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Segment 3 - Top Deck: Left Side

Getting back to the top of the camera, going to be now moving over to the left hand side, where we have kind of ah dialled looking device with four buttons on the top of it. The button at the top is the quality control, but the image quality button pressing and holding this button while turning the back dial will allow us to change through the options of neff switches, nikon, elektronik format, it's the raw image if you want to get the highest quality image from the camera, you're going probably want to be shooting raws. They do offer a tiff option, which I don't know a lot of photographers are using that's, a very, very large, very high quality file, but it's much larger than it needs to be it's if you wanted to shoot something in camera and you want to hand it to a magazine editor right away, you could probably do it in tiff, because it's going to be the easiest system that both your camera can record, highest quality that they can read, but most serious photographers, they're going ...

to shoot the raw, and they're going to use some sort of program, whether it's, the nikon software or something from adobe or another company that reads the raw so that they can work with all the original information that the sense or gather the camera can also record basic j pegs. I think it be a little bit of a crime to shoot this camera and j peg the whole time, because it has such great quality that you're only going to get from those raw settings. But if you do need j pegs there's, a variety of size j pigs that you could get. And, of course, you can shoot raw, plus a j j pick, which means that each time you press the shutter released, once you get to photos, you get a raw photo and you get a j peg photo and there's many people that have needs for very immediate quick j pegs. I don't like doing it for general photography because you end up with two files and you end up deleting the j peg because you have the original raw. And so it depends on your workflow and how you were going to be using this camera as to what's going to be the best setup. Now by pressing the quality button and turning the front dial, you can change the size of the j pegs that you are recording. And I would see this mainly being used for people who are shooting raw plus j peg if you wanted to record rob but you just needed some small j pegs to send email real quickly you might want to just use thie small image size, for instance, for that and so you can customize small, medium or large on the j picks that you're shooting there now we will see this control again in the menu system, where perhaps the display of information will be a little bit more clear. So this is not the last time we encounter image quality in the settings of the camera question jim, I don't mind at all it gives me a chance to drinkwater okay, perfect and I'll read it really slowly you so this is from maurice, who wants to know what you might have already answered this but one of just confirmed can I use my sb nine hundred with the d a ten? Yes, sb nine hundred is the predecessor to the nine ten and that's going to be fully compatible with it. What you want to be careful of and I haven't really researched this, so I'm just going to go enough time ahead is you want to be careful of flashes that have only two digits like an ssp twenty six or twenty four those air much older generation designed for film cameras and I think the changeover was when they went to all the three digits like the seven hundred and nine hundred nineteen those should all be okay and do these higher and flashes did you say it's the nine ten nine ten do they talk wirelessly to the camera they can but the wireless system that it uses is this built in flash so it's kind of like in the old days the navy would send signals to ships with lights right? You know, for a mile across they could send silently instantly thes light signals and that's where you get this blinking problem potentially and so it has limited functionality in the real world if you're doing people photography okay if you're going to shooting like a car and you want to buy, say ten nikon s p nine ten you can light up the inside of the car and have these things all over the place is the other downside to it that I will mention because it is using light to communicate if you have something like a table like I have a light underneath this table and one on top this one on top may not be getting down here to communicate to the other one unless it happens to be bouncing off the floor and the wall and everything else around it and so I've set up lighting situations where I was I was photographing a person in a restaurant door and I wanted to put a light on the inside of the restaurant behind them and the light from outside was not reaching to trigger the one on the inside. And so this is where radio triggers that use a radio signal, which is a whole different thing really come in handy. Great. Thank you. Maybe more than you were asking for was good. Okay, so the esso button on the top, the camera press that and turn the dial on the back of the camera, and we can change through the different settings of the s o now, this is the first camera that I've seen in a long time that has an s o f sixty four on the predecessor, the nine hundred. Excuse me, the eight hundred was isa one hundred, so they brought it down to sixty four. And if you are shoot, if you are portrait shooter who shoots with fast lenses out, you know, a lot of light, this is going to be kind of handy for you. If you shoot cinematography with it, it's going to be handy to be able to go down to sixty four. So sixty four is the native aya, so that means that that is the highest quality setting you can have for the censor, and you can set it up higher and higher and higher as your demands need now twelve thousand eight hundred is the highest of the kind of standard rage, but you can push it beyond that to twenty five thousand fifty one thousand and what's happening when you do that is that it's setting it at twelve thousand eight hundred and it's using built in software to just kind of manipulate the image too to boost the brightness of it? We also have a low setting off thirty two, so if you really need to slow it down you can the downside to going down too thirty two on this from sixty four is you have a loss of dynamic range, so you have a loss mostly in kind of those highlight areas you might lose some of the detail in that and so you don't want to go down to thirty two unless you I absolutely have to and you don't have a too wide of dynamic range and so I s o sixty four is kind of the default position to be in and then you can kind of bump it up from there. It's necessary now if you press the button and you turn the front dial of the camera, you can turn on or off the auto setting and so if you want to let the camera choose theis so for you put it in auto if you want to do it yourself, make a specific setting yourself now I said before we're not testing this camera but of course I had to go out and shoot a lot with this camera and so I did run it through my standard little s o test and what I've found is that it has extremely good resolution everything from thirty two upto s o eight hundred it is just clean, clean, clean and nice and so you really shouldn't be afraid about any sort of noise problems in this rage where you will start seeing some noise if you're very picky is at sixteen hundred and somewhere between sixteen hundred and sixty, four hundred you're probably going to draw limit of what you think is acceptable quality depending on what your needs are for it yeah, you can go up to fifty one thousand but it looks very, very grainy therein and far if you can't see the image role clearly on your screen at home. As I said before, everything up to eight hundred super clean sixteen hundred is still very nice and I probably would not mind shooting this up to sixty, four hundred for certain situations like if you were doing concert photography, you're in a you're in a dark bar you're shooting a band on stage sixty four hundred just going to get you some still pretty good results I do notice a pretty big drop when we could start going up to twelve thousand eight hundred so one of the most capable cameras, when it comes to shooting at hirai zoe's out there, especially very good for the fact that it is a thirty six megapixel camera, those pixels are fairly small in size, getting impact onto that sensor, so that is your s o city. We're going to see this again when we get into the menu setting and a lot of times there's controls on the outside of the camera, and they're duplicated again in the menu and it's, whatever one you set most most recently, that takes effect, and you'll see where things are, where you've set them before. Next up is our white balance that's what the w b stands for, and this controls the color of light them. We're going to get according to the color of light that we're working under your camera doesn't automatically know what type of light source you have around you, and so you can adjust for it in here. And so this is all based off of the kelvin scale, which ranges from red to blue, and so the automatic settings would be things like sunlight, cloudy and shade, and then for artificial light source things like incandescent or tungsten light that's the one that's, the most different it's the light that a lot of us have in our homes is this kind of orange is light and if you want to adjust and correct for it then you can set your camera to incandescent now the fluorescent light has kind of a split arrow because you can adjust for many different types of fluorescent light you're going to see several different settings depending on whether it's warm fluorescent or a clue cool fluorescent flashes once again very close to standard and then we do have a couple of other additional options for setting the first of which is called preset manual and this is where you photograph a white sheet of paper and then you let the camera figure out what color it iss to correct for it so it's a nice system for a little bit more advanced photographers under very particular situations yeah, we have a kelvin temperature setting where if you just happen to know the kelvin temperature you could set it exactly where it needs to be. This is very helpful for people shooting with multiple cameras in a controlled scene for instance here in the creative life studios were shooting with multiple cameras and they all want to have the same look to him so they're all set to the same kelvin setting and so if we were shooting still photography in here with multiple cameras we'd probably have all the photographers check their own cameras are you at sixty four hundred because that's what these lights air out or whatever they happen to be? And then finally there is auto white balance where what what the camera does is it looks at the photo you've taken it looks at the highlighted areas and it tries to determine what color they are and in general the camera does a pretty good job otto white balance I think for a lot of photographers the default setting on white balance will be auto white balance and if you are shooting raw this is perfectly acceptable because if you shoot raw images and the color balance is not correct you can fix it later in the post processing pro process without any negative affected to the final image the only negative impact is that it takes a little bit of time to reset it and so if you are under a situation you're outside and it's cloudy yeah it's a good thing to set it to cloudy but if you are shooting raw you can just leave it in auto white balance and you should be able to adjust very easily afterwards but if you do have the time it always is nice to get things set ahead of time as much as possible so that is the white balance setting and when you press the front dial or he's pressed the white melas button intern the front dial you can fine tune this and the a stands for amber b stands for blue and there's six different levels for instance you like the fluorescent city but you need to make it a little bit more bluish. You might set set it to a level of b two or b three, and so you can really adjust any one of these settings very, very incrementally so you can get very, very specific settings. Now, if you do want to set your camera to the kelvin temperature where you are setting a very setting for a very specific color, then you're going to use the multi selector on the back of the camera to make that sort of setting, and that is white balance. Next up, we have a our newly repaired free positioned meeting, but if you have a nikon d eight hundred, they've moved a few buttons around. I don't know just to maybe make things a little bit easier on one of the things they moved around is they now have a dedicated button from eatery, and so we have our matrix metering, which those of you who have been in the nikon world for quite a while know that this is a really high quality system where it is using multiple areas to measure the light and get a great balance of the correct exposure meter. Now we do have the centre waited, which is customizable, and this is kind of the old school traditional media ring system back from the sixties and seventies and early eighties. We have a spot meter, which is a one point five percent of the area, which is a very tiny area it's just a four millimeter circle in the middle of the frame if you want to measure the light in a very particular area and brand new, I haven't talked about a camera with a new meeting system, but we do have a highlight waited mita ring system. Now what this does is it looks at the scene it's at an entire edits entirety, and it looks at the brightest areas of that scene, and it sets the exposure so as not to overexpose those bright areas this was designed, I believe, for something like stage photography, where you have a fairly dark stage, you have one character that is highly lit and you don't want them over exposed you don't want an average you want to set it for the highlighted area, and so this might work out for any sort of stage photography or anything where there's a lot of dark area or under some certain types of tricky lighting situations. So I encourage you if this is your new camera, not a lot of cameras. Well, I haven't seen any other camera that has this particular feature on it, uh, kind of play around with this, see if it works for your type of photography, um because it is a new way of meeting but it does make a lot of sense and it is going to be a very good meeting system for a number of different types of purposes now it is not a spot meter even though it has the little spot they haven't figured up a really good symbol for this yet unfortunately they chose this spot in there it kind of looks like it's a spot meter it is not a spot meter in any way it is looking at the entire area of the scene and so it's just taking into account those areas that are the brightest next up we have kind of the collar around that whole little round protrusion upon the top left hand side which is thie release mode and this does have a lock because nikon loves their double button system of pressing a button and turning a dial and so this release mode controls what happens when you press down on the shutter release single frame for your basic photography takes one picture each time you press the shutter release we have two different continuous modes low setting in the high city the low setting is currently set for three frames per second but you can go in and you can customize it the hi setting is going to be for five frames per second now you can get it to go faster than five frames per second if you set your camera to a special crop mode where you're not getting the full frame, you're getting a one point to crop and it can fire then at six frames per second, and if you do want to get to seven frames per second, you could do it, albeit with two limitations number one is you need to have the vertical battery grip on the bottom of the camera and secondly, you need to have the camera in the d x mode, which is a one point five crop factor. And so if you were going to be shooting sports with the battery grip on there and you were looking for that extra reach that little extra telephoto capability, you can get up to seven frames per second, but if you want to shoot with the full frame, the full thirty five millimetre frame on this it's going to be five frames per second, so there's a little bit of asterix and situations special situations going on there. Next up we have q for quiet, which makes a little bit less noise and for anybody who doesn't own this camera and they're just kind of watching this and they want to know how quiet is quiet, let me fire a couple of shots under the normal mode and then I'll put it in the quiet mouth and I'll just hold it up here into my microphone so that's a normal mode and one of the things that nikon is done is that they have put on a quieter shutter it's got a little bit more sound dampening than in previous cameras so just to start with it's a little bit quieter now we'll put it in the quiet mode away I think it was actually just focusing had actually shooting so that's the quiet mild let me change it back and back to the choir perhaps that was not quite mode sorry that was continuous so it's a little bit quieter so if you were shooting say for instance you know, in a theater for instance I'd probably put it there it's perfectly fine there's also continue quiet continuous mode another good place might be at a wedding uh quite continuous mode is going to be a little bit slower it's three frames per second so this is what that sounds like so three frames per second a little bit quieter we have our self timer mode which will be able to be customizable. We'll get into that customization in the menu setting and then finally we have the mup mode the mere up mode so let me explain why this is important on this camera so on the camera slr when you press down on the shutter release the mere goes up and it wants to get up out of the way as quickly as possible and this causes a vibration and shaking of the camera and this happens right? Win the shutter is opening and exposing the sensor toe light and so your camera is moving and vibrating while it is taking a picture which as you might imagine, would cause blurriness in your photographs. And so if you really want to get the sharpest possible photos who put the camera on a tripod, you would put the camera in the mere lockup mode and what would happen in this scenario is that you would press down on the shutter release to lock the mirror up and the camera would have the same normal vibrations that it would always have. But you wait two or three seconds for those to settle out and then you would press the shutter release again to take the picture. Now, of course, you wouldn't want to use the shutter release on the camera because you would be touching the camera. This is where you would use a cable release, one of the connections all talk about later in the cable release that you can connect up to it so that you're not touching or moving the camera in anyway. Now, if you're wondering if I'm just getting a little bit fussy here, well, this does have a serious impact when you were actually shooting pictures so here's an example I was shooting a picture of a tree and I did not have near lock up engaged, and you can see how blurry this photo is on the left hand side. When I engaged mere lock up, you can see how much sharper it made the camera. Now, for those of you who do want to use this, be aware that this is a problem in and around one eighth of a second, and so there's kind of what I call a vibration zone that ranges anywhere from around a thirtieth of a second down to about one full second. It depends a little bit on your tripod, set up on what lens you're using as to where this is and how bad it's going to be and how far it's going to extend. So if you are on a tripod, if you are shooting anywhere around that one eighth of a second, you should probably either have your camera in the mere lock up mode. Or you can have it in the live you mode where the mere is locked up. Now. A further notation that we will address a little bit later is the camera's new elektronik first shuter curtain because previous models and other manufacturers have also have problems of the first shuter blades moving up, getting out of the way, the sensor so quickly that it causes a slight vibration that would beam, or around a sixtieth, eightieth of a second. And so nikon now has implemented a new elektronik first shuter curtain, so the only thing moving before the picture is actually taken is the aperture stopping down. And so, as we are increasing the number of pixels and the resolution on our cameras were having to get a little bit fussier and fussier about every little bit of tiny movement going on in the camera. And the first step in this regards is the mere lockup mode, and so it's something nature photographers do it's, something that product photographers would do it's. Not something that you're going to do. If you are doing hand held photography it's something on lee, you would only use it if you are on a tripod. If you do want to go in to the continuous low mode, I said it was currently said it. Three frames per second. If you want to adjusted upwards or downwards you, khun, do that under custom menu d to to adjust that continuous low shooting speed.