Lessons

Lesson Info

Back Side

So we're going to move on to the back side of the camera the lcd monitor is new and different from the previous model, the d eight hundred it's, the same three point, two inch size screen. But it now has about twelve hundred for twelve thousand one thousand two hundred twenty nine dots on it, whereas the previous camera had about three quarters. That what they've done is they've added in a white pixel to the red, blue and green pixels that we're there and this is going to help the monitor b a little bit brighter under bright sun condition, a little bit easier to see under brighter conditions in short. And so the resolution isn't different the size. So I guessed the size did change slightly on it. But it's mostly going to be a easier, more easier to view screen on the back of the camera. Next up, we have our view finder, which makes slr so great, is that they have very clear. You finders, they've increased the sharpest and the clarity of the prison they've done some special coatings and...

other things that they say help out. I think it's probably a very small amount that it's helped out, but it does have one hundred percent coverage, so what you see in the frame is going to be in the final photograph, which is always nice to have it is a point seven magnification for those of you that are interested, and it has a twenty one millimeter I point, which means for those of us who wear glasses, you can actually hold the camera a fair bit from your eye and still be able to see either all or most of what's going on. I mean, I can still see the line of information, the display information at the bottom from back here, and so it has a nice high igh point and these air one of those little subtle, geeky things that serious photographers get to appreciate that a lot of the lower in cameras don't have next up. One of the other features that lower in cameras don't have is this shutter in the back of the camera, and what this does is it blocks the shutter off, let me go ahead and get this over here in our side cameras so that you can see what's going on on this one so when I flip this it blocks all light entering in through the back of the camera and the reason that you want to have that is that if you were using the camera in a self timer mode what happens is that you have the camera on a tripod you're out in front of it having your picture taken and potentially bright light is entering in here and throwing off the exposure meter and so any time you set the self timer and used program shutter priority or aperture priority you may have an issue with this all right next uh the diop ter so this is a little dial on the side of the camera that you pulled out and actually let me demonstrate this one as well to you over here on the side is you want to pull this out you want to look through the viewfinder and adjust this that little notches so that the display of information at the bottom of the frame is as clear as possible and then you can push it back in and it stays locked it's a little bit better system than on many other cameras because it's got a very deliberate setting to it and so we just pull it out adjusted for your eyes and then put it back in and if you are sharing this camera with somebody else who has different vision good luck on getting that set in one convenient spot all right, we do have a removable eyepiece on the back of the camera. There's a little rubber I cup, you can just unscrew that, replace it. If you have this camera for many, many, many years, he might wear it out. If you have glasses or something else on it, there are other eye cups that you can get for it as well. So let's, talk a little bit about what you see in the viewfinder as you hold it up to your eye. First off, the frame, as I mentioned before, is one hundred percent coverage on it. So what you see is what you're going to get next up. The focusing points. We have fifty one auto focus points that work down to minus two evey, which in layman's terms really dark, so it's going to work under very, very low light conditions. There's a number of electronic options that you can turn on or off one of them is a grid pattern. This is custom menu d for and there are certain types of photographers that like this for composition or possibly getting the horizon level. For instance, a architectural or landscape photographer might want to turn this on. Some people just don't like the clutter and want to leave it turned off it's, your camera, your choice to make next up, we have a virtual horizon display and there's a couple of different ways that we can work with this there's one on the back of the camera. This is the one that's in the view, care in the view finder of the camera and it's going to show you whether you tilted your camera left or right, kind of forward or backwards. And this could be turned on by going in the setup menu to turning on the virtual horizon. Next up along the bottom of the camera is thie led information line. There we go and this is going to show you kind of the full complement of information going on. You're not going to see it look like this because I have everything turned on so that you can easily see what's all going on through here. Now, this is going to stay on for a little while and then it's going to shut down. And if you think keeps shutting down so quickly, that frustrates me, you can go into custom and you see to and adjust the standby timer as to how long this information is active. So let's quickly go through this line of information as to what we see and what it's doing so the focus indicator. The green dot is a visual indicator that your camera is in focus. One of the things that irritates me more than anything else is a camera that has a little beep beep when it auto focus is I like turning that off. I like being a little bit more discreet about my shooting, but I still like to have confirmation that the camera believes it's in focus and that green dot will come on as an additional extra cool factor. And I don't. I guess they do know one other come company, but there's only one other company that I know it's got these arrows in here. And what the arrows tell you is which way to turn the focusing on the lens for sharpest focus. And this will work even with older manual focus lenses. And so if you want to stick on an old school, ends like a fifty one point two lens and you wanted to, you know, check on focusing the camera, I can help you out, focusing by telling you the direction to focus and when you are in perfect focus. Next up is our meeting system. So we just have a display of where we have what we have set on the top of the camera. Auto exposure lock there's a button on the back of the camera for locking exposure. This lets you know if you have locked the exposure in this is something you would use in program exposure, aperture, priority or shutter priority. There is a system where you can lock if you have a flash and you have it do a test fire and you like that. The setting of it. You can lock that flash value and it's a bit more of feature of the flash than it is of the camera. But it's, just a notification that it's locked in the flash sink indicator indicates that you have your camera at the one two fiftieth of a second ex synchronization and, uh, let me just do a quick check and see if I could get that set up on this camera if I go down to really slow shutter speeds all the way down to thirty seconds if you go down to thirty seconds and you go one step further than theirs bulb, which is a long time exposure, where it stays open as long as you leave your finger on the shutter and then you go two more past that you get to x two fifty and so if you were working in a studio and you wanted it to leave it at its fastest flash synchronization, that should indicate an x in there which it does x two fifty flash synchronization, that's the fastest speed that you can sink with flash next to that, you're going to have your shutter speed information and your aperture information your f stop, you have the ability to lock those in. So let's say, for instance, you were going to go photograph a sporting event, a football game, and you're in a stadium that has very consistent lighting and you know that you want to shoot at one one thousandth of a second at f two point eight for the whole game and you're gonna be running around with three cameras bouncing around, and you don't want any chance of one of these dials bumping on you. You can then go into custom menu f four, and you can lock in your shutter speed or your aperture so that they do not move for any reason and takes a lot of work to go in there and change them. But for that type of scenario, it's a neat little feature tohave next up is our exposure level. We talked about this before you're gonna get a brighter than average or darker than average image, the exposure modes we've talked about those before little battery indicator there's gonna be a better one, I'm going to show you when we get into the menu system. Flash exposure compensation. I'm going to talk more about this in a later section, but this is where you can go in and control the exposure of the flash because normally the nikon flash system's going to figure out the right amount of power to have and if you want to go in and you want to make it a little bit more powerful or less powerful, you can go in there and taylor that on your own, and that will just let you know that you've made an adjustment. Bracketing is a system of shooting multiple pictures at different exposure level's only explain how to do it in an upcoming section, but this just lets you know that it's turned on, and this is something that if you see the bracket in there, that's a good warning that something's up because you normally don't have your camera in the bracket. C'mon it's, usually a special circumstance that you were gonna have that turned on same thing with exposure compensation if you're shooting an aperture priority, for instance, and you've said it to minus two it's going to have this plus minus on there and that's another warning of something that is normally set at zero and should not be turned on, we're going to see our s o setting in there. And then we'll see the shots remaining and if there's less than a thousand shots it's just going to show you the number in the bracketed area if it's more than a thousand it abbreviated for instance two point one k means two thousand one hundred shots are left and then finally we have our flash warning or ready light if you happen to have your flash on and it's ready to fire this light will be well, come on for you if you have just fired the flash and it's not ready yet you know I don't recall if it blinks let's just do a little test here so the flashes up and it's orange not in the kind of pale blue that the normal other colors are so it's indicating that the flash is ready and then it blinks when it's not quite ready and then when it's ready again it's a solid, steady orange light so it blinks if it's warning steady if it's ready and so that's what you're going to see in the viewfinder, we're going to talk a little bit about the playback mode, so once you've taken a picture and you want to look at it, what do you do when one of your options so first obviously is the playback but in the top left shoulder of the camera hit that you're gonna get your image up there after that, you're going to get the delete option right next to that get that up there we go and so that if you want to delete your image thing, you're going to have an option, you will need to kind of confirm that you deleted so it's, not just a single press of the button, then we get over to the control tab on the right hand side of the camera, and if you go up and down, this will change information. You go left and right, this will change images, and I want to show you some of the different options that are in here and little note before we do that, though, there is a setting in the menu playback menu, specifically where you can go on and turn on or off some of these options, and I've gone through already, and I've turned these on on the camera so that I can show you what's going on, so let me go ahead and get this camera turned around. And if you remember, I took a picture of jim earlier, I actually just took another one of them here, and so if you want to go left and right, take you through the different pictures you've taken, but if you go up and down, you can see some of the different, different information, and so this is just some of the settings we have set on the camera more settings mohr setting so we can see specifically what are shutter speed and our aperture and our s o is here this is our rgb hissed a gram so we can see our brightness levels on the red green blue channel as well as for everything all of them together they're only hit this because it timed out on me here and so going up further this is showing us highlights the little logo on his computer is blinking at me, which means it's kind of the brightest part of the scene that's potentially a little bit over exposed something to note is that the images that we're looking at here on the back of the camera? You know what? I'm gonna take this off. These things have always irritated me from night gone and I'll talk about them in a moment where was I? I was totally lost my train of thought here, so these are the highlights the image that we're looking at this is a jpeg image even though I have the cameras set to shoot raw this is a j peg image and so that's probably an area that I'll be able to rescue if the camera if it's not too far out so what else do we have? We have a larger image shows us thirty one of thirty one photos basic information down here and here's a full screen with no information no one of the things that we can do is we can zoom in and so we can zoom in and you can see down here in the bottom right? We have our thumbnails and we can zoom around and find different things, but watch this if you want to see something that's really cool is that if we turn, you'll notice what areas activated right now we're down in the right hand corner can actually that changes image to image, but if I turn the front dial, it automatically looks for faces, so if you're zoomed in on another part of the image and you want to check for sharpest, turn the front dial either left or right and it will go and look for faces in the magnified view and so the magnifying portion was over here on the left hand side there's a plus and a minus aero haven't shown that on the keynote yet, but we're just jumping ahead and playing around here. So there's a lot of great options for checking your images to making sure that they are as sharp and have everything in him that you want to have in them and they're correctly exposed, so play around with that get it set up the way you want it to we're going to get into that playback menu very certainly after the next break on it along the left hand side of the back of the camera or a number of options in the playback mode one option with the key on it that stands for protecting what this does is it prevents you from being able to delete the image this is something that you might want to do for an image that was really good that you want to make sure that you don't accidentally delete I recently led a photo tour in morocco and there was a number of situations where people were trying to edit their images on the fly and they would accidentally delete a good image on so this is one thing that you could do to put on it the problem with this is is it doesn't truly protect the image because the card can be reformatted and that image would be lost at that point and so it's not a feature that I personally use and I don't know a lot of photographers that use but that's the idea of it next up are the two buttons that I was just playing around with zooming in and zooming out but one of the things that you can also do on the zoom out let me do a little demo on this one just to show you what we can do on this one you can zoom in very very closely but you can also zoom out and if you zoom out you start getting thumbnails and you can work with four or you can work with nine I've taken a lot of black pictures here just cause I was playing around here and so if you zoom out zoom out even further you can go back to choosing different cards I only have a cf card in here right now let me just go back into this and then if I want to get back in I can select a particular image and I can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in and there we are and so zooming in zooming out all the way two thumbnails alright moving on what do we have next? Next is the exact same button that button actually does three different things the first thing it did was protect pictures when you're in the playback mode when you're in the shooting mode this controls the picture control and this is kind of the look or the style of the photograph and there's a number of different options you can cme listed here on screen it mostly has to do with the vibrance or saturation the contrast in the sharpness of the particular image those of you old enough to shoot have shot film will remember the days that there was kodak and fuji konica and a variety of other brands of film as well as different styles of the different film and this allows you to kind of shoot with that look to your images now for those of you shooting raw image is this is of really no importance at all because you're going to be able to adjust your raw image exactly the way you want it but if you are shooting jay pig images and you wanted to have a little bit of one look or another look then you can select one of these settings in here one of the new settings that was kind of specifically designed for the videographers ofyou out there is the new flat setting the f l setting and what this is all about is choosing a scene that his very, very neutral intone ality so that you could do your color grading in your adjustments in post processing and this is going to allow you a lot of options and it's well it's as close as you can get to shooting video in raw so that you have this many color options as possible and so if you know that you want to adjust it later flat is a good option flat looks terrible don't get me wrong it does not look good straight out of the camera it's not designed to look good it's designed to be a workable platform so that you can work with it later normally I would lead the camera in standard because I normally shoot raw as I imagine a lot of you will and you want to make specific adjustments according to the the photo and so standard or neutral would be probably the best positions neutral might be pretty good as well standard is going to do a little bit of changing. According to the situation, neutral is going to be neutral the same settings on all photos standard is going to tweak a little bit, but on ly within a very small standard deviation from it. Another mode that I do like I will mention is the monochrome mode I occasionally like shooting black and white, and one of the hard things about shooting black and white is I don't see black and white and when you shoot with the camera, it's kind of hard to tell what's this going to look like in black and white? Well, if you put your camera in monochrome and raw at the same time, you will be getting the original color information, but what you see on the back of the camera will be a black and white image, so you'll be able to judge right there in the field. How good of black and white it's going to make? And then when you've downloaded to your computer, you will get the color information, and you can choose at that time whether to shoot color or black and white, so in some ways this is the best of both worlds. You get to see it in black and white, but you get it both in color and black and white to work with later the third function that this button does it's as a help button when you were in the menu setting, and you're looking at a particular option in there, and you're kind of wondering, I don't remember what this is all about. You could hit the question button and it's going to pull up a slightly larger dialog box that will tell you a little bit more information about that particular setting. It may trigger a little bit more memory for you, for what that particular feature is going to do. We have our ok button down on the bottom, just kind of some other little things going on in the back of the camera there's a card access like so when you take a picture with the memory card it's going to be this, this light is going to be on basically telling you the camera is working and storing that card. You probably don't want to turn the camera off at that time, although it's really not going damage anything, the most important thing you don't want to do when that light is on, do not take the card out of the camera, it will probably lose the photograph that you were trying to shoot at that time or store at that time but you may corrupt that card and cause serious problems so basically that is a warning light not to take the card out of the camera at that time if you do record videos, the speaker for playback is going to be right back there on the back of the camera, getting in a bit more serious stuff up on the top right? We have the auto exposure lock button and the auto focus lot, but these air kind of combined buttons right now as the camera's default out of the box it is an exposure lock button if you put your camera in a program aperture priority or shutter priority mode and you pick the camera up and you kind of pan it around, you'll notice shutter speeds and or apertures or whatever variables are adjusting as you pan around from side to side as it's constantly looking at the new life. If you have decided that this is the correct light right here, wherever it happens to be, you would just simply press down on that button and you would have to hold your finger down on that button for this to be locked in. Now I'll give you two scenarios in which you might want to use this aperture priority shutter priority or programs, so they're semi automated modes and you're going to photograph somebody beside a window and the window is letting in very bright light, throwing off the exposure you might frame up your subject, which is next to the window, hold down the auto exposure lock and then recompose and whole and get the window in while you take the picture in this way it's exposing light for the person and not the window. Another scenario is basically doing that same thing with a sunset. You don't want to point your camera directly at the sun for the light reading. You want to point it a little away from the sun, lock in that exposure and then bring the composition back to where you have the sun in the frame. And so it's not something you would ever use, for instance, in manual exposure, because it's not going teo can't lock in the exposure because already locking it in manually. Now the auto focus lock is something that you could turn on in the menu system and where's my little shortcut for that. There we go so you can get to this through the custom menu f six there's also a shortcut through the eye button, which I'm going to explain shortly, and you can have this button either do auto exposure lock. Or auto focus lock or you can have it do both at the same time it depends on your work flowing in what you do and so there's gonna be a lot of people with a lot of different setups on this but that's what the button is used for next up is the auto focus on button and so when you press this button down the camera is goingto auto focus and it's going to do so until it achieves the focusing as the camera comes out of the box kind of the default system this button really doesn't do any good at all because it does focus the camera but when you go up to press the shutter release, the camera wants to refocus and so for instance, if we're doing a situation where were photographing a person and they're in front of a background that's a long ways away and we focus on that person with the button on the back of the camera camera focuses on the person we recompose for more interesting composition and when we pressed down again the camera focuses on the background and so where this button really comes into play is if you turn off the focusing on the shutter release and this is what we call back button focusing is something a lot of more advanced photographers have gotten used to and really like the system of working where you press the back button for focusing and then you press the front running to take the picture, so back button for focusing in front for taking the pictures. Now the downside to this for you, newcomers and intermediate level photographers is that you now need to press two buttons every time you want to take a focused picture, you need to focus and then shoot, but it does separate those two functions and allows you a little bit more versatility. For instance, if I was going to shoot a model and I wanted the model off of one side, I would focus on the model I would recompose, and then I could take a cz many pictures as I want. As long as our distance doesn't change, all those pictures will be in focus, and I don't have to focus recompose focus recompose and so it's a nice system for anyone who uses their camera on a regular basis and wants to really adjust those functions. Now, if you do want to make this into a back button focusing system, what you need to go is to go into custom menu a four and change the a f activation on what button is activating the auto focus, and you want to turn off the focusing system of the shutter release so that that no longer focuses because the a f on button always works and always does what it does, focusing so hopefully that clarifies how those buttons work. We've talked about our main command, I'll are multi selector, which is going to be used for navigating the menu system and selecting focusing points like we will do in just a moment. The center button has three different functions depending on what mode you are currently in for the shooting mode. What it does is it relocates the focusing point to the centre option. When you're in the playback menu it's gonna activate the retouch menu, which is a way to go in and make adjustments to your photos in in camera. This is what I call photoshopping the camera, but it's photo shop on a very, very light level and then within the menus it simply going to confirm the settings and once again, if you want to customize this button here, custom men, you have to allows you to go in and adjust the settings of that center button. Okay, on the back of the camera, we also have a little info button, and this pulls up information about what you have set on the camera, and this is very similar to the sleigh on the top of the camera, but obviously it's much larger and is able to fit much more information. There are two parts to the screen on the back of this info screens, and the eye button is a new button for the eight hundred and this allows you direct access to actually making changes, the info button basically just turns on the display and turns it off the eye button allows you to access these bottom two rows of information, and we're going to talk a little bit about this here, but you'll see more of him when we get into the menu, said so let's, take a look at this info screen that we get on the back of the camera and what it means, so hit the input button and it will pull up the screen. You're gonna have your basic exposure information along the top shutter speed aperture exposure so forth over on the left hand side, you'll see what's going on with your cards and your recording quality. What what size of files or you're recording, and where are they going to next? The middle portion of it is just a lot of general information about all sorts of different settings that you have on your camera. So it's a great place for looking at information very helpful. If you ever shooting from a tall tripod it's much easier to see this on the back of the camera than it is to see the top of the screen, we're going to be going through a lot of these specific information specific issues in here as we get through the menu system but by pressing the eye button, which why they put the I button on top and controls the features on the bottom, I don't understand, I think they should have switched these two buttons, but this allows you to directly go in and change these functions down here on the bottom of the camera, and I love the concept nikon, but if you don't mind my opinion, I would like to be ableto ad and put it in my own customized set of features. I don't find these choices in here these ten options, all that valuable for the most part, I wish I could go in and change them, but you cannot change them. They are just there and, uh, using were not used. All of these are going to be duplicated in the menu system. This is just a secondary place, a quick access to going into making these changes. So we're going to talk about these in the menu system, but if you like him, you'll be able to change him a little bit more quickly here than diving in and finding them in the menu system. And that is the info screens, so once again, the info just kind of turns the screen on and off the eye button allows you to directly go in and start making changes on those bottom two lines of information.