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Segment 6 - Flash and Focusing Modes

Okay let's jump back to the back side of the camera and what else do we have here? We have our little cover here that I took off. These things have always annoyed me on this camera they're pretty clear and they're designed just to prevent scratches on the back of the camera. I actually prefer the aftermarket brands that you can get my favorite brand I don't have it listed up here it zag z a g and they make very specific really well coated covers that adhere to the back of the screen they designed stuff for the military and they show just some incredible videos of people taking knives and keys banging on these screens they're designed for iphones and all sorts of devices and they make custom sized pieces that fit right on the back and there incredible and they don't look as ugly as that little plastic piece on there but, uh that's just my opinion sorry to throw opinion here in this class happens every once in a while all right? Aah button combination did you notice on your camera that t...

here's too little green dots? If you press both of them simultaneously for two to three seconds it resets everything on the camera back to the camera default settings and this is what I did this morning because I got this camera and I wanted to make sure everything was kind of set to the way that a normal person would grab this camera out of the box so you probably want to be careful and not do that on a regular basis. The other buttons did you notice is that there is a the format in a card if you press those two buttons at the same time, it'll reform at the card on your camera is something that I kind of don't know why it's on there was kind of convenient when you do want to just reform at the card and you don't want to dive into the menu system. So it's, just a little bit of a shortcut that is available to you, working our way over to the left side of the camera. Up front. We have our manual flash pop up buttons, so you'll press this to pop the flash up. You can just physically push it down with your finger and it's all very manual. The flash will not pop up if you need flash. It'll only pop up when you press the button, which is the way it should be folks, you need to make the choice as to whether you want to add flash or not into the photograph very near that is the flash button on the camera, and what this does is it controls the flash mode. As well as flash exposure compensation so let's talk about flash for a moment folks first off flash especially the built in flash has a very limited range it's on ly good for ten fifteen maybe twenty feet depending on what s o you have set and so it has a very limited range it is not going to do you any good in the top seats off a large auditorium it's only good for things that are directly right in front of you the one area that I think it is very helpful is in people photography in lighting up the face that might be in some shadows and so adding a little bit of what we call phil flash you're filling in the shadows with a little bit of light can be very, very effective and on times when you might not expect it bright sunshine for instance, if you really want to be able to see the face more clearly it can add a lot of light to that face that is normally in the shadows and so it's a great way for people photography for them to be a little bit more visible and easy to work with now there is a number of flash modes this half special things that it could do ways in which you can fire red eye reduction will fire a double flash so that it reduces the pupil size phil flash basically fires when you want to force it on, even when the camera thinks there's plenty of life, I don't need the flash slow synchronization allows you to use slow shutter speeds like one fifteenth of a second so that you can let in the ambient light that might be a little bit darker rear curtain synchronizes the flash with a second curtain rather than the first curtain when it's operating, and as you can see in the shot here on the screen, the cyclist moving through the scene had the flash fire at the end of the exposure. It kind of makes it look like there's, a blur coming out of the back of them because that was the front part of the exposure, and, as we mentioned before in the flash in the accessory flashes that you can get this built in flash to fire off camera flashes to get a much better balance of lighting on your subject, and you can fire one, two or multiples of these flashes. Now, in order to do this, you're going to hit the flash button and you're going to be hitting another dial to change these modes, and you're going to see a lot of these symbols lightning bolt indicates the flash is going to fire basically means a phil flash system normal, normal flash the eyeball is for red eye reduction, the slow enemy indicates that you'll allow the camera to use very slow shutter speeds and of course the rear indicates we're going to hook it up with the rear. How do you change these? Well, get your fingers ready, we're going to have to press the flash up first and then you're going to press the flash button and you're going turn the dial on the back of the camera and you look at the top of the camera to see exactly what your options are in there now you'll notice that that little plus minus next to the lightning bolt this is the indicator for flash exposure compensation and by pressing that button and turning the front dial, you'll be able to either power up or power down the built in flash because normally when you fire a picture with flash, you may set the so the shutter speed the aperture. But when the flash fires it's kind of doing its own thing it's looking at all the other information and it's trying to set the right exposure for you but a lot of times it's not quite right and let me give you a couple of visual examples. So here is an example of what is known as tl flash through the lens automated josh this is where the camera is figuring things out I think personally this is a personal opinion there was a little too much flash and the skin is a little over exposed in this case and so we can power the flash down and we would call this tt l minus one or minus two this is one stop under exposed to stops underexposed with the power of the flash and this is a very subtle adjustment here on a cloudy day take a look at this example on a sunny day the tt l flash has clearly over exposed this subject let's go ahead and power the flash down to minus one minus two minus three and in this example I think minus two is giving the truest skin tones now you'll be able to adjust this in third stop so if you just want power it down a little bit point three or point seven two thirds of a stop or various increments wherever you think it's necessary in fact if you're going to use this flash for people photography I would just flat out recommend setting it to t t l minus one just because with flash it's a little bit like spice on your meal you want a little bit of spice but you clearly don't want too much spice and so it's better to have ah two little than too much in this case and so there's very few reasons I can't think of any but I would say there's very few reasons why you would set this to plus one but it technically can be done so lots of flash modes lots of flash options a couple of other things to note is that the camera has a maximum shutter synchronization of one two fiftieth when using this tt l type flash and so if you try to set a faster shutter speed, the camera just simply will not allow it so you don't have to worry about setting a faster shutter speed and having a problem it just won't allow it and then finally let me just reiterate the built in flash has a very limited range generally think about things that are about three meters or ten feet away it can extend a little bit further when you're at higher esos but that's one of the basic things that are directly here in front of you all right so that's flash the other button that was in between these that we kind of skipped over is the b katie for bracketing and so bracketing allows you to shoot a syriza pictures different exposures very, very quickly and there's a couple of good reasons why you might want to do this so if you hit the bracketing button and turn the dial in the back of the camera which I'm going to do right now the off position is kind of twofold it's either zero frames or off with only one f we can then change it to two or three or five or seven or nine frames and as an example we're going to shoot different exposures, you can shoot three or five or seven or nine frames now this is gonna work best in aperture priority, shutter, priority or program. My preferred mode is aperture priority, because generally you're going to be shooting a subject that is not moving, for instance, a landscape shot, maybe a product type shot, and you want to adjust the brightness levels, and you want to keep a consistent depth of field because a lot of these photos you're shooting a lot of them and you either going toe, combine them all the work in and hdr type image, or you're just trying to pick one good image and in those images when you're picking between them, you don't want to be picking between ones with different apertures, different depths of field in most cases, so I think it's best in aperture priority, but you, khun technically use it in manual is well, now you can shoot anywhere two, three, five, seven or nine frames if you are shooting two frames, what you're generally doing is you're going to shoot one frame at the recommended metering setting and then one more either over exposed or under exposed. Now you'll be able to set increments from one third, two thirds, one stop to stop. Or three stops now there is some limitations with regard to how far the camera can go. I don't think in any or most situations you'll be able to shoot nine frames at three stop increments it's just too big of a bracketing in there, but you can shoot, say, three stops at a three stop increment and so play around with that if you want to and you can also use exposure compensation on top of this. So for instance, say you want to do three exposures, but you wanted them to be all a little bit on the darker side you could set in a minus let's just say two thirds exposure compensation, then you would set your camera for a three stop bracketing, and then you could set it up on top of that for, you know, one or two or three stop bracket siri's were there that far there's one, two or three exposure levels difference between each of the shots? And so this was something that was very popular with landscape photographers back before digital, when they weren't sure of their settings. Now, when I do landscape photography, I don't shoot bracketing hardly ever is a very the only case that I'm really doing it now is mostly for teaching purposes because I'm able to judge the exposure on the back of the camera occasionally I'll shoot one of what I think and then won it kind of a safety either darker or lighter a lot of people are using this for hdr work that they're compiling it later and this is great for that because it shoots all the pictures very very quickly if you also put your camera into the continuous mode it will fire these pictures let me go ahead and set this up and continuous I'm going to go ahead and put it in a bracket siri's and where's my bracket button I'm going to set it for five frames one stop bracket siri's it's in the programme mode and when I hit down on the shutter release button it's going to fire through five of them as quickly as it can and so I'm going to just stick it in manual focus for simplicity right now and here we go and so those air five shots different brightness levels and it's all shot as close to the exact same time as possible you could do this manually and I do this manually all the time but you have to make all the settings and there's a little bit of a time gap and things move in that time so that is bracketing this is probably has the widest variety of options of any camera I've ever seen as far as the number of images that you can shoot the increments and the modes that you can use with this quick question john are all those sort of customizable like you khun set all the different you can hold a different parameter set um all the different parameters and is this good for hdr someone wants to do this? Yes it's j r if I was shooting hdr and I'm no h d our expert, that is for sure but if I was shooting hdr I would probably be shooting five stops with one stop increments in between. I think once you get beyond one stops it gets to be a little bit much so possibly five for your basic hd our shooters seven if you're a little bit more advanced and nine if you were like it got hdr tattooed on your forehead and you all right? Okay, so that is the bracketing modes now you could be able to change the number of shots by turning the back dial while holding the bracket button down. You'll be able to change the increment amount by the front dial and if you want to turn it off it is zero f which means zero frames but also kind of looks like the word off the scene and f all right auto focus time folks so we talked a little bit about this before when we were in live you and I movie mode but down on the left hand side of the camera is our auto focus manual switch now it is slightly confusing because their heir to auto focus switches on the camera what I recommend is leading the switch on the camera in the auto focus mode all the time the reason it's here is because some of the original nikon autofocus lenses did not have the switch on it and so if you go out and you buy a nineteen eighty nine thirty five millimeter f to lens which I used to own that doesn't have an auto focus which on it and if you want to flip it he would have to flip it here but with all the new orleans is they're putting the switch on the lens and so this is how I would recommend it with all the current lenses you want to manually focus put it over teo am auto focus this is always in a f this would be in the a or the position here now as I noted before there is a button right here in the middle and this controls the focusing mode so if you want to change the focusing mowed your camera's not in live you it's not in the movie mode you're going to press the a f mode area button and what you're going to dio is you then going to turn the back dial on the camera and you will see your settings on the top lcd your choices are either f s for single or fc for continuous single means if you're going to focus on a subject like we got a little boy here and he's sitting down he's not moving towards us are moving away from us, we're going to focus on that subject it's gonna lock in and be done with it now for subjects that are moving around sports action, we want to have our camera in the a f c for continuous mode words constantly changing and adjusting focus, and so those are the two major modes that it has. There are lower and cameras and other cameras that have third mode that this does not had called a f a, where it automatically switches back and forth and that is something that serious photographers don't like because it kind of isn't consistent about what it does and so for basic photography leave it in a f s when you get to sports action photography, then you switch it over to a f c and then we get to the really interesting stuff. Come on, clicker come on, clicker everybody think good thoughts for their liquor. There we go okay, so if we hit the button and we turn the front dial we now have many, many different choices off what area we get to choose in so let's go through these one by one, the first area is a single point. We have fifty one different folks listen points we can choose from and we can choose any one of those fifty one points by choosing the s and then adjusting which one of those points we want next up is called d nine stands for dynamic nine point focusing now as you'll note here this is on ly good in the a f c or continuous mode this is one of my favorite modes for shooting action or sports photography. If the subject is a little bit larger in frame, you can use the d twenty one which works the same way as the dean I it's just a larger area now this group of nine and this group of twenty one can be moved left right up and down to your specified area within the frame. We then have a d fifty one which looks at all the focusing points and it's available in the continuous mode only as well. We have a three d mode where the camera looks at color information to try to track focus and this is kind of, you know, the nikon gurus setting up a program where it's really tracking using a lot of different data. Some people have found that it is less consistent in some scenarios and so my default is to not recommend this because it doesn't work as consistently as the d fifty one or some of the other dynamic modes on the camera this camera has a new mode that some people when this camera came out they got very, very excited about the new group mode because this is something that was on ly in the deformed the d for s and I don't mean to burst your bubble but this group mode should have been called d five because it's a five point focusing it uses the dynamic and it works very much in that same manner and it's just a smaller tighter little area but it uses five points rather than one or nine but it's good when you do have pretty precise control of where you're able to hit that on a particular subject works really well and a sport like football where you've got players crossing in front of each other and you really want to kind of keep it lined up on one particular player in general and then we have an auto mode and the auto mode is all the points on there there is a slight difference in the auto mode between that and the d fifty one because they're both using all focusing points in the d fifty one the difference is is that you get to choose one point that it starts out with and then it will cover the entire area if that subject moves the auto area doesn't look for anything in particular it's just looking for everything and when all these focusing points go out what happens is it stops at the first solid object it sees? It assumes that that's what you want to focus it and so I don't like the auto mode because sometimes I have things in the foreground that it's not my main intention to be in focus and so kind of for the discerning careful photographer they tend to like the s mode where you get to choose one specific point so with the s mode the day nine the d twenty one you have some options about which points you're choosing and if you do want to choose something other than the centre point, you can adjust it left and right so if you do choose the single the d nine or the g twenty one you khun change which focusing points you've chosen by using that controller on the back of the camera and so let me just do a quick little demo here and so if we go in tight on the camera and I'm gonna put this in film oh adan and I'm going to change it as you can just see if you can get really close and you can see are focusing points over here on the left and I'm just able to cruise around and choose any one of the different points if I hit the center one it jump straight back to the center, let me change the focusing area to something more exciting and what's it got to be in the continuous vote for this to work I'm going to choose d nine and you can see how I can change this mode off to the left and right and it will also show you this in frame while you're looking through the viewfinder and so if you are shooting and you want to have it off to the side I highly recommend it allows you a little bit more interesting composition on that okay, let's, talk a little bit more about these focusing points you guys don't mind if we get into a little geekdom here, do you? All right, so the focusing points on how they work they're looking at lines and so they like contrast but particular they like lines and so they have some sensors in here that are known as horizontal line sensors if you stick a vertical line through him, it doesn't sense them because this line has to cross over both sensors and sew it if it's over one or the other it's in the middle it just doesn't count doesn't work it's looking for horizontal lines and it understands when the lens is unfocused it's a broken line and it understands how to turn the lens for focusing now there's other sensors within the camera that are specifically looking for vertical line sensors and so it knows how to look for vertical lines and how to how to focus for them and so within different types of cameras you might have a focusing sensor that is an f two eight horizontal line sensor now what this means is that you need to have a lens that is f to eight or faster and there's not a lot of those but f to eight or faster and it has the horizontal line for focusing, and so this isn't the best type of focusing system f four means you need an f four lands and there's a lot more of those in a vertical line sensor and the type of line that I love is thie f five six cross type sensor, which means it works with all lenses that are f five six or faster and currently all the lenses available from nikon haven't aperture of f five six or faster and across types answer means that it's good with vertical lines as well as horizontal lines, so let's, take a look at the fifty one focusing points and what they offer in this camera. So in your camera you have a lot of five let's cross type they're all going to work at all. All focus points will work with all lenses, however it's that group in the middle that is what we have here we have fifteen focusing points in the middle that air cross type sensors with one's off to the side are horizontal line on ly in what they're looking for next up we have this next group that you see here in blue these are good with lenses in the f five six two f eight range now wait a minute john didn't you just say that all lenses or five six or faster I did take a lens like a five hundred millimeter f or throw on a tele converter the tc one point seven and that puts you smack dab in this range you have the middle mina's cross type points and those ones off to the side as a horizontal line sensors so you are limited once you start getting in to slower than f five six lenses and then for our final one we have a smaller group in red here that are f ate type sensors so let's say you take an f four lens like a six hundred millimeter f or you throw it two times converter on it you're now at f ate or you taken eight hundred five sixty you put a one for comfort you're a deaf aid as well. The center point is your cross type auto focus and you do have a a bunch of them off to the side and one on the top of the bottom that are horizontal line focusing on ly so in general what you can take away from this is that the closer you get to the center the more they're they're all accurate, but the more sensitive the focusing points are. And so when you are using the bigger telephoto lenses with tele converters, really be thinking about using that center focusing point as your main focusing point. Okay, so in review we're gonna press are focusing button on the side of the camera, we're going to turn the back dial to control single versus continuous focusing will turn the front nile to control what area we focus in and of course, be aware that if you can't get to some of these, the reason why you probably can't get to him is that your camera is in the s mode. If you're in the single serve o f s mode, you're only going to be able to get two single hand. Let me just confirm here, get the single you have single auto and that's it, so you're just gonna have either one or all of them, but if you do have it on either one or the dynamic nine or d twenty one, using the touch pad in the back of the camera to select where you want it, and if for some reason you can't get it, you can't get away from the center, let me show you on the back of the camera think I may have failed to mention this is that there is a little lock switch right here. So let's say you wanted to set it to the left, you could move it off to the left and you could lock it in. And so this is just simply a lock lever it the button, this this control pads still technically moves, but it's not making any changes in the camera. And so make sure this is in the on position, which is the non lock position on the camera. And so that is the focusing system on the cameras. So hopefully that clarifies all of that for all of you. Okay, I was just checking over a gym to see if we had any questions, and I think we're for asking. I think a couple questions don, that I feel a little bit more for your fundamentals. Class about focusing like, if you have a large group, you know what? What? You're focused point. You have small, you have large? Yeah. Would you would you agree that your fundamentals course I think that dress is it more? Because that's not an operational that's. More like a photography question. Exactly. Yeah, and they're great questions, but we just don't have time to address all of them. Yeah, folks are asking about landscapes and, like really john's fundamental class addresses all of those different focussing scenario so I'd encourage you to check that out and I'll post a link in the chat rooms as well I'll mention that later because I do have the fundamentals class which kind of it's not just the basics but it's a lot it's kind of what you're supposed you know he's a photographer but that's my tag line you're supposed to know this stuff on and then I do also have a landscape class for people who are interested particularly landscape photography that's on the side so over on the left hand side of the camera we have a bunch of ports that opened up allow us to plug in with lots of other devices. The first is a microphone the camera does have stereo microphone built in, but if you want really good quality sound you need a good quality microphone and you can plug that end that standard mini jack if you are interested nikon makes their own not that it's any better or worse than anyone else's, but they do make a very compact one that will plug into the hot show the camera other brands that I highly recommend our sign heuser and road they make a couple of nice compact dslr type microphones we have our headphone jack and so if you want to monitor sound while you're recording uses a standard mini jack you can plug in your standard small headphone jack into that next up, we have our usb connection. There is a nikon wireless transmitter that you can get very nice transmitter. There are many other brands that you can get that fit more of a generic system, but nikon has their own. This is also how you would download via usb cable to your computer on it slow way I don't recommend I'll have better recommendations for downloading in a moment. Hd my port if you want to send the video signal out of the camera for either recording purposes recording their movies or just showing on the tv what you've recorded on your camera, you would use thes little mini out of html and then there's a couple little holes next to the usb in the hd my port and this is a cable clip port, and so if you are going to have cables connected to this like you are tethered in a studio, you may want to use this cable clips so that the cables and don't fall out because the actual connection is not real strong, and if you have a heavy cable or the cameras up on a tripod, the cable might be falling out, and this will help prevent that cable from coming out. But do be careful with all cables and pulling your camera off the tripod or pulling the tripod down with the camera.