Can I Limit the ISO Range on the Wheel When in ISO-C Mode?

Shooters on My Squad wrote:

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

There are a lot of ways to to set up and use these cameras, but as AUTO-ISO will always use the lowest possible ISO value and highest possible SS (respective of your other settings), I see no reason to limit the ISO at all. If your SS is as low as it can go to avoid motion blur (either manually set, or with an Auto-ISO preset), and your aperture is as wide as it can go without compromising your desired DOF, if the ISO has to go all the way to ISO 12800 to maintain the desired brightness then I don’t see any good reason to limit it - again, better noisy than blurry. I always want to shoot with as low an ISO as possible, but if it has to go high to get the shot, it has to go high. If I want a darker/lower ISO RAW, I simply dial down the exposure compensation (I always use EC in C mode which effectively adjusts the ISO or the SS depending on the available light with the front dial).

Thanks for evaluating the Auto-ISO functionality on the Fujifilm cameras, this inspired me to slightly tweak its setup on my X-T4.

In theory everything you write sounds great, but it simply doesn’t work for me in practice, because how the Auto-ISO functionality is implemented in the camera. At first it will try to keep the base ISO by lowering the shutter speed. Then once it reaches the threshold that was set up it starts to increase the ISO value until it reaches this second threshold. Then it tries to lower the shutter speed until it reaches what it thinks is a correct exposure, hence eventually introducing motion blur. This means that by changing EC while in Auto-ISO you will either change the shutter speed or the ISO value, depending on the state you are currently in, but there is no direct control. So the only way out I currently see is to override Auto-ISO with a manual ISO setting, but this is not ideal if done via a wheel due to the big ISO range which is mostly unused.

Auto-ISO would need something like SS/ISO priority settings, similar to how Release / Focus Priority work in AF. Alternatively it would be maybe enough, although not that sophisticated, if there would be twice as many Auto-ISO slots. This way I could duplicate them with different ISO settings, hence emulating something like SS/ISO priority. Maybe you could get completely rid of the different Auto-ISO settings, and implement it similar to how other manufacturers do it.

The other thing that slightly bothers me is the mapping of the wheels when in A or M mode. On the front wheel I have configured F/EC/ISO, on the back wheel I have SS. When I’m in manual mode, it’s fine, because I can change the ISO value directly with the front wheel and the SS with the back dial. But when I am in A mode the back wheel becomes defunct, and I have to click the front wheel to toogle between ISO & EC. I can configure the wheels for A mode, but then the problem is just the other way around for M. Ideally no dial would be disabled, no matter the mode, but I see no way of configuring the camera this way.

The only time I typically override the Auto-ISO is if I plop my camera on a tripod, in which case I simply dial the top ISO dial to base ISO (or whatever).

The top dials are great for this use case. They are in my opinion the best usability option we currently have available on the market when using cameras on tripods.

I will continue to find better settings for my use cases for Auto-ISO, and maybe eventually I will also solve my issues with the wheel mappings. Thanks so far for all the precious input.

I’m at work at the moment, but when I have some time this weekend, I’ll be happy to explain how I have my cameras set up and how I can quickly and easily get an optimal exposure in almost any situation with a very simple control configuration and minimal fuss with an X-T camera. At this point I’ve probably experimented with every possible configuration that doesn’t work efficiently, so I can probably offer some worthwhile direction.

I always shoot RAW so I don’t mess much with film sim recipes or incorporate  much in the way of jpeg options into my customized setup. I don’t shoot video, don’t use flash, and I always set my aperture manually. If you need to do otherwise, let me know and I’ll think about a way to work them into a simple, easy to use setup.