Now, you are able to go into custom setting D1 to control the Continuous Low shooting mode. And so if you've found that a particular motor drive doesn't work for the sequencing of events that you want, you can adjust it anywhere between one frame and nine frames a minute. The self-timer can be adjusted. There's our self-timer shortcut, there it is. Self-timers can be adjusted anywhere between two and 20 seconds. So there's two, five, 10, and 20-second options in there. Next up we have our viewfinder, and over to the side we have a diopter. What you wanna do is you wanna look through the viewfinder and look at the line of information below the image itself, and you wanna adjust the diopter so that this is correctly focused for your eye, because it gets bumped from time to time, and it's different if you have different users, and that's what you wanna be looking at for getting the sharpest focus. It has nothing to do with the focus of your photos, it's just the focusing of the focusing s...

creen and how easily you can see in the viewfinder itself. Now over on the left side we have an eye piece blind that is gonna be helpful in situations where we are not putting our eye up to the viewfinder. Now in live view, the mirror comes up and blocks the viewfinder so it's not a problem, but if we're doing a self-timer shot, and let's just say there's a bright light shining from behind the camera, that light goes into the mirror box and down into the metering sensor and it could throw off the metering of your camera, I don't know. Let's do a little test here in class, and I just wanna see if it makes any difference in here. I haven't tested this, so I'm gonna maybe look like a fool here. All right, so right now let's go to Aperture Priority. We're at F8, and what's our shutter speed, it's 125ths of a second. How much light is coming in that viewfinder? I don't know, let's close this and see if we, it doesn't change here. If I was to point this up, so let's see we have a little bit brighter light right here and it's possible that with a really bright light it could be sneaking in there. And in this particular case I just don't have a light bright enough for it to make a difference. Now I wanna show you another little trick, and this is very, very tricky on Nikon, is that this is a removable eye piece right here and it's locked, you can't turn it off. But if you flip this lever out so that's it's closed you can then unscrew it, and so it's an automatic lock on there and it'll only become unscrewed when you flip that out. And so it's locked in there right there. And so that's something that potentially may wear out after a period of time, and that is the DK17F eye piece and you can order replacement parts for that. So looking in the viewfinder is you're gonna be shooting most of your photos, so let's talk about what you see in the viewfinder and what you can turn off and on and what it means. So first off we have our total frame lines which is 100% coverage which means what you see is what you're going to get. And so it's very, very accurate in that regard. We will be talking more in an upcoming section about the focusing points themselves but there are 153 focusing points that the camera uses and it may show you some or all of them depending on what you have selected. If you want, you can turn on a grid system and this is useful for people who want to make sure that they have a level horizon, they like it for compositional reasons and this can be turned on with the custom setting menu D8. And so it's a nice little system for making sure that your horizons are not tilted one direction or the other. We have an option for cropping our images in-camera with the 1.3x crop ratio, and this will show us what our resulting frame will be if we have that turned on. And that will be something that we'll talk more about in the photo shooting menu. We have another way of telling if you are tilting the horizon either forward, backwards, left or right; it's the roll indicator. And these will light up if you are tilting the camera once again, left, right, up or down and we'll see this in a couple different types of displays on the camera. There are various warnings that will turn on. One is that you have your camera in the black and white mode. There is a monochrome mode that you can be in for shooting JPEG images and that's something you would probably to know about if you're intending to shoot color. There is also a flicker option that you can have turned on and what this is telling you is if the fluorescent lights that you are shooting, or other types of lights are having a flicker issue that may cause problems with the exposure. And I'm gonna have some really good examples coming up in the menu section about how to turn on Auto-Flicker and how it affects your photos and what my recommendations are. But one of the options is just turning on a warning so if you go into, let's say a high school gymnasium and you start shooting photos, this will come on to let you know there is a flicker problem and you're gonna end up with subtle exposure differences on a shot-to-shot basis. Finally, down at the bottom is where we have our normal LED information, and quickly going through some of this, we do have a focus indicator. This is very handy because the camera does have a little beep beep when it focuses, and that can be a little irritating to other photographers and you may want to quiet it and turn that off. But if you want to confirm that the camera is in focus over on that far left the green light turns on. But you'll notice there's also a couple of arrows that are pointing inwards. If you want to manually focus the lens this will tell you which direction to turn the lens for sharpest focus, and it can even do this on manual focus lenses. So it's a neat little focusing aid in the camera. After that we'll have our Metering system and then whether we have Auto Exposure lock which is a button on the back we'll talk about here in just a minute. We can lock flash, if we have a flash on here we can do a test exposure with the flash and lock that in. If the flash has a chance to do a practice it knows how much to actually fire when it comes to the real flash. And so you can lock that flash value in. Something more for topics in a flash class. We can lock our shutter speeds and apertures in. For instance, if you were gonna go to a basketball game and you knew that they were not going to change the lighting during the entire game, which they usually don't, and you wanted to make sure that you never bumped your camera off of the settings of 1000th of a second at F2.8, you could lock those settings in and you wouldn't have to worry about grabbing the camera and bumping those dials on it. And so that's something that you can go in and lock in the menu system. You'll see your exposure modes in there right above your exposure level, your light meter. And then there's a few other little warnings that you may have something turned on and we'll talk more about these as we go through the rest of the class. Little battery indicator, and then there is an ISO setting down there where you can see where your ISO is set. And then in the brackets themselves generally it's the number of photos left and if there is a K that means how many thousands of shots that you have left. One of my little gripes on the Nikon camera, and I don't mind, this is my class, I can gripe a little bit if I want, is that you can't see the ISO and the number of frames left at exactly the same time. You have to kind of choose which one you want. And there will be a menu setting where you can actually see both pretty well. So they do have a system in there where it flips back and forth very easily and we'll talk about that customization when we get into the menu setting of the camera. And then we finally have a flash over there to let you know that it's ready to go. Now one of the things that some people are irritated with when they are taking one of my classes is that the camera turns off and shuts down very quickly, more quickly than they had time to really examine what they were doing. And so there is a standby timer that you can adjust. If you want the lights and the displays to stay on longer, you can go in there and give it a longer period of time. And there's about four different options when you are in playback, or in live view, in shooting, in various modes. But if you want to save more battery power you can make those shorter in time. And so maybe while you're watching this class, jump over in there, set your standby timer to a longer period of time like 20 seconds as opposed to 10 seconds, and then when you're done with the class and you're just out shooting in the field then you can set it back down to ten or five seconds going forward. So that's all which you're going to see in the viewfinder itself.

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John Greengo

John Greengo is an award-winning photographer specializing in outdoor and travel photography. Shooting for over 3 decades, John has developed an unrivaled understanding of the industry, tools, techniques and art of photography. When he's not traveling for a new shoot,

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topics covered in this class

Camera Guides Nikon Tutorials Digital Photography

Ratings and Reviews

Carl Vanderweyden

John Greengo is the best! I purchased a Nikon D500 and this course around the same time. Because of this camera being so complex, I felt that a course would be beneficial. This course that John teaches is exactly what I needed. His knowledge of this camera as well as photography in general is exceptional. In fact, I own a couple of other courses presented by John and I also bought a couple of his books! I would highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to know the ins-and-outs of this D500! Thanks again John for a great course and your great way of explaining things with clear dialect and great visuals!

M Jo

Wow! What a great class! John is a natural teacher, moving at a good pace and explaining things carefully, never assuming you already know more than you might. I just got my D500 last week and am so pleased to have gone through this entire class. I learned a LOT and took some notes to refer back to. I've also just bought a Z6 and have purchased John's class for that. Can't wait to dive in!!!

Christina Brittain

By The class. John is the gold standard for teaching. He repairs lessons to perfection. He speaks in ways students comprehend all that he presents. Never waste words. Never bores. Always demonstrates his points. I will continue to purchase his classes as they provide the best learning I have found. He is making me a much better photographer, both technically and creatively. You can't make good images if you don't know your gear. Hope he teaches lessons in Portland Oregon one day. I know Pro Photo Supply would sponsor him.

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Back of Camera: Viewfinder Display

Back of Camera: Viewfinder Display

Lesson Info

8. Back of Camera: Viewfinder Display

Lessons

Class Introduction

Nikon D500 Overview

Camera Basics

Basic Camera Controls

Top of Camera: Exposure Control

Top of Camera: Buttons

Back of Camera: Release Mode