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Lesson Info

Back of Camera

All right, visible on the top side, but we're gonna be talking about it more on the back side of the camera, is the lock for the collar the goes around the button cluster on the top left. And this is gonna control the release mode. So we're gonna need to switch over to the back side of the camera to talk about this. So looking on the back side of the camera, up on the top left shoulder, is our release mode. And this is gonna control what happens when we press down on the shutter release and there's a number of options in here. So let's take a look at what each one of these do. Press halfway down, the camera will focus and will meter. Press all the way down, the shutter will fire. But exactly what happens? Here's how we control it. First up is the single frame. So you shoot one shot at a time. And this is pretty obvious. This is where a lot of people are gonna leave their camera a great percentage of the time, I would think. Next up, we have a couple of continuous modes. We have a conti...

nuous low and a continuous high. The low can be customized according to what you want it to be. It can be one frame a second, two, three, or more. And so you can jump into the custom setting menu and you can control the exact number that you might want in the continuous low setting. The continuous high will be at seven frames per second. It can be at nine frames per second, but you're gonna need the additional grip in order to do that, so there's a number of accessories that you're gonna need to make that work and so when I get down to the bottom of the camera, we'll talk about the different grip accessories and what you need in order to get up to that nine frames per second. Now, one thing to note, if you are shooting in continuous in this camera, 'cause it's one of the fastest shooting high resolution cameras out there, is that you can shoot for 200 JPEGs or between 29 and 51 raw images. It depends a little bit on what type of raw image you are shooting, which we will talk more about, and the speed of your memory card. And so faster memory cards will tend to be able to clear out that memory buffer a little bit more quickly and so a faster memory card would be an advantage to anyone who plans to shoot rapid bursts of shots very, very quickly. The Q stands for quiet. You have a single and a continuous release on this. It's not totally silent, but it is less noisy because what it's doing is it's slowing down the mirror movement as the SLR's mirror is coming up and down. And so you can't fire as quickly. It's three frames per second. But if you're in a theater, on a studio set, or any time you just wanna keep quiet about things, you could lower the noise of the camera just a little bit by putting it into this mode. We then have a self timer, which has many different options that we'll get to in the custom setting menu, where you can control how many seconds the delay is and how many photos it takes after that delay. And finally, we have a mirror lock-up option. And this mirror lock-up option is to prevent and reduce vibration from the mirror going up and causing vibrations throughout the camera. So let me show you what's going on when this happens and the reason for this. Is that when you normally press the shutter release, the mirror needs to get up and out of the way. When it does so, it causes a little bit of vibration right at the time you are taking a photograph. And you can end up with blurred photographs, even though you really didn't do anything wrong. It's just the camera's vibration that's causing the problem. And so the solution to this is putting the camera in the mirror lock-up mode. What happens then is the first press will lock the mirror up and then you should wait a couple of seconds to let the vibrations settle out of the camera. Then you will press the shutter release a second time To actually take the photo. So it's a two-button system here. And then you can take the exposure Now, this is also a good time where you may wanna be using an external trigger, so something like the MC-36(A) is a cable release that you can plug into the camera so that you're not actually touching the camera when you do this. Now, the problem out in the real world is that if you are at a relatively slow shutter speed like 1/8 of a second, and you forget to lock your mirror up, that mirror can cause a little bit of vibration right during that 1/8 of a second. By turning on the mirror lock-up, you'll be able to get very sharp photos because there is very, very little movement and vibration throughout the camera. I have found that these vibrations tend to hover around 1/8 of a second. And so anywhere between 1/30 of a second down to a full second is a good place where you might wanna be using mirror lock-up. Now, an option to mirror lock-up is to be using the live-view mode, which does the same thing. It puts the mirror in the upward position. And it's kind of the same thing. The main difference is is that in live view, you can see the image on the back of the camera, which will be very helpful in many situations, but does waste more battery power. So if you know you want the mirror up but you don't wanna waste battery power, that's when you would wanna use the mirror lock up. And as I say, you probably wanna be using the cable release as well, to make sure you're preventing any sort of movement of the camera during the time it's shooting. All right, let's talk about the viewfinder. This has one of the best viewfinders in the industry out there. So looking through the viewfinder, there is a diopter on the right-hand side of the prism housing. And what you wanna do is you wanna look at the information at the bottom of the screen and you wanna focus on that and turn the dipter into the viewfinder as sharp. That way, it is calibrated for your eyes. The camera has a removable eyepiece. It's a DK-17. After a lot of use, you may need to replace that. And there is an eyepiece shutter lever lock. And let me just show you just real quickly on the back of my camera about this one. So the reason that you wanna close this little eyepiece right here is that if you are in any one of the aperture or the automatic aperture modes, light can be seeping in here during the exposure, not only through the front of the lens but also through here and that can be throwing off your exposure. So for instance, if you were gonna do a self-timer shot and you were looking at a sunset and the sun's coming directly in here, that's gonna throw more light in there and it's gonna make your picture too dark. So any time you're not gonna be looking through the viewfinder, it's a good time to close that up. Now, one of the things is is that this piece is locked on here. But if you close the window, it then unlocks this so that you can unscrew this and replace it if you want. So there is just kind of an extra lock on there so that doesn't turn accidentally. I know on previous Nikon cameras I've had, they haven't had that, and I've lost a few of those eyepieces 'cause they worked their way loose as you had the camera hanging around your shoulder or in your camera bag, and so it's a nice little safety device that they've put in there. Let's take a look in the viewfinder and talk about what you are seeing as you look through the viewfinder. All right, so the frame is 100% accurate. So if you line up something on the edges, that is where it's going to be. We're gonna talk more about the auto focus in upcoming sections, but for right now, you will see focusing points in there. They are controlled by this button over on the left side of the camera that we're gonna be talking much, much more about. The camera has 153 focusing points. Has one of the best focusing systems out on the market today. You'll see a portion of a circle, and this is your center weighted metering area. And so if you do activate that, that's where you'll wanna be concentrating pointing the camera, as far as getting the correct light reading. There is an optional grid pattern that you can turn on. Some people like this to get correct horizon levels. Some people just do it like, like to do it for composition reasons. And so something that you can turn on and off in the custom setting menu. Image area. You can record in the full frame area, which is what most people are gonna do most of the time. But if you wanna record with a slight crop or a more significant crop, like the DX cameras have, you can also have different aspect ratios. So if you know you're gonna be going to an eight by 10, you can shoot in the five by four aspect ratio. You can see that crop in the viewfinder. And you know what exactly your final composition is gonna look like. We also have a one by one crop. So if you're shooting square, you can know what that's gonna look like. Now, we have a simple outline but we also have a mask overlay that we can choose between. And so in the shooting menu under image area viewfinder mask display, you can choose whether you want a line or you want the area masked out and darker than the rest of the scene. And so it's just a matter of personal preference as to what you like, if you're gonna be shooting within any of these cropped areas. The roll and pinch indicator will tell you if you are pointing your camera level. And so tipping the camera forward and back and tilting it left and right, these will come up to show whether you have the camera level or not. A warning, a flicker warning, may show up in the bottom right-hand corner if you have that feature turned on. And where this might come into play is where you are shooting under certain types of light that flicker. And you can either have the camera automatically adjust for it, and I'll explain this as I get into the menu section on that particular feature, or you can have the camera just let you know that there is a flicker problem with the lights and that you should probably address that issue. And so I like to let the camera just fix it on its own. But if you wanna let the camera warn you so that you can go in and turn that on as needed, that's where you would see the information. Down along the bottom, we're gonna have our LED info, and this is kind of our most important information as we are shooting with the camera. On the far left, we have our focus indicator. We have a little dot that will show up when our camera is in focus. But the little arrows can be very handy if you are manually focusing. They're telling you which way to turn the focusing ring on the lens to get sharpest focus. Then we have indicators for our metering, our auto exposure lock. There's a button on the back of the camera where we can lock exposures. We can also lock the flash by, if we have a flash attached, we can fire a test flash and lock that exposure in for upcoming shots. We can also lock the shutter speed and the aperture. You'll see different Ls by the shutter speed and the aperture. So if you were shooting a sporting event and you did not want your shutter speed and aperture to change because the lighting was not changing, you could lock it in and it will never change on you. The X flash sync is gonna let you know that you've dialed all the way down to that last shutter speed option. This is usually gonna be 250th of a second but you can this if you want to. We're gonna have our critical shutter, or, exposure information, shutter speed, aperture, exposure modes, exposure level all right there in the middle. Then we're gonna have options. We're gonna see if there's other things that have been turned on. And anything in the viewfinder is something that we're actively changing or a pretty important warning that we might want to have. So our exposure level, where that is, if we've changed the flash exposure compensation, if we have a flash connected. And then we have our battery and bracketing, if we have our bracketing turned on. And then over on the right-hand side, you'll see your ISO listed, finally, with the number of shots remaining. If there is a K, that means thousand. And so 2.1K means you have 2,100 estimated shots left on that memory card. And then if you do have a flash hooked up, there'll be a lightning bolt over there on the side. It'll either blink to let you know there's a warning or it'll be steady to let you know that it's on and it's ready to fire. Of course, we have a big LCD on the back of the camera. This is a tilting screen. First time they've put a tilting screen on the D800 series. It is also a touch screen. And so for everybody who likes touch screens, it is now a fully implemented touch screen, whereas on previous Nikons, you could do a few things with it. But now you can do the menu. You can move your focusing points. You can do a ton of stuff. Now, if you don't like touch screens, that's OK as well. You can turn off the touch screen if you want. And all the other buttons and controls on the camera will enable you to control everything that you need to. So there's nothing that you have to use with the touch screen. It's totally option on your part, as to whether you wanna use it or not. All right, the playback button is obviously gonna allow you to go in and show you the images that you have recently taken. The garbage can right next to it needs to be pressed twice in order to delete images. Bit of a safety protocol there so that you don't delete images a little too quickly. Over on the right-hand side, our control pad over here, is how we're gonna be going from forward and back through our images that we've shot. And if we go up and down, we can change the information if it is turned on. So the playback display information will switch around and cycle through different options like just an image, which is what I like to see most of the time. But sometimes, I wanna look at the histogram or I wanna look at some of the shooting data like my shutter speed and aperture and ISO for a particular situation. Now, I don't know why, but Nikon does not have this turned on right at the beginning. So my camera doesn't do it 'cause it's basically factory fresh, you might say. And so in order to turn this on, you need to go back into the playback menu, into the playback display options, and turn these on. So I wanna show you what you need to do on these shortcuts. So let's go ahead and turn on some of these options on my camera. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into the menu system. And there's several tabs over here. We're gonna be looking at the top tab for the playback menu. And under playback display options, which is right here, I can either go to the right or hit the center button and I'll dive into here. And now you'll see down at the bottom little instructions. And so if I wanna select something, I'm gonna go to the right. And so what I'll do is I wanna see my focusing points. And then I'm gonna come down. I wanna see nothing, which is my image only. We'll look at highlights, RGB histogram, shooting data. You know what? I'm just gonna check everything off. And now very important, don't just back out of this. Don't press the menu. Don't press the shutter release, 'cause that may not lock these features in. You'll see down here it says, if this is OK with you, press the OK. And that's why we have to come over here to the OK button and press that. Now we have those features in there. And I have not taken too many exciting photos here so far. But let's take a look at some of the photos here. And now, if I wanna check out information about this, I can go up or down and it goes through the different options. And so here, we're looking at the RGB highlights. And you can see this little blinking area. It's showing me areas that might be blown out. They're probably blown out on the JPEG. They may not be blown out on the raw image. But they're areas of potential brightness. Here's my histogram in red, green, red... Red, blue, green, and then the combined one in white up at the top. Turning off a little quick on me here. Gotta stay going through this. Here's what focal length I was at, what lens I was using, what white balance I was at. Other features and settings on the camera. And if you don't use these and you don't ever look at them, then you can turn these off. But I think for most people, to start with, it's a nice option. Because you don't really have to go to it. You can simply go through your images without any data at all and then when you do want data, just dial up and then you can go through your images like this and you see the critical information, which I think is very handy, so that you can see exactly what your settings are on the camera. All right, one other thing I'm gonna show you on the playback, and I'm gonna get into this... On the Keynote in a moment. Is over here on the left side is we can go in. We can zoom in, and we can zoom out. And so on this image, I'm gonna go to the full image, which is right here. Now, right there. I can zoom out, out, out. And so if I've taken a lot of photos, I can scroll through this more easily than going through one image at a time. If I have a single image, I can zoom in on this image and zoom back out as well. Now, you'll also be able to use your fingers to do this. I think I can just double tap. And it goes in and then I can use my finger to scroll around. And then I can go... Left and right. I don't know if I can go into the thumbnails. Yes, I can. And I can move things around. But it's a little bit easier here. And then you'll have all the common gestures that you would have on a touch screen, as far as pinching and double tapping to see an image. All right, and so we'll go back to the Keynote. And so we do have a protect key over here. If you wanna prevent your images from being locked, or, from deleted, you can lock them. And it's a very, very light level of protection. What's happening is you can no longer delete your images in-camera. You can reformat the memory card, which would delete the images, and, of course, you can reformat the cards outside the camera as well. So it's a very low level of protection. We have our zoom in and zoom out, so that we can get all the way back out to our thumbnails. We can use either the touch screen or we can use the control on the back of the camera to navigate and change through our images. So you're gonna use your regular controls in order to do that. All right, there are a couple of secret shortcuts when you are in the playback mode. If you press the OK button and press the up on the control pad over on the right, you can choose which slot of your memory card slots you are looking at images from. If you want to adjust your images, you can enter the retouch menu by pressing the OK and the right button. If you press the OK and the center button, you can activate your wireless image transfer option. And so that's gonna be if you have your camera already set up in the Wi-Fi system. So there's some other things you need to do to make sure that this works ahead of time. But you can do that once it's set up. When you are in the playback mode, you can press the I button. Now, the I button is this information button that is a bit of a shortcut to a number of different features. And so if you want, in here, you can get into rating or sending your images to a device. And so it's a lot of the other shortcuts that we just talked about. But sometimes people forget which option it is, and so they'd rather just bring up a menu and select from the menu. And so you can get that once you hit playback and then the I button at the same time. Now, on the back of the camera is a function two button. And currently, right now, in the playback mode, it is used for rating images. And so you can rate your images by pressing the function two button and then using the multi selector. And then you'll actually use the left button to go to garbage and to the right, you can add stars. Now, when you select it for the garbage, it's not like deleting the image. It's just indicating that that's where the image is going to go at some point in the future. And so you're not actually getting rid of things but you're just kind of marking on the metadata what you think about that image so that you can come back to your favorite images and see those very, very quickly and easily. Working our way around the back side of the camera, we next up have the menu button, and this is something that is gonna be the entire second half of this class. And so we're gonna go through the entire menu later on in the class, and so we're gonna kind of save this button and come back to it a little bit later. Next up is a button that does three different things. We've already talked about how it protects the images when you're in the playback mode. And so that's only gonna work when it's in the playback mode and by pressing that button, you'll see this little sign that comes up that says the image is protected. If you wanna unprotect it, you just simply press the button again and back and forth and it just goes back and forth between protecting and not protecting it. It's also a help button. So as you go through the menu system, if and when you see a little question mark in the bottom left-hand corner, you can press the question mark button and that's gonna bring up a little bit of text and information about what that particular feature is. Now, it is not here on all of the features in the menu system but it's there for, I don't know, somewhere between 1/3 and 1/ of the different features in there. If you kind of forget what it does, hit the question button and it's gonna give you a little bit more information which will hopefully jog your memory as to what that particular feature is doing. Finally, under your normal shooting modes, this is gonna change your picture controls. Now, what controls is is it's very important for JPEG shooters, not so important for raw users, because it controls the way that your picture is going to look in the color and the contrast. Now, there's a number of different options that you can see. And it may be hard to see on your screen because these are pretty subtle differences once they've been taken out of the camera in this manner. Clearly, the black and white one is very different. The flat one does not show very much contrast. But what it's doing is it's kind of pushing the data around a little bit, brightening up shadows, holding back the highlights from getting over exposed. Or, in the case of the vivid, it's making it a little bit more contrast. It's increasing the saturation. And so if you shoot JPEGs, this is gonna be pretty important to you because this is how your images are gonna be processed and this is how they're gonna look when you download them. Now, normally, I like to leave mine pretty neutral so that I can adjust them later. Now, when I shoot with raw, this doesn't even matter because you'll have the straight raw to shoot with. But this is what will show up on the back of the camera. So I like, usually, leaving my camera either at standard or neutral. The reason I don't go with auto is because it changes from image to image. You can be shooting two images that are almost identical, one after another, and it's gonna process one one way and then the second one a different way. And so I prefer standard or neutral in that regard. But if you do wanna shoot black and white, you can see on the back of the camera, out in the field, what that black and white image is gonna look like. And so you'll see this warning, this JPEG only sign that comes up from time to time. And that's letting you know that this feature only applies when you are shooting JPEG images, or only has a real important impact when you're shooting JPEG images. Next button down we've already talked about. This is zoom in, and that's gonna be zoom in for the playback or the live view or movie modes that we are gonna be talking about here in a little bit. Another three control button here. We zoom out and we'll be doing that in live view and playback modes and so forth. We can get back to our thumbnails so that we can see a large grouping of images at any one time. If we have a flash attached to the camera, we can control the flash by turning, pressing this button and turning the flash mode button on the back of the camera. Let me give you a quick display on this one. So this is like one of your typical Nikon buttons that requires you to press the button. So I'm gonna hit the info button so that you can see what's going on nice and clearly here. And so by pressing this button, you'll see that it's suddenly gone into the flash mode and compensation. And so by turning the back dial of the camera, we can go through the various options of turning the flash on and off, the red eye reduction, rear curtain flash synchronization. And we're not gonna talk too much about flash, because that's a whole another class, folks, getting into the Nikon flashes. It can be very, very sophisticated. Now, if I turn the front dial, and you can see right here on the back of the camera, the back dial and the front dial. So if I change the front dial, I'm changing the power of the flash. I can power the flash one stop over what the camera thinks is normal. And I can go up to 3 stops under exposed. A lot of people who do on-camera flash photography like to leave their camera somewhere around minus 2/3 of a stop, just to take a smidgen of power off that flash, or somewhere down to 1 1/3 so that the flash is a very, very subtle little flash right there. And so that might not be a bad idea if you do a lot of portrait photography with an on-camera flash. But your other key modes are gonna be over here and that's gonna determine what shutter speeds and when the curtain, or when the flash fires, according to front and back curtain. And so there's a lot more to talk about in that. But that is a little bit more designed for a class on flash photography. And so remember, just, you can turn the back dial for your main modes and the front dial for flash exposure compensation. The OK button on the camera is gonna need to be pressed a lot of times when you're confirming more important decisions. You can use the center button on the control over on the right-hand side a lot of the time. But you will need that OK button from time to time. Working our way over to the right-hand side of the camera, we have our AF-on button. This allows you to focus with the back button of the camera. As you get the camera from the factory, though, it doesn't do much good because you can press the back button in focus, but then when you go around to press the shutter release button, the camera's going to re-focus on what it wants to take at that time. And so if you want to get your camera set up in back button focusing, you need to turn off the shutter release on the front dial. Now, the way that you do that is you need to go into custom setting menu A for autofocus, A8, and turn off the AF activation of the shutter release. The AF-on button, though, can be reprogrammed. There's a lot of buttons on this camera that you can reprogram to do something else. If you don't like back button focusing or you want this back button focusing to be done by a different button on the camera, and you would prefer this button have a different dedicated function, you can go into the custom setting controls and program that button to do something different. And so there's a lot of very interesting controls that we can get into. And we will get into in the menu section when it comes to customizing the different buttons on this camera. Next up we have a number of general controls that we've already talked about, our main command dial, our sub-selector. And little thing about the sub-selector is it's not only a controller for going up, down, left, and right. It's also a button that you can press in. Multi selector for getting around. And the multi selector may not work if you have locked it. There is a little lock lever down along the bottom so that you don't accidentally bump it. And this is there because a lot of people used to change their focusing points by that... Dial on the back of the camera, by pressing it up and down. But if you're left-eyed, your nose may hit that and start moving the focusing point inadvertently. And they had installed a easy-to-function lock button so that you could just simply lock that in. Now, as I mentioned, that sub-selector is also a button. And to start with, it is an auto exposure lock button. And so let me just show you what's going on here. And so let me put my camera into a program mode. And you'll remember that the shutter speeds and apertures will change a little bit as we move the camera around. But if we are in a certain area where we wanna lock that particular setting in, let's make sure I stay on, here. I can lock that setting in. And now as I move that camera, I'm pressing in on the multi selector and it's not changing. When I take my finger off of it, let's go ahead and get this information back on. You'll see that it changes around. And then if I wanna lock it, I press in on it and it stays locked. So this is an auto exposure lock button. And you will see the AEL in the viewfinder turn on. So you'll see that over on the left-hand side, down below the image area that you're shooting. Now, if you are in the AFC continuous focusing mode, this will also lock the focusing for you. Now, once again, as you might guess, this is a button that you can program. And so you're gonna be able to get in and specify. Maybe you don't want it doing one but you do want it doing the other. Trust me. You'll be able to customize it in many, many different ways. We have the info button, and this is something that you've seen me hitting throughout this class because it shows you the information on the back of the camera. It makes it very easy to read. Great when you're on a tripod or if you just wanna see things in nice, big print. The I button, as I mentioned before, is a shortcut button. And this is gonna give us a shortcut in different ways. In the playback mode, it gives you certain options. In the standard shooting mode, by just pressing the I button, it's gonna lead you to a number of items that are in the menu system that we're gonna talk about in the menu system. But they are here if you wanna get to them very, very quickly. They are not something, unfortunately, they are not something that Nikon allows you to customize. And so this is the next level of customization that I would like to see from Nikon. I would like to choose what is in my I menu here, because there's a lot of features here that I think some people just don't use on a regular basis. But for right now, it is exactly the way Nikon has programmed it, just a shortcut to these particular features.