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Lenses and Accessories

Lesson 6 from: Nikon D7000 Fast Start

John Greengo

Lenses and Accessories

Lesson 6 from: Nikon D7000 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

6. Lenses and Accessories

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Lesson Info

Lenses and Accessories

So just kind of a final little bit here on some lenses and accessories for the nikon d seven thousand owner. The first thing that you should know about is the differences in lenses, and nikon has two different siri's of lenses. They have the fx lenses and the d excellence is now the dx lenses are indicated by the d x on the lens. Thie f x lenses are not indicated with anything, so the only way to tell if it's a dx lanza's if it says dx and if it doesn't, then it's not that's, just the way it isthe so, uh, different lenses are designed to do different things. The fx lands has been designed for full frame thirty five millimetre type sensors and the dx lenses designed for smaller frames, the one point five crop that this camera has. So when you shoot with an fx lands, it has a very large projection of a circle onto the sensor and it's covering that sensor from corner to corner. Okay, the dx lands especially designed for the smaller sensor, and the lenses are sometimes a little bit smaller...

, little bit lighter weight. Less money has just big enough of a circle to fit the sensor on this smaller the smaller size. Now, if you want to take your dx lands and you want to upgrade to a full frame camera and you take your dx linz and put it on that camera, you're going to end up with what's called a vignette ing problema darkening of the corners, and that is generally considered an undesirable thing. Tohave now, as an owner of a d seven thousand, if you want to buy a dx lens, that's, not a problem, because what's going to happen, then it's it's going to project a very large image, and your sensor is only going to see a certain portion of it, but it's going to be a very good portion, apart the image, so you're going to get this cropped frame of you, essentially. And so, if you are thinking about upgrading to a full frame camera, you might want to invest maurin f excellence is then indy excellence is, but you can certainly use any of the current nikon lenses on this camera, which is one of the great things about this camera. So with that in mind, the standard lens that comes with the camera is a d x lands it's an f s lands has got the silent wave motor in it, eighteen to one or five, with an aperture of three, five, two, five, six, and it's, a good general purpose standard lands, but there's a lot of other things out there if you're like most people in the first thing you want is a little bit more of a telephoto lens. The best matching telephoto lens in my opinion is the seventy two, three hundred this is a vibration reduction lands reaching out to three hundred is quite a bit more than the one hundred, so if you're looking at photographing travel or landscape or maybe even some sports, this is going to let in a lot more light kind of an upgrade telephoto and this is actually an older lands is thie eighty two, two hundred two point eight now they make a new version of the seventy two, two hundred two point eight but it's more than twice as much money in this as this one I think this one is a really good bye it's a very sharp lands and it's got a very fast aperture it's f two point eight so compared to the standard linds it's letting in four times as much light and it's got twice the magnification on it. And so this is ahh nice lands toe look at and it also has vibration reduction there's a lot of lenses, but I'm just going to show you a few a few of the basics nikon came out with a normal lens for the dx sensor it's a thirty five millimeter, one point eight lance and if you bought it with the kit lens and you're looking for something else. This is a great lands toe have it's just a general purpose lands you can already do with this candace faras focal length, but the one point eight aperture means you're going to be able to shoot in low light conditions and with very shallow depth of field if you want. So it does open up some new doors to you. The standard fifty millimeter lands is also a good option. Now they make actually a couple of versions of this. They have a one point for a swell it's a one point eight and this makes for a really nice portrait lance and is probably one of the best bangs for the buck in getting a good lands because you get to shoot in low light, you get shallow depth of field it's a really nice look with this lance. If you're into close up work, they make a good macro lens that also makes a pretty good portrait. Lance it's not as fast but it's much better at focusing close up. So if you have a desire to photograph things very, very closely, you wantto take a postage stamp and fill the frame. You can do it with this lance. One of the biggest options on this camera is the external battery gripped the m d m b d eleven it's, the multi power battery back battery pack and so this is something that you might add on there for a couple reasons number one it has its own battery, so you now have two batteries in the camera, so the cameras will last longer it's on on one charge essentially he'll give you a bigger grip so if you have big hands and if you shoot a lot of vertical stuff so you're shooting portrait's a large percentage of the time it gives you a vertical shutter release that's more comfortable to use if you do that sort of work a lot of portrait wedding work you might be interested in the vertical grip the battery that it takes is an ian l fifteen you confined this from nikon there were also some generic manufacturers that make the batteries for less money. I haven't seen him down which the camera, but they may not provide all the chip information that tells you how many shots you've taken and all the battery information and they may not last as law. The lens hood is supplied in the kit. If you don't have a lens hood with your lens, I would highly recommend getting one and using one on a regular basis yet blocks light from hitting the front of the lens, which is what causes flair and reduces contrast in situations and so I try to keep a lens hood on my camera at all times and the one for the eighteen to one or five is thie h b thirty two, but there is a unique one for every lens, and so you would want to check to see what the exact lens hood that you need for your lands for keeping the sensor clean, putting the camera in the mere lockup mode. You can use a bulb blower like this, too blow in some clean air to potentially knock off dust that is hanging on the sensor good device to have you don't need to have any skill on how to use it. You just squeeze your hand and blow a bunch of air inside the sensor to help clean it off. If you have this camera, you've already probably purchased a memory card, so you're familiar with the fact that it uses one or two sd memory cards sd is available in three different forms sth cst xy basically are extended, and larger capacity versions of the card in this camera can handle all of those you'll notice on the side of the cards is a right protection switch. If you flip that switch, you won't be able to delete the card you won't be able to reform at the card, so it's a way to locking in data to the cards, you might say so that it's not accidentally written over. If you shoot a lot of video, you'll probably want to get a card that is a class six or faster for general shooting. Class four is fine if you're shooting with high end video cameras, you might be a class ten but there's a classification on the memory cards that talks about how fast they are and this will also indicate how fast downloads to your computer speaking about downloading to your computer a great way to get the images to your computer rather than transferring them through the camera is through a card reader I highly recommend an external card reader you don't need any software it's faster than using the camera and it potentially allows your camera to be off shooting pictures while you're one card is being downloaded, you have to have the camera to download the images and there's a number of good ones on the market. We have a couple of one's listed from being h at the creative life website flash nikon does a really good job flash and this is one area I would highly recommend sticking with ny khan's name in the flash unit the four hundred is not a flash I'd recommend unless the flash in this camera breaks and you just want the smallest simplest thing possible if you're going to get a flash, get something that adds a little bit more power to it for most people, I think the s p seven hundred is a good intermediate level flash it's going to add more power it's going to get the flash further away from the lens, which is important, and it's going to allow you to twist and bounce the flash off of ceilings and walls. If you really get into flash they macon sb nine hundred, which has more power and more versatility and maur tricks that it could dio for the average photographer, the sb seven hundred is probably the right one, but if you're really into it and you need that extra power or extra features, look for the s b nine hundred and then finally to fire the shutter release without touching the camera. Important for getting the sharpest pictures possible, you can get the wired cable release, which is thie m c d c, too, which plugs into the side of the camera or you can get the wireless remote. Each one kind of has their benefits and drawbacks depends on your style of shooting. If you're the type of person that likes to get in the picture with your friends, the wireless remote it's nice, because then you can kind of just put it into the remote mode and take the picture whenever you're ready. If you're working from a tripod and you're doing landscape type photography, I'd be more inclined to be with the cable release and so as we bring our class too close I'll just let you know that my name is john gringo you go to my website to find out more information about the classes I teach you may wanna check out our fundamentals of digital photography here it creative live it's a great ten week class if you want to know about more about digital more about photography I do eh great ten weight class that goes into all the shutter speed step the field lenses, composition all of that and it's a great starting point here a creative life we have a lot of great classes that are very advanced in nature and this is kind of the good beginning one to start with if you happen to live in the seattle or portland area I do teach a number of classes as well as lead tours and so you can check out my website for more information about that and so we're going to go ahead and finish up taking some questions and answers but I'll say right now, thanks a lot for tuning in and taking part in the d seven thousand class yes, thank you all we have a question from parana that says wise creative lives so awesome I don't know the answer to that one there's somebody also people that are working here that's for sure adam in the booth says because he works here like I said there's some awesome people working I have to call him out sometimes like in here out of peace no one else can he's a big part of our lives so we gotta give him a shot great class john again thank you so much thank you learned how about you guys did you guys get a lot out of this looks like we got a thumbs up in the classroom so I should just go and we want some questions take it away kate yeah I'm not sure how many more questions we have we have a few and then we've got two more winners to announce before we sign off. Excellent ok scavenges so we'll do a few questions a few winners yeah I've been kind of harassing the chat room um asking them okay where's where's your questions because and I'm surprised because usually we have a ton but it looks like we have a few but we've gotten a lot of them answered so well you know, extremely not having questions either is good or bad either I already answered them in the class or people have just tuned off I think it's really good because you've been extremely thorough and a lot of the questions have been really end up so I mean we do have some but I just I'm kind of surprised and I think it's a good thing hopefully so that's my all right so um let's see director boy had asked if set to single point in f s and center waited where does the focus point fall also because the point that the exposure measurement is made and that is really I don't really understand there's a bit of a jumble going on because we're talking about there's focusing in their meeting and in this particular camera those two things are separate s so you can choose spot metering which is this little tiny area in the middle we can choose center waited which is a bigger spot or we can choose matrix which is choosing a whole matrix of space is now when it comes to focus you can choose a single point and you can adjust what point that isthe and so a very dangerous way to set your camera up is in spot meeting in the middle and focusing over here you could see a potential problem if you're focusing on your subjects over here and this is pointed at some black background or white background that your subject is not like at all they could throw off your meter completely and so you do want to be very careful using that spot meter and I'm not sure if that's where they were getting too but I'll just make that point anyway wait I don't know if this is right but it sounded to me like they were asking how they moved the single focus point right inside the viewfinder okay, so this okay this is something that could be a little bit of confusing and I no if this is going to answer it but this will answer some other people's questions when you do have it set to the single point focusing so that's the button on the side of the camera and by turning the front dial to the just one little dot in there now when you hold the camera up to your eye and you press the button on the back of your camera here that will move the focusing point around but it doesn't do it in this view finder on the top this lcd display it'll do it in the viewfinder but not on the lcd and so if I want to focus way over on the right I will activate the camera tab over to the right and I'm focused over here but in the lcd this isn't quite accurate it's just showing the center point and so that information is slightly different and be aware of that um ok a quick question about using a remote shutter or the shutter release roy can you start video recording with that same cable release? Not to my knowledge okay all right, I'm pretty sure you can't and the questions they're just flooding in now that I had to go and say there are no questions so take the best of him we'll mure had asked earlier if you could explain again what focus point rap is that that wasn't really clear to them? Okay, you have thirty nine focus points and I forget how many there are but there's about like ten over here and if you go all the way over here and you want to go back over here if you wrap it around it just one click goes all the way over here which is kind of nice so if you're over on the right hand side I'll do it for the tv if you're on the left hand side and you go left it would wrap around to this side instantaneously and so it's you know it's the magical area where it just kind of switches over to the other side does that make sense for most people? It makes sense so you don't have to go quick like click, click, click, click, click, click and b miller had also asked, when would you want to use the three d or thirty nine point focus? You know, I unfortunately have not had a chance to really test this camera out on a variety of sports modes, which is where the thirty nine point and the three d tracking is going to come in most handy it's kind of in theory the three d tracking is a new thing in this camera and I am kind of waiting to see how the sports photographers I like it because it's kind of using new software to track things and that's why I'm recommending to anyone to see how it works for the type of action that they shoot as I said before, it may work great for soccer, but it doesn't work good for basketball depends on how that action is the lens that you use and so forth in theory there working somewhat similarly, the three d I from my understanding is using not only the focus but it's using the tonality and the colors of the subject to help track it and so it potentially has maur capability to track the focusing but uh that may depend on the types of subject your showed your shooting. I've seen a few questions coming in about light room and tethered shooting and do you know if light room supports this newer camera model yet? I don't know if it does at this time it does it does okay way have in in class confirmation thank you, thank you. I'm reed had asked if you could talk about the basic settings you would recommend for shooting video you know, for shooting video it's going to depend on how you set this camera because in the in the auto moat the mom and pop just shooting their kid just cause they want a short little video mode I would leave it in the automatic settings and try to pre focus ahead of time, and she was generally a wide angle lens. If you're more serious into video, you know how to set your camera up? I'm not going to tell you I'm I know if it had been about video, but I'm sure you know as much as I know on video, but there you're going to be maurin manual exposure, selecting your focus and and using other equipment besides this, whether it's, the fluid head or other device toehold amount or brace the camera but the video you're gonna have to try to play around with it. It's not the best video camera in the world it's capable of incredible video it's just not the best video camera in the world. Um, oakley had asked, what prime lens do you think is the sharpest? Well, there's places that do testing on the sharpest lenses and in general it's going to be a telephoto lens? But I've heard really good things if you've got the spare change for a two hundred millimeter f too four, five, six grand, something like that. I'll just purchased one of those next week, its just what everybody yeah, yeah passenger had asked when I take video in ten eighty I have a hard time playing it back without being choppy. Should I be using a specific software for playback on the computer the playback on the computer you know once again I'm not a huge video expert but that's likely to be thesis oft where the the dot movie file is kind of a chunky file from what I've heard it's kind of thick and slow running so you do need a very fast computer. The file is probably fine, but if you had a fast enough computer it may run more smoothly and so it's probably not a defect with your camera recording however, check the speed of your card if it's not a fast enough card it could potentially dropped frames and make it look choppy so you probably want to class six card or higher for shooting the video ah it's hard to determine exactly where that problem is starting next question bobby had asked if you could give some tips for time lapse during sunset photography how to set the camera because the exposer the express exposure changes continuously during a sunset sunrise yeah, do you have any suggestions about that? I was going to ask him if he finds some if you could let me know because shooting a time lapse during the the sunset is great if you want to get the sun going down and going dark or if you want to get it like coming up getting that transition the problem with this camera with all still cameras is that the increments that we change exposures on this is one third of a stop and we need it to be maur exacting than that would be nice to have one one hundredth of a stop because a third of a stop is actually fairly large when you get into the increments of light changes during sunset and it's hard to get that with this type of camera because you're trying to adjust for the light and when you had just one third that's a that's, a big jump and so it's it's rather difficult to shoot time lapses going through a sunset, there are special high end video cameras that are designed for controlling it better than this camera, but they're really expensive I think we're about done with questions do you have any more least on this one last time give away way let's just let's just giveaways I mean, they're the questions air the questions are you know we've got we've got mostly pretty much we've done well in the questions okay? All right. All right. Time to give away a couple of more prizes we have one more are strapped one more black rapid our stop and a bar lenses get service get s o the first one is going to go to atc instead who tweeted settings these air all seasoning to flavor as you like it which is awesome and the other prize is going to go teo troy the watson who said every camera should come with a gringo and a black rapid in the box so sorry had to pick it it was just too awesome thank you for tweeting out thanks and thank you to black rapid and borrowed lenses first and also I wanted to give a shout out to be an h yeah line this very camera right exactly so and we do have a specific link from creative live that if you purchase the being h products through creative life it helps us out so we'll put that in the chat room being h has been a big supporter of ours here and so those who like this free learning and cheap learning and online learning they've been a big help out with a lot of the equipment from the camera right here to some of the other equipment in the office and we have links with all the accessories that we talked about at the end of class today about model numbers and so forth and how to get them and free learning is amazing but also if you purchase this course now it's still twenty nine dollars so watch it over again and go back through all the custom menus and get that set right. The best thing after a free learning is very cheap learning you're right also I wanted to say a comment in the chat room from g blank who's, one of our regulars wanted to know what's. Your next class is here. Creative live john, that is unknown. I would like to know hazarding a guess that that new cannon t three I probably needs a class on it. Not that it's gonna help people out in the nikon class, but I just keep hoping and pushing night kind of come out with the deed three hundred two or whatever they d eight hundred eighty eight hundred think we're glass on that. Four hundred, eight hundred and four votes. Light room three. Room three. Yeah, like way good. So also, folks, please join us tomorrow. We have a workshop going on with vincent law ferree very excited about that three day workshop on d s r r two video. So very excited about that. That's. Awesome. He has an awesome one. And for all those people who were interested in video, take a day off work and call in sick and tune in. You're going to learn you're gonna learn a lot this weekend. So thanks again, john. It was a great class. Thanks a lot for helping out. And thanks to all the students in class and around the world, yeah, thank you, creative life.

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Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

First off, John is a great teacher who is easy to follow and he gets the information across in a way I can relate to. I loved his Fundamentals course, it was a great refresher for me. This course covers the plethora of features found on the new D7000. They are covered in a logical sequence covering each button, menu selection or setting found on the camera. However, I was a bit disappointed in that this course seemed more like a video manual than a how-to for setting up this camera AND WHY. I'm a competent amateur and I understand how to set up my camera. I guess I was looking more for a WHY one would choose this setting over that one. For example: focus tracking has 5 settings, long to short. I was looking for some insight on how to utilize this feature best. Or when to change the AE-L button for different situations. I think I was expecting too much from this course for setting up this amazing camera. Perhaps they will add another chapter at a later date explaining the WHY when choosing one setting over another. Overall though this course will help beginners grasp the multitude of settings and features available on the D7000, especially if you're not into reading the manual or have difficulty understanding one.

Peter Alper
 

Instructor FABULOUS! Course materials COMPLETE. I went into photography (hobby) after retiring. Automotive marketing exec. Retired bicycle, sailboat, motocross, and sports car racer. A benign hobby...No Way. So I bought a Nikon D7000 (used)(, put together rather too full equip ($$$), and then found Greengo. Learned all about the Nikon and now do photo essays of the automotive industry...just for fun. Sign up for Creative Live before they got filled up. Don't wait. Oh yes...not getting paid for the endorsement!!!!! It's the real thing. Peter.

Maxsophie Landsman
 

Really good class. Best thing is that I can go back and review the information. John is an excellent teacher. I've had my 7000 for a couple of years but now I have a much better idea of how to use it.

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