Lessons

Lesson Info

Set Up Menu

The next major section here is the setup menu and this is for, first item here is format the memory card and this is for formatting the memory card, it deletes the photos on it, it clears off any other ghost folders, files, file directories on the card, and it's something that you should do anytime you're heading out on a new shoot. If you wanna save your user settings, I talked about this earlier in the day and what this means is you set the camera up the way you want it to work with all the settings exactly dialed into your settings, you come here to save user settings, and you can save them to U1 or U and then when you dial your camera to those, to this U1 or U2, then all of your settings are automatically exactly where you want them to be. If you want to reset this, you can completely reset it here on choosing either U1 or U2 and just reset it back to the factory default settings. You can choose different language depending what you want the menu to be at. Time zone and date will a...

llow you to go in and tweak a few of the time zone options, you get to choose what time zone in the world you're at, you get to pick what the date and time is, of course. You can sync with a smart device and so if you are using bluetooth which we're gonna be talking more about here in a little bit, you can have the date and time on your phone transfer to your camera and the date and time, it's picking it up from the astronomical clock and it's very, very, accurate and the clock in your camera can drift from time to time and you kinda need to reset it or you should reset it about once a year and this will prevent you, or eliminate the need for doing that. You can choose the date format in a couple of different options depending on where you live in the world and what the normal setting is. Daylight savings time can be turned on or off as well. The monitor brightness is normally gonna be left right in the middle, good for judging exposure but sometimes you need to brighten it up 'cause the sunlight's really bright and you wanna see the screen on the back of the camera, sometimes it's really bright when you're working at night time and you wanna darken it up a little bit but normally it should be left right at the zero setting. If you need to change the color balance, the color drifts for some reason, normally not gonna need to play with this, hopefully you'll never, never need this. Virtual horizon can be kinda cool, this will show you if you're tilting the camera forward or sideways, this can be attributed to one of the function buttons, if you go back to the function controls, you can add this feature to a lot of the function buttons so you can get this with a single press of a particular function button which can be nice. Information display, so the information on the back of the camera can have a white background or a black background and you get to choose which one you want. Normally the camera is automatically gonna switch back and forth according to how bright of light you are currently in, but if you would prefer one or the other you can go in and choose either dark on light or light on dark. Auto info display, the info display on the back of the camera is automatically gonna turn on anytime you press the shutter release and then it turns off when you press the info button, if you wanna turn this off so that you don't see it, you can turn it off. Now if you wanna turn it off with the eye sensor, you can leave this info display auto off as to when does it turn off. Normally people like leaving this turned on which means that when you hold it up to your eye, the display automatically turns off. Some people wanna leave it turned on all the time, in which case, you turn it off. Kind of awkward. AF fine-tune, we talked about this when we were doing the live view 'cause there was an automated way of doing the fine-tune so if you need to do it more manually, if your focus is not perfect, if you, let me get into the visuals, let's show you. So if you focus on a subject, and it's not quite perfectly in focus, it's focused in front of that subject, that's what we call front focus. We also have back focus available, it might be a problem, and so if you're focusing on subject and the focus seems to be behind the subject in every case it means you need to adjust the camera and lens settings together. And so what you need to do is you need a target to focus on and that can be pretty much anything that has some nice contrast, and then you need to be able to measure in front of and behind it and so an angled device like this works, you can buy a professional measuring tool that looks like this so you're focusing over on the left hand side and then you're measuring on the right hand side whether what's in the foreground or the background is in focus, if you wanna do it on the cheap, you can use a ruler and a yardstick aligned like this so you have something to focus on and then you can tell whether it's focused in front or in back. When you take photographs and you adjust the settings from minus 20 to plus 20, you will see that the focus shifts and you can shift the focus so that it's perfect for any given lens that you have available and so you can see in this example, zero is not quite focusing it right where it should be and so this should probably be at around a plus five setting and so it's a very, very subtle little adjustment and this is only gonna be really necessary for people with lenses that have very shallow depth of field. So typically lenses that are of 2.8 aperture or wider and so if you have an 8514, 100 millimeter 1.4, 200 millimeter F2 type lens, those are the type of people that are gonna wanna check to make sure that they're getting sharp focus with each of their images and if it's front or back focused, come in and do an AF fine-tune manually. But with the automated fine-tune that we talked about earlier in live view where you hold down the video record button and the focus mode button on the side of the camera for three seconds, the camera can automatically do that for you and eliminate this entire need but sometimes that doesn't work and that's why I'm still talking about it here. So what you'll have the option on is you can turn on or off the AF fine-tune, so normally, most people are gonna just keep this turned off. Those who wanna dive into it can get into it. You can have a saved value for each particular lens and what that does is it takes that lens and basically works with the camera to focus a little bit in front or back of where it would normally have gone. The default system is zero, you can reset it here if need be. And then you can have a list of saved values for different lenses in here as well. And so I hope you don't need to do this but if you do need to fine-tune the camera, it is available and it's a good option to have in there. The camera can clean the image sensor automatically when you turn the camera on and off and so you can also come in here and tell it to clean it right now, uses a little ultrasonic filter in there to knock off any of the dust. And that's a good thing to have on general and you can choose when it does that and so startup and start down, having it do it as much as possible generally is a good thing because it doesn't seem to wear out, doesn't seem to cause any other problems with the camera, and dust on the pictures can be a major problem. If you wanna lock the mirror up for manual cleaning, you can do that yourself, the first stage that most people I think are gonna be fully ready for is just using one of the rocket air blowers and so in this case you lock the mirror up for cleaning, take the rocket blower, blow air in on the sensor, knocking off the dust. If there's something that's kinda sticky on there well there is a second stage, not everyone's comfortable with it, but it's gonna be some sort of sweeping technique where you use a swab and liquid perhaps and what you're doing here is you're gonna be sweeping across the sensor to try to knock off any of the dust. And so you do need to be a little bit skilled if you wanna do this, it is something that the common layperson can do but not everybody feels comfortable doing it, if you don't, turn your camera in for repair, but there are devices out there that are available at all good camera stores for doing this yourself. If you wanna check to see how bad your camera is you can do an image dust off reference photo and try to clean the sensor off the best you can at first and when you shoot these test photos under this case it's gonna show you how bad the sensor is okay this is a pretty bad example here but what's gonna happen here is the camera can clone out that information on images so that you don't have any of that dust. Now what you need to have to do that is you need the Nikon Capture NX software to do it and you need to use Nikon software so it is possible but you do have to go through the Nikon software which not everybody loves to use. If you wanna add an image comment to your photos, if you wanna add your name, your website, your company name, contact information, anything like that, you can add that in here, it gets added to the metadata and that'll be attributed to all of the photographs that you take. It's not the most secure thing in the world because it can be written over in post production but if somebody is trying to get a hold of you or in contact with you or they wanna know who took the photo, or something about it, you can put your own notes in here that you can retrieve later when you look at the photo. You can attach copyright information to the metadata of your images as well and so you can also put your name, your artist, your copyright, all of that in there. The camera has a few different beep options, and so there is a general beep when the camera focuses that can be a little irritating to subjects that you're working with or other photographers around you, I recommend turning that off, no need to disrupt everybody else. The volume of the beep can be adjusted in a few different levels and the volume or the sound of the pitch can be adjusted from low to high as well. Touch controls on the camera, remember the back screen is touch sensitive and so we're gonna have a little submenu in here of controls. If you don't use those, you don't like them, you don't want them ever turned on, you can just simply disable them or you could enable them only in the playback of images so that they don't work when you're out recording images. When you playback an image, you can flick images to the right or flick images to the left but if you would like your flicks to send the images in the opposite direction, you can do so here. Normally the touch controls are pretty nice, a lot of people like them so we can leave those turned on. Inside the viewfinder, there's a flashing lightning bolt over on the right hand side when it's dark and the camera thinks you need flash. You know you might be a professional concert photographer and you're thinking I'm not allowed to use flash, would you stop blinking at me for the entire concert? And so if that bothers you and you just don't like that turned on and you know when you wanna use flash and when you don't wanna use flash, you can turn it off right here. If you're gonna hook your camera up to an HDMI port, there's a lot of different options that we have in here at least a few different options. So you're gonna plug your camera in, the output resolution can be selected automatically or you can force it to be one setting or the other. With the advanced setting in here, this goes into a little bit of a submenu. We have the output range in this which is the range of colors that you're sending out, normally it's gonna be auto and it will adjust for the device that it's going to but if you wanna limit it, it limits it between 16 and 235, the full range is from zero to and that's brightness levels from zero to a very bright of 255. Depending on the size of the display, you might wanna go 100%, or 95%, depending on how you're using that display. Do you wanna see on screen display of the information on your screen? Some people are using it as an external recorder, in which case they would turn it off. Most people are just looking at it to see what's going on with the camera and they wanna see those displays. Do you want it to act as a dual monitor so that you're seeing what's going on in the back of the camera? So you can turn that aspect on and off. And that's all within the HDMI function. Location data, this can be used, this can be turned on and activated if you are using the GP-1A unit, and so inside here little bit of a submenu, you can download information from a smart device to your phone, you can take a look at your current position, your GPS coordinates, you do need to have good coverage at that time, so it's gonna be very difficult to do that in a building, you need to have pretty good outside coverage, you can't be under the trees, need to be able to usually pick up a couple of satellites to see that. Alright next up with the wireless remote options, the camera has a lot of different wireless remote options and this is where you can tell the camera which option you have plugged in and which one you are using. Some of those wireless options will have a function button and here you can customize how that function button works. There is an airplane mode which turns off all the wi-fi, bluetooth, NFC signals from the camera so if you wanna conserve battery power, if you're on an airplane, you can put it into the airplane mode for general purpose if you're not gonna be using those wi-fi features, this is a great item just to turn this on so that there's no signals going on and no wasted power in this at all. Alright, the camera can connect to a smart device using SnapBridge app program and so we're gonna talk about how to connect your camera up so that you can download images while you're shooting to your phone or to use your phone as a remote so you can see exactly what the camera is pointed at. And so when we dive in here we're gonna be able to start up the SnapBridge which is what Nikon uses, it's a technology that uses bluetooth technology, it's an always on connection, it's a relatively low power option and so it's gonna use up relatively little battery power. In my mind it still uses up a fair bit of battery power, but it's apparently lower than other systems out there. And so this is gonna allow you to communicate between your phone and the camera. And so the advantages of this is that it can add geotag information, it can automatically just download images from your camera to your phone as you're shooting you can just have your phone in your back pocket and you're shooting photos and it's downloading images to your phone so that you can just pick up your phone and send your images off and use them as you want from your great camera. They can update the clock, they can register your camera, there's all sorts of different kinda cool options on this and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna walk you through the set up process of what you need to do on how to get this set up with SnapBridge. There's a lot of different steps, and it's gonna be easier the second time you do it 'cause you won't have to go through all the steps, but let me just go through what you need to do in its entirety, so there are tasks with your camera and there are tasks with the phone. To start with, the phone side you need to download the Nikon SnapBridge app and this is something that is evolving and changing as time goes forward and so this may change at some point in the future, currently right now this is the version that we are using. On your camera, you're gonna come to the point where we are here in the menu here and you're gonna connect to a smart device and we're gonna use the SnapBridge setup, there's also an NFC setup which works very similar but we're gonna go through the SnapBridge setup here in this class. You go back to the phone and you're gonna need to make sure that your bluetooth is turned on, open SnapBridge, there's gonna be an option for you to connect with other cameras, it's gonna pick up the signal from the D7500, asks you to confirm that and pair them together. You'll then need to go back on the camera to let the camera know that yes this is an okay connection to make, and that you really do wanna go through it and then you can choose whether you wanna download the location and sync the clock, and from there you can start shooting photos and images are automatically sent from there to your phone. If you want to review photos or if you want to use your phone as a remote, you'll have to use the wi-fi option which switches out of bluetooth and over to wi-fi and so it's not the most seamless experience in the world but it does work and you can do it. Alright so what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna try to follow all of these steps live and hopefully they're gonna work. And so I'm gonna just first off put my camera in the program mode just to keep things nice and simple and if you wanna take a look here on the back of the camera as we get started, we got our phone, we've got our camera, and we're gonna go ahead and get started with going to our menu, our setup menu, going to connect to smart device, and in this case here what we wanna do is we wanna start things up and it tells us we're gonna be using SnapBridge, and we're gonna press okay here and then it's gonna start sending a signal out, so it's sending a signal out and I'm gonna go to my phone and I've already downloaded SnapBridge, and so I'm gonna open up my wi-fi systems here and we're gonna look on SnapBridge and at the top here is connection options and so we're gonna hit this and if things go right we're gonna see a D and this is probably the serial number of this particular model and I'm gonna select this one and then this is where we cross our fingers and it's trying to connect to the camera and if it does it properly, looking good folks, we get the D7500 so this is kinda confirming this is the one we're gonna connect with. And so now we're gonna pair these two together and so it's working to pair them, we're gonna go up here and we're gonna press okay, now we're establishing a connection, this is good folks, this is very good, and we're gonna hit okay for the next one, download location from smart device, and for right now I'm just gonna say no, and do I wanna sync the clock, I'm gonna say no on this one, you can say yes, I'm just trying to keep things simple here, and we're done. Alright so now when I take a photo with the camera, we should see, I'm gonna go ahead and get this started, so let's take a photo, in a moment we're gonna see a little image going from the camera, there it is, see the little image, it's going from the camera to the phone and I should be able to see on my phone what I just shot with the camera here and so if I jump out of this and I go into my photos, which are right here, we should be able to see the exciting photo that I just took right there. Not too exciting, but let's go back to the SnapBridge, okay so in here one of the options that we can do, let's make sure that we're still on, we should be still on this one, so in this case what we're doing is we're just shooting photos and they automatically are sending images, we should see this happen here in a moment, is this new image is coming over, it's not the fastest thing in the world there it comes, see I took a photo and it probably waited five or six seconds and it's downloading JPEG photos, it's not downloading raws, it's just going off of very small ones here. Now if I wanna connect the camera up via wi-fi and I wanna use this as an external remote control, down here along the bottom I'll have the option of either going into the gallery to look at images or I can use the camera, or use this as a remote for the camera, so I'm gonna press the camera remote, and in this case I'll press remote photography, and it's gonna kick me off of the bluetooth and it's gonna push me over onto the wi-fi, it takes a moment for this to do it, like I said, it wasn't completely seamless. But it does seem to be working here so it's establishing a connection via wi-fi to the phone right now. And... We're gonna say that that's good, oh wait, I think I need to press go and then I'm gonna jump back to settings and hopefully this will allow me to get in and do some remote photography here in just a moment. Hang with me folks. Okay think we're there folks. Alright, so there we are and so I'm gonna zoom in just a little bit so you can see on the camera exactly what the camera would see and so I'm gonna go see if I can get a photo of myself by the prop table and that seems like good composition there so I'm gonna take the phone with me and walk over here and so now I can see if I'm in position, and okay I can see I'm cropped out a little bit there so I wanna get here, and I got my shutter release right here at the bottom, smile. And get my photo taken and so now I get that composed exactly as I want so here on the back of the camera, let's see if I can pull up my image here. And so there we are with the image now there is a whole lot of other features and controls that we can do in the camera, we're not gonna get into that totally right now I just wanna show you the basics of how it works. I can take this image and then I can upload it, I can email it, Facebook it, Instagram it, all that other sort of stuff and so I'm not gonna bother with that right now but that is the basics on how it works. And so then when I'm done what I'm gonna do is I can just turn the camera off, that's typically the easiest thing and that's gonna kill the connection between the camera and the phone. So there you go folks that is how it works I will let you know that some users possibly myself, possibly others, have reported that it doesn't always work the first time out and so you may have to try the exact, playing around with the button sequence, the sequence that I have given you here on screen is the system that seems to work best for me most of the time and so this is what should work for you. There may be changes with this in the future, but this is what works right now. One of the key things is JPEG images and so it's sending over small JPEG images to the phone so that you can easily upload them and it's not taking up too much space. So great system, very, very fun to use when everything's working right like it is today so good luck and have fun with that. So we're able to start the SnapBridge system and dive into it. We also have the option of adding a password protection and that's something that you might wanna do so that people don't have too easy of access to photos on your camera. Alright you can have your camera set to automatically send photos to your phone and this is something that you may wanna turn on when you are shooting a special event that you do want that feature turned on. Normally you kinda wanna have this turned off 'cause it does wear the batteries of your camera and your phone down somewhat quickly, even though it's using the bluetooth technology it is somewhat quick, so try not to use it unless you are actually needing it for a particular event. We do have wi-fi option in here which is basically for going in and controlling some of the background settings on this, you can go into network settings and you can take a look at the SSID, the set service indicator, this is basically the name of the camera if you had a number of D7500s or you wanted to give them particular names, you could do so in here. You could turn on the encryption or you could just leave it open so that anybody can access your camera via wi-fi, you can choose what your password is here as well, and you can choose to work on different channels, which most people aren't gonna need to worry about in here. Next up we'll have our current settings which just simply show you what camera is hooked up, what the password is, and the various wi-fi information. Generally a lot of this stuff is not necessary and if you do need to reset everything you can do so with one fell swoop right here. Cameras connecting up by bluetooth when it is using the SnapBridge technology here and so we're gonna have additional options for going in and taking a look at some of the bluetooth connections. Once again, this is the type of stuff that you don't generally need to dive in to, this will show you what paired devices it is currently paired with and currently working with and whether you want it to send it to these devices via bluetooth while things are turned off. The conformity markings just show you some of the settings that the camera has, some procedures that they have adhered to, it's really not that important for sure. Battery information, this is a great one, this tells you how much life is left on the battery, how many images you have, and the overall condition of your battery and so this is something that you may wanna set as a shortcut which is something I'm gonna talk about here in a little bit 'cause this is something that a lot of people check on a regular basis. If you forget to put a memory card in your camera, do you wanna lock the shutter release? Most people would say yes, they don't wanna think they're taking photographs when there is no memory card in the camera. If you wanted to hear the shutter sound but without a memory card in the camera, then you could leave this in the unlock position but lock is a nice safety position to have so that you don't think you're taking pictures when there's no memory card in the camera. If you have multiple D7500s and you wanna load settings from one camera to the next, you can save them and load them back and forth by storing them on a memory card. If you wanna reset all the settings you can go in here and just simply reset everything. Firmware operation is the software that runs the camera, and from time to time there are updates, I don't think there's been any updates so far on this but if there are, Nikon lists them at their website, you can download them, put them on a memory card, put the card in the camera, come here to the firmware, and the camera will see that there is new firmware on the card and it will upload that and give you the new software right on your camera so it's free of charge, but it does require just a small bit of work and you may wanna check back with Nikon's website every six months to one year to see if they've made some sort of bug adjustment or new feature enhancement and put it on the camera. Next major category here is the retouch menu and this allows you to go in and adjust the images that you shot. This is kinda what I call Photoshop in the camera and so if you wanna adjust your images, the truth is is that you're better off doing it on a computer where you have a nice big screen and lots of controls for doing it. If you have to and you need to do it in your camera, you can do it in here, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time in here because you can go in here and you can adjust all sorts of images. Now the first option here is pretty valuable. If you shoot raw images, you're gonna use JPEGs and you're gonna need JPEGs from time to time and so if you wanna take a raw image and turn it into a JPEG, you can do it here with the raw processing. And you can adjust and tweak the image, you can adjust the white balance, you can make it brighter, you can make it darker, you can do quite a few things with that raw image in here. With all the other images in here you can do a ton of other stuff, resizing, trimming them, adding various features like the D-lighting to them, you can straighten them, change the distortion control, many people never touch this stuff at all 'cause it's all things that they would do on their computer afterwards but if you need to do something in camera 'cause you don't have access to your computer for a variety of reasons you can go in here and you can definitely do it.