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Bracketing Flash And Controls

Alright, gonna be looking at things dealing with bracketing and flash. The flash sync is the top shutter speed that you can use with flash. Most people are gonna wanna leave this at 250, but if you wanna change it, you certainly can. Flash shutter speed. This is more along the lines of what is the slowest shutter that you want the camera to use when the flash fires. And a lot of this is gonna be kind of your own rating of how steady you can hold the camera. Now I think most photographers are gonna be pretty safe at 1/60th of a second. But if you're very steady, and I'm pretty steady holding a camera and a big camera like this I can hold quite steady, I kinda like being able to get down to 1/15th of a second. And so this is only important if you're shooting flash photography, but allows you to drag that shutter a little bit to gain a little bit more ambient light in your shot. Exposure compensation for flash. You can either use the entire frame or the background only. And so, the backgr...

ound only is just doing exposure compensation for the standard exposure. For the entire frame, it's adjusting the power of the flash. And the more advanced photographers probably don't want the exposure compensation affecting that. E4, auto flash ISO sensitivity control. And so this is kinda the same thing that we talked about in e3. What areas do you want the auto ISO to control? And so for most people subject and background is what it's gonna be looking at for information. The camera has a modeling flash. If you press the preview button while the flash is attached to the camera, it fires a bunch of low powered, very quick repeating flashes to kinda give you an idea of what the subject is gonna look like under the light of the flash. You'll get to see kinda where the shadows are and it's partly really annoying, but it does help you see a little bit more about what it's gonna look like when the flash actually fires. So you can do bracketing in the manual mode and you can choose what aspects of the camera are actually bracketing. So you can choose flash and shutter speed, flash, shutter speed, and aperture, flash and aperture, or only the flash. And so for anybody who does a lot of bracketing, just a further way of customizing the way it works. The bracketing order. Normally you shoot the correct exposure first and then in under exposure and then in over exposure. But I know a lot of photographers that like to change this to under, metered, and over so that you get dark, medium, light. And it shows up that way when you're looking at it in the computer. Alright, next is f for controls. And f1 is a big one here. This is where we get to go in on all of these buttons that I have circled on screen and we get to customize some of these buttons. And there's a few different ideas that I wanna give you on how to customize your camera. So let's look at some possible ways to customize your camera. Alright, so function button number three. We can turn it into a microphone. And so by the press of that, we're gonna be able to turn on our audio recording so we don't have to go into any sub menus. I mentioned this before when we were talking about playing back and doing our voice memos. Another one that's kind of cool is the exposure modes. I mentioned this before as well. We have that video record button that's not doing anything when we're shooting still photos. We can have that programmed so that we press that and turn the back dial to change between program and manual and shutter and aperture priority. And so since that button's not doing anything else, I say put it to use. Next up if you have one of the lenses, the bigger lenses that have a lens button on it itself, you can have that control a particular feature on the camera, activating or holding the focus for instance. And so make use of those buttons if you've spent all that money on those expensive lenses. Alright shutter speed and aperture lock. And so you can program the buttons to go in and lock the shutter speed and aperture. And so you can do this with a press and a turn of the button. And I know at some cases, like I was shooting basketball, and when I shoot basketball I know that I'm shooting the basketball players in the lighting of the arena that I'm at and I'm gonna choose a shutter speed and I'm gonna choose an aperture and it's gonna be pretty much the same for the entire game that I'm there. But I might be shooting with two cameras, so one gets put down, one gets picked up and I might bump that shutter speed and aperture and that's gonna throw off my exposure and potentially ruin the photo. So I can lock those in if I know that I'm gonna be keeping the same ones for a long period of time. And you can do it by just programming in one of those function one or two buttons. And so you press the custom button and you either turn the front dial or the back dial to lock either the shutter speeds or the apertures in. Another good custom control is if you quickly wanna go between shooting banks, you can program the function one or two button to switch between that A, B, C, and D shooting banks that we had talked about earlier in the menu section. Alright, now this is getting really cool I think. Preset focus point. You can jump to a pre-selected point. And so if normally you're using the center point for focusing, but you wanna jump very quickly way off to one of the sides, you can preset that point way off to the side with a, one of the preview buttons. And so you would go into preview and you would set it off to the side. And so you're gonna set your focusing point, potentially maybe off to the right hand side. And then what you're gonna need to do is press the AF-mode button and the selected button so that preview button for two seconds until it blinks. And so you'll get that one preset button where it jumps off to. And it allows you to be able to just jump between two places very very quickly, which I think is very cool. Now we can have a second and third focusing button. So, for instance, we could set our AF-ON button to dynamic 25 point focusing. We could then go program our preview button up on the front to Dynamic 153 point focusing. And then we could change our function two button to a group point focusing. And so just to show you what this looks like, let's go ahead and do a demo with my camera here. And I'm gonna try to do it. I don't think I've made any changes in here so far. So we need to get into the custom menu. I think we are on f1, so let's go in here. Custom control. I can go to the right here. And so let's, I wanna find the button on the back of the camera first. And so we can see it light up in red. And so this is just the normal auto focus on this. And so in this case, I wanted to choose the AF-area mode of 25. Okay? So when I focus on the back of the camera, it's a 25 point focusing. Now I'm gonna go find the preview button in the front of the camera, which is right there. I'm gonna select it. I'm gonna go and I'm gonna select, what do I wanna do here? I wanna do 153 point focusing, so I'm gonna choose the AF-area mode. Go down and choose 153. Select that one. I'm gonna come down to the function two button. And I'm gonna select that. And I am gonna change that to the group point. And that is the group area right here. And I'm gonna select that. Now I'll be able to show you some of this, but not all of it. Alright, so make sure I'm in auto focus. That always helps. See I caught myself even before I made the mistake. And so when I press the AF-ON button, let's see, on the back of the camera, let's see, the front, where's my buttons? Okay, so with the, my function two or is that three button? Function two button. You can see how it's jumping to the group point right there. Now I am in AF-S and that's causing some of the problems, why I can't get to these other things. So when I press the back button, it goes to 25 point. When I press the top button, it goes to 153. And when I press the function two button, it goes to group. And so I can quickly go between three different focusing systems. Now granted, these buttons are in different locations. And you're gonna have to learn to play it like, I don't know, like a guitar or a flute or something. But you can quickly go between any of those points, whoops didn't mean to do that, very very quickly by programming any of those custom buttons to the way that you wanna focus. Now there are some limitations, but this is the greatest versatility we've ever had with a Nikon camera in choosing different ways to focus. And so if you need one more pinpoint area and one more backed off area, I think this is a great system to use. So take full advantage. Get in there. Investigate those custom modes. Play around. Make, do something creative with it that helps and makes your photography a little bit easier. So that's our second and third focusing buttons. Now there are many other things we don't have time to go into on how to control all the different features in there. Not every button can be controlled to do everything, but I do encourage you to go in there, investigate, play around, and experiment and see what works with your type of photography. So that is all the f1 custom control assignment. Alright, the center button on the back of the camera is not doing much much of the time. And so we can go in and control it by going into the shooting mode and have it reset which means bring our focusing point back to the center. Which I think works quite well most of the time. In the playback mode, I like having this go into the zoom in and I like to have it zoom in to 100 percent so I can see my sharpness. That's the best way to tell sharpness is by zooming in to 100 percent. And that's a quick and easy way to do it. So I think that's a good way to customize that particular button. And in the live view, I like having it reset the focusing point to the middle. I think that's just kind of a good place to use it for a lot of photography. But if you wanna use it for something else, you can have it get in there and do the zoom or do nothing at all. Next up, shutter speed and aperture lock. This is one of the ideas that I talked about earlier, that you could go in and program that as one of the shortcut buttons to lock those shutter speeds and apertures. But if you do wanna lock it for an event so that it doesn't accidentally get bumped, it's a nice feature to have. The main command dial in the back of the camera and the sub-command dial, well they get their own little sub-menus so let's get in and talk about what we can do here. So we can reverse the rotation of these if we want. And this might seem a little bit strange, but I wanna do a little demo here for you because Nikon, you are weird and I do not understand you. So let me get my camera changed over to manual. Let me turn on my info so you can see what's going on here. Now you can clearly see that we are over exposed. The meter is to the right. So one would think that I should turn the dial to the left to correct for this. But what I'm going to do is I'm gonna turn the dial to the right to correct for this. And so you can see the lines going this direction. And it's going exactly the opposite direction that my finger is moving on this dial. And let's see if I can get this over here. And with the front dial, it's doing exactly the opposite the way that my dial is turning. And so I'm gonna jump in to this particular control, which is f4 command dial and reverse rotation. I'm gonna come down here to shutter speed and aperture. And I want all of you at home to do this as well. You're gonna thank me for it. Whoops. I did it wrong. I pressed the center button and I'm supposed to press it to the right. Common mistake I always make. And then I'm gonna hit the OK to confirm it. Now, let's turn the info button on. And oh, it's going the same direction my fingers are going. Why do you do that Nikon? I don't know. This will make things much more intuitive and you will go the wrong direction far fewer times. It makes life much much more easy if for anyone who's setting manual exposure on the camera. So make that change. I think you will like it. Alright, also customizing those dials. We can change what the front one and the back one do. We can just rotate which, you know swap them front to back as far as their operation. If you don't like which one controls the shutter speed, you can swap it around. We can do that for the exposure setting. So if you want to change where the shutter speeds and apertures are changed. Or we can go in and we can change what they do in the auto focus 'cuz you remember one does the mode and one does the area mode. And if you wanna switch it around for one or the other, you can do both of those here. Most people aren't that picky and so they're not changing the surround, but it's there if you need it. And so on the aperture setting, if you are using one of the older lenses that has a physical aperture ring on it, you can choose to use the aperture ring on the lens itself. Most people choose to use the one in the camera. It's just a little bit more versatile and easier to get to for most people. But if you wanted to use the aperture ring, you could select that. And then if you want to change the way it operates in the menus and playback, you could do that as well. Usually not a very necessary change. And then the sub-dial frame, which is the front dial, you can change how that works. And so when you're playing back movies, or playing back images, do you want it to jump 10 frames or 50 frames. And so, you can change some of the parameters of how it works in the playback modes. So that is your command-dial customization. The multi-selector, the little up down. Or excuse me, the little joysticks on the back of the camera. If you don't like those, you can turn 'em off. I think you're nuts, but I think, I would wanna leave 'em turned on here. Or actually, excuse me. What am I talking about? You're not turning 'em off. You are resetting the standby timer if you want by pressing them. And so that can kinda keep the camera activated. Mixed up there folks. Alright, release button to use the dial. Okay, so you remember the way that we press buttons on a Nikon camera is that we press the button in. And then we turn the dial. And we have to be pressing the button down in order for that feature to be active for us to be turning the dial. And this requires two fingers on the camera. And this is not how all cameras work. If you want, you can just simply press the button and it starts an invisible timer and then you got about six seconds to get your finger over there and start making some adjustments on that dial. And so if you want your camera to work like that, you could use that release button to use dial. You could turn that on if you want. So it's a bit of a button pressing preference, whatever system that you like. Funny thing about Nikon cameras is a few years ago, their indicators were reversed. At least on all of their earlier digital cameras, for some reason they decided to put the minus on the right side and plus on the left side, which is kinda reverse intuitive the way people would think. And so not long ago, they reversed it. But, somebody who had a D3 who is upgrading to a D and then they want the D5 to match the D 'cuz that's what they're used to. They don't care that it's weird. That's the way they're used to it. Well you can switch this camera back to that camera. And so they may not be able to switch that camera to the way of this one. So, most people aren't gonna touch that one. The live view button options. And so if you don't use live view and you don't like hitting that button and having your camera go into the live view, you can either turn it off or you can have it only enabled when your camera is in the standby mode and has kinda been activated by that shutter release being pressed half way. The light switch on the camera. Recall it by turning this little dial. Do you want that to light up the information display in the back of the camera, as well as turning on the LCD light on the top? And so it just kinda depends on how many lights you wanna have turned on at the same time. Most people just leave it on the LCD backlight. Alright, next up are some more things that we're gonna be hitting up on deja vu again. But these are all features that are only implemented when we are in the movie mode. So when we have the movie switch in the back of the camera turned on. And then we have the live view pressed when we are ready to shoot movies on that. We can go in and we can customize the buttons. I'm not gonna go through the whole button customization again. But it's the same type of operation. A little different standards in there. We'll go through maybe one or two. So for exposure compensation, if you want to you can program the preview button and the function one button so that you can easily change exposure brighter and darker. Normally the aperture is gonna wanna close down to the working aperture and you can have the aperture physically open and close down with these buttons if you need to with their power aperture option. And so that, as well as many other features are in the custom control assignment for those of you who shoot lots of movies.