Lessons

Lesson Info

Menus

With nikon, you're going to hit the menu button and this is going to give you access to kind of the full list of all the options in the camera. Nikon organizes the menu into several tabs you can see the tabs listed here in do pretty logical areas, and so if you think real carefully about what that feature is, you'll figure out which tab to do to find it under now. The way to navigate through this tab is definitely using the multi control tab on the back of the camera and you'll be going up down left, right? He'll hit the okay to enter or you could hit the right to enter, and so if you want to enter something, you're going to the right. If you want to exit and get out your often going to the left now, you'll notice there's a question mark it down in there, which means if you want more information about what you're looking at, hit the question button and it will bring up a little bit better description of the feature that you happen to be looking at or the option that's available. One of...

the things that kind of misses me up with nikon cameras is that you can't see everything in one look you sometimes have to scroll down to the bottom of the screen so it's just like a web page, not everything might be on the first glance that you take a look take a look see if there's a scroll bar and you may need to go up and down with that multi controller to find what you're looking for all right so first tab make your way to the playback menu because we're going to start at the top line here and we're going to go through these I all these items line item just to talk about him a little bit the delete key is the same as the garbage can button on the back of the camera so if you want to get rid of your pictures you can do one you could do all of them you could delete everything from a particular day so it does give you a few more options than the garbage can but for the most part I just used the garbage can on the back of the camera cause it's a lot fester you will be able to select and create different folders for right now I recommend many users change the playback folder option to all what's going to happen here is that it's going to look through all the folders on the memory card when you play back images and this is going to be helpful because if you have taken pictures with another camera that's on a different folder before you delete that card or reform at the card you will see what is on the card there are situations where you want to have to separate folders, for instance, for business and for personal use, and for business, you're showing a slideshow of maybe a home that you're selling, you would only be looking at those pictures and not your kids playing in the backyard, and so you could separate things, but in general, I think most people are just wanting to keep everything and make sure that they don't delete the wrong images. If you want to hide an image in that particular scenario is just talking about, you can't do that, and earlier we were talking about pressing the info button are the excuse me, the tab on the back of the camera, the multi controller, up and down after you play back an image, and it shows you extra information, and this could be very helpful because its data about the pictures you shoot, so I would highly recommend going in and checking off, probably all of these boxes, so that their options of information that you can check out right after you've taken a picture, and so check them all off and come back out. Now, one of the ones that you want to know about in there is what's called highlights, and what happens here is that the camera will blink pixels that are hot, that are over exposed, that have received too much light and it doesn't mean it's a bad picture but it's a warning that it might have exposure difficulties and so be very careful with pictures that have lots of highlights that are blinking at you. You may want to double check and make sure you got the right exposure in that case all right, next up, if you want to make a copy of an image you could go in here you would select an image and then you would make a copy of it and the main reason that you would want to do this is if you want to copy images between memory cards, for instance you could have a memory card in your camera, fill it all the way up, stick in a second card and then copy everything from card one two card too, which is kind of nice because prior to this you needed a computer to download the images and copy it someplace. And so now you can do all that copy right in camera image review. Do you want the camera to show you the image after you've taken it? Most people like to leave this set on. If you are doing time lapse photography, you may want to leave it off for saving power for if you're in a really critical battery situation, you could turn it off, but most people like to leave this turned on after delete when you delete an image what image shows up next and showing next is theological way to go so I would leave that set I think that's the default setting okay rotate tall here's what happens if you leave rotate tall on and here's what happens if you leave rotate tall off it won't rotate images but it's very easy to rotate the camera and if you do that you get a much bigger picture so I would leave rotate tall off and you will have to go through the emanuel trouble turning the camera vertically but that's probably the way you just shot the picture and that's going to give you the best look at your image I'm not going to go into this but if you want to do a slide show you could hook your camera to a tv and do a little slide show and this goes in and tells you what image and when to start in the frame interval and some other little factors to control your slide show next up another issue I'm not really going to go into you can hook your camera directly up to a printer and make prince you're much better off if you go through a computer because then you can make crops and do it just mister your image and really refined it make it just right but if you want to hook it up to a printer and knock yourself out you khun read about it in the instruction manual has about fifteen different pages that go over. Next up. I think we're gonna go ahead and dive into the shooting menu will take some questions at the end of the shooting menu and first up, if you totally like script for the next fifteen minutes, you come back here and reset the shooting menu to the factory default, but we're going to go ahead and here and change a few things. Number one, we're talking about storage shoulders a little bit earlier, and if you want to create separate folders for different groupings of images, you could create different folders on different memory cards. Most people just have completely separate memory cards when they really want to separate things, but you can create individual folders on cards you can control a little bit about the naming of your pictures. The camera usually gives kind of a standard computer generated generated name to it, but if you want to go ahead and change the three letter code to your initials, you could put your initials on all the file numbers of the pictures that you shoot, which is a good start of an idea, but your pictures should be re numbered when you take him in storm in your computer because it has a counter that goes up to ten thousand and you'll start having repeat file numbers. Which is not a good idea so that's more of a computer issue that you would have say with light room where imports for pictures and changes the final name but to start with you could do a little bit writing camera card slot one is on top card slot too is on the bottom and you get to dictate the different options in here so let's go through some of the different options the one I like is overflow if you have to memory cards it stores all the images to one memory card and then when it's full it starts sending them to the second memory card now something to be aware of I think I have my camera here set up on overflow and when I look at the number of pictures left it's only showing me what is in car number one it doesn't show you how many images are available to put in car number two until it gets there and so be aware if you stick into memory cards that is just the first memory card the next option is back up where it sends each image that you shoot to both memory cards so if you were being hired by a client who was paying you lots of money to take their picture and they you wanted to be absolutely certain everything got stored this would be the safest way to do it that way it's stored in two locations nearly at the moment of capture just a moment later another option is to shoot raw and j peg but to separate out where then raws get sent and where the j pegs get set and so there's some people for instance, a wedding photographer for instance who wants to shoot raw plus j peg you can have separate cards to help separate those images out so they don't have to physically go in and separate them themselves and so those are the three different options I like overflow for basic photography image quality now this is something we've already dealt with and we saw this on the back of the camera with the quality button but this is where you khun dive in and control it in here so you're choosing raw or j peg my preference, of course is to shoot raw the nef nikon elektronik format if you don't have the software to work with raw images right now I would at least shoot j peg fined for most things, there are some times where you may want to record a smaller size raw or more basic jpeg but for the most part you're trying to capture the highest quality image and that goes along with image sizes well capturing the largest image size now as you can see on screen, I am giving you some recommendations and the ones in grey are what I would call general recommendations for most people the red ones will be form or advanced users on dh, so you'll need to make your own choice it's your camera you get to customize it exactly the way you want it the image sizes we just saw a moment ago you're gonna want to choose large which is choosing all the pixels on the frame bought a twenty four megapixel you probably want to use all of them. All right? We've been talking about the image area the one point three crop this is where you can change it there's also the shortcut in the info screen but you can either choose to shoot the dx area or the one point three crop area most people are going to want to leave it in the dx area with maybe an occasional switch over to the one point three x for sports or action photography. Next up we have jpeg compression, so the jpeg images and one of the reasons serious photographers don't like jpeg images is because they are compressed they are throwing some data away in order to save space and you can choose size, priority or optimal quality and optimal quality is the higher quality method you're going to get better quality images the file sizes are slightly larger there about twelve megabytes instead of ten megabytes, but if you want the best quality out of the camera, this is what you will choose optimal quality all right, we're gonna get a little geeky now hey, uh for those who are shooting raw, you can actually specify how the raw recording is done, and so here are the options you can record in twelve bit or fourteen bit you can choose lossless, compressed or compressed and these air the approximate file sizes that you're likely to get from it, and I have been a pretty big proponent of recording everything at the highest possible quality setting on this camera, and I'm actually going to make an exception here I think twelve bit is probably the a better choice than fourteen and choosing lossless compressed. Now, the reason for twelve bit over fourteen bit is I have yet to see or be shown the difference that fourteen bit makes its one of these things were in theory fourteen bit supplies more information, and it does it absolutely does, but that information is either not visible to the human eye not visible to printers that we use or not visible on screens that we look at. And so I've done a bunch of testing myself, I can't see how it can help out in any way I may be wrong, that could be the case, but it doesn't seem to be doing any good and so that's why I'm choosing twelve bit lossless compressed is a little bit higher quality than compressed, and so I'm always generally wanting to get larger quality if I can see any difference at all and there's a very small difference here, so I think that's kind of the sweet spot to have the raw recording done next up is another duplicate feature that we have seen, which is white balance we saw this before in the back of the camera with the w b button, but we can dive in here and do the same controls you can also get in here and have a little bit more specific control, for instance, you see that fluorescent setting it's got a number for by it? Well, you can actually go in and specify several of the different fluorescent settings there isn't just one force and sitting there are several for us and setting so you could go in there and control that as well. One of the settings that you can do in here is what's called preset white balance, and this is where you don't know what color the light source is and you're going to photograph a white object in this case I have a white piece of paper under in the photograph and as you can see, it seems very orange or yellowish and so what you would do is you would first shoot a photograph of my white piece of paper or grey object anything neutral and color will work, you would slip preset manual notice pre he would need to select a destination there are six pre sets that you can save and you can actually give names too if you work under unusual lighting on a regular basis and so once you do that you would select the image and the camera would look at that and it would correct for that image so that you would get correct color under that light source and so if you work under a number of unusual light source is up to six, you could save those right in your camera as preset white balances set picture control right? This, you might say, is the modern day equivalent of shooting fuji film or kodak film or egg for film you have a slightly different look to your images now this on lee applies two people who are shooting j peg images if you shoot raw image, this doesn't matter because you're getting the original information but if you want to have a little bit more vivid look to your landscape photographs you coulda just vivid here and that would make your pictures for landscape probably look a little bit better once again. I think you're much better off downloading to a computer, looking at it and making small adjustments there but if you just don't like the way the j pegs look, you can go in here and adjust it I think it's just probably best just to leave it on standard or perhaps neutral as just a simple baseline setting so that you can make adjustments from there manage picture control allows you to get very nerdy if you want to create your own look to your images, you can do that now it is going to do that to all of the images until you go into men and manage picture control and change it, but it's, just like the picture settings were talking about, but those air presets now what you could do is you can go in and set the contrast level, the saturation and some other factors exactly the way you think it would look good. And so if you're shooting j pegs and you don't like the way the j pegs look, this might be a solution for you the color space if you shoot in raw, you get the largest color space possible called adobe rgb. If you shoot in jpeg, you start off at s r g b, and if you want, you can change it to adobe rgb. If you plan to do any sort of printing or color manipulation or working on your images, you want to be in adobe rgb. If you're just shooting really basic pictures with your camera and you're just printing directly from your camera not doing anything, you could leave it in srg b but for the more serious user I would say you want to be an adobe rgb which I think is where most people will want to be next up on the camera is something called active d lighting and we have a number of options in here where we can let the camera figure things out we could turn it on high no low, normal and it's probably easier to show you with some visuals as to what this means here so in this image the shadows are a little dark and we might want to see a little bit more information in the shadows if we turn on active delighting one of the things that it does on a regular basis like this is it lightens up the shadows a little bit it also plays a little bit with the highlights as well to make sure they're not overblown and so in this particular scenario I prefer the standard look where it has lightened up the shadows but before you turn this on standard or some other setting like this, be aware that not every image you shoot looks better with the shadows lightened up sometimes images look better that are nice and contrast and so my feeling is is that I would prefer to just plain old leave this turned off I don't want my camera playing games with how light and dark the image should be in that case and so if you shoot raw this doesn't matter once again it's not going to be working it's on ly if you're in jpeg if you plan to do no post processing you want everything done in camera you could try it on normal you could try it on low and see if you like it but for anyone who wants to work with their images later and have his much information to work with, I would just leave it off because anything that the camera could do you could do better in the computer with mohr exact detail and with particular arat ease to each individual image that you might want to change it to hdr stands for high dynamic range and it is where the camera will combine a number of pictures in this case, the camera will take two images a brighter image and a darker image and it will combine those two images into a single jpeg image can't do a rod on ly combines it toe a j peg image and I'm not real impressed it's uh it does it but there are other programs out there photo photo matics I believe is the number one program out there that most hdr shooters are working with and that program is very, very good allows you virtually infinite control compared to what's available in camera it does do it, play around with it, see if you like it or not use it accordingly next up is something called auto distortion control and here is the advantage of buying a nikon lands and putting it on a nikon camera all lenses have a little bit of distortion to him and nikon knows how bad their lenses are and they build a program into their cameras so if you shoot jpeg images not raw she jpeg images it'll fix that distortion so as an example you can see the horizon line in this photograph is slightly bendy and I was just switch back and forth and you can see when we straighten that image up the horizon becomes straight and so it's pretty rare that we ever want distortion in our photograph if we do we generally by a fish islands so this is one of the few things that I would leave turned on now it doesn't help you out when you shoot raws but it will help you out win and where you shoot j pegs so leave that one on long exposure noise reduction and hi s o noise reduction are both in camera noise reduction where the camera is trying to reduce the amount of noise so in this visual you know that low eso is the way to go for best image quality wood with high I s so you get noise and there are two reasons why you get noise actually high I isos like esso thirty two hundred sixty four hundred and also if you leave the shutter open for longer than one second you're going to start to get some noise because the sensor heats up at that period of time and so that's why there's both long exposure and high aya so noise reduction? Well, the camera will go in and try to fix the problem and in general it doesn't reasonably good job, but sometimes the processing of it takes a little while and you're not able to shoot the next picture and you can always do a better job if you want to get into do do the work yourself, for instance, in adobe is light room has a very easy slider that you can control the noise with it, and so for most of cases, I recommend turning this off just because it'll you're still going to get the same good quality image, but you may need to do the adjustment later on, but you'll be able to make a better quality adjustment later on the is so sensitive sensitivity settings is the same as theis o button on the back of the camera, but it also has extra controls in here so you can change from one hundred two sixty four hundred but this is where you would go in to change the maximum sensitivity and so if you want to get up to that twelve thousand eight hundred or twenty five thousand six hundred, you could change the maximums sensitivity up and down you can also turn on the auto eso control here, and this is where you can also choose what shutter speed your camera. We'll start changing the so let's just say, with a normal ends on your camera, you can hand hold that down to about a sixtieth of a second and anything below a sixteenth of a second, your camera bumps up the iso to compensate. Well. One of the cool things about the minimum shutter speed adjustment here is that you can set it to auto, and what happens there is the camera looks at what lens you have and adjust the shutter speeds according tto lenses. So if you have a three hundred millimeter lands, it'll start adjusting sooner like issa at cheddar speed to fifty, which can really help you help out in many situations. And so, ah, minimum shutter speed around of auto might be good, or you might want to specifically set a certain number and as faras the maximum sensitivity, I often raise that up too high, too. I don't use high too, really ever but it's always nice to have it available as an option, as is the low setting next up, if you happen to purchase the remote control that we talked about, you can control exactly how it works. One option would be a two second delay. This is good if you're going to get in the picture because then you would press the button and you have two seconds to hide it in the palm of your hand you could be using this for some sort of maybe wildlife photography maybe the camera's up by a bird feeder and when you hit the quick response it fires picture at exactly the time that you press the shutter release or you could be using it for the room remote mere up so you press it once to lock the mirror up and once again to fire the shutter so those air all three different options choose it how you use it if you own it multiple exposures this's a little gimmicky to meet uh if you want to take two pictures and have him on the same frame used to be a trick we used to do with film by not advancing the film well, you could do the same thing in camera hearing just takes two pictures. You can either take two or three pictures there's also something called gain where the camera's basically adjusting the esso to accommodate for multiple exposures because you're having too exposures on the same frame you can play around, have some fun in the field you can also do this by just taking single pictures into photo shop and creating layers but if you don't have photoshopped, this is a way to do it right in camera, john before we leave this page of the menu, someone asked in the chat room when I try to put out a distortion control to on my camera is telling me that the option is not available at the current settings or in the camera's current state do you know what could be wrong it's possible that they might have their camera in raw it's possible they might have a non nikon lens on their camera? I'm going to make a quick adjustment in here, so I'm shooting raw and actually I'll do this so people can see it hard for me but easy for you and so they were not able to get to the sense of maximum sensitivity or what was it now that distortion control distortion control? I'm sorry to its jump back up utter distortion control I could get to that they have done something, what have they done? What are the other options that they could have done that would not allow that it's definitely not available with non nikon lenses, so that would be the first an easy thing I'm trying to think there's a few things that are not available, like right now hdr is not available ok is you can see in my camera because I have the cameras set to raw and so if you're watching out there maybe they could try using an icon lens and putting it on j peg setting and then let us know what that work you let me see if there's anything else actually not my talents I'm gonna try one other thing here just changing it to j peg j go back into the menu and auto distortion is still available got hdr now we haven't been using from the chat room what's that she said it is a non nikon lens so good I was right you were totally right it could be a number of things and it's lucky when it's the first thing you guess and thank you for letting us know yes all right, well good alright do you want it? Would you like me to ask some questions about this menu or what are you gonna keep? All right ahead. Um let's see here we have pixel chick saying what did he say this at the minimum shutter speed under I s a sensitivity if you are going to be using the auto eso a reasonably good safe option is to leave the minimum shutter speed at auto if you have specific number that you feel comfortable hand holding the camera, for instance let's say I think I'm really steady and I could hold a camera to a fifteenth of a second you could bump it all the way down to a fifteenth of a second, but the auto setting accommodates different lenses and adjust for different lenses, which is nice, excellent. And blackhawk john asked question for john. Another done. Is there any way other than reformatting to delete the raw and the jpeg files at the same time? In the playback mode? If you shoot a raw plus a j peg and you delete it, you will, but deleting both of them at the same time, you don't have to look for both him. They're only going to show up once when you play it back. And I believe you covered this briefly. But it's pixel check as if you're on rather's. Noticed choice for image size. Is that correct? No. Well, yeah, yes and no. Okay. So, no, there isn't a specific size with cannon. They have, for instance, small, medium large raws with nikon. You do have the choice of twelve bit to fourteen bit lossless, compressed and compressed. And those of the ways that you can adjust the file size. The raw image is twenty four mega pixels in every case. All right. And we one more question a did you? Underscore, br asked. What happens if I choose overflow two cards and after the card and number one is full, I remove it from the camera or and leave number to where it was or how does that work it's in overflow it's just going to go to the next available card just actually, just naturally and just just for a quick reference, I'll do this. So right now I'm going to card number one, but I do have two cards in there. I'm going to take out card number one. I'm going to place it on the desk in front of me and it's, just going to card number two. I can take card number to put it into card sliding one card number two and carnival won in cards, too and it's still off, going back into one and will overflow into, too. So it always starts with one if it's not there, or if it's full, it goes to number two.