Lessons

Lesson Info

Back of Camera Buttons

The camera has a large LCD on the back of the camera that is a touch screen, so you'll be able to use that for shooting photos, in the playback mode, going through the menu system. So you'll be able to use that touch screen in a lot of different ways. If you don't like using a touch screen, not to worry. The regular controls will work for everything else on the camera. You don't have to use the touch screen. It's just another way of operating and working with the camera. The LCD will turn on and off, in some sense, with the eye sensor. So as you hold the camera up to your eye, it'll automatically turn off the LCD, so that it's not giving you a bright light in your eye as you are focusing and using the viewfinder of the camera. Looking at some of the buttons on the back of the camera on the top left, we have our playback button which will obviously play back the last image on the camera. And with that, the camera's gonna kinda really change modes. So let's talk about some of the differe...

nt playback options on the camera. Obviously there is a garbage can button. Any time you want to delete a photograph, you'll press that once to indicate you wanna delete it, and then a second time to confirm it. For scrolling through your images, you're gonna use the control panel and use the left and right tab to go forward and previous images. And if you want more information about those images, you can press the up and down info button. And there's gonna be a number of different screens that are available to you. However, they're probably not gonna be available to you right now because those features need to be turned on. So what you need to do, is you need to go back into the playback menu, and you need to check off all the options that you may want to see in here. I really think Nikon should have these turned on by default. But they don't. And so you gotta go in here and turn it on. So I wanna show you what it looks like with it. So let's go ahead and do this little shortcut routine here. And what we're gonna do is we wanna get all those playback options. And so right now if I hit playback, I get an image. And I can go forward and back through the different images that I've shot here. And if I go up and down, I get nothing. All right, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into the menu system, and I'm gonna go over to the playback options. And I'm gonna come down to playback display options and go to the right in here. I'll go left to back out. I could also hit the OK button and that will get us in here as well. So these are the different options that we can have, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to the right to give a check mark to every single one of these. Because I want all of these as options, and you'll notice that there's a scroll bar here on the right. So I'm gonna go down, so I can do the overview as well. And when I'm done, I'm gonna hit the OK, 'cause you can see down here it's select. You go to the right. OK to confirm. So we're gonna hit OK. Now I'm gonna come here, press playback. And as I go up, I get less information, more information, different information, and more and more different sets of information. And so if I wanna see shutter speed, aperture, what metering system I used. We'll get all that. What lens we used in here, what focal length the lens was at. This is our histogram. We'll talk more about this as we get through the menu system here. The highlights which is showing you the little highlights blinking over here where we have some over exposed pixels. Our focus point. Just a nice, clean image with no data on it at all or more data. So just going up and down to change the information, you can go left and right to change the photos. So if you wanna see the different photos looking at different sets of data. Maybe I wanna see the histogram for different images all at the same time or one after another. So this gives you a lot of options, and so I recommend checking off all or all the useful options in the playback display options that you might find. That way you can find that information very easily. You don't have to look at it, but you can scroll to it very easy if you need it. When you're in the playback mode, the buttons on the left side of the camera change their operation from normal shooting into the playback option. One option is to protect your images, and what that does is it puts a lock on them, so you can't delete them. Now you can still format the memory card. There's a lot of terrible things that you can do to the card or the image. And so it's a very light level of protection. It just simply prevents them from being put in the garbage with the garbage can button. You can zoom in and you can zoom out if you want to check the sharpness. And then you can navigate and change image by turning the dial there. So let's go ahead and take a look at some of these options in here. Because when you're out in the field, you wanna take a look at how sharp your images are. And so let's see if we can find a good, sharp image here to work with. And so this one looks like we've got some nice area to dig into. And so what we can do is we can go over here to the left, and we're gonna hit the plus button. And we can keep hitting the plus button. And now we can kinda scroll around using our controller over here on the right to see what we wanna look at. Now if we want, we can also use the touchscreen. So we can see it here. And we can zoom in. We can also zoom out just using the same technique that you would use on a phone for going back and forth. Now we can use the buttons down here at the bottom. Let's go out to the full image. And so we can actually go to a number of images. Let's go back into one image. And we can use flicking techniques to go back and forth between images. And so let's go zoom in a little bit on this image here. And what we can do. Let's see if we can use the back dial. And so what we're doing is we're zooming into one image after another. And so doesn't work real well in this particular case, but if you took a number of shots that were all zoomed in kind of to the same level, you could compare images. Like if you were doing portraits, and you wanted to see how sharp the eyes were, you could just simply go back and forth between them using that dial in the back of the camera. And so use the plus and minus, or you can use your fingers if you want. If you do wanna back out, you can back out. Actually I'm not pressing the right button here. Let's back out, back in. Back out. Maybe I need to get to the right information screen. There we go. So now we have a scroll bar over on the right-hand side where we can scroll through our images, but if we want to really back out, we can back out even further, all the way to a date calendar. So you can see photographs taken on different dates. And always keep an eye on the bottom of the screen for additional information. And if you did have photos at different dates, you could just go to those by going up and down. We're gonna hit the minus button, and this jumps us over to the right. And so we can choose photos over here. Let's pick a photo over here. And we can go jump into that photo right there and go directly to that photo. So there's a lot of navigation options if you really wanna get into that playback and look at some of those photos that you've been shooting. And we talked about the touch screen. So we have different options. You can swipe back and forth. You can magnify, reduce, and then just double tap on an image if you wanna see it more closely. The eye button on the back of the camera. We'll talk more about this as we go through the back of the camera, but in the playback option, it's gonna give you a shortcut to making a few different changes. You can rate your images if you want. You can send your images to a smart device. We'll talk about Wifi later on in this class, but that would be a shortcut to doing it. You can also retouch your images which means you would make a copy of them with some small adjustments that the camera will allow you to do. And then you can choose specific folders that you are looking at in the playback option. So it's not a huge collection of options. We'll see most of these options as we go through the menu system. Next button is the menu button, and we're gonna deal with this in the second half of the class. This dives into the full list of options available for the camera. And so we're gonna go through this on the menu section of the class, and we'll go through all the different items and all the different settings in there. We're gonna come back to that one later on. Next button down does three different things. The first thing it does is it adjusts the white balance when you're in the normal shooting mode. It can also be a help button when you're in the menu. And we saw just a moment ago how we could use it as a protect button in the playback. But first, let's talk about using it as a white balance control. So the way that this works is that you will press this button, and while you are holding it, you will turn the back dial of the camera for changing the white balance. You can also change the front dial to change a sub section of the white menu, so let's just talk about the white balance to start with. So there are three different, natural daylight settings that you might have. Sunlight, cloudy, and shade. The artificial ones are incandescent which is a very orange-ish one. Fluorescent can actually run a quite wide range, and there are many different fluorescent settings within the camera's operations here. And there is the flash setting which is very close to neutral, clean light you might say. We do have a number of other options. Auto is were the camera will choose for you. And there are actually two versions of auto. Auto one and auto two. Auto one is normal where it's trying to correct for the light as purely and as best as it can. Auto two where it keeps a bit of that warm light, and so if you do have a warm light from a sunset or just tungsten lights in your house, for instance, it's gonna keep a little bit of that warmth that we see with our own eyes and possibly just add a little bit to that type of photograph. And so I tend to like that for more natural photographs. We also have a case setting where we can select a specific Kelvin temperature that we wanna have, and so if you wanna set it for a very specific number like 8,200, you can set it there. Finally, there is a preset manual. You can go into the shooting menu under white balance preset manual. You would photograph a white sheet of paper, and it would be able to figure out what color light is illuminating the scene that you are in, and it could then correct for that perfectly. And so let's take a look on the back of this camera here, and I'll do a little white balance demo for you. And so you wanna hold down on the button. The way a lot of Nikon buttons work is you're gonna hold down on it, and while you are holding down on it, then is when you're gonna be making your changes on it. So here you can see all the different symbols. And on most of them, you're gonna have the opportunity for doing a little sub change as well. So here we are on tungsten lighting right now. And if I want to tweak it a little bit more to the blue side or a little bit more to the red side, I can do that. Now here in the studios, we have some form of fluorescent lighting, but I'm not sure exactly what form we have. And so let's just try it right here and see what sort of light we get with this particular shot. And okay, that seems a bit on the blue side to me. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hold down the white balance and I'm gonna dial the front side over to the amber. I'm gonna go pretty far here. And we'll do another shot and see how these two shots compare. So this is the one with more amber and a little bit more blue. So it's not a great difference here. Let's see if I can pull up some additional information about our white balance and where we're setting this. And so you can see down here, we're changing it a little bit. It's not changing it enough in here, and we'd probably wanna go in and choose one of the different fluorescent lights for the particular lighting that's going on in here. But you can make small, little adjustments as needed with that. Next up is the help button. Any time you are going through the menu system and you see the question down in the bottom left, that means you can hit the help button, the question mark, and it's gonna pull up a little bit of more information, additional information, about how that particular feature works. And so it can be sometimes helpful. It's not available on all settings everywhere you go in the menu, but any time you do see it and want a bit of help, there is that option there for you. The third option for this button is protect. So if you are in the playback mode and you press this button, it'll tell you that the image is protected. If you press it again, the protection is removed. And so you can just simply press that button back and forth to protect or un-protect any of the images in the camera. Next button controls double duty again. It is the quality and the zoom in option. We've already seen the zoom in option when we looked at the playback features of the camera, so let's talk about the quality options on this. So when you press the quality button and turn the back dial on the camera, you're gonna change the image quality. And let's look at the options that are available. There are a lot of them. First off, raw. Raw is the original information off the sensor. If you want to get the highest quality image out of the camera, you probably wanna be shooting a raw image. When you shoot a raw image, you're gonna get an NEF file. This is a Nikon electronic file. You need Nikon software or software from another company that knows how to read that Nikon electronic file. A lot of Adobe software can do that as well as many other different brands of software. When you do that, you're gonna be getting the 20.6 megapixels of information that's coming off the sensor. And if you want the highest quality and most amount of data, you wanna be shooting in raw. Sometimes though, you want a JPEG to work with because they're a little easier to work with. So they have different sizes and styles of JPEGs. Fine, normal, and basic are different compression levels of the JPEG, and within each of those, they have two different versions. The one with the star has prioritized quality over size, and so those are gonna be a little bit better in their overall image quality. And so it depends on what you're doing with your photos as far as what size you should shoot. But if you're not sure, you should probably be shooting in the largest of the sizes because if you shoot it small, you can't do anything about making it larger. If you want the best of both worlds, you can shoot raw and JPEG. There's only one type of raw. So you're gonna get a raw, but there's many different types of JPEGs depending on how you want the camera to compress that information. And so there is a variety of options you can choose in this case. Now one thing to note is that the differences in all these JPEGs has to do with the compression. How much color data it's keeping and other detail information. There is gonna be an additional option for the size of those JPEGs. There's small, medium, and large available. That's in addition to all of this. Normally, I recommend shooting raw for anyone who wants to get the most out of the camera. For anyone who doesn't quite have their software game all in alignment, you might say, all ready to go, then you probably want to be shooting in the highest quality, fine JPEG image. If you turn the front dial, you're able to change the image size. This one's pretty simple. For the JPEG images, you have three different sizes. Large, medium, and small which is roughly a 20 megapixel, 12 megapixel, and five megapixel image. In some cases, you know that the file that you're trying to get out of the camera just isn't needed in a really large size. If you know that for sure, you can shoot a smaller size and save space on the memory card and any other memory going forward that is gonna be storing that particular image. Next button deals with metering. In the playback mode, it does the zoom out which we saw earlier as well as going to the thumbnail. So let's talk about the metering option with this button. So when you press this button and you turn the back dial, you can change the way that the camera meters the light. We have four different options, and let's take a closer look at those. The first and most popular of these is the matrix metering option. This is using a 3D color matrix metering two system which is actually 180,000 pixels. There is a database within the camera that it is looking at when it looks at this information. It's basically looking at a low res, digital version of the image and determining the bright areas and the dark areas. And where the best possible exposure would be when it comes to shutter speeds, aperture, and ISO. And it does a really good job under most situations which is why most people shooting Nikon leave it in the matrix metering mode most of the time. Center-weighted metering measures a fairly, heavily concentrated reading right in the middle of the frame. So if your subject is in the middle of the frame, and it's of average tonality, it's gonna work well. If you want something that's more concentrated, there is the spot metering which is a highly concentrated reading of the light directly in the middle of the frame. And a relatively new version within the Nikon system is highlight-weighted metering. And what it does here is it looks at the highlighted area and tries to make sure that it is not overexposed. Now it might cause your picture to be a little bit darker than you would expect in some cases, but it's making sure you're not overexposing too many pixels in the frame. This might be very good for, say, a stage spotlight where someone's in the spotlight. You don't want them blown out. And it's okay that everything else is a little bit darker. And so most people, they end up using matrix metering most of the time with occasional use to spot metering and highlighted metering. Those tend to be the most popular metering options with this camera. Next up is the info button. You've seen me using this a little bit in the past. If you wanna see information on the back of the camera, you can press that camera to get that screen to turn on. It'll automatically turn off because of the image or the eye sensor right above the viewfinder, so that you don't have that shining in your eyes when you are shooting photos. Moving our way over to the right-hand side of the camera, we have the AE-L AF-L for locking the exposure and locking the focus. So let me do a little demo here with you. I'm gonna put my camera in the program mode, and you will see as I move the camera around, the shutter speed and or aperture is gonna change according to what the camera's pointing at. Let me give a little bit more telephoto looks here, so we can see even more changes. Now if I wanna lock that in, I can hold my thumb in on that button, and it locks that particular shutter speed combination. And so that way if I find that, oh no, this is the light I want over here. I press in on that button, and that number will stay locked in as I move the camera around. Now currently, it's set to just for auto exposure lock. If you wanna set it for autofocus lock, you can go into the menu system, and let's bring that up little information here. You can go into custom setting menu F1, and you can control exactly how that button works. In fact, if you don't like auto exposure lock, you don't use it or autofocus lock, you can set this up as an autofocus on button or have it do something else. There's a lot of different options. We're not gonna go through all of the options, but it's one of the many different ways you can customize the camera. We have a number of general controls we've been talking about on the camera. Main command dial, multi selector. Be aware that the multi selector can be locked. It's something that's gonna be used for changing the focusing system and the metering system. And if you accidentally bump that from time to time and you don't like that, there's a quick little lock switch down there below. And so if you do wanna use that control, make sure that you unlock it so that it'll actually work for you. Inside that is the OK button. We're gonna use that to confirm a lot of our settings as we go forward. If you wanna customize that button to do something particular, you can go into the custom setting menu under controls, and go to OK button and set that up to do a variety of different options that are available. The iButton is gonna pull up additional information. It's gonna be a shortcut menu for a lot of different modes. And you'll see that this changes depending on how your camera's set up. If you are just in your normal shooting mode and you press the iButton, you're gonna get these options in here. Now all of these ones are ones that you're gonna find in the menu system, so we're gonna discuss that as we get into the menu system of the camera. So we're gonna get back to all of these, but if any of these ones are ones that you quickly wanna get to, you forget where they are in the menu system, you can always hit the iButton. And we're gonna see more of this, especially as we get into live view and the movie mode. And as we saw earlier in the playback mode, it's got different menu options depending on what mode you are in in the camera.