Lessons

Lesson Info

Live View

Alright, next up, the big old switch, no, it's the live, little switch, but it's got a lot of big things that it does, is our Live View, Movie switch down on the bottom of the camera. So let's talk about Live View and the Movie mode. First up, Live View. So you flip it to the camera section, and you press the LV button for Live View, and you will put your camera into the Live View mode which means the mirror goes up, the shutter unit opens up, light goes into the sensor, and you get to see what's going on on the back of the camera. And so, from here, if you press the Info button, you'll be able to go through a bunch of different options, and let's do a quick little demo here in class, so I got my camera in aperture priority, I've got my color, there's the video mode, we're gonna go to the still mode for right now, I'm gonna press Live View, we're gonna see a live view of what our camera is pointed at, right out here, and if I press the Info button, we can go through, we've got our grid...

s here, we've got our horizon level, are there any pilots in the crowd? Is this anything like flying a plane? Whoa, we can see how we're tipping forward and backwards, and so this is a great way to tell if you're getting your camera level or not, and if we get it just right, we get a nice little green dot there that we're pointed straight ahead. So the Info button allows to go through those different options, whether we want to see more or less information. Now, as I said, the i button allows us to get in to do some shortcut stuff, and there are some kinda cool things that you can do, and one of the ones that I wanna show you, let's see, we got image area, that's nice, lighting, electronic front-curtain, we're gonna talk more about that, brightness, this is a really cool one. It's called split-screen digital zoom. So, I've selected it, I'm gonna hit the center button, and now, we've got this very, notice we can see the cameras as we move back and forth, and I'm gonna go onto the table here, and the table looks like it's really small here, but it's gonna exaggerate the horizon line. And we can level the horizon by tilting the camera back and forth and getting things lined up. Now if I pull up the right information, lemme see where this information is, there it is, now I can take this left frame, and I can move it in and out, and if I want to move it out to the very edge, and then I gotta hit the lock button, and I can move the right frame in and out, you can see that table in the middle there, it's very easy to see if I am tilting the table in one direction or the other, so if I want to get it very leveled, now this would normally be done with a horizon going across the entire, the entire frame. And so, just by pressing that center button, I can go back and forth and then I hit that lock button, and then I can change the left side, and so it's a very cool way to make sure that you've got a very level horizon, it's very, very easy to use, in fact, it may be the easiest system of any camera on the market to use out there. And so that was accessed by going into the i button, once the camera is in Live View, to the split-screen digital zoom. And so, nice little feature for Live View. And so that i button will get you, as I say, to a bunch of other features, we're gonna talk more about these other features, like the electronic front-curtain, and the silent shutter, as we get in more into the menu system, but there's, as I say, a lot of shortcuts that you can get to right there. So you can also zoom in using the plus and minus to check focus, which can be very important, let me do a little demo of that here, with the camera, so I wanna make sure that our cameras over there on the stand are in focus, so I am going to come over here to the side and hit the plus button, and I'm gonna zoom in and I can navigate around, and just for fun, I'm gonna put my camera into manual focus, and so let's zoom in as close as we can on one of these original Nikon Fs here, clearly out of focus, but we're gonna focus, and, right there, that looks pretty good. And then I can zoom back on out, and I guarantee that that photo is in focus. So if you're doing product photography, working in the studio off of a tripod, or doing landscape photography, we're working from a tripod, almost any place, that is one of the best ways for guaranteed sharp photos, is that you really zoom in and check them out. And so that's a great system I use all the time. Now, one of the options, things to know about when you're in the Live View mode, is that, well, light comes into the lens, and normally it hits the mirror, but in Live View, we're not gonna be using this mirror, this mirror has a partial mirror to it, which allows light through it. So in standard photography, there's light that goes through the mirror, hits a sub-mirror, goes down to your phase detection system, which is your autofocusing system. And this is how your camera focuses when you look through the camera. Now, when we go into Live View, that mirror goes up, gets out of the way, the shutter opens up, light goes into the sensor, and your camera no longer has that standard information on how to focus. And so it uses contrast of the scene to focus and it's not nearly as fast on focusing. And so if you are trying to focus, you need to give it a little bit more time, you need to really give it subjects that have a lot of contrast in which to focus on. Because the Nikons are arguably one of the worst cameras when it comes to focusing in this manner. And so you do have to be very careful, and just aware that it's not going to track action real well. Now, there are some options for focusing. It does autofocus, and we can even use the touchscreen to focus, to change the options, is gonna be controlled by a button, we haven't talked about it yet, it's kind of hidden around the left side of the camera, by the edge of the camera, over on the edge, left, left edge of the camera, the AF Mode button. So when we press this button, we're gonna be able to change between single and full time focus, where the camera either focuses once, a single time, or it is constantly trying to focus. If we press that button and turn the front dial, we'll be changing the AF-area mode, where you can see we have face-priority, different sized brackets, wide and normal, and then it also has a subject tracking, where it's looking at color, and contrast, and facial recognition to try to track a subject moving back and forth. And as I say, the whole focusing system is relatively slow on this camera, so don't expect miracles out of it when it comes to shooting. And so, let's, uh, let's put this camera back in autofocus, let me do a little demo for you, so I'm gonna throw this back in autofocus, and I'm gonna kinda reach around, let me show you over here on the side of the camera, so it's this little button right in here, right below the AF M button in here, so that's the one I'm reaching in and I'm pressing, and I'll let you look at it on the back of the camera, so when I press in on this, you'll see I get this in yellow, between AF-S, and AF-F. Now I prefer AF-S where it focuses once and then it stops, it's not like constantly trying to focus. As I press the button and I turn the front dial, I'll be able to change through different sized brackets, small bracket, large bracket, and then there's a facial recognition tracking one, as well in there. Now, I can focus by simply tapping where I want it to focus, and I can move that focusing point anywhere I want. Now I still am coming up to the shutter release to press halfway down to focus, but you can change where you want it to focus in the Live View by just touching this screen, or you can move any one of the joysticks as well. That'll also move it around. So that is all in Live View, which is very similar to the Movie mode, which we're gonna talk about next. So we talked about touchscreen and moving it around, okay, so we also have Picture Controls, so we can go in and control that the same as we could in standard photography, and something important to note, and let me show you on the back of the camera, is, and I'm gonna switch my camera over to manual exposure, alright. So I'm in manual exposure, at 1/100 of a second, at f/4. What's gonna happen if I go to a faster shutter speed? It should get darker, right? Here I am, at 1/8000 of a second, and it's not darker. Because what it's trying to do right now, is it's giving us the best possible image on the back of the camera. If we wanted to do an exposure simulation, we hit the OK button, and it brings up the light meter and now it simulates with that final photograph. This isn't, that's clearly too fast, the shutter speed, so I'm gonna change those shutter speeds back down to what I think looks a little bit better, and I can use the light meter as a little bit of a guide over here, kinda a lot of white here, so I'm gonna go a little bit on the plus side, that brings us back down to 1/160 of a second, and so, whether you want to kinda get the maximum, image out of this, or whether do you want to get a simulated image, is turned on and off by the OK button. I prefer to leave this on all the time, I like to see if my picture's gonna be overly light or overly dark, I get to see what the final image is gonna look like. And so, it's nice that you can just press the OK button, and simply turn it off in my mind, but that's a, I think, a key thing that's often hidden and buried in the instruction manual I got out there for you. Alright, let's see, what do we do, let's see, we've talked about moving that focusing point around, covered that. So over on the front of the camera, there's another button we haven't talked about, the PV, the preview button, and as you are using different apertures on the lens, the lens is actually closing down, to show you the actual depth of field on it, and if you want to open up the aperture, and I don't know if I'll be able to show this to you, but let's turn this around, straight at the camera, some camera on camera action here, and I'd, I think it'd be better if I had a faster lens to show you the aperture opening up, but we can open and close that aperture with, let's see, this button right here, and you'll see there's a PV, barely get some light in there, there's a button there we'll talk more about, and so we can open up our aperture to let in more light if necessary, if there's not enough light coming in. Alright, Spot White Balance. Okay, there's a number of steps to this, and so if you want to get accurate white balance in a particular scene, we can do that, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask Drew to help me out with something, if you could just take this piece of paper and hold it up, or, if you're, pure white, stand over here by the Nikon cameras, and hold on, right on the table here, so he's got a white piece of paper there, and we're gonna want to get a white balance, because we got some funky light going on in here, we wanna make sure it's right, and let's, we'll do it on the keynote first, just to show you what we're gonna do. So first thing that we need to do is we need to have the camera in Live View. We're gonna press the white balance button, we're gonna select numbers one through six, remember we have six different presets for this, then we're gonna press and hold the white balance button, to activate it, we're gonna move that positioning target onto the white paper that Drew is holding, and then we're gonna take the measure with the center button, and then we're gonna press the white balance to finish. So we got a whole bunch of different steps to do, so number one, I'm gonna follow through, I'm in Live View, and got that checked, number two, we're gonna press the white balance, and I'm gonna set this up, Drew pick a number between one and five, one and six, Three. Three, okay, so I'm gotta get to preset, and we're gonna set it to d-3 down here, so we're gonna be on d-3, and next thing, let's see, number four, is I'm gonna press and hold the white balance button, and so now, you see it's blinking at us, alright, so now I'm gonna position the target, and we can see there's a yellow target that I can move around, and I don't want it over there, on his blue shirt, that's not gonna work, so I'm gonna put it right here, on the white piece of paper, number six, is I'm gonna take the measure, right here, data has been acquired, and number seven is I'm gonna press the white balance to finish, and so now, our number here, our white balance number three has been calibrated for exactly that light. Thank you Drew. Yeah. And so that's how you would calibrate the light in a particular scene, you could use a white piece of paper, you could use a gray card, and as I say, you can do that for up to six different locations. Alright, next up, Automated Fine Tune. Now, some people get a little bit angry, and they just have no tolerance for imperfections anywhere. When you buy this expensive of a camera, and the type of lenses that are typically gonna go with it, you would expect absolute precision in the way that it focuses. But the fact of the matter is, is that there are very small, tight tolerances, but there are little bit of wiggle room in how your lens may focus. And, what happens, is that, when you focus, it's possible, especially if you shoot with telephoto lenses, or very shallow depth of field lenses, that the focus will not be a 100% perfect. And you need to do some calibrations, some fine tune adjustment. This can be done manually, I'll talk about that in the menu section later on, but it can now be done automatically in the cameras. And so, I wanna go through this, the process, of how to automatically fine tune your camera. So let's just look at the keynote, we'll go through the steps, and then we'll do an actual demo here in the class. And so the set-up is you need to be in Live View, you need to have your camera set to AF-S, which is single focusing, you need to be using the center point, the actual center point, and you need to have your aperture wide open. You're gonna zoom in on a subject, you're gonna focus on it, and then you're gonna press and hold the Video Record button, and the AF Mode button for three seconds. And what this does, is it's going to check the Live View focusing versus the way the camera would normally want to focus, and it's gonna see if there's any difference. And so, I have not calibrated this 24 to 70 lens, and so we're gonna see if this lens is on or off. And I'm first gonna make sure that my lens is set at 70 millimeters, so it's at the maximum, and you know that Nikon camera right there in the middle has some nice contrast on it, so that's what we're gonna lock our camera on. So first up, we're in Live View, let's make sure we're in the AF-S mode, and it says AF-S, so we're good on that, we want the center focusing point, so I'm gonna move it away from the center, so you can clearly see that we're away from the center, and then I'm gonna press the center button. And that gets me exactly back to the middle, and then I'll reposition just slightly, I wanna be on the Nikon, on that particular camera, we want our aperture wide open, so I'm just gonna put my camera in aperture priority, we're not taking a picture, but I just wanna have the aperture at f/2.8. Now, I'm gonna zoom in on my subject, maximum zoom, and now I'm gonna focus, and it's okay to autofocus, I'm gonna let the camera autofocus so that Nikon is nice and sharp, and now I'm gonna press and hold the Video Record button and the AF Mode button here for three seconds, and let's see if this works. One, two, three. Before proceeding, fix the camera in place, it's on a tripod, and check that it's focused. And so we've done that, so we're good, so we're gonna press yes, New value has been added to the fine-tune for the 24 to 70, and I'm curious as to what it actually registered, so I'm gonna dive in to the menu system, and if I can remember, I may have to go into, I have to go into my own notes, because there's so many things in the menu system, I'm gonna go into the Setup Menu, and I'm gonna look under AF fine-tune, and it has recorded a value for this lens of minus eight, which I believe it means it's focusing in front of the subject by eight. Eight what, I don't know, eight units. It's a little bit of a, it goes between plus 20 and minus 20. And so I can see that the saved value for this lens, for this 24 to 70, f/2.8, and if I had another one, I can give them different numbers. But I can change this if I want to the minus seven or some other number. And so now, this lens has been calibrated to work with this body. If you had a different body, you could go through the same process, and end up with plus eight, or minus six, or some other number. But right now, this lens is calibrated to this camera. Now, unfortunately, it only gives one number for the entire lens, it doesn't matter, where the zoom is set, it doesn't matter how close you're focusing, it's gonna count one number, and if I ran through the whole process again, at 50 millimeters, it may give me a different number. And so you may want to do a couple of different checks with it. Now, this is a really cool way of not having to go through a very laborious process of checking it yourself. However, I have seen that other photographers have done this on it, Automatic Fine Tune, and then they've gone back to manually check things, and these are some people who are very, very picky about things, and they have found that the automated fine-tune is not always a 100% perfect. And so, depending on your level of precision, this may be good enough, or you may want to manually go in and check things further out. As far as who really needs to worry about this, in a very general sense, anyone who has lenses that are f/2.8 or faster, will probably want to look at this if you have lenses that go down to f/1.4, you will definitely want to go and to do this, to check it out, and, if not, at least pay attention to the photos you are taking, that you shoot shallow depth of field, and if you're not getting consistent focus out of your camera and lens, you can fix it yourself. You can always turn it back in to Nikon, but this is the exact same thing that they're going to do with it. And so, if you have fast lenses, lenses that shoot with shallow depth of field, you're gonna probably want to get in and check this sort of information out and probably go through this tuning process. So hopefully that helps you out. Alright, so that's Automated Fine Tune.