Fortuity – SLC, UT – Fujifilm X100F
A reader of Fuji X Weekly asked me what my Auto-ISO settings are for the Fujifilm X100F. I realized that I’ve never fully covered this in a post. I’ve mentioned some things here and there regarding Auto-ISO, but never laid it out in one place. So I’ll explain it here and now.
Back in the days of film or in the early days of digital, ISO was critical because things didn’t look particularly good past a certain point. I remember when I considered ISO 400 to be high ISO. I remember that my first DSLR, which I purchased about a decade ago, was only capable of good results to ISO 1600, and any ISO above that looked unpleasant. Nowadays cameras are capable of great results at ridiculously high ISOs. The X100F is good to ISO 12800, which is amazing to me!
Auto-ISO is a great feature. Most cameras have it, and the X100F is no exception. You can set it and forget it. You can worry about more important things since you know you’ll get good results no matter what the camera chooses.
Most of the time I operate the X100F in aperture-priority mode, which means that I set the aperture but let the camera choose the ISO and shutter speed. It’s all situational, and I don’t always do things the same way, but the majority of the time this is what I do because the aperture is what I typically want control of.
Kiki – South Weber, UT – Fujifilm X100F
For the Auto-ISO parameters I set the minimum ISO to ISO 200 and the maximum to ISO 6400. Why not ISO 12800? Because if I use the digital teleconverter, ISO 12800 doesn’t look so great. I can always manually set the ISO to 12800 if I need it with a quick and short twist of a ring on top of the camera.
I also set the minimum shutter speed to 1/125. The camera will only choose a slower shutter speed than 1/125 if it reaches ISO 6400 but needs more light for a correct exposure. I find this to be a good shutter speed for most situations. If nothing in the scene is moving and you use a good technique for holding the camera, it’s possible to get sharp pictures handheld with a shutter speed as slow as 1/15. Sometimes if the subject is quickly moving, 1/125 isn’t fast enough, and 1/250 or even 1/500 might be more appropriate. It’s pretty easy to adjust the shutter to be either slower or faster with a turn of the shutter knob on top of the camera from “A” to whatever is needed.
Auto-ISO is a feature that I rely on extensively, but from time-to-time I manually adjust the ISO and/or the shutter speed whenever appropriate. The auto features work well on this camera, and manual adjustments are simple when necessary because the X100F is well designed for quick on-the-fly adjustments.
To summarize, on the X100F I use Auto-ISO with ISO 200 set as the minimum and ISO 6400 set as the maximum, and with the minimum shutter speed set to 1/125. But I look at each situation and decide if these settings will work, and, if not, I make manual adjustments. I hope this helps.