Lessons

Lesson Info

Segment 1 - Introduction and Overview

As you probably know, if you own the d a 10 this is one of the premier top of line best cameras out of the market. It's not actually the most expensive one, but at 36 megapixels and just a very refined operating system here it is a camera that anyone who is shooting that wants incredibly high resolution in a fairly still compact camera, not quite going into the medium format genre of cameras. This is really about the best that you could do. So we're gonna be going through a class on this camera here. We're gonna be going through all the buttons, dials, controls on the outside of the camera. We're gonna be going through all the menu listings in the camera. I'm gonna be giving you recommendations on how to best set them up for general shooting. And for some different types of specific shooting on this notably this classes is not a review. Were not reviewing how good this camera is. We're not comparing it with other cameras, and we're not going through and testing this camera. You operati...

ng out in the field. This is really about how to operate and get the most out of your camera and how to get it set up. That's possible for what you're doing along with this class, as one of the downloads when you do by the class is a PdF that I put together, and this is kind of ah, it's a note taking guide from going through the class kind of handy to have a long so that you can add your own annotations to the basic outline of the class. There is one or two things in here that I do think are kind of especially helpful when we find them in here. On Page six is the entire menu system of the entire camera. On one page, as many of you know, I'm a very visual person. I like to be able to look and see and find things, and sometimes the men you can get a little complicated cause they're several pages and there's a bit of scrolling that goes on in there. And so what I've done here is I've just listed everything very clearly so that you can just quickly scan looking for the words or the features that you want, and I also have in here my recommendations as to how I would set that up, and sometimes I'll have a couple of recommendations, depending on the level of user that you're doing. But I know that everyone likes to customize to their own way of doing things. And so I have a second page with has the exact same information minus my recommendations so that you can put in your own little notes is to the way you like to have it set up. So this is kind of handy to have out in the field. You can rip this out, or you could just print this one page and have that in your camera bag for quickly accessing and finding that information and then also on here, which is kind of nice, is towards the back. I have recommended settings for different types of photography, and this is something that we will go through towards the end of the class. You know what would how would I set the camera for landscape photography or portrait or action photography? And I go through with very specific recommendations on how to really make the most of this particular camera in that regard. And so this is the PDF for the 8 that comes with the purchase of the class from Creative Live so we can set that aside. And I think we're ready to get rolling on this class. So let's make sure that everything's running right here and let's get started. So in this class, I've broken it up into some different sections. We're going to start off with just a little bit of overview of what you have got yourself into by purchasing the D A 10 we're gonna do a few basics. It's not a basic photography class, but there's a few basics that I do want to cover just five minutes or so. And then the big part of this class is going to be going through the controls of the camera, which are all the buttons and dials on the outside. And then we'll be going through the entire menu of the camera and will be able Teoh go through each line item by line item. I know it sounds a little tedious, but it will help you get your camera set up. Once you are done with this class, your camera will be set up for going out and shooting and everything will be in the place that it is supposed to be. So is you know, if you have purchased this camera, you have got this very, very thick manual, which is quite, I mean, it's about an inch in thickness. Now, this is a I mean, they've got the size of it down here, but it's just incredibly thick, and this class is not a complete replacement for that manual. After all, it's gonna take about 17 hours to go through that manual. As far as I can tell, this class is going to be about five hours in length. And what I am concentrating on are all of the major functions that you need to know about to get the highest quality images. You know, there's a lot of things this camera conduce, which are interesting, like you can print pictures directly from the camera, and that's one of those areas that we're not going to spend a lot of time on in this class. We're going to be going over all the controls, functions and settings in order to get the highest quality images. So that's how this class is a little different than the instruction manual in the instruction manual is still helpful From time to time, you may need to carry it around for the first few months of use, but I think once you get used to it, you can kind of ditch that because it's about the size of a lens. And I'd rather have an extra lens in my bag than that instruction manual. Once you've got it down next just to let you know this is not a photography, one of one class. If you are here because you're your new camera and you want to learn about shutter speeds and apertures in depth of field, this is not the right class for that. We're gonna not really cover that here. There are other classes that are better suited for this class. We're going to be staying very focused on the D A 10 itself. Now, if you are new to Nikon, welcome to the Nikon family of cameras. They've been around for a long time, started back way back in 1917. Their first cameras were little range finder cameras, but they quickly progressed onto SL ours, which has been the mainstay of serious photographers for the last 60 years. or so The original F uses essentially the same lens mount that is on this camera. So they stayed true to their lens collection and their compatibility. Now there are some differences, and there are some things to take note up when you are using those manual older lenses, and I'll talk about that more in the lens section of this class 1986 they saw a big change because that's when they went auto focus and their lenses went to a kind of a major change then and so you can use all all the lenses back to 1986 and get auto focus on it with this camera. And then, in 1999 they brought out their first digital camera, the D one, and remember this camera because it was her first serious professional camera that was digital, and it sold for $5400 had 2.7 megapixels. I ran the math gym on this just in case you're interested. So back then, $1 would buy you 500 pixels. Okay, so every dollar you spend it, you got 500 pixels. Now, $1 on this camera buys you 10,000 pixels. So we went from one for 501 for 10,000. And so we've got quite a much better value these days. Yeah, when it comes to resolution, All right, So being in the Nikon family, one of the things that I like most about it is that they have a huge collection of cameras and so pretty much any type of photography that you were into any type of budget that you have. Nikon probably has a camera that fits your needs. Of course, with a Nikon system, you have fantastic lenses. They have a great collection of many, many different lenses that address pretty much everything that you could encounter. And then I would have to argue that icon has probably the best flash system out on the market for on camera flash. And so they have a number of good flashes. They'll give you some recommendations what I would recommend for this particular camera in in and around the lead, the lens section on this so great system to be a part of now the 8 10 Where does it fit into this whole system? Well, it is definitely very high end. It's their highest resolution camera. So if you want the greatest resolution sharpness out of a camera, it's going to be the D A. 10 the D four s above. This is designed a little bit more for photojournalists and sports photographers. It has, I believe, 16 megapixels shoots at a much faster frame rate, has a bigger beef your build to it for, say, a news photographer, for instance. But for the studio photographer of the Landscape photographer or anyone who's just really wanting to get the sharpest picture is possible out there. The D A. 10 is far and away the best camera for the money. The only way to get anything better than this would be to spend somewhere in the range of 15 to $50,000 on many of the different medium format systems that are out there. But this is the system that you can still stick in a fairly small compact camera bag and travel around pretty easily west. So I'm a pretty big fan of it now. This is using the full frame sensor, and it's one of the more compact cameras that do this. The timeline kind of on this goes back to the D 700 which was introduced back in 2008. That was nigh cons. First full frame camera in this compact size that wasn't in their full size professional body of a camera. We saw the D 800 the D 100 E introduced in 2012 and that was the one had a 36 megapixel sensor, and the difference between the 800 the 800 e is on the e. The essentially took off the anti alias seen filter to get a little bit sharper images. Now when I say the effect of it was that they took off the anti a leasing filter. Technically, what they did is they negated the anti a leasing filter, even though it was still on their in the d A. 10. They've actually taken that filter off. And so one thing to note is that this camera may not be really good for certain people who are doing photography of clothing because it has a very fine texture to it that you could get more a problems with it. And so that's why they made the D 800 versus the E because the E does have a little bit of a problem with Moray as this one does. And so this is something that you may want to test out before you purchase. If you were in to, say, clothing photography, where you're doing fashion or some other type of product photography with it now, the upgrade from the D 800. I think that if they didn't have a d 800 e, this camera would have been called the D 800 s because a lot of times with Nikon they'll have a model like the D four and then they kind of tweak it, refined some of the details of it, and they throw on s on the end of it. And so this kind of feels like an 800 s to me. But seeing how they already used up the letter, I think they decided to just move on up to D 8 10 Now, if you do dive through the instruction manual, you will get to the section on care and handling of the camera and has all sorts of dire things that you were not supposed to do with the cameras, some of them I find a little funny like don't swallow the battery. That would be bad. One of my favorite is when adjusting the doctor. Don't put your finger in your eye. And so, in essence, don't be stupid with it. And I think most of us understand this now. The camera does have weather ceiling, however, in the instruction manual. It very specifically says this product is not waterproof and may malfunction if immersed in water are exposed to high levels of humidity, which is basically night cons way of saying there is a limit to how much water this thing can take. And so there is a number of weather seals, as you can see here that they have put around the camera to help ward off things like rain and spray from any sort of source getting into the camera. But it is not something that you should be shooting out in a heavy rainstorm for a long time with. It is obviously not an underwater camera, so it does have limitations and do take some precautions. If you are gonna be shooting out in a heavy weather condition, I would highly recommend some of the many different weather bags out there, so there's rain shields and all sorts of covers that you can get for. And so I wouldn't worry about the light rain, but I would worry about a heavy, constant rain with it. Secondly, some people have questions about the use of non Nikon accessories because Nikon says that it could void your warranty. I have not seen aftermarket lenses or batteries cause a problem personally in the cameras. It's technically possible, but I think you're gonna be obviously great with Nikon lenses. But there's many other lenses that work just find whether they're from Tamron or Sigma or Toe Kina. They've never caused a problem with the camera. I know there are some older Sigma lenses that had some chip issues that had to be updated as the camera manufacturers progress their cameras. But I don't know that that is true of any of the Sigma lenses lenses over the last about last five years or so, I would probably stick with the Nikon batteries. A lot of times there's kind of cheap aftermarket batteries that can heat up a little bit, and they may cause a problem with the battery charger. The Nikon batteries air. Not that much money. So I'd probably stick with those. And with the flash units, I highly recommend staying with the Nikon flashes. And it's not because the other flashes will do any damage to the camera. It's just because the Nikon flashes are just so much easier to use the way that you press the buttons and you read the information. And the operation of, in my opinion is just so much better than many of the other flashes unless you're just looking for studio flashes, which is kind of a whole nother category. But if you are looking for an on camera flash, I highly recommend the Nikon wants. All right, let's make sure that your camera is ready for today's class. You should have the battery charged. It lasts or charges in about 2.5 hours. And one of the nice little changes upgraded from the D 800 is that we now get about 50% more battery life. They've just gotten more efficient in the use of power on the camera so you can get about 1200 shots on a battery charge. Now your mileage may vary. It depends on how much you used the built in flash. How much you playing the menu system and how much live you or movie shooting you do? If you were to shoot just straight movies, you're only going to get about 40 minutes of HD footage on it, so you want to make sure that you have a lens on it. Make sure you have your charge battery inside. You'll also need a memory card. You can either use SD or compact flash cards. We'll talk more about those in a moment so that you can kind of practice taking pictures on this. Go ahead and turn your camera on and you want to make sure that the auto focus is on on the camera. There's a switch on the side of the camera that will be an auto focus. And then most of the current lenses will have a switch on the side of the lens, where you can either have it in manual focus or auto focus. So that's one thing that you need to kind of double check on to make sure that you are going to get auto focus and then for putting the camera in the program mode you're gonna press the mode button on the top of the camera and you're gonna turn the command dial in the back of the camera and just put it into the key mode. P stands for program, which means the camera's gonna figure out shutter speeds and apertures for you. And go ahead and take a picture. Jim, I'm gonna take a picture of you just to make sure our camera here is working and we've got auto focus. Put a little off to the side and let's make sure I got my picture here. We've got a bunch of information. There's artist, a gram, and there you are. OK, so we got our camera working here. I hope you got your camera working. We're going to take just a short trip right now through some basics of photography. I know a lot of you who owned this camera. You know, all this stuff, I get it. But we get some people who are up and comers and they need to learn about photography. And I want to give him just a quick five minutes of a class that I teach here Creativelive called Fundamentals of Digital Photography. This is a long and I was like a 20 hour class on the fundamentals, and I just want to go through some of the basics. All right, so you're D 8 10 is a DSLR digital single lens reflex single lens. That's pretty obvious. You got one lens on there. We have a variety of different lenses that you can put on this wide angle. Telephoto. Many, many others in the lenses is an aperture unit. The aperture unit can open and close down. It never completely closes, but it changes how much light is lead in through the lens. And so, as you can see this aperture closing down each time it closes down another set of numbers, another stop. It's letting in half assed much light as we opened the aperture up. Each time it goes to the next setting, it's letting in twice as much light. So this is the first way that we can control how much light is getting into the camera. Beyond controlling the amount of light. It also controls the depth of field or how much is going to be in focus in the photo. In this first photo, you can see very shallow depth of field, you can see the numbers at the top and bottom of this yardstick are very out of focus. But as we stop our aperture down, our depth of field is growing. It's not a significant amount with each step, but it does grow. And by the time we get down to F 22 were getting quite a bit of depth of field. And so that's one of our main controls in the camera. Once the light comes in through the lens on a reflex camera SLR camera, we're gonna bounce the light on a mirror. And that's where the word reflex comes from up to the focusing screen and an image is formed on this screen, and in order to see it the most easily, we bounced the light up again through a prison system and out the viewfinder. So when you pick up this camera and just look through it, that is the path of light that you're I have seen. Now, in order to take a photo once you press down on the shutter, we need to get that mere up and out of the way so the light can get back to the image sensor in the camera. Now, before the light gets to the image sensor, it needs to cross one more little hurdle here. And that is the shutter unit, and the shutter has two parts to it. It has a first curtain and a second curtain, and it has this so that it can open up the first curtain. And that lets the light into the sensor for its short shutter speed in many cases, and then the second shutter will come down and block it off. It uses the system so that peaks pixel on the sensor will be exposed for exactly the same amount of time. And then the whole shutter unit needs to return to its starting position for the next photo. Now, shutter speeds are another way of controlling the amount of light coming in the camera. We have a variety of shutter speeds from 30 seconds up to 1 8/1000 of a second. You'd use a fast shutter speed like 1 2/1000 of a second for stopping the motion of a whale breaching out of the water. We would use a reasonably fast shutter speed, like 1 5/100 of a second for stopping human emotion like dancers or athletes 125th of a second. Good enough to stop these camels walking in the desert. When we get down below 1/60 like 1/30 of a second, we're getting into slower shutter speeds for blurring motion. Like these runners, when we get down to an eighth of a second, you can see that we are on a tripod on this shot because the bridge is very sharp. But the people are blurry cause they're walking in a fairly normal pace. If you like those shots of waterfalls and rivers flowing where you get the nice, blurry cotton candy type water, you're gonna get that around one second. And if you want to do nighttime photography, you'd use something like 30 seconds. This is light painting and a little bit of star points in there as well. So there are lots of different cameras out on the market, and the D A 10 uses a large sensor in comparison to what is being used by most of the photographers out there. And so that's one of the major differences in the camera is the size of the sensor and the Nikon 8 10 uses what's called a full frame sensors the same size as a piece of 35 millimeter film. And so it was very easy for the photographers at that time who were shooting film to transition to digital because all their lenses work as normal in order to save money, many other companies went to smaller size sensors. But it was always nice, and it's always been a goal of a lot of photographers to have that full frame sensor because of that meant that they could use it the whitest variety of lenses available on the market. Many of the other Nikon cameras, like the D 7100 or 5300 or 3300 use the Nikon D X sensor, and they have a crop factor of 1.5 with their smaller size sensor, and that other companies, like Cannon, will have some cameras that Aaron AP S C size sensor, which is for Canon and it's a 1.6 crop factor. One little note for those of you using the supplied strapped with the camera is that when you are adjusting and setting up the strap, make sure that the tail end is kind of on the bottom side of that little strap adjuster as you have it there. Make sure that because that way, what happens? This pressure gets put on it, and it doesn't slip out quite as easily if you do it in the reverse way. Now a quick little test for all of you with your cameras watching right now, go ahead and pick your camera and hold it as if you're ready to go shoot a picture and I want you to notice How are you holding the camera? Is your thumb on the top of the lens or on the bottom of the lens? Or maybe it's on the camera body. But the correct way of holding a camera is with the thumb on the top of the lands. This will allow you to get your elbow rather than being way out here on the side. It allows you to keep your elbow in closer towards your torso, where you'll be able to hold your camera a little bit more steady. It's also really nice when you get into a longer lens because then you can kind of support the camera with lens with the base of your left hand, and then you can control with fine tuned finger control, either the focusing, zooming or any other buttons or features on that particular lands. And so this is a better system for holding your camera in the long term. Now, as we go through this class, I want you to be aware that there are a lot of different features that can be set to automatic or manual, and they're often independent control, so you can have one doing something automatically something else going manually. And for pretty much all of these, it really comes down to how much time it takes to set the camera up the effort and your knowledge level of what's going on as to whether you want things automatic or manual. But in most of these areas, you'll be able to do everything automatically or everything manually. But if you really want to get the most out of your photography, you're gonna wanna learn how to do it manually so that you can really dial in exactly what you want. So if anything over the last five minutes seems interesting to you when you would like to know more, various a class called Fundamentals of Digital photography that you can get from creativelive about this that goes, um, or into it.