Taking Pictures With the X-E4: Some Default Settings and Habits

(I had a series of posts about how I took a bunch of under-exposed pictures. Re-reading them recently, every one was close to gibberish. I've done the right thing, and removed all but the last two. The one about crop ratios and camera maths stays, as does this one about my default settings, which has been edited to make sense.)

Nobody writes detailed instruction manuals anymore. I used to like those. Now one has to experiment. Which is easy to do on a technology one already knows, but learning a new technology by experiment is very messy.

So the result of learning what I could about digital camera technology as implemented in the X-E4 is this:

My default settings are 0 for the exposure compensation; f4 for the aperture; A = aperture priority for shutter speed, and an ISO bracket between 160 and 800. There's a post that explains the f4 setting choice.

I assigned the Quick Menu to the Q button, and reduced the number of options to eight. One is always the Custom settings. The others are: ISO, Film Simulation, sensor format, Clarity, Grain Effect, Colour Chrome and screen brightness.

I created two custom settings: one for colour film (Provia) and the other for black-and-white (Acron). I turned the Autosave Custom Settings to OFF, so I could see that I had to Save the changes. When you save a Custom Setting, all the other settings are saved with it as well as the ones you consciously changed. Aspect ratio, file size, sharpness, the works. This is actually a Good Thing, because there are many other things you may want to tweak along with the film type.

I bought a BlackRapid RS-4 Camera Sling. This wonderful gadget lets you slide the camera along the strap up to your face. Ordinary straps make you move the strap. Watch a YT video about the BlackRapid.

I am also bedding-in two habits: checking the dial settings before I take the first shot, in case anything got jogged; and looking at the first shot I take to make sure it is in the mode I want. So the photos I took on the next river ride were a lot better than the horrible ones I took going down to Barking.

Also, here's a video. It's not great, and the wind noise is terrible, but it's one of the first videos I shot with this camera.