Hold, focus, shoot: your first deliberate photograph

How to hold this particular camera

A camera pressed to your eye braces against your forehead: three points of contact. Held out at arm’s length in front of you, it has two points of contact and a lever arm — and on the X-M5 that is the default posture, because there is no viewfinder to press your eye to. Budget roughly one stop of lost steadiness for it, and then claw most of it back:

1. Left hand under the lens, palm up, supporting the weight. The right hand only grips and presses.
2. Elbows in, against your ribs. This is the single biggest improvement available.
3. Tilt the screen up and shoot from chest height rather than holding the camera out at eye level. Steadier, and far less conspicuous in the street.
4. Breathe out, then press. Fire at the bottom of the exhale, not while inhaling.
5. Lean on something. A wall, a railing, a doorframe, a knee. Free tripod.

The focus reflex

With the beginner setup in place — AF-S, single point, touch screen in AREA mode — focusing is two motions that will become one:

1. Tap the screen where the important thing is. The focus frame moves there.
2. Half-press the shutter and hold it. The frame turns green and the camera beeps: focus is locked at that distance.
3. Full-press to take the photograph.

AF-S locks focus and keeps it locked while you hold the half-press. That is useful — you can focus on a face, then recompose slightly — and it is also the trap: if your subject moves closer or further away after the lock, the photograph will be soft. Moving subjects want AF-C, which is a later lesson.

Your first deliberate photograph

Not a snapshot: a photograph you chose every part of. Do it indoors near a window, or outdoors in shade.

1. Set the mode dial to A (aperture priority) and the aperture to f/5.6.
2. Set ISO to AUTO. Let the camera worry about it for now.
3. Zoom to about 35 mm and stand so your subject fills roughly a third of the frame.
4. Put the light behind you or to one side, never directly behind the subject, for this first frame.
5. Tap the subject’s eye. Half-press. Check the shutter speed the camera has chosen — if it is slower than about 1/60 s, open a window blind, move closer to the light, or accept some blur and try again.
6. Exhale, press, and then look at the photograph: zoom into the eye in playback and ask whether it is genuinely sharp.

Review checklist

• Is the eye sharp at 100 percent, or only “sharp-ish”?
• Is the brightest important area still holding detail, or has it gone flat white?
• What shutter speed did the camera pick, and does that explain any softness?
• Is there anything in the background you would remove by taking two steps sideways?

That is the whole first hour. From here the course splits: Light and exposure explains what the numbers on screen mean, and Field recipes gives you a starting point for any situation you walk into.