Fixing Fujifilm Shutter Speed — Four Recommendations
In an era where computational photography allows for technically impressive photos from the tiny camera in your smart phone, one must wonder what is to become of dedicated cameras aimed at the enthusiast crowd. After all, they’re expensive, bulky, and often require tedious importing and post-processing steps before you can share your work with your audience.
But if you think that I’m about to proclaim that the enthusiast camera market is “dead”, think again. One advantage that dedicated cameras will always hold due to their aforementioned “bulk” is superior handling. The ability to rapidly adjust your camera’s settings to suit a given scene or artistic vision using physical tactile dials—without even moving your eye away from the viewfinder — not only results in better quality photos and fewer missed opportunities, it can inspire you to shoot more and get creative.
I certainly draw on this when out shooting with my Fujifilm cameras — as do many other Fuji X shooters. But it’s become apparent to me that one dial sits unused 99% of the time: the shutter speed dial.
As a relative amateur in the vast world of photography, I haven’t yet settled on a photographic niche, trying my hand at travel, street, macro, wildlife, portraits — basically anything that takes my interest and can provide a learning opportunity. The 99% figure quoted before comes from the fact that I’m almost always trying to either freeze moving subjects, or prevent camera shake. For the remaining 1% of situations where I deliberately slow the shutter speed to create motion blur (such as the panning shot at the top of this article), I’m rarely trying to achieve that in the heat-of-the-moment.
For this reason, I’m far more likely to benefit from a minimum shutter speed. While Fuji does support minimum shutter speeds, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. In this article I will elucidate five problems with the minimum shutter speed implementation on Fujifilm cameras, and present corresponding solutions that will not only improve the shooting experience, but allow you to get cleaner photos with less redundant tweaking of settings.
Problem 1: Minimum shutter speed is cumbersome to change
Let’s get the ball rolling with a real-life example:
I’m on holiday in a far-away exotic destination, walking the streets, taking in the sights, snapping photos at every opportunity. Grand cathedrals, ornate statues, colourful markets, impressive vistas — you know the drill. It’s getting on in the afternoon, and patchy could cover is providing variable lighting conditions.
As I step out onto the street after taking some interior shots of a cathedral, I catch a lively street parade passing by at a rapid pace. My minimum shutter speed is 1/30 — great for static subjects, but just isn’t going to cut it for such a lively display of dancers and costumes fueled by upbeat music and Mezcal. In an attempt to avoid a blurry photo in the overcast conditions, I crank the shutter speed dial from A to 1/250 and go to frame up the perfect shot.
Then I’m met with an overexposed mess of blown highlights —there’s more light in the scene than I had estimated. Feeling slightly flustered I adjust the top shutter speed dial back to A to let the camera choose a faster speed, and finally snap a less-than-ideal photo of the sides of dancer’s heads as they pass by.
So why not just use a minimum shutter speed of 1/250 for the parade to avoid the chance of overexposing the scene? Well first off, changing the minimum shutter speed means changing your auto ISO setting. On the X-T20 this can be achieved with the quick menu (although it doesn’t state the minimum shutter speed you’re selecting), or a custom function button. By assigning the left directional pad button to ISO, auto ISO can be changed in a minimum of 3–4 presses (left, down/up, [down/up], left or shutter half-press). This could be executed relatively quickly with some muscle memory if you’ve memorised the positions of your auto ISO minimum shutter speeds and are 100% sure of the auto ISO setting you’re currently using, but still not as fast as a physical dial. Should you make the mistake of pressing MENU/OK to confirm your selection, you’ll be ushered into a deeper menu to adjust parameters of that auto ISO setting — not ideal in the heat-of-the-moment.
And all of this assumes that you only ever need three different minimum shutter speeds quickly accessible, as that’s all that you can have under a single custom setting group. If using multiple custom setting groups — which allow for three auto ISO/minimum shutter speed settings each — accessing the desired minimum shutter speed becomes even more tedious.
Now, Fuji has cleverly included an “auto” minimum shutter speed option that will calculate a minimum shutter speed based on the current focal length of the attached lens, which in theory should allow one to minimise the number of auto ISO settings required for day-to-day use. And while this is a great idea, the execution falls short if you own any stabilised lenses , due to…
Problem 2: Auto minimum shutter speed ignores lens stabilisation
For those who are not familiar with this particular feature (understandable, considering it’s buried deep in the ISO settings area), setting the minimum shutter speed to “Auto” will yield a shutter speed roughly equivalent to the inverse of the current focal length (converted to 35mm equivalent). If you only shoot with unstabilised lenses, you’re set—you should definitely use this feature.
Around the year 2012, Fuji introduced their first stabilised lenses, and today, their latest stabilised offering — the XF 16–80 mm— boasts an incredible six stops of OIS goodness. But if you want to take full advantage of that stabilisation, then you likely won’t be using an auto minimum shutter speed, because it doesn’t give a damn about your lens’ OIS. So eight years after introducing their first stabilised lens, no Fuji camera can take advantage of this to offer slower minimum shutter speeds, which could drive down ISO in low-light situations for cleaner shots of static subjects.
Maybe you don’t own any stabilised lenses, so this doesn’t affect you. But not everybody has the same ability (or inclination) to hold their camera equally steady at a given focal length, which leads us to…
Problem 3: Auto minimum shutter speeds can’t be adjusted for hand-holding ability
The reciprocal rule, as all old salts of photography will know by heart, states that the shutter speed should be roughly set to the inverse of the focal length (35mm equivalent) or faster in order to avoid the effects of camera shake. Like all rules of thumb, this is useful for a majority of users. But what about the rest?
Whether it’s unsteady hands, shooting on the move, shooting from the back of an old truck on a bumpy road, shooting with one hand (or, a combination of all four), a calculated minimum shutter speed should adapt to your situation. On the flip side, someone with steady hands and a more careful shooting style would surely appreciate a reduction in noise afforded by slower shutter speeds.
Even if you only shoot rapidly moving subjects that require shutter speeds far in excess of the reciprocal of your shutter speed, you’re still out of luck due to…
Problem 4: The fastest minimum shutter speed is 1/500
Ahh Golden Hour. Sought after by enthusiasts and professionals alike for its pleasingly warm side-lighting that can give a boost to even the most boring subjects and compositions. But there’s a dark side to the golden hour: the one that ushers in the darkness of night (obviously). If you happen be to out shooting wildlife or fast-action during this coveted window, you’d appreciate minimum shutter speed kicking in when the light drops to boost ISO and keep your fast-moving subjects as frozen as the polar ice caps (maybe even more so?).
Now that we’re up to speed on some of the shortcomings of Fujifilm’s shutter speed implementation, let’s move on to the good part: how they can be improved.
Solution 1: Tie minimum shutter speed to the shutter speed dial
When it comes to quickly adjusting settings in the heat of the moment, it’s hard to go past physical dials and controls to directly modify settings. Fortunately, the X-T20 and many other X series cameras have exactly this in the form of a shutter speed dial. Limiting this dial to fixed shutter speeds only means that for a lot of photographers — particularly those who missed out on the pre-digital era of photography and don’t find joy in full-manual shooting — the dial will sit unused, and unloved.
My proposal is to add another option to the minimum shutter speed setup menu called “AUTO+DIAL”. With this auto ISO setting selected and the shutter speed dial in A, a shutter speed will be intelligently chosen to minimise camera shake. But move the dial away from A, and whatever you select will now be your new minimum shutter speed. A fixed shutter speed could then be achieved by moving out of “AUTO+DIAL” mode, or by selecting T on the shutter speed dial and using the rear command dial to select a specific value.
While allowing the camera shoot at a speed that is not exactly what’s chosen on the dial might irk some photographic purists, taking full advantage of the physical controls that almost define Fuji’s higher-end bodies is well worth the trade-off if you ask me. There is also very little chance that this mode will be enabled accidentally by users who do not understand the implications or wish to use it, as it needs to be set up deep within ISO settings before being available for selection.
So how would this work in practice? Walking around taking photos of static subjects and scenes? Be in “AUTO+DIAL” with the shutter speed dial set to A, and you can be confident you’re getting the cleanest, shake-free images at any focal length. Need to freeze some action? Simply adjust the shutter speed dial to your chosen speed and be confident that your subject will be frozen without risk of overexposing in variable lighting conditions. Want to take some long-exposure shots on a tripod? Just set the ISO back to base, or switch the shutter speed dial to T and fine-tune exposure times with the rear dial.
If the dial is set to a shutter speed slower than that calculated by the camera to combat camera shake, I think I would prefer for the camera to er on the side of caution and use the faster shutter speed. However, I can’t think of too many real-world scenarios under which this would occur, so I would be happy either way. With OIS on many Fuji lenses today, this becomes even less of an issue — that is, assuming Fuji also implements…
Solution 2: Account for stabilisation with auto minimum shutter speed
While the claimed OIS effectiveness does not appear to be communicated via EXIF data, at the very least Fuji could create a lookup table with all Fujinon lenses and their OIS chops so that this could be used to slow down minimum shutter speeds, in turn driving down ISO in low-light conditions. This will also ideally take into account IBIS and be smart enough to know how effectively IBIS and OIS will combine to allow for slower shutter speeds.
If you find that your stabilised lenses don’t deliver on their claimed effectiveness in the real world, you’ll appreciate…
Solution 3: Allow users to tweak/personalise auto shutter speeds
This is essentially shutter speed compensation, and could either be a “set and forget” configuration based on your general shooting style or something that is adjusted constantly depending on conditions, like shooting one-handed from the back of a bumpy truck (or is that just me?).
My recommendation is to add a menu item under the shooting settings menu for “Auto Shutter Speed Compensation”, and a corresponding quick menu entry.
Now that we’ve got camera shake under control, let’s think about freezing our subjects with…
Solution 4: Increase the maximum (fastest) minimum shutter speed from 1/500
The concept of a maximum minimum shutter speed is as confusing as it is unnecessary. Remove it and allow users to use the camera the way they want.
Final Notes
With so much to say about the shortcomings of Fujifilm’s shutter speed settings, you might think that I’m being critical of Fujifilm’s designers or design process. This is absolutely not the case, as I think they’ve gotten so much right, delivering a camera that is — for the most part — a joy to use. The lack of a more robust minimum shutter speed implementation (which in my mind is core to the shooting experience) is also likely in part due to Fuji’s responsiveness to user feedback — users don’t talk much about minimum shutter speeds, so Fuji has been busy improving other areas.
While I am a little bit surprised about the lack of noise about these shortcomings, I understand that many photographers prefer to shoot in full-manual mode and control every aspect of their exposure. The recommendations that I’ve made here will likely be of little interest to this group, but I feel that any and every photographer can benefit from these enhancements.
Among photographers that do embrace auto ISO, it seems that the levels of tolerance to high-ISO noise ranges dramatically. Some would sooner miss a shot completely than allow ISO to budge from the base setting, while others are just interested in capturing a moment no matter the trade off in image quality. It may come as a surprise, but I place myself in the latter camp. But while an image shot at ISO 12,800 is perfectly acceptable for my purposes, knowing that the exact same image could have been shot at 6,400, 3,200 or even lower — with no extra effort required on my part — does not sit will with me at all.
All of the solutions I’ve discussed should — in theory — be relatively easy to implement via firmware updates. And while I don’t hold out hope that any of these enhancements would ever come to my beloved X-T20, an X-T30 successor that inherits the current limitations in minimum shutter speed will have me looking for alternatives outside of the Fuji ecosystem.
I spent a considerable amount of time compiling this article with the hope that one day I will see these changes implemented in a Fuji body that I can use and love. While I plan to present this article directly to Fuji, I’m relying on my fellow Fuji advocates to comment, critique, and ultimately strengthen my arguments and ideas — so please share your thoughts below.
While I’ve taken care to ensure that this article is accurate, I only have personal experience with the X70 and X-T20 (and nowhere near the wealth of photographic experience that you, the readers, will bring to the table), and have relied on Fuji’s online documentation when making inferences regarding the newer generation of cameras. If there’s anything I’ve missed, please let me know.
Thank you for reading, and I look forward to discussing this further with you in the comments below.
