Lessons
Introduction and Product Overview
16:28 2Photography Basics
05:49 3Button Layout: Top Deck
34:53 4Button Layout: Back Side
23:36 5Button Layout: Other Sides
28:35 6Lenses
13:06 7Display System
08:10 8Playback & Shooting Menus
27:36Lesson Info
Display System
The viewfinder in the words of nikon is one hundred percent approximately accurate and so it's a hundred percent viewfinder which basically means you're going to get exactly what you see and the approximation means that there's maybe just a smidgen that's just a little off but it's basically hundred percent s o be careful when you're lining things up on the edge because that is the edge of the frame that you will get on it next off we talked a little bit about the focusing points in selecting different groups of those points well, things are going to get a little techie here because there's a lot of different things going on with the focusing points and we're not going to get into this too far, but it is important to know a little bit about this we have fifty one focusing points and they were all good with lenses that have an aperture of f five six or faster, which is pretty much all the nikon autofocus lenses fifteen of them in the middle are cross type sensors, which means they're se...
nsitive to vertical and horizontal lines so ah good collection of them to choose from now if we get a little bit more specific let's say we take lens and we put a one four converter on it where we're using a longer, slower lands that has an aperture somewhere in the range of five six to eight well, there's only fifteen sensors that are really going to be useful when the lens slows down to that speed and there's only nine focus points that will become cross type auto focus points when using these slower lenses and let's say, you take a five hundred millimeter f four lands and you put a doubler on it, which cuts the f stopped down to f ate, there are only eleven auto focus points that'll work, and only one in the mill will be across type autofocus sensor, and so the slower your lenses with less auto focus points, we'll work. Now you'll still be able to set any focus point. You want it's just not gonna work very well or won't work at all. And so just kind of the base thing to remember is the faster lenses are going to focus faster and focusing points towards the middle tend to be better than once further away from the center, and so if you're using a slow lands, try just using the center, focusing points because they're going to be the best one. All right, next up. One of the things that we can do is we can electronically turn on a grid pattern toe look at in the viewfinder this might be nice for a landscape photographer who wants to level the horizon. Or some people who like to draw but like to use graph paper just toe so they can keep kind of a rule of thirds type thinking about how to frame up their photograph, but this is something that can be turned on and off elektronik lee a new feature in nikon cameras is an in camera in viewfinder virtual horizon display this is something that could be turned on or off, and it helps you figure out if your camera is tilted a little bit from side to side or tilted forward two back these little lights will come on, and this is something that you can turn on or off because you don't want to slightly turn your camera because you may have to crop your image to fix that you're losing pixels when you do that next up down at the bottom is the led information now you will never see it hopefully with all of this data on it, this is kind of the complete compilation of what you might see and this is for the most part either really important data or it's kind of warnings that something has turned on or working, so to start with, we have the focusing indicator it's, a little green dot that is an electronic focusing aid that will come on when the cameras and focus if you are manually focusing one of the arrows will be on to tell you which way to turn the lens to help focus so it's a manual focusing aid we have the meter in system we've talked already a little bit about that we have auto exposure lock and flash value lock you can lock your exposure you can lock your flash exposure in and this just lets you know that you have done that flash exposure synchronization lets you know that you get your cameras at the speed and on this camera it's one to fiftieth of a second it's the fastest shutter speeds you can use with flash on this cameron you can lock it in if you want at two fifty and I should mention the lock feature in that when we get into the menu system if you are shooting this camera in a manual mode and you bump these dials accidentally let's say you ran a portrait studio that had the same consistent lighting and every time you shot a picture the styles were supposed to be in the same place and say somebody else maybe you had a college student shooting all your pictures and you didn't want them to change it on the camera you could lock these dials even though the dials khun freely move the shutter speed or aperture would not change and this lets you know that those features are locked and it's something that you turn on and off in the menu system well, of course have r shutter speed information are aperture information in there, we'll have our exposure mode and exposure level. We talked about this a little bit when we were talking about the exposure mode at the very beginning of the day. Then we'll have a couple of warnings your battery level, whether it's running low or it's good, whether you have flash exposure, compensation turned on and I kind of recommend leaving it on minus one, so this is going to be on in the viewfinder for me. We could also do something called bracketing, which we've already saw, and we will see again in the menu system in the same thing with exposure, compensation, just another warning our s o and then we'll have within the brackets are remaining exposures, and with nikon, they kind of do something kind of funny is that they give you the number of remaining exposure, so for right now I have two hundred forty nine shots, but when I pressed down half way, it gives me an r and r thirteen I can take thirteen shots in a burst it's how many pictures you can take in a row very quickly. And so it depends on whether you have your camera set to tiff, raj, a peg and some other variables and there's two how money you're going to be in that number and then they there's a little k in there that indicates if it's more than a thousand shots and then a little lightning bolt letting you know if the flash is ready he fired so on the back side of the camera the lcd information we talked about hitting the info button to turn it on pressing that info button twice it allows you to go in and change some of the features at the bottom of that display and what you'll be using is thie multi selector either that or the sub command island the command ill and that little center button to go around and select different things within the info screen. And so this is a nice screen to look at I like it if I had the camera on a tripod and it's up really high and I can't see the top deck of the camera and so this is going to give me some of the basic shooting information that you can also go in and change so we have your exposure mode shutter speed and aperture information kind of a step down from that is going to be a whole collection of stuff depending on whether you had a turned on or not it's just some general data it might be the flash mode could be whether you have bracketing or vignette in control a lot of other things that were going to talk about here in a minute over on the left hand side way have our image quality and we have two cards lots and this is going to indicate how we're recording images we could record j pegs to one card and raw images to another car and we could be able to split things up and this is just a quick reference to see what's what's going on in there within the other area that kind of the main big box here we have image area and a lot of these things we're going to go into in more depth when we get into the menu system, so these are a lot of things that we can turn on and off within the camera how good your batteries are, how many shots remaining once again, same numbers you see in the viewfinder they're your white balance and then your flash mode and then what? Focusing points you have chosen as well. And so a lot of things you're going to see in two or three places on your camera depending on what sort of information it isthe now the actual areas that you can get into change or the bottom two rows of information down here and if you press the information button twice you'll see that one of those areas becomes highlighted in yellow you can then use the multi selector to navigate up, down left and right to go in and make those changes
Class Materials
bonus material with purchase
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
John is a phenomenal teacher and has a great style and his hard efforts are saw in his knowledge and the detail in his slides. This course was great however I would have liked more from this course. It seemed as if it scratched the surface of the D800 but not really got into the micro details of the features of this camera. In my opinion this is a GREAT course for the person just purchasing the camera. Keep up the great work John.
Amber Sehrt
I loved this class. I was afraid that when I got my D800 it would take me weeks to feel comfortable with it (I was a Canon user before). But after this class, I was immediately ready to put my old canon away for good. Plus, he walked you through all of the settings so my new camera was set up perfectly. So happy I bought this course
Jeremy Kwok
I've been shooting with Nikon DSLRs since 2007 and I would rate myself as an advanced amateur (I've shot a few weddings and have published material in digital and print forms). I really enjoyed this course because it brought me up to speed in a visual way with the technical advances to the Nikon system. John's a good, systematic teacher and his visuals are very helpful. I actually enjoyed the basics refresher part of the course and the price is very reasonable - this would be a $400+ PD if you went to a day course like this in Sydney, Australia.
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