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
Photography Basics
Cover the basics. All right. And so this is actually a clip you might say from my fundamentals of digital photography class. This is a class I did here at creative live a very short time ago and it's available for download if you are interested and it goes through and it explains all the basics in photography, and we're going to rush through a five day class in five minutes here. And so you have yourself a single lens reflex camera, and one of the great things about a single lens reflex camera is that you have a really high quality lens and there's, a variety of lenses that you could get from white angle to telephoto, and you get to look through this lands as well as shoot through the lands when you focus lens elements are going to move back and forth and in the lens is an aperture. This is an opening that you can open and close to adjust the amount of light coming in the camera. And so this is one of the first three really important things that you need to know about adjusting your ex...
posures and letting in the proper amount of light is that as you are closing the aperture down, you're letting less light in, obviously, and as you open the aperture up, you were letting more like it. And so this is the first control that you have for controlling the amount of light in the camera. Now, the thing that's not so obvious about this to the newcomer is it is also controls our depth of field, so we're going to open this lens to one point for and we're going to look at how much depth of field we get. This is shot with a fifty millimeter lands you can see those little red hash marks over on the side. Well, that is indicating how much depth of field you are getting with this lens, and you can see as we stop the lens down, we're getting more and more depth of field. Now, if you want to know exactly why this is doing this, you're gonna have to download my class because then I go into the explanation of how it and why it does it. But for now it just does it, I think that's good enough, alright, so f twenty two we get lots of depth of field good for, say, shooting a landscape shots next as light comes into the camera, it hits the mere this's, the reflex portion of single lens reflex it's reflecting the light upward, and so what it's doing is it's bouncing the light upward to a focusing screen in the camera. And some of you may have used a twin lands or an old hasselblad that used a waist level finder, and this is what you looked at. But to make things easy to work with and comfortable to hold on the camera, we bounce the light up through a prism system so that we can look at what our lens sees through the viewfinder. When you press the shutter release, that mere needs to get up and out of the way so light can come on back to the image sensor, and the image sensor is a a big portion of how good a cameras, and we'll talk specifically about that in just a moment. But before it gets to the image sensor, it needs to get through the shutter unit, which is a two part curtain. They call it a curtain, but it's really metal blades, and so the first part of the curtain will drop away four metal blades typically, and then the second curtain will follow it, blocking the light off, and that is your exposure, and then the whole thing will reset back to its starting position. The mural will return down so you can see through the camera, and so you can't see through the camera when you're actually shooting. Now the shutter speed is really critical because that allows us to stop time essential essentially and that is at the very essence of what photography is all about, and being very familiar with all the shutter speeds is important to all types of photographers. You're going tohave fashion our speed, say five hundredth of a second for stopping human action one hundred twenty fifth of a second is kind of more middle of the road shutter speed, stopping casual action like some camels walking in the desert as we get into slower shutter speeds, we're going to get blurriness and sometimes we have good blur and sometimes we have bad blur down in the eighth of a second, you can see what it does with people walking, going to be quite blurry at that point and then it khun be a lot of fun to shoot, say, waterfalls on rivers and waves on the ocean crashing at a half a second, and we can leave our shutter open for a long period of time for thirty seconds and shoot at nighttime and get all sorts of very interesting photographs different than what we see with our own eyes. And I said the sensor was really important and the censor in this camera is a very, very high quality censor. It is also one of the largest size sensors that is used in most common cameras these days and so a lot of those other cameras out there that sell for less money have smaller sensors and that's one of the main reasons people who are buying this camera are buying it for they're buying it for that full frame sensor and so we kind of forget about the smaller sensors and think about the larger sl ours and this one uses a sensor that is based directly off of thirty five millimeter film and that's why we call it a full frame sensor it's the same size is thirty five millimetre and we give it a crop factor of one point oh because it's the same size and nikon also has a little shortcut name that they call f x for this full frame sensor now some of their other cameras in order for them to be less money to be smaller in size used a d x sensor which is a smaller sensor it's got a crop factor of one point five why's it called one point five a bigger number even though the sensor is smaller well, you can watch my full photography class and I'll explain that all right? And then there are other companies I'll never refer to them by name but there other companies that have slightly smaller sensors in their camera and so having the large size sensor in this camera big advantage we'll talk a bit more of that as we go along
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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