Lessons
Class Introduction
03:59 2Nikon D500 Overview
11:25 3Camera Basics
08:31 4Basic Camera Controls
03:22 5Top of Camera: Exposure Control
25:50 6Top of Camera: Buttons
16:33 7Back of Camera: Release Mode
05:55 8Back of Camera: Viewfinder Display
08:44Back of Camera: Play Back
10:18 10Back of Camera: Buttons
09:36 11Back of Camera: Live View
22:56 12Back of Camera: Movie Mode
09:48 13Left of Camera: Exposure Bracketing
03:19 14Left of Camera: Focus Mode
12:00 15Left & Right Sides of Camera
05:18 16Bottom of Camera
04:56 17Front of Camera
05:34 18Nikon Lenses Overview
09:26 19Playback Menu
08:24 20Photo Shooting Menu
14:26 21ISO: Photo Shooting Menu
26:14 22Movie Shooting Menu
14:01 23Custom Setting Menu: Autofocus
14:20 24Custom Setting Menu: Metering/Exposure
04:05 25Custom Setting Menu: Shooting/Display
07:33 26Custom Setting Menu: Bracketing/Flash
03:16 27Custom Setting Menu: Controls
11:38 28Setup Menu
16:00 29Setup Menu: Wi-Fi
06:47 30Retouch & My Menu
06:06 31Camera Operation Overview
08:13Lesson Info
Playback Menu
Alright, well folks, it is time to dive into the menu function so we're going to be going through the menu functions of the camera. This is where it's very handy to have the little PDF that has the menu section, 'cause we're going to be going through this, basically top to bottom, talking about each of the different items in there. Now I kind of put these into three different categories. Different categories then they have them in there, and I have, first off the most common type of thing that we're gonna find in the menu is something that doesn't matter to what you do. And so, it's just something, it really doesn't matter on how it's changed. And so you don't have to worry too much about those. And then the second one is something that you need to change and you're gonna leave changed for the life of the camera. That's just the way you want things to be. And then finally there's gonna be the third type which is the most important which is something that you wanna come back to on a reg...
ular basis. And you're gonna wanna kinda keep that in mind, maybe put an underline by it, maybe you put a star or you circle it, because there is gonna be a menu that you can select and you can create your own items, it's called My Menu. And you'll be able to have a number of those items there so that you don't have to go digging and trying to shuffle through the entire menu to find a few of those favorite items. And so kinda keep in mind is this something that is not important? Or just set it once and I'm done? Or something that I'm gonna come back to on a regular basis. Alright, press the menu button and you're gonna see that there are several tabs where information is located under one of these six different tabs. And they're fairly obvious, we're gonna go through all of them. And Nikon has done a pretty good job of organizing the data so that it is in the appropriate tab that it needs to be. Now as far as navigating, you can use the joystick or the touch pad on the back of the camera and you're going to be going up down left and right. When you want to enter into a particular function or mode, you can either press the center button, the OK button, or you can go to the right, and so if you go to the left that kinda backs you up out of things. And if you really wanna back up out of everything, you can either hit the menu button, or you can hit the shutter release halfway down. Now something to be aware of in Nikon menus, is that they have long pages that you have to scroll through to find items. And this is a little different than other cameras on the market. And so if you quickly just go up and down and you say, well I don't see it here, it's because you probably need to page down. And so be aware if that scroll bar is over there on the right, that means you might need to page up and down. And for those of you with the PDF, a little hint, you'll notice that some of the boxes are shaded and some of them are white, that means they're on different pages going through. So you can kind of estimate it's on the second or the third page down in that particular tab of information. Starting at the beginning, the playback menu. We're gonna go pretty quickly through this because it's not real critical for high quality images. You can delete your photos, there's a garbage can button on the back of the camera, but you can do it here a little bit more easily if there is a lot of photos to delete. If you wanna get rid of all your images, I recommend going directly to the reformat option, which is something we'll see in the setup menu. That gets rid of the images, as well as the data directories and the folders, empty folders and everything else. You can select and create different playback folders in this camera, and this is the first change from the default settings. This should be changed to all in my mind, it's normally comes to ND500 and the reason for this is if you were to take a memory card from your other camera, put it in here, chances are if you have it set at ND500, it wouldn't see the memory card of that other camera and you might end up reformatting that card not realizing there's data on there. And so I think it's better if there is data on that card, you can see it in the camera, and that's why I have this selected at all. If you wanted to hide an image, you can, the reason that you might want to do this, if you were doing a slideshow, if you're a real estate broker and you wanna show a slideshow of a house that you're trying to sell but you don't wanna show photos of your kids playing in the swimming pool, you could hide those images from your particular slideshow. Playback display options, if you recall earlier in the class, when we wanted to turn this information on, this is something at first, I would recommend going in, and checking on all the boxes so that you have all the display options available to you by pressing up and down, on the back of the camera. Now if you find you don't utilize one of these features, then you can go back and uncheck that box. One of the ones that's kind of interesting is the Highlights. And what this does, is it shows you information that is overblown in pixels and so there's too much light that has gotten to it and you should just adjust your exposure. We looked at this earlier where we were able to look at the individual colors in the RGB histogram, but this can be very handy for checking out if it's the correct exposure or not. But it is a tool and you can ignore it as well. We have two memory cards which means we can copy images from one memory card and so if you take a bunch of images on one memory card you can stick in a second memory card and copy images to that other card. When you take a photo, do you want to have that photo come up on the back of the camera? And with a digital SLR, most people kinda wanna see that image to see what it looks like. If you know you don't need it, if you wanna save battery power, say you're doing a time lapse series of photographs where you don't need to look at the photo every single time you can turn it off, but I think most of us will want it left on. When you delete a photo, what's the next photo you wanna see the one that you are going to or the one that you were just at before this one and so if you do a lot of in camera deleting, you may wanna play with this but there is a theory that you should not delete photos in the camera. Because when you're playing around with communication between the card and the camera, that's just one more opportunity for something to become corrupt and the camera not wanna communicate with that card and it locks everything down, and the solution is to get a spare memory card, put it in the camera and use it and then you're gonna have to come back to the original card after you download it and then reformat it. And so this probably isn't going to be too important for most people just because something you should shy away from a little bit . So when you shoot a burst of images, do you want it to go to the first image in the burst, or the last image in the burst? And so traditionally cameras go to the last. But if you often shoot in bursts and you go back and you wanna see those in progression, you can have it select the first of that images so that you can just walk through them a little bit more cleanly. Auto image rotation, will automatically rotate your images when you download them to your computer, your camera knows when you're shooting vertically and this saves you a lot of time if you shoot very many verticals. Related to that, but different, is rotate tall. This will rotate tall images that you shoot in a vertical fashion but then you're playing back in the camera horizontally. And so in this case, I recommend turning rotate tall off. Because, if you shoot a vertical image, you're gonna wanna see it in the biggest size possible for a general image review and it's very easy because you probably just shot the picture vertically, you can turn the camera vertically. The reason to leave it on is if you happen to leave your camera in that horizontal position a lot or you're going to be doing a slideshow where it's connected up to a TV. You can put your camera into a slide show mode and do slide shows via the HDMI port on the side of the camera and you can set various parameters as far as the interval and which images you're looking at and how long they're up and so forth. You can also send images WiFi. We're gonna be covering some of the WiFi and SnapBridge options fairly lightly in this class but you can look at an image, and then you can select that image to be sent to a smartphone device.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
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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