Lessons

Lesson Info

Left & Right Sides Of Camera

Looking over to the left side of the camera, we have the flash button that we talked about earlier when we were talking about the top of the camera, but just a little bit of review on that. By pressing that button, it'll pop the flash up. Or it will allow you to go in and change the flash mode if you press the button and turn the back dial at the exact same time. If you turn the front dial, you'll be able to change the flash compensation with it. There's a lot of different modes. It'll depend on which exposure mode you are in as to which flash modes the camera will allow you to use. But for anyone who uses flash, there's gonna be some good options for creative control with that. Exposure compensation is great to use when you are doing people photography. Because often times, the natural TTL flash is a little bit much in some cases. And so using the flash, get in there and change those modes, and change that compensation to fit your needs. The next button down is the bracketing button. ...

And this is gonna allow us to shoot a series of photos at different exposures to make sure that we got the right one or that we're getting a collection of images that cover the entire exposure range of a particular photograph. To operate this, like most of the other buttons on the camera, you're gonna press and hold it in while you are turning the back button. In this case, to change the number of shots. Or to turn the front dial to change the exposure increment. And so if there is a situation that has a wide exposure latitude and you want to get a collection of images, for a variety of reasons, press the bracket button, choose the number of shots you wanna get, and then adjust the front dial to control the exposure increments. And so we can choose between three, five, seven, or nine shots. We can choose increments as small as a third of a stop or as big as three stops on it, so we can get a very wide range of photos from that. Basic bracket series is usually gonna be around three shots. Somebody who wants a bit more information might be shooting five or more shots. And you can add exposure compensation on top of this, so if you would prefer that that whole series be a little bit brighter or a little bit darker than average, you can simply add that exposure compensation in there as well. Some of their lenses will have vibration reduction. There'll be an on-off switch if it is available on that particular lens. Most of the lenses will have an autofocus or manual focus option on it. Nikon traditionally has had all their autofocus, manual focus controls on their camera, but they seem to be kind of transitioning into having more of it on the lenses. If you do want it to be autofocus, both of these switches need to be in the autofocus mode. If you want to manually focus, you can switch either one of them to manual focus. Inside that colored area is the AF mode button. We've been dealing with this a little bit more, but in this case, in the normal shooting mode, we're gonna press in on this button and turn the back dial to change the focusing mode. So let's look at the different options that are available. So we press in on the AF mode button. We're gonna change the focusing mode dial in the back of the camera, and then we can change our camera to AF single for single focus. And so for standard subjects that are not moving around, this is good, basic autofocus system that's gonna work well with most subjects. The different type of subject is action. So if you have motion, your subject's moving closer to you or further away from you, you wanna have the camera in a continuous focusing mode. And that is AF-C. Now there is a third option called AF-A where the camera will choose for you, and this is not one of my favorite modes because it's a little unpredictable as to which direction the camera's gonna go in choosing because it may choose single focus or it may choose continuous according to what it thinks is going on. So I prefer to put it either in AF-S or AF-C. By pressing that button and turning the front dial, we can change the area which is which focusing points we're gonna use for focusing. So let's take a look at the many different focusing points that are available. All right. First option is to choose a single point of focus. And this is gonna be good when you wanna be very precise about what you're choosing to focus on. And so you have 51 different points that you can move 'em to, and you'll be able to move 'em using the multi-controller in the back of the camera. If a subject is moving around a little bit more erratically, you can choose a group of nine points. This is gonna be a little bit bigger area box to focus on. Now this will only be available in the continuous focusing mode. It's not available in the single or the AF-A autofocusing options. Same is true for d21 which is just simply a slightly larger target area of 21 points. You can choose all 51 points in which to focus, and this is for very erratic subjects. And what's going on here is the camera looks at all 51 points and it chooses whatever is closest to you. There is also a 3D tracking mode, and this is gonna use additional color tracking information from the metering sensor to judge whether your subject is moving towards you, away from you, and whereabouts in the frame. And so it's adding additional information. Some people have found that it works very well for them. Some people have found that it doesn't work as well. It's something you're gonna have to try to see how well it works with your photography. But it is looking at the entire 51 point area. If you do want a smaller group somewhere between smaller and the d9 option, there is a group option which is four points. And it's looking for whatever is closest to you in those four points. We also do have an auto area which is basically looking at all 51 points and where in that area. And it focuses on whatever is nearest to you. So let me show you on the camera as to how to make these changes. And so the first thing that's just kind of awkward for most people who get these cameras is that this button is not labeled down here. Some people might not even know it's a button until they read the instruction manual or watched the class in here. So we're gonna have to press in on that button in order to make these changes. And so that's what I'm doing when I reach around the left side of the camera here, so when I press down. Get this lined up so you can see it a little bit easier. Press down on this. In the back of the camera, I can change it from single A to continuous. I'm gonna put it into continuous now so that I can change the area mode in the front to all the different options of single, group, and d9, d21 and so forth. And so for basic photography, I like just in the single point area, so I can be very precise. When I'm shooting action, I kinda like nine. If it's pretty erratic, then I'll go with the 21 point focusing system. And in most of these modes where you have a group or a single point, you'll be able to move the focusing point around by hitting this multi-controller in the back of the camera. It's not exactly easy for me to show you because you gotta be looking through the viewfinder in order to see whether you're moving the focusing points to the left or right. So you'll have to look through the viewfinder and then go left and right on this before you get it into that area. Now let me give you some little background information on the focusing points that are being used in this camera. So we do have 51 focusing points that are good down to EV-3 which is a very dark level of focusing. It's a very good camera for focusing under low light conditions. We have 180,000-pixel RGB metering sensor. So that's part of the metering sensor we talked about earlier, but it's also used for focusing for understanding color information. This would work really well, for instance, if you have players that you were shooting that were wearing colored jerseys. You're photographing someone in a red jersey. The autofocus system is reading where that subject is, but the color tracking system is watching those reds and having a better understanding of where they are moving to. So that's gonna help you out. It's kinda invisible behind the scenes working. You're not gonna see anything changing or anything that looks different when you look through the viewfinder. And so it's kind of a secret mojo that's going on behind the scenes there. The side focusing areas to the left and to the right are horizontal line sensors which means they're sensitive to horizontal lines. They're not as good on vertical lines. The 15 in the middle are cross-type sensors which means they're good with verticals and horizontals. So they're very good with all different types of contrast that they're going to see. The center one is still the best of the bunch. This one will support focusing down on f/ which means that if you have a lens that goes down all the way to f/8 in its aperture, its maximum aperture, and right now, Nikon doesn't have any lenses that do that unless you were to take a lens like the 500 millimeter f/4 and add a doubler onto it. So in that case, the maximum aperture would then be f/8. So if you are using the tele extenders, you may not have all the sensors working for you. You may have to rely just on the center point for focusing. All right, so a lot going on with the focusing there. Encourage you to try those out. If you do action photography, there's definitely a lot of options to work with there. So I encourage you to experiment a little bit to see which options work for you. It's gonna depend on the types of sports you shoot or wildlife you shoot, what lenses, where you're shooting them, how large the subjects are in the frame, and so forth as to which mode is good for you. But I encourage you to try out as many of those different modes to see which ones work best for your type of photography. All right, next up you might see a little Bluetooth icon on the side of your camera. So you can use Bluetooth to transfer information from your camera to your phone or other smart device. And this is something that we're gonna look more closely at when we get into the Wifi section of the camera. 'Cause the camera does have Wifi as well so that you can use a remote control on the camera, or at least remote control on your phone to control the camera. You can also use it to download images from your camera to your phone. The Bluetooth system is set up. It's a SnapBridge system that we'll talk more about from Nikon. And the idea is that you have your phone and your camera communicating on a regular basis, so that when you shoot a photo, it automatically downloads to your phone. And so you can have your phone in your back pocket and be out shooting photos, and as you shoot, it's downloading copies of all those photos to your phone so you can have immediate access to them, and you don't have to go through any setup process afterwards. Just do it once ahead of time before you go out and shoot. We do have a rubber cover here which gets us into the door. We have a number of options in here. First is the microphone input. Nikon makes their own little microphone for this, the ME-1. And there's lots of other microphones you can get out here that plug into that same, standard size 3 1/2 millimeter mini jack on it. If you want to monitor the audio that you're recording, you might wanna plug in some headphones into the standard headphone jack on it. We do have a micro USB connection, and this is used for connecting up to a computer. If you want to download your images, you can do so directly from your camera to the computer. If you wanna hook up your computer to a monitor or a TV, you can do that through the HDMI mini out port. And so this is good for doing slideshows for your friends or using a monitor for recording video. There is an accessory terminal here. So if you do have a remote control like the MC-DC for doing cable release photography, working from a tripod, doing time exposures or nighttime exposures, or just triggering the camera without touching the camera, this is a good device that would plug into that. There's a number of other devices that will plug in too. Nikon makes a wireless remote control transceiver if you wanna trigger your camera wirelessly from a very large distance. It's a little bit on the expensive side. It's around $500 for this transceiver system. But it does work over very great distances. If you don't need to be over as large a differences, they do make another wireless control, but this is gonna have a much shorter range on it. So if you just need to be within a few meters of the camera, then the WR-R10 with the WR-T transmitter and controller, those will work fine in this category. We do also have a GPS unit that you can plug into this. And so if you want to record your location data onto the metadata of the photos, you can get the GPS GP-1(A) unit. That's gonna sell for a little under $300 these days. Working our way around to the right-hand side, we have our memory card door which uses the SD memory cards. It's UHS-1 compliant. You can put the UHS-2 cards in there, but there's no additional benefit on it because it's just got the speed built for the UHS-1 type cards. The cards will have a lock switch over on the side, so that you can lock them to prevent them from being used whether that's image or data recorded to the card or pulled off the card. So make sure that's not in the downward position if you're trying to shoot photos. We'll have the memory size of the card located, or indicated with large numbers. The bus speed of the card, as I say this is a USH-1 compliant camera. If you shoot a lot of photos, sport action photos, and you want them downloaded to the card as quickly as possible and you wanna be able to pull them off the card and onto your computer as quickly as possible, you wanna pay attention to the maximum speed of the card. If you shoot a lot of video, you wanna pay attention to the minimum speed of the card. And Nikon recommends a speed class three card or faster, which is 30 megabytes per second. The video recording can cause a lot of data to get backed up very quickly if you don't have a card that's fast enough, and so if you do a lot of recording, and especially in the 4K mode on this camera, then you're gonna wanna have a faster card most definitely. So I did mention that you can download directly from the camera to a computer, but that is honestly a very slow way of downloading. If you get a card reader, it's gonna do a much better job 'cause it's much faster in that way. Another way to do it is by simply plugging your card into your computer if you do have a slot straight for doing that. With your memory cards, any time you are going out on a new shoot, a big shoot, a big vacation, or something like that, it's probably a good idea to format the memory card. What happens when you format the memory card is it deletes all the photos, and it gets rid of all the directory and ghost folders and everything else that's on that memory card. And so highly recommend that you format your cards on a regular basis. It's gonna extend the life of those cards because they're gonna have a better, clean communication with the camera.