Lessons

Lesson Info

Custom Menu

We have a lot of difference things that you can customize on the camera and these get a little tedious in here so hang with us as we go through this so we're going to start off with the auto focus system first off fc priority selection what this is is I would generally leave this at release priority when the camera is in a continuous mode for sports it's gonna prioritize the ability for you to take the picture release the shutter even if the subject may be a tad out of focus it's where the standard setting is if you find different needs in sports you can go in and change this to focus priority for f s this is single shot this is where your typically shooting a portrait or something that's not moving it's going to be focused priority so it won't shoot a picture until it's in focus this is a general system where most people leave it you can move this to release private priority if you want to but I would be very careful about doing that next up focus tracking with lock on okay so we have...

a question earlier you know when you're focusing on the subject how quickly does it change to that new subject who just crossed in front of your previous subject well the camera is set to a f three which is kind of the middle of the one two, three four or five settees if you want the lock on to make sure I get my notes right uh if you want it to jumped very quickly you would set it to number one if you want it to stay with that subject for a longer period of time you would go to five for the average user I would start off on three shoot sports whatever sport you happen to be shooting and figure out maybe does that need to be set a little longer or a little shorter and you may find out that if you shoot different sports it needs to be in different places for those different sports and this is when those men eubanks that we talked about earlier you can come in handy said that you don't have to dive in and make all these little minute adjustments between different sports activation alright, remember that f on button on the back of the camera and we talked about turning this button off. This is where you could turn this button off for kennedy beginning to intermediate level shooter I would probably just leave this at shuter slash f on so that this is working the shutter release as well as the auto focus on, but for the more advanced user I would go to a f on on lee and that means you're gonna have to use the back button on the camera the f on back here to focus and the shutter button will not focus at all this is going to get really dangerous when you hand the camera to somebody else to shoot a picture because they're not going to know about that button on the back of the camera so advanced users only a half point illumination uh this let's see if what am I doing here? This is the light on the front of the camera you know, this little flashlight up here I like to turn it off for some people it helps him focus under close low light situations. I know I have the senate auto on and I was kind of where I'm telling everyone else is a good standard position but personally I kind of want to turn this one off all right? Focus point wrap around. All right, so we have fifty one focusing points all over the screen, right? And when you go all the way over here to one side and you suddenly want to go way over there do you have to go cep cep cep that that all the way back with wraparound youjust go that direction and it wraps around to the other side and I think of course I like more options turn it on the camera has fifty one focusing points, but if you don't really use all of them and you want to narrow it down to eleven, you could do that I would I would leave the fifty one option turned on and I think I misspoke earlier because I have my notes in a different area. The illuminator is the one in front here. This is the one that I like to have turned off. What? I misspoke earlier on a five eighth point illumination is when you're looking through the viewfinder in there they will light up in red when they become in focus. And some people like that as a visual cue that their subject is in focus. Some people find that really irritating and so that's number five there and on auto, when it's dark, it lights up when it's really bright out, it doesn't light up. And I think auto does a pretty good job. But if you want to customize it, you can. So that was a five. All right. So moving on to the b section deals with me uttering and exposure first up the step value I would leave it third steps gives us lots of options, same same type of thing. With exposure control, we can deal with third stops or full stops. Why not do third stops? Gives us let's, just be more exact the same thing with flash and exposure compensation I why would you change this in case somebody's interesting? I have a light meter and it's an older light meter, and it works in half stops, and if I wanted to match this camera to that old light meter, I could do it. Next up is easy exposure compensation, all right? So they've got so many things in here, I have to just pause for a moment to think so on this camera to do exposure compensation, you have to press down this button and turn the dial on the back it's kind of a safety precaution so that if you just turn the style, it doesn't automatically change. Some people would prefer to just turn the dial without pressing that button, and that makes it even easier to change now. Some people don't like it when it's too easy, and so for most people, I would leave this turned off, but if you use exposure compensation a lot and you know what you're doing, then you could turn it on the centre waited meeting metering area is customizable, as we mentioned, and you're basically choosing how big of a area in the middle it's choosing I don't use center way to very often a lot of people I know do not use it, but if you did, you could customise it in different size circles that you're using fine tune, optimal exposure. In the old days of photography, every once in a while, a camera's light meter would drift a little too bright or a little too dark. And in order to fix it, you had to send the camera back to the manufacturer to have him fix it. Well, what you could do if you find that your cameras just always a little bit bright, you could go into fine to an optimal exposure and you can adjust by one six oven f stop a little bit brighter or a little bit darker and that's. How it's going to do everything on your camera from there on out now you can go back and reset it to zero or go the other direction. Hopefully you won't need to go here, but it's there in case your camera's light meter drifts in the future. Next up timers and auto exposure lock. So the shutter release button auto exposure lock. Normally this is turned off, which basically means when I press down on the shutter release and I move the camera over here, it's. Now meet oring over here. If I want to turn this feature on its gonna lock my shutter speeds and apertures as I move over here most of the time people prefer to have this turned off, which I think is fine. Auto meter off delay how soon do you want your camera to shut down? Thirty seconds is a pretty normal time, so I was probably stick with that the self timer can be customized to five ten, twenty seconds and you can also select for the camera to shoot one or up to nine pictures at the time the self timer has taken and so just very customizable and they're normally I'd leave it at ten seconds enough time for you to get in the picture the monitor on the back of the camera how long do you like that to stay on? Uh generally for seconds or so depends and you can go in and customize it depending on after the shots taken for menu sevens there's a lot of little customizing it's just all a matter of your personal preferences how you like to have your camera set up moving on to the shooting and display custom menu first off the beat I like to turn this off, you know just smacks of amateurism to my baby baby is you're focusing around and so I just like to be a little bit quieter when I'm shooting the continuous low meat mode. Now the camera's not all that fast four frames a second and you can select this to one, two or three frames if you have on the bigger battery grips and you're shooting in the cropped modes where you're shooting it higher frame rates you could get up to five frames per second in the low speed mode but for most people in most situations you're gonna have the set to three you can limit the maximum continuous number of shots that you can take in anyone time if you didn't want to burn through too many pictures to quickly, you might set this at five or six but for most people you can just leave it at one hundred and it will be fine exposure delay mode if you are in a scientific arena perhaps where you I want the shutter delayed the exposure delayed from the shutter release by one two or three seconds so that there's no vibration of you pressing the shutter release on the camera and so you can set the self timer to two seconds that's another way of doing it you could use a cable release so there's a lot of options for minimising vibrations with the camera filed numbering sequence this is the way that pictures are number on your memory card in general just leave this on you find her grid display this is that grid in the viewfinder some people like this for keeping the horizon level or just for compositional reasons some people want to keep the screen as clean possible I think keeping it clean is a good option so I would turn it off I also display an adjustment normally in the viewfinder, it will show you the so but we also have an option for easy I s o, which is kind of like the modes we talked about with the easy exposure change, where if you want to be able to change eso without pressing a button and turning a dial, just turning a dial, you could go in and do this as well. Now one of the other things you can go in in the display of the isos, you can show the frame count in the top lcd because right now is you looking you're the top display of your camera, you can see how many pictures you have left, but what you can't see is what s so you're out in there, and if you do want to see that you could go in here and I believe if you do show I s so in fact, this is one I actually want to go on a double check myself just because I want to make sure it's, right? So going to get to the right mode d one, not so d eighty seven, eighty seven and I'm going to put show s o sensitivity, and now my s o is on in the viewfinder, so actually there. You want to have I think it's good to have the esso up there I think I s so is one of the most important things to know about and that's nice to have that visible in that screen next up for people who are new to this camera the screen tips you might want to leave turned on but once you get to know this I would probably want to turn it off. What happens is that in the back lcd there's all these screen tips that pop up that give you helpful hints but they also cover up things that you're trying to look at information display. Normally I would just leave this on auto and this is displaying what? The back of the screen the camera's gonna look like a ce forest the colors is it white on black or is it black on white? Just some customized look, so whatever you kind of like there but I think the auto is fine for that lcd illumination and normally I would leave this on off. What happens here is that if you want to turn it on any button you press on, the camera is going to turn on this lcd light on the top of the camera and that's not really necessary if you work in daytime conditions for most of the time, if you're always working at night, you could turn that one on if you do get the vertical grip for this camera, you do need to kind of specify what type of batteries you are using in it, because there's a slightly different a connection between the camera and the chargers to what type of batteries were in there. And so normally you'd leave it on l r six, which is kind of the standard system. But if you are using nickel metal hydride or lithium batteries, he would need to change over for them. You can also change if you have that vertical grip, which order it uses batteries. First, the battery in the camera or the battery in the grip. Most people are going to have the one selected for the grip. Alright, so moving over to bracketing and flash the flash sink speed is too fiftieth of a second. You can use other shutter speeds like one twenty fifth and a sixteenth of a second. Normally a lot of people like leaving this at two. Fifty and I did tell you that to fiftieth was thie top shutter speed with this camera and I lied to you. You can actually shoot it at one, three hundred twenty, three hundred twentieth of a second excuse me, but you have to have the nikon flash system to basically trigger that system it's it's more part of the flash system that it is the camera, but it's a combination of the camera and the flash in order to do that has to be in a special f p mode that we're not going to get into. And then there is flash shutter speed, so if you are using the programme mode, for instance, what shutter speeds do you want your camera to be able to go to when the flash has popped up? And so I kind of like letting my camera go down to really slow shutter speeds because I'm very aware of my shutter speed, so if you are very manually conscious of your camera what's going on, you could set this down to thirty seconds. If you don't pay attention to those sorts of things, you could set it to one sixty eighth of a second and the camera will never go below one sixteenth of a second. When you're using flash, I love using, ah slow speed, shutter and having a little bit of flashing a fifteenth or an eighth of a second. I think the really fun look for a nightclub party or any time where there's low light levels, but you kind of have to know what you do it so you can set it wherever you need to in that range. Flash control for built in flash the built in flash can be used in an automatic mode called tt l, which is where I'd recommend for most people, you can manually control it, which might be helpful in some situations. You can also use it as a repeating or a commander flash to trigger other flashes. For most people, tl will be fine modeling flash. This camera can fire flashes very quickly. It looks a little like a strobe light, and it helps illuminate your subjects so you can see the shadows if it's fairly close by and in order to do this, you have to press the depth of field button. I don't know if this will actually work, I don't have it, I don't have it turned on right now. There it is and so it waist a little bit of battery power and I could see shadows on something that's pretty close by auto bracketing set normal parameters when you shoot a bracket siri's remember we talked about that very beginning? Is it's going to shoot a, uh, metered exposure, the proper exposure that it's going to shoot one that's, underexposed and then over exposed? If you don't like that format, you can change it in here I think the standard one is fine, you can also adjust bracketing when you were in the manual mode. So in this case, what exactly is affected by the bracketing? And it gets a little in depth here, so if you get into a lot of racket ing, take a look at your instruction manual it's got some more information in there and actually hears I think I misspoke I looked at my notes wrong, so let me go back to e five auto bracketing set you can set the camera up to shoot different types of bracketing. Normally people are going to be bracketing their auto exposure as opposed to their white balance, but there's a lot of other things you can do in there normally I would set e five e auto exposure and I would set the bracket in order here at normal moving over to the controls. This is where we get to customize a number of buttons on our camera so the light switch on the top of the camera. I don't know if I mentioned this, but the on off switch also has a little lcd that turns on the light in the top of the camera by its swinging all the way over its spring loaded over there. If you want, you can have that turn on the information screen in the back if you wanted to a swell if you did, you would turn this f one toe both for most people I would just leave it at lcd the multi selector center button that's that little button. That's, unlabeled. You can have it control a couple different things. You can have it control the shooting mode. Like selecting the center focusing point. You can customize the way it's used and playback and live you. So take a look at once again in your instruction manual for full customizing of that button the multi selector, uh, multi selector that's the big old mouse on the back of the camera in general, I would just leave this turned off it's gonna leave it at that the function button. The function button is on the front of the camera. It is tthe e lower of the two buttons. Thie upper one is depth of field preview and let's go to that one as well. We can reassign the functions of those buttons theirs about seventeen different functions that you can customize with those two buttons, depending on what's important to you. So take some time, go in and customize your camera with those buttons. Next up is the a l f l button. We talked about this button beginning of the day, the little button in the center of the meat ary what happens when you press that button, get the right button here normally I wouldn't make a change on it, but if you want to adjust the change of what it's locking either focus exposure or locking both in at the same time you could do that as well shutter speed and aperture locked we talked about this when we were in the viewfinder there's a little lock where you can lock in a shutter speed or an aperture if you knew you didn't want the camera to change from there so if you were going to say mount the camera on a rally car and you wanted to have a camera stay at the same shutter speed an aperture and you didn't want anything to get bumped out of the out of that setting you could lock those in and they are electronically locked in scrolling down we're gonna have to get down to f ate the bracket button uh some people like to use the bracket button for other things there bracketing a lot they're shooting hdr they're shooting multiple exposures you can reassign what that button does customised the command isles if you don't like the direction the dials turn you can reverse it you can change it up you don't like what is the main one the front one in the back one you can switch all of these so this is our all things that you can control really customize your camera you could make your cameras so freaked out somebody else fix it up would not know what to do release button to use dial ok, so with theis so white balance and quality also with flash flash exposure compensation, we talked about this before. Do you have to press down on the button to use the dial? Or do you press the button? Let me say this again trying to be as clear as possible normally to make a change like so you have to press the button in, you gotta leave it held in and make the change. The other option is to press the button in and it's active for like five seconds and you can go in to make the change, and then it settles in so you could press the button and then go make the change. So, do you want to be pressing the button while you're making the change or to give you a few seconds to do it? Most of the time I would just leave this that no, this is the way nikon cameras have worked for quite some time it's kind of a good safety situate you have to press down on the button to make that change. If you don't have a memory card in your camera, do you want the shutter release to fire? Most people don't because they think they're taking pictures, but they're not because there's no memory card in the camera, so I would leave this unlock unless you are in a camera store and you're trying to sell the camera and you want to show what the camera's shutter sounds like that's when you want to take pictures without a memory card in there most people leave it unlocked nikon has finally come around maybe I should wear the geek glasses for this one again okay see? See normally nikon had minus and I'll do this for you on the right hand side and plus on the left side which was kind of opposite the way a mathematical person would think about things and so now they have actually reversed it and in some of their previous cameras they've allowed you to reverse that reverse it because it's kind of awkward well now it's right to start with but if it's different than your other cameras, which is very likely to be if you're coming from c a a d three hundred or d seven hundred, you could reverse it back to the way that you're used to working so you can have it either way you want it, you can have some more recent get those the g class is high and all right. If you have the vertical grip, you can assign custom functions to the button on that camera the airfone button on that camera there's a lot of stuff in here I think we're in the last one in the custom in you all right, so signing the function button. All right, so the function button. When we're shooting movies, we already just assigned the custom mode first. Now we're in the movie mode. What does it do in the movie mode? So normally, I think, leaving this as the index marking the indices so you can have little reminders where you want to come back to. In your video editing the preview button, you could once again reassigned this, as well as the auto exposure autofocus lock button, as well as reassigning the shutter button. Because normally to shoot video, you have to press the red button beside the shutter button, and some people would actually just rather press the shutter button. Some people are very particular. What can I say?