Lessons
Class Introduction
08:45 2Photo Basics
03:55 3Basic Camera Controls
05:11 4Mode Dial
19:08 5Top Of Camera
10:15 6Back Of Camera
06:11 7Viewfinder Display
05:07 8Back of Camera Buttons
22:08Live View Menu
16:05 10Movie Mode Menu
10:23 11Left & Right Sides Of Camera
15:57 12Bottom Of Camera
02:46 13Front Of Camera
03:18 14Lens Options
10:49 15Playback Menu
07:23 16Photo Shooting Menu
08:34 17ISO Shooting Menu
09:03 18Image Quality Shooting Menus
09:16 19Multiple Exposure & HDR Menus
05:48 20Movie Shooting Menu
07:25 21Custom Setting Menu
09:13 22Timer & Bracketing Menus
08:27 23Custom Control Menu
05:44 24Set Up Menu
28:47 25My Menu
03:03 26Camera Operation
09:50Lesson Info
Photo Shooting Menu
We're diving next into the shooting menu on the camera which is going to control a lot of the quality features, the main features for actually shooting with the camera. First up, you can go in here and you can reset the photo shooting menu back to its original factory fresh settings in here and so if you've gone through here, made some changes, not really sure what you changed and what you didn't change, or if something is not operating properly, this is a good place to come and reset that back to its normal setting. As I mentioned in the previous playback section, you can have different folders. And so what you can do in here, is you can go in and you can select by which folder you are shooting to. So if you want to have groups of images separated in different folders, you can select those folder numbers in here. And then if you want to simply browse the list, you can go in and browse the list and choose which folder you want to shoot with. The file naming, every time you shoot a phot...
o, it has a letter and a number code that goes with it. In this case you can go in and you can change that three letter code at the beginning of the name. And it's slightly different depending on whether you're shooting in sRGB or Adobe RGB, which is another topic we'll talk about here very shortly, so you can change slightly the three letter code if you want to put your initials in for instance you'll have your three letter initials in the front of all the file names that you shoot with the camera. Flash control gets us into a larger sub menu dealing with controls when you are adding another flash onto the camera for instance. Flash control with the built-in flash, you can have that set to TTL which is the automated through the lens system for simple, basic automatic flash, I'd recommend that. But sometimes you want to do manual 'cause you want to specifically, manually control things and then there is more of the special effects mode of the repeating flash. If you are setting it manually, you can control the output here. One to one would be full output, you could do one to 128 for just the slightest bit of flash output. One of the options is a repeating flash. And in this case, you can choose the output power, the number of times that it's going to repeat, and the frequency which is how many times per second that flash is gonna fire. So it's going to fire kinda like a strobe light does and you'll have to figure out exactly what you need for that special effects shot you're trying to create. If you want to get into the wireless flash options, there are many to choose from with the Nikon camera and flashes. One option is to have a wireless system like the WR-A and the WR-R10, and one's plugged into the camera as a transmitter, one's plugged into a flash as a receiver and the camera can trigger the flash without any sort of flash coming from the camera at all. You can have groups of flashes put together so that you can control them independently and have different power ratios or different settings on those different flashes. And to be honest with you this sort of control of the flash probably requires an entire class of its own on this. You could spend hours and hours controlling this and there are some classes that you can get on working with the flashes. We may be going through this a little bit quickly but it can dive in and you can get very, very deep into the subject. Alright, so that is your flash control. Normally, just going to be left on TTL. Next up, choose image area, as I mentioned before you can use a 1.3 crop area. Don't imagine that's something that a lot of people are going to use very much. Best time to use that is if you are trying to shoot telephoto and your lens is just simply not filling the subject and you know you're going to end up cropping it later on. For the most part, it's not really worth it. It's something that you can always crop later on, it's not something that you're really changing in that regard. Image quality, we talked about this before, this is where you get to chose between RAW and JPEG and all the different iterations that you have of this. You can shoot RAW and JPEG and of course JPEG comes in different sizes and in different compression rates so it's going to be different quality levels. And so normally, recommending of course the RAW setting, if not that at least the highest quality JPEG setting. As you go through the menu system, as you look at the handout that I have in the class, you'll notice I'm making recommendations on the right hand side of the column in gray. I also will have recommendations in red for more advanced settings. So it kind of depends on what you're trying to do with the camera and of course you are going to take these settings and adjust them to your own needs. But as you go through them, that's what my indication is as far as the gray and the red settings for recommendations. Image size is normally, you're going to want to leave that on large. If you know you need it small and you don't want to waste the file space, then that would be the time to change it to small. NEF RAW recording, this allows us to get into the details of how the RAW is recorded because there is multiple ways the camera can record a RAW image and I think it was kind of interesting the options that Nikon has put in here for you to choose from, and so I've done a little bit of my own testing, I've read a lot on the internet about what other people are shooting their Nikon cameras at. And so let me show you what my tests look like. And so I wanted to shoot a subject that had some highlight information, some shadow information. And one of the options is to shoot it at 14-bit, which is gonna be 4.4 trillion colors. And there's going to be two versions of this. There's a lossless compressed and a compressed. So compressed is they're throwing out a little bit of the information and you'll notice the file size is a little bit smaller. The lossless compressed is a compressed file but they have done it in a way that does not lose information when they expand it again. The other option we have is with 12-bit information which is 68 billion colors, a lot of colors, but not nearly as many as four trillion. We have that in lossless compressed and compressed. And so these are the four options that you can choose for shooting in a NEF or RAW file format. And I have a hard time seeing the difference in any of these four images or any of the comparisons that I've done with any of the Nikon cameras. You really have to dig in real deep into the details to see any sort of difference on them. But, from what I have checked, my pick for what I would choose, is the lossless compressed 12-bit image. And I'm choosing that over the compressed version because when you compress something in a non-lossless fashion, you are throwing out some information. Now, the reason I'm not going with the 14-bit, because 14-bit should give you some more information, and on a technical level, it is giving you more information, it just doesn't seem to be visible by human eyes in 99.99999% of the cases. I've done a lot of checks with other photographers who've gone through this testing, and I have yet to have somebody show me where there is any realistic, notable difference between 14-bit and 12-bit. And so 14-bit is recording a lot of extra information that it appears that we just can't really make use of. If you do actually want the absolute largest files, then you should put your camera in 14-bit. But I don't think you're really going to see a difference in any of your photos that you shoot. And so the 12-bit lossless compressed seems to be the sweet spot to have your RAW settings at. They're not overly large and they're not having good information thrown away on it. And so that is where I would set my camera at. And so you'll see an option in here for the lossless compressed or the compressed option, we're going with lossless compressed there, and a 12-bit depth on them, seems to be fine from everything I've seen.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Keshav
Helps you master the camera controls very quickly. I'm glad I took the course. Without it, I'm sure it would have taken me years to know and use the full power of this camera. Great Course. Highly recommend.
Thomas Sielaff
Great, great course. Could not be any clearer on what to know, what to do, and in all, making understanding my camera a fun thing! Well, well, worth that cost. A steal really!!
Roy Shenfield
This is a great course! I recently bought a D7500 and was somewhat stymied by the large number of different possible settings and the several hundred page user manual and menu guide. This course covers the vast majority of what I need to know and in a reasonable amount of detail. I especially liked the material on menus as he went through most of them in detail. Additionally all the slides shown in the course are available in pdf as well as several pages detailing the authors recommended settings. I highly recommend, especially given the $24.00 special offering for this.
Student Work
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Camera Guides