Lessons

Lesson Info

Backside Buttons

Okay the release mode on the camera kind of on the top it's a collar around the mod dial and number of options on here this is what happens when you press down on the shutter release itself most of the time most people are going to be fine with s for single frame you press down you get one picture that's really all you need most of the time there is a continuous low in a continuous high speed the high speed will be at six frames per second. The low speed is adjustable but it starts off in three frames you can have it for five or two or one if the continuous high speed it's a little too fast, there is a quiet mode and for those who don't own the camera and wondering how much difference is there, let me fire it under the normal mode and hold it close to make so here's the continuous low setting actually that's not fair because I was at a slower than normal shutter speed let's try and normal shutter speed continuous high coming up okay, we're reaching the buffer on the raw here. One of th...

e downsides when shooting raw and continuous jai is that you can't shoot very many pictures to the ram memory before it stores it in the memory card and so the buffer is it is no let's try this again and then the camera slows down so there's a very short burst that you could shoot but what I was going to get two was the cue mode it technically is a little bit quieter. Some people don't find it to be a normal camera noise and they find it more disturbing even though it is quieter. But if you did want to make a little bit less noise in the theatre, for instance you could put it in the quiet mouth. We also have a self timer on there which is kind of nice because you can go in and you can just how long the self timer is. I believe we have the choice of two, five, ten and twenty seconds. We can adjust that when we get into the menu setting and then there is a mere lock up mode on the camera as well. Let's see what else we had a few of things here could actually worry about that you can customised continuous low mode on the camera by going into the custom menu. D five what I did want to address was the mere up mode so little graphic to go along with this. So here is the problem when taking normal pictures at kind of slow shutter speeds you press down on the shutter release the mere goes up and as soon as the mere hits the top of the mere box, this vibration rattles the camera right as the shutter is opening in exposing the film and so it's some very particular shutter speeds, even though your camera's on a tripod there's going to be a little bit of vibration and thus blurriness to your photograph. So what you want to engage is mere lockup, and what happens with mere lockup is it's, now a two stage process you press once to bring the mere up the vibrations happened throughout the camera, same as always, but then they dissipate and then after a period of time, usually about five seconds you press the shutter release a second time. Obviously we have to be using a shutter release that is not connected to the camera or at least not directly on the camera. This is where a wireless cable release or a cape a cable release or wireless cable release will work. And so I was down in yosemite national park a few months ago, and I forgot to turn mayor lock up on and you can see in this magnified section on the left that it's not very sharp. But then when I remembered what my problem wass because this happens to a lot of people, at least I like, I think it does, and I turned on mere lockup you'll notice that it's a much sharper image so it can have a huge impact now this shot was around one eighth of a second, and what anyone who does this type of photography will let you know is that there is a vibration zone where you are likely to encounter these problems if you are shooting from a tripod this's not really an issue hand held with faster shutter speeds it's generally around a fifteenth to around a second. It may extend up into the thirtieth of a second range, but any time you're in this range shooting from a tripod you should be using near lockup for maximum sharpness. If you don't, you're going to get slightly blurry pictures, so that is the release mode on the camera moving around to the back side of the camera. We have a very large screen one point, two million dots a little bit larger than on previous cameras at three point two inches, talk about play back for a moment, so play back an image if you want. If you want to delete the image you'll hit the garbage can wants to indicate you want to throw it into the garbage, and then you'll hit it once again to actually delete it from the camera. You have a protect button, which is the little lock key, and what this does is it does not allow you to throw your images into the garbage now you, khun still reformat your card and get rid of your images that way. So do be careful it's not permanently truly locking those images in forever. If you want to check sharpness, zoom in and zoom out, zooming in almost all the way you don't want to go in all the way and check to see how sharp your pictures are is a great way to ensure out in the field that you got the picture as sharp as you wanted. When you zoom out, you can zoom out to thumbnails, including, I think afore image nine image, and you can even go all the way back to a calendar if you want. So if you go on vacation, you can quickly jumped from day today rather than scrolling through every image on your camera. Now to scroll through your image is what you'll use is the multi selector on the back of the camera, left and right previous image next image and if you go up and down, you can pull up more information or less information. And if you try that right now and nothing happens, it's, because you're going to need to stick around till we go back into the menu into something called playback display options, and we check off a bunch of the options so some of the optional screens besides the picture you actually took. Will be something that shows you the highlights the rgb hissed a gram, which is kind of a graph that shows you how good of exposure you got and then the rest of the shooting data that you've worked with the eye button down on the bottom is a shortcut into its called the retouch menu. You might call this photo shop on board the camera and so it's not something I'm really big into, but you can go in and you could do red eye correction you could trim an image, crop it up a little bit, you could make a color image black and white and you could change around some of the filter effects and what's going on is going to do is it's going to create a copy of the original image in a j peg version for you to play with? So you're not going to harm any images it's just that you have very limited resource is in what you do to your image. All right? What else do we have on the back of the camera? So we have our white balance and help, but this is a triple duty button we already talked about the key which locks or images in the playback mode the question mark basically means help what's going on when you're in the menu system and you're under a line that you're like, what does this do you could hit the question button and it brings up a little bit of description about what that item is. The main reason people are pressing this button is to get to the w b white balance effect and so let's bring in some of the white balance options in here and so this camera records light but it doesn't know what type of light you're working on nder isn't fluorescent is tungsten lights and so this way you khun tell exactly the camera what's going on because if you don't, the camera doesn't necessarily know what color snow is and it could end up tweaking the color of the snow if it's not really sure and so let's bring in the kelvin scale here, which is how we measure light and so sunlight is a little over five thousand degrees kelvin and we have a number of different options for kind of normal natural light situations and then for artificial light incandescent light the type of life that a lot of people have in their homes is very orange in color you would need to adjust your white balance to match the type of lights that you're working under if you want correct light now beyond these you have another set of options you have preset manual where you would photograph a white sheet of paper, for instance and you would tell the camera to correct for that white piece of paper and this camera has a new feature which is kind of fun I haven't seen it on a camera before it's a spot white balance that you can activate from live view or a movie basically you just take the camera you pointed at something light and you press a button and it calibrates the color to that white object which is very nice if you know the kelvin temperature anyone know the kelvin temperature in here right now quickly guess feels like it's about sixty eight sixty nine wait kelvin actually with these lights in here it's pretty no it's pretty close to natural daylight in here it's probably around six thousand degrees in here right now but if you knew the number let's say you worked at the creative live studio I don't know are they hiring right now they've been hiring a lot lately and let's say it's your job to come in here and shoot pictures and you're on ly job is to shoot pictures in this room once you figure out what temperature these lights are in here you could set your camera to let's just say it's six thousand k leave it at six thousand k and every time you shoot pictures in here it's going to be perfect so long it's the lights change and so very convenient in that type of scenario and then finally there's something called auto white balance and auto white balance is where the camera figures things out for you and takes a wild guess at what what's going on and as much as I am a manual guy, I kind of like a white balance and I got two reasons for number one it does a pretty good job and gets me pretty close to the mark number two is I like to shoot in raw and if you shoot raw white balance doesn't really matter too much because you can always go back and fix it without any harm to the original image. So no damage to the original image. Having said that, if I am in a particular situation where I know the lighting is not going to change and it's something very obvious, I'm out on a bright, sunny day and I'm shooting, I'm gonna set it to sunlight because that's going to be the most color correct and it's not going to change from shot to shot, and so my general recommendation is to set it toe auto white balance, and then if you see a problem or you're working in an area of where you're going to have similar lighting for a large number of pictures, then flip it over to the appropriate white balance setting but utilize whatever ones in here you think are appropriate to your type of work, but a lot of good options in there, okay, next button down is our zoom in bun, which we've already talked about, but it's the quality, but this is very important for setting the image quality because I think this is highly unusual. The camera out of the box does not come set to the highest image quality, and so if you have just opened your camera, you just got a delivery from fedex and ups, and you're just playing with your camera right now. It's not set to the highest setting on here, and so the two basic options we have on the back of the camera r, j peg pictures or raw pictures and the raw pictures are known in the nikon nomenclature as n e o f stands for nikon elektronik format, and the highest quality images that you're going to get out of this camera are going to come from the any afs, the nef ce or the raw image. And so if you want the highest quality image you want to set it to raw now the downside to raw is that you're going to have to have the right software to work with. The camera comes with software. All the other common programs out there, like photoshopped and light room and aperture can all handle the raw images from this camera, and so anyone who's pretty serious about what they're doing is going to be shooting raw images with this camera. Now if you don't really have your software game in place right now and you just want to start with j picks, the camera comes set two large normal j pegs and I would recommend upping the quality to all the best quality which is large fine quality j pecs and so what it's doing is it's compressing the information and it's reducing the file size with the norm when you go to fine, you're going to get less images and sorry to say you're going to get a few less images on the memory card but that's not a big deal memory cards are pretty cheap these days it's well worth it I think teo either shoot large fine or raw now you do also have the additional option of setting raw and a j peg image I don't recommend this for most people most of the time. What happens then is you take one picture, you're going to get two photographs arana j pick and that would be a special case scenario for instance, you're shooting your friend's wedding and they want really high quality images so you shoot rock but they said, you know what could you do a slide show at the reception and you're wondering how are you going to download and process five hundred images from the ceremony into a slide show at the reception in twenty minutes and that isn't gonna happen and that's why you shoot jpeg images so that you can quickly download those to the computer and you can make a slide show with those he eventually throw those away or those air just used for the slide show and the raw images are kept for the high quality prints and so it's a special case scenario you normally don't want to go around shooting two files it's just going to clutter up your hard drive and so that is controlled by pressing the quality button and turning the main command I'll if you shoot j pegs and we all do shoot j pegs from time to time if you press the quality button and turn the front dial, you'll change the size of the j peg which is just simply the number of pixels that it's recording and so obviously if you want the best quality you wanted large you didn't spend all this money on a twenty four megapixel camera to get six megapixels out of it most likely if you don't have a computer and you can't scale it down with anything else or if you really don't need that larger file you could choose a smaller image size but most most people want to have it on the largest best quality image on daily shooter ass if you're using live you can you see the changes in white balance so I know that's going back a few slides to white balance but well, we haven't done that, but let's do it in here right now. Okay, so I'm going to turn my camera and so hopefully our camera over here can see it and we haven't officially introduced live you but will jump around just because we feel like doing it so I'm going to throw it in a live view and we have kind of a white board over here I don't know how it looks pretty white and I am going teo hold down the white balance button and see if I can get this to work oh, please do this uh did it due to come on and say I need teo or we're going there we go and so I believe that we can see it happening let me change it to something else with a different color and so data acquired so yes, you can see it directly in camera. All right, there you get davor is a gentleman or woman not sure who you are but they ask the question earlier about the esso and they said to add to the previous question I believe my d three hundreds also can go as low as s a one hundred but its native lois just two hundred would going toe I so one hundred by the extended range of low one lessen the quality just like going up in s o yes it would on dh I can correct a mistake that I had earlier in the class where I said the camera doesn't go below one hundred this camera at this point in time right now doesn't go below one hundred you can get it down lower than that but you have to go in and release some locks on the camera the native is on this camera is one hundred witches the sensitivity that the sensor is acquiring the best data it's where you're going to get the best information off of the pixels anything other than that the quality goes down and what happens typically when you go down with low one and I haven't technically tested this but this is true of other cameras is you don't encounter noise as you compress the tonal range and so that's likely what's gonna happen is you're just compressing the tonal range and so you have a smaller range of colors in the image in some cases it's not a big deal and it's perfectly acceptable but it's not in general better quality uh we had a few questions about banding mega seven s there from washington d c and they ask I'm going to jump the gun and ask jonathan knows about the banding problem in d seven one hundred and if he can address it please thanks and then in parentheses and energy seven one hundred andi I see the problem and I'm terribly disappointed and worried have you notice that I have not seen that problem? I have not noticed it as a rampant problem would seem to be maybe a fairly small problem. My guess is that they might be encountering something that very high esos, if it happens on anything other than hye won and hi to you may want to have your camera sent back to nikon to have it checked out because that's just not it's, not normal when you get to extremes on the so that can happen from camera to camera, and would it be too surprising? But if it's happening s o eight hundred, I would send it back tonight. What if you get people asking about what lenses you would recommend for this camera? Oh, you know, I've got a great slide for that actually got a few slides for that there's a lot of there's, a lot of good good lenses. I'm I will say that the kit lens thie eighteen to one of five that it comes with its not a bad lands it's nothing to get overly excited about, its a good starter lands unless you know exactly what you're doing, it's a good way, tio kind of get your feet going until you figure out exactly what you want, but I'll have smooth some specific recommendations later on.