Lessons

Lesson Info

Setup Menu: Connect to Smart Device

Now is where we gonna get into one of the new features on this camera. Something that Nikon has just introduced and it's called SnapBridge. And it's a wireless system that allows you to connect from the camera to a smart device, a tablet or a phone of something like that. And what's unique about this from previous wifi connections which are available on other Canon or excuse me other Nikon cameras is that it's an always on connection. So once you get it synced up it's always on and it's got some interesting benefits. One of the main things is that it uses relatively low battery power. And so it's something that you can leave on all the time. Now up on screen are some of the things that are most beneficial about what this can particularly do. And so we can add Geotag information. We can auto upload from the camera to the phone. So we can just be out shooting with our cameras and when we go to our phones our pictures are automatically downloaded right into our phones without even having ...

to press any buttons just because we've set it up ahead of time. I will be able to do some clock updates, imprints on photos, and so we'll even be able to do firmware updates through our phone to update the firmware of the camera. So the way that we do this and we're gonna do this live. Let me walk you through the steps first and then I'm gonna try to do it myself which I usually stumble and make a number of mistakes but you're gonna try to go through it. And so here is how you would do it with your camera and your phone. First off, there's gonna be things that you need to do with your phone and things that you need to do with your camera. The first thing that you need to do is you need to download Nikon's SnapBridge. They've had some other wireless systems but this is the new system that they're using. You can get it on Google Play. You can get it at the App Store. So you'll need to get that app on your device first. Next up, in the camera, is you're gonna need to go to the setup menu and connect to the smart device which is exactly where we are in the menu system right now. From there you're gonna need to do a few things on your phone. You're gonna need to open up SnapBridge. You're gonna get, go to the connect mode. You're gonna select the camera and you're gonna pair the two of 'em together. And then you're gonna go back onto your camera and you're gonna press okay. So these are the steps that I have written out and I am now going to try to follow them right here with you. So first step, I download the Nikon app. I've already done that on my phone. So the next thing I need to do is I need to come here and I need to go down to Let's get the right over here so you can see it. Come down to the right area, past the HDMI. Connect to smart device. I'm gonna go to the right to this. Alright, gives us a little bit of information and you can read that and we're gonna basically press okay. And so now the camera is sending out a signal and it's telling the world that there is a Nikon D with this particular number right now. This is not the serial number of this camera. This is a one time code that it'll change the next time I do it. Now let's take a look at my phone here and let's see if I can rest it right here so that you can see it. So now I'm gonna go ahead and let's jump into the phone. And so I have all my wifi connections down here, and I'm gonna open up SnapBridge right here. And so what we see up here is an exclamation point. Tap the exclamation point and adjust settings. So I'm gonna tap that and okay folks this is good news cause it says D3400 and this number matches the number on the back of the camera. So I'm gonna select this. It's gonna think. It's gonna work for a bit. It's gonna give me another little window and there it is. Thankfully it came up. So I'm gonna select that. It's now making this Bluetooth connection and I'm gonna say pair. So these two are gonna become a pair. So these two have been paired up and I'm gonna come up over here to the camera and I'm gonna press okay and it's finishing the connection. And so now my phone and this camera are connected up. So if I want to shoot a photo And I want to try to shoot a unique photo so I'm gonna grab a little prop here. And so I got a little camera up here and so I'm just take a photo right here. (camera clicking) And now what's gonna happen is it's gonna send that image to my phone here. And you can actually see the little graphic working that it's sending it to my phone right now. Now it's not super, super fast and it's gonna take a moment. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go down here to my gallery and I'm gonna take a look at the image I just shot right here. And so this is a two megapixel image. It's not the full resolution. It's not the 24 but I can come back and I can look through other images. I was doing some testing earlier at home and I can look through different images. And so as I shoot photos Let me go ahead and shoot another photo here and go back to the connection and see if we can wait for this one to come in. So it should just appear here but it sometimes takes a little bit of time. And it looks like the Bluetooth was blinking and it's working. Waiting, waiting, waiting. I'm gonna go back to connect to see if it says anything here. There it's working now. And I'm gonna go back to gallery and there's our next image that we just shot. And so you can go through and you can just shoot and shoot and shoot and it's gonna go into your phone with two megapixel images. And so there's a number of controls that we can have on here. I can take an image, right here, and now I can hit it down here. And now I can send it off mail. I can add it up to Facebook. I can add it to my photos. There's a number of different direct things that you can do with it from here. You can also have it setup and we're not gonna do a full tutorial on SnapBridge. That's probably an hour or two long class in itself. You can send it up to Nikon's own website where you can give somebody a password. You could be shooting at pictures at the birthday party and grandma in another city, another state, another country is watching on the internet as you are taking photos. They're coming up and she's able to view those later on. We do have a few other controls I'll show you real quickly. We do have some camera controls down here so let me click this. We can go in It says remote photography but you can not do remote photography with the D3400. The D500 which is a much higher-end camera can do it and there are other cameras probably in the future that will work with SnapBridge to do remote photography, but this one doesn't. We can choose and download selected pictures on the camera so this will go into the camera and it's gonna look right now. It's going through all the images that I've been shooting through in this class here. There's some terrible photos in here we're just, you know, taking for practice purposes. But if we, if I recall correctly this is a photo that we took from the video. No, we did some special processing on this one and so I can choose even though I didn't this was taken well before I had these cameras and phone paired up but I can download this image right now. And I can download the two megapixel or the original version of it right now. And so now it's gonna go through the process of downloading that so I can work with it on the phone and send it off or do whatever I want with it on the phone. There's some other controls in here. There's a tutorial in here. There's other information about this particular item. We're not gonna spend all this time going through it. I just wanted to show you the basics of how to get it connected up. We can synchronize clocks and I'll let you play around a little bit on your own on this one but I just wanted to get you set up on the connections. Now back on the camera, the camera is using battery power right now and my phone's using a little bit more battery power to do this. Now I have this all paired up and if I want to and I said you know what I'm just not using this right now I can come down to Bluetooth. And we're gonna get to this in the keynote in just a moment. And I can, I can disable this right now and so it's not sending the information back and forth but if I want it turn it on they've already established a communication between the two of 'em and I don't need to go in and go through a bunch of steps to turn things on. And so I wanted to show you the connection process because that first connection process is the most complicated and they've actually made it pretty easy. I've done this with a number of different brands and it doesn't get much easier than this. The main complaint right now by people who are using this is it does use a little bit of battery power and it's not real fast and it sometimes a little intermittent Now you do need to have the phone close to the camera. If you have it like in another room it's not gonna work cause it's a relatively weak wifi system in the camera so it needs to be pretty close with this. It's actually not using wifi. It's using Bluetooth and it needs to be pretty close to work with it. So that's some of the basics on this. There's a few more controls we're gonna look at when we get through, when we go into the, back to the keynote here. So you'll connect the smart device. That's a one time thing. If you want you can send images to the smart device so you could go through if you recall in the playback menu you could select images to send to your phone. So one option is to just shoot everything and send it over to your phone, and that's a little dangerous there. A lot of information being transferred. Another option is just to shoot photos and then go through and select which photos you want and then send that batch over. And so in this case as soon as the device is turned on it will send those photos across. Now if you want to turn off the Bluetooth system you can go in here. There's gonna be a sub-menu. We're gonna see some controls in here. And so if you want to disable the whole Bluetooth system for conserving battery power you can do that right here. Paired devices will show you which device you're paired with. And just for instance if you want to look on the back of my camera if we go into Bluetooth it's turned off right now but I can go in and I can turn it back on or I can turn it off. I'm gonna leave it off right now to save battery power. But under paired devices you'll see that it's paired up with my iPhone and it looks like it's even pulling up the date that I made that pairing on the iPhone. And so you can see which device you're exactly on. And then the third and final option here is do you want to have this send while the camera is turned off? And so even though you have the camera turned off it'll still be turned on internally sending photos off. And so for battery consumption reasons I'd be real careful about this. Normally I would leave it turned off unless you really need to get those photos out and you want it to do it at any time. So those are a lot of different connections in there on how you can turn things on and off with the Bluetooth. Alright continuing onward. Conformity marking. I don't know why it's in here but the camera meets certain standards and these are the confirmations that it's done it. Slot empty release lock. What this is gonna prevent you from doing is trying to take photos when there is no memory card in the camera. And so if you've forgotten to put film in your camera it won't allow you to shoot photos. And so this is pretty handy. The only reason, in case you were wondering why would you want to shoot photos without a memory card in there? If you work in a camera store and you want to show what the shutter sounds like and what it feels like to shoot photos then that's why you would want to turn it on. Alright, if you want to just reset everything in the setup shooting you can do so here. The firmware is the software that operates the entire camera and from time-to-time Nikon finds either a mistake or an improvement and they will post new firmware at their website. So the idea is that you go to Nikon's website. You can just do a search for the D3400 firmware. You're gonna download that firmware to your computer. You're gonna take that file. You're gonna put it on a formatted memory card. You're gonna put the memory card in the camera and then you are gonna come right here to where it says firmware version. And it's gonna recognize that there is new firmware on that memory card and it's gonna ask you if you want to upload it. And then it will take a few minutes and it will download the new firmware that has any sort of improvement on the camera. And we could already tell there's been one improvement because at least at this point right now the camera is at version 1. and at some point in the future Nikon may upgrade that and may be a little bit better in the future. Now there is lens data information in lens firmware that may also change as well. So be aware that you can change that, as well, in the same way. Alright, the retouch menu is one that we're not really gonna do much in. This is Photoshop in the camera. This is where you can tweak your images after the fact and the one example I do want to give you in here is under RAW processing. And so let me make sure that my camera first off is in RAW shooting. So right now I'm gonna change my image quality to RAW, and I'm gonna take a quick picture here. (camera clicking) Okay let's get this back down here. There's my photo and I want a JPEG version. I want a send a JPEG version out or I want to transfer one off the memory card. And so what I can do is I can go into retouch menu under NEF RAW processing and I'm gonna go to the right here. Now I have different images I can choose and there's just one I shot in RAW so that's the only one so I'm gonna press okay on this image. Now here's my image and I can go up and down and I can select different features. For instance, it looks like my camera everything's very blue because my camera's currently set to the tungsten lighting and I'm gonna change the lighting on this. And I'm gonna choose cloudy lighting on this cause I'm getting better colors off of it. Now I could go into the brightness and I can make this brighter or I can make it darker. Now the original image here at zero looked a little bit dark to me so I'm gonna brighten this image up by a stop and 1/3. And let's see what other changes can I make on this? And everything else looks pretty good so I'm gonna go up here to execution and I'm gonna say okay. And so now I have a new version of this image, and so let's go back. Here is the original RAW version and here is my corrected version that I did in camera. So as I say Photoshop in the camera. Now we don't have a lot of controls but there are a few things that we can do. If you shoot a RAW image you want to get a better looking JPEG image that you want to tweak a few settings on you can do that right in the camera without even needing a computer at all. So you can take a look through there and explore some of the options. It's not something a lot of people are gonna play around with but it is possible. Now there are many other things that you can do there. You can trim and you can resize your image. That was just what we were doing with the RAW image but you can also work with JPEG images in many ways as well. And so there's some fun things in there. You can add a fisheye effect and make it look a little goofy and so forth. You can change it to black and white. And so as I say I'm not gonna go through all of those but you can play around in there if you want to tweak and adjust. One thing to keep in mind is that you can never damage an image doing this. What you do is you create copies of images when you do it. So you can use up more memory but you're not gonna damage the original image whether it's a RAW image or a JPEG image. The final tab is recent settings and this just is a listing of places that you have been in the menu recently. So if you went in, you made a change and you kinda forgot where it was you can just come here to recent settings and you'll find a listing, a short listing of the places you've most recently been in the menu system.