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Lesson 12 from: Nikon D7100 / D7200 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

12. Custom Menu

Lesson Info

Custom Menu

We had a question about why somebody had the great out option for time lapse there could be a number of things and I wasn't able to figure out one option is that your cameras in the self timer mode and the other option is if your cameras in the mere lock up mode, you can't do it because the cameras limited going from one shot to the next and there may even be some other things in there, but that is something that you take a look at and see if that's an issue or not. Okay, so we have finished up with group b of the custom menu and now we're getting to group c, which deals with things like the timers and the auto exposure lock feature. So first off shutter release button e l off what this means is that when you press the shutter release button, the auto exposure lock feature is not working of the shutter release button you could turn it on and when you press down on the show shutter release it locks the exposure and this isn't the way most photographers have their cameras set up. They wa...

nt to lock focus, but they don't want to lock exposure if they want to lock exposure there's a button on the back of the camera for that, but some people prefer to have it up here thus the customization choose at your own will standby timer I told you at the very beginning of the class that the camera wants to shut down and take a nap after about six seconds. And if you want that to be a longer period of time, you could go into the standby timer and choose a longer or perhaps even a shorter period of time. Self timer. Normally, people have the senate. Ten seconds is enough time to run around and get in the picture there themselves. But if you prefer to have a shorter self timer, for instance, for use on a tripod, you just need a two second delay. You consider it to two, five, ten, twenty or you can also set it kind of separate with all of those to take a siri's of shots. So let's say, you're going to take a picture of you and your group of france. Well, if you have a group of friends, there's, a really good chance that someone's going to blink or do something stupid right in one of those shots, you you're going to do it right? And so what you could do is you can actually say, wait ten or twenty seconds and then it will take three or four shots. So you can choose anything between one and nine pictures and then you can actually choose the interval between the shots from a half second to every three seconds so you could move into a different position or do a different crazy face in every picture so there's a lot of little options that you can get in there under the self timer next up monitor off delay there are a number of reasons that the monitor turns on in the back of the camera when you play back an image when you're looking at menus when you have the information screen up when you're in live you and you can go in and you can customize how long these stay on the longer they stay on it might be more convenient but it uses more battery life so you'll need to draw balances to what you think is appropriate the settings that it comes with right now are pretty good but you can change him remote on duration if you do get the wireless remote the camera needs to stay on and active looking for a remote and that uses up battery power so once again this is kind of a compromise with the battery if you do get the remote and you need it on for a longer period of time, you can leave this on if necessary all right moving on to the next grouping of features general shooting and display options when you get the camera from the factory, it has this very annoying and amateurish sound of baby every time it focuses. And if you want to be a little bit more discreet about your shooting, I would recommend turning this off. It could be a little irritating in quiet environments when you're doing a lot of auto focusing because this be people be going on and off. So once you get used to the camera, you can turn it off, maybe at the beginning. It's good to leave it on just as a confirmation, that camera is focusing, but after a few weeks of shooting it with it, you should be able to be doing it without the sound. If you want, you can turn on a grid display in the viewfinder. We talked about this when we talked about the display. I generally like to leave my screen as clutter free as possible, but I do find this to be helpful in some situations, so it's something that you may want to turn on from time to time, see if it works for your photography. All right, we've talked about this a couple of times had a question from the audience about this, the esso display, an adjustment, and so normally it's going to show you the number of pictures you have left and when you have four hundred eighty seven pictures you don't run out of pictures too frequently and so what you can do is you could switch it over to show you the so and so I highly recommend changing d three to show s o because eso is much more important in the shot to shot picture taking, then having hundreds of pictures left screen tips allright these air the automatic little helpful screen tips that come on as you're navigating through the menu and through different features of the camera specially in the information screen and for the newcomer to the camera. This is quite helpful, but once you get used to this, they just get in the way of you looking at what you want to look at and so for the more advanced users, I recommend turning this off for the new user leave it on for a little bit and then come back and turn this off when you watch this class for the second time to squeeze as much information out of it as possible the high speed on the camera we'll shoot at six frames per second. You can select how fast or how slow the continuous low mode is. Most people leave it at three frames per second, but it is adjustable I really don't know why, but nikon has a continuous release of one hundred as the maximum number of shots you can shoot in a row, you can choose a shorter number if you want. Most people don't change this file number sequence. This keeps the file number sequence on. We talked about changing the final numbers earlier. This is where you can change how and when it resets you, khun manually reset it. Not too many people do do that. Most people just leave it on on. It counts up to ten thousand and then resets back to zero. Moving down to d eight information display in auto. What happens on the back of your camera is that the display will show you white on black or black on white, depending on how bright or dark the area around the camera is and it will automatically switch back and forth. If you prefer one style of lettering over the other, you can manually set it to black lettering or white lettering. Totally your choice on this part. But auto seems to be fine for a lot of people. Lcd illumination. If you rotate the on off a little bit further, you will actually turn on a light on the top control panel and that's all it will do. If you want to turn this on, it will also turn on the back screen of the camera as well, and so if you want everything lit up at the same time, you could turn this on. If you do want to just turn on the back of the camera, there is an info button that you could turn on for that so this is just simply linking two screens together in the illumination next up exposure delay mode would be more of what I would call a scientific mode. This is where the exposure is delayed by one two or three seconds most of this time this would be done for vibration reduction so that it doesn't have any mere shake going on. It might be used in a scientific environment potentially for product photography or landscape photography but not useful for most people. Flash warning if you recall inside the viewfinder there was a lightning bolt that turned on every time you were under low light conditions if you do a lot of low light shooting it's irritating that this lightning bolt is constantly blinking at you and so the more advanced users might want to turn it off beginning users might want to leave it turned on as a helpful reminder that there in a danger zone if you get the vertical grip you can select which battery you are using first the one in the camera or the one in the grip normally you're going to use the one in the grip first attari type so let's go back to d twelve mbd fifteen that's the vertical grip what type of battery is in there there is a different choice for the rechargeable battery for double a batteries and for lithium, double a batteries. If you're going to be using the rechargeable batteries that's the l r six then you can choose which battery gets used first, because when you put the vertical grip on the camera, what happens is one battery is in the camera. Another battery is in the grip down below and that's the one that's a lot easier to replace. So that's the one that you want to use first and that's why you wanted at mbd fifteen so in general there's, no changes you need to make here but that's the way things work, bracketing and flash. All right, so flashing sinks speed the fastest sink speed is too fiftieth of a second for use with t t l flash. Now you can go faster to three twentieth, but it's not going to be t tl flash if you need it, you can go there, but most people don't want to do this. Some people even want to slow the flashlight down there's not a lot of benefit to the day to day user, and so I would leave this at one to fiftieth of a second. Now the flash shutter speed that actually gets used is when you pop up the flash. Is in many ways dependent very much on your skill level of holding the camera steady for a basic photographer around a thirtieth or a sixteenth of a second would be a very safe bet for me, I might have it as low is one eighth or one quarter of a second because I can reasonably hand hold the camera at an eighth or quarter of a second with a little bit of help from the flash. And so it depends on the look that you want from your images because they'll slower the shutter speed, the more ambient light it's going to let in, but you gotta be really careful about the way you hold the camera and when when you're using those slower shutter speeds. All right, we have a question earlier from someone in the audience about using the camera with off camera flashes, and that is a fun and interesting area, and that is the subject of completely separate five hour classes that we don't have time to get into here, but this little e three here is what I call a rabbit hole. It just seems like a little hole in the ground, but if you start digging in here, you're going to see there's tons of stuff going on in here, and this controls the built in flash does it fire through t t l means, which is through the lens standard automatic stuff do you want to manually control it? We have a repeating flash and we also have a commander flash. And so if you want hook up additional flashes, you need to go into the commander mode on this. The repeating mode allows you to have the flash fire well, let's, just say like a disco strobe fires repeatedly very quickly for special effects. The commander mode allows you to go in and set this as the commander and having different groups under different channels, so you could have lights over here that they're doing one thing lights over here that they're doing something else, and nikon would love you to death if you went out and just purchased like a a dozen of their sb nine tens at five hundred bucks a pop and created an entire studio with ease off camera flashes and there's some fun stuff you khun dio, albeit it gets a little pricey, and then you do have an interference problem because these have to be line of sight within each other within each other s o there is a little bit tricky to work with, but could be a lot of fun. Teo get some really creative, interesting, better quality images then with the built in flash and so play a round if you do have one of the external nikon flashes, there's, some great stuff in here and I believe creative live does have some other classes that go in and talk specifically about using these remote modes with the flashes we actually just had we just had an amazing class with mike's fulton and cody clinton on t l so check that out everyone as well and we'll drop the links in the chat rooms but yeah it was really really that was a good one and I know I think mark wallace also had a class on the last flashes as well so it's I'm sorry we can't discuss everything way are limited in time and scope next up exposure compensation for flash for the beginning photographer you could leave this on entire frame and what happens when you do exposure compensation is that powers up and powers down both the ambient exposure and the flash at the same time the flash is one of the most flash is the most complicated airhead photography and understanding it sometimes requires years of practice but for the more advanced users they will often want to control the flash on its own not regarding the ambient flashed and they would change this to background on ly so what's going on here is that you are on ly controlling the flash exposure and it has nothing to do with the ambient exposure on the serious photographers will want to separate those out so they have more control over the specific flash exposure and the amputee exposure, if you're not sure about this all just leave it in entire frame and let it do its thing, and you will get to this eventually modeling flash on this one here when you press the depth of field button, I don't know if this will work very well on video. Let me try to do so. I'm gonna turn the flash on. And if I press the depth of field button, which is this button up here, the flash is going to do a little stroke and I don't know how well you can see that on video and what this is doing for me, that photographer is I can see well what the shadows are and so where are the shadows? It is a great way to kill the batteries. Great way to annoy subjects if you do lose your keys, you can always you know, for your keys on the floor with us. It doesn't last very long, it's not a great class light, but if you accidentally hit that button a lot, you could turn this feature off because it can be annoying if you don't want it. But it's fine, as far as I'm concerned, auto bracketing set. We've talked about bracketing because it's the little button over here on the side of the camera normally bracketing is done for exposure reasons you want to shoot a light exposure, a normal and a dark exposure but we can do much more than just exposure. We could do exposure and flash weaken, do white balance we can do active, delighting where it uses different types of active delighting within the exposure and knock yourself out have some fun. Most people just leave this on a e and flash or a only actually on dso dealing with the exposure. The auto exposure is the normal setting, but you khun you consented to anything else that you need to hear next up bracketing order. Okay, so when you shoot the bracketing siri's, the normal sequence of events is to shoot the meter exposure first and then the under exposure and then the overexposure. But if you would prefer to shoot a different order going under metered and then over, you could do that by going in here and changing it to the different options off under meter over doesn't really matter to me depends on how much he shoot time lapse and how important or not time lapse but bracketing and how important it is the normal one seems fine next up under controls the ok button on the back of the camera is something that you can customize in the shooting mode, the playback mode and the live mode. And so this is where we're gonna get to go in and customized exactly where the these buttons work is normally it's fine in the playback mode, a medium zuma view is one idea that works pretty well the function button on the front of the camera that's the one that we get to use one of eighteen different features and so there's a long list of features that we can program for that function button and the button just above it. The preview button has that same basic list of all the things here. Normally, I would leave this one on preview and used the function button for something else. If you never use the preview button, you can use this for something else let's see what's, what else on the list I like, um, I kind of like the viewfinder virtual horizon every once in a while that's nice to know that I'm getting a level shot, but find something in there that's useful to you and put it in and make that button useful. All right, the button on the back of the camera, we talked about changing this to a f on and so for you're more advanced users who are not using the auto exposure lock function and they would like to focus back here when you engage that disengages the focusing on the shutter release button and could be a good slightly more advanced way of focusing for the average user just leaving it at e a f l lock is going to work just fine but there might be something else there that works with what type of work you do next step customizing the command I lt's all right so the command dials basically the dial in the back of the dial in the front you can go in and you can reverse the rotation on it and I am going to recommend changing the rotation for shutter speed and aperture and here's why when you look in the viewfinder and the meter says you're too bright as you can see on screen here it's lit up to the right which way would you turn that dial on the back of the camera to fix the problem would you go left or would you go right well can daikon thinks you should turn the dial to the right to fix this problem which is exactly the opposite I would think there's too much to the right we need to go back to the left and so if while turning the dials on this camera in the manual mode things don't seem logical you want to reverse this trust me it'll just make more sense so you want to reverse the rotation of the shutter speed and aperture but there are other things that you can go you can change the front aisle in the back dial most of those aren't necessary but this is the one change that will make life easier if you plan to use manual exposure release button to use dial I would leave this on no on off and what this basically means is on the back of the camera white balance quality eso normally you have to press down on the button and as you hold down you turn the dial if you turn this too yes on what happens is you press the button and you have a few seconds to come up here and make the change most people kind of like that setting a pressing the button and turning the dial at the same time because that's how most of the buttons work on the nikon camera all right, if you forget to put film in your camera memory cards, do you want the shutter to fire off most cases? We don't want it to even take a picture to even think we're taking a picture. So leave this locked as I mentioned before, nikon has had different methods in their meeting system of whether minus is on the left or minus is on the right and the current system that there just changed over to is they're putting plus on the right in minus on the left so if you are upgrading from let's, say, a d seven thousand that had it reversed, had a minus on the right and a plus on the left. And so, if you wanted to change this camera back to the old nikon standard, you could do that by coming in here and choosing the other option for logic reasons. Most mathematicians prefer minus on the left and plus on the right. With the vertical grip. There is an extra button and a l a f l button on that grip. And you can customize that that button, as well as being an auto focus on button.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

D7200 Menu Recommendations
NikonD7100 - Outline

Ratings and Reviews

judy49
 

I'm sold. Can't wait to upgrade from my D5200 to the D7100. Thanks to John I have just been convinced of what I have been reading about this camera. And John is much more interesting than a manual. Since I now own this video, I can re-watch it when I get the camera. I have watched and purchased John Greengo's videos several times, and he never ceases to amaze me. I have been shooting for about 18 months, and really have developed a real passion for the art. At 65 years old, its not as easy as maybe it would have been years ago, but with the help with instructors like John Greengo, and others on Creative Live, I'm on my way to an exciting retirement.

user e35335
 

I think Nikon should supply this course as part of the purchase price, it's that good. John is a great ambassador for the Nikon brand and there can be no better way to get immediate confidence in your new camera. He has a calm engaging manner, is very fluent (no umm's & err's) and is a true inspiration. I owned the camera for a couple of months before I came across this course and my hit rate has dramatically improved with his instruction. I have gone on to purchase "The fundamentals of photography" and the fast start for my other camera OMD EM1, both equally excellent.

~user-458e96
 

This is my first experience with a DSLR and John's class and instruction style is excellent and easy to understand his instructions. I purchases the D7100 and am happy that I can watch this video again and again to increase my knowledge of this wonderful camera. I am so satisfied with John's style of instruction I intend to purchase "Fundamentals of Digital Photography 2014" Thank you CreativeLive. eddyhc1

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