rear screens). X-T3 first followed by the 4 X-H2s modes.

Of course, once in the mood for changes, it did not stop there.

When Autofocus Face Selection appeared on these cameras, as it was new to me I assigned it to a button I never used, the from (Fn2) function button. I realised as I was making the changes that I no longer used the rear AE & AF lock buttons because as the AF-C has improved so drastically I rarely lock focus independently of depressing the shutter halfway. SO I have decided to move the Face Selection On/Off to the AE-L (X-T3) & AF-on (X-H2s).

I have used the cameras on a few jobs since then and it seems to be working ok for me, now it is just a case of reprogramming the muscle memory….

As for some images, I spent a couple of afternoons in the last week on assignment for the BFI at the London Film Festival…

I guess it’s worthwhile keeping a good eye on what changes in Firmware updates, sometimes they do not just squash bugs or improve existing functionality, sometimes new stuff is added.

Have any firmware updates caused you to re-think your settings? Let me know how you set your cameras up.

Until next time.

J