Lessons

Lesson Info

Display System

All right, well we're going to get back to the camera and start talking about the display system so we're talking about what you see in the viewfinder display as well as the lcd monitor on the back of the camera and first off we're going to go ahead and start taking a look in the viewfinder display what do we see? What is there and what's going on? So first off is the actual frame area that you are looking at this is not one hundred percent accurate it is ninety five percent coverage which means you're going to actually get about five percent more than your shooting and so you're going to get a little bit more around all the edges then you see in the viewfinder so take note when you are trying to align something with the very edges of the frame next up the camera has eleven focusing brackets in there and they're going to be spread around the middles tops the bottom in the side and so forth. The one in the middle is a cross type sensor which is sensitive to both vertical and horizontal ...

lines the top and bottom we're going to be sensitive to vertical and the side ones are going to be sensitive to horizontal lines and so it's different types of lines and different types of contrast that these brackets are sensitive to when it comes to focusing down at the bottom of the display below the frame is the led information now you will never see it all lit up like it is right here this is done so that you can see that what all the options are and so what we're going to do is just kind of go through these one by one and look and talk about exactly what's going on, so starting on the far left is a green circle is a focus indicator, which means you were in focus and this will also work if you are in manual focus, so if you want to manually focus with some elektronik assist, you can do that by just looking for that green light to turn on. Next up, we have our auto exposure locket if you call in the back of the camera there's the auto exposure lock button just to help let you know that you have fully pressed down on that button that light will come on while you are doing it the flexible program remember when we were in the program mode on the top of the camera, we turn the command wheel on the back to get a different combination of shutter speeds and apertures that which means we're we're still letting the camera pick the correct shutter speed and aperture it's just that we're kind of telling it to ten to one direction or the other next up we'll have our shutter speeds and our aperture r f stops is another way of calling apertures that's why there is a little f next to the number and then our exposure level indicator here and this is what you're going to be using for manual media ring if you want to select the manual metering mode and select shutter speeds and apertures yourself, you will use this now one thing to take note of and I I love toe to bug nikon about this is you'll notice that the minuses on the right hand side which is a little awkward in my opinion for any of you math majors out there minus would usually be on the left side and this is something that we can switch when we get into the menu system, which I think is a nice little option tohave we have a battery level indicator let you know if your battery is running low our flash exposure compensation if we've adjusted the flash it's kind of an important thing to know about and we will know in here if we've made that adjustment exposure, compensation the same type of thing brightening or darkening the scene and then we're gonna have ah kind of a grouping of other information that kind of depends on how the cameras set up in working at that moment it's either going to show you the shots remaining or the burst which is how many pictures can you take in a rapid succession right away and that is generally going to happen when you press halfway down on the shutter release let me give this a try right now right now my camera says one hundred thirty six so I could get one hundred thirty six shots it's on this memory card when I press halfway down it has kind of like a little r and eleven which means that I can get eleven shots in one burst of this now what you say having the your camera may differ according to the size of the memory card you have in there and whether you have j peg raw or some of their combination set that's a little differently than I have my camera set up next up we owe that and that can also be used for telling you what your eyes so is and these are going to be one of the options that we're going to be able to change when we get into the menu system on it. Next up is thie auto aya so indicator if you have your eyes so set toe auto it'll let you know right there if you have a big memory card in here where you can handle more than a thousand shots there isn't enough numbers right there to indicate two thousand shots so what he would say to k so to k is equal to two thousand or two point five k is two thousand five hundred pictures approximately it'll get a little bit more accurate when you get down to less than a thousand shots. The lightning bolt simply indicates that the flash is ready to fire and is going to fire on the next shot and then there's a warning indicator over on the right hand side. If something has gone wrong, maybe your memory card can't be written two or something like that, but it's just kind of a little warning that something's going wrong on the camera, so we're gonna move to the back of the camera and the articulating movable lcd that we can flip around. This is going to give us a lot of very important information in the menu, which is where we're going to get to well, in a little bit is going to we were all the information is stored, the information screen that we're about to pop, pop open and look at here is where the most important features of that menu are located, and we can get to that by pressing the information button on the back of the camera, and this is going toe open up the display. Yeah, that you see now we can also press the information, but in on the top of the camera to turn that on in office, well, in here, what we're gonna be looking at the main things we're going to see its first off what shooting mode we are in and so as we change shooting moz that will change right there in the display for us so we have a manual shooting most selected their next up we're going to have a very large shutter speed indicator and aperture indicator next to that now both shutter speed and aperture have a graphic over on the left hand side which is kind of cool because as you change your aperture you can see I'm closing this lends down and I am going to open it up and you can see the actual graphic of the aperture opening and closing and I know a lot of newcomers different to photography are not real familiar with the aperture and so this just reinforces what's going on it so I think this is a very helpful learning technique for any new photographers having this graphic display turned on we can turn this off if we want to now the shutter speed also has a graphic it's not quite as interesting it's just simply some lights that turn on going around the aperture but it's a nice little additional way to seymour information and then below all that we're going to have our exposure indicator which lets sweeten lets us know if we're under exposed or over exposed for a proper exposure let's see if I'm going to set up my camera here for even exposure at one point six one over one point six, which is a little bit of an awkward shutter speed, I might say, there we go half second that's a pretty normal one, okay, so back with the keynote along, the top part of the frame is going to be a bunch of other information and some of which is not necessarily going to be right here, but we'll have things like the manual flash, datum printer, auto, eso indicator, multiple exposures, hdr deep, the battery gps, and I if I and so we're going to, we're going to control a lot of those things when we get into the manual, the menu of the camera, and so we need don't need to worry about those too much. Right now, down there at the bottom, you're going to see the total remaining shots there is going to be a little indicator down there I set that means you're going to want to press the eye information button if you want to get in and make a further setting change, and when you do that, the screen is going to change, change colors and so forth and there's going to be something in yellow and that's kind of the active area that you are working with. And what you're going to be doing once you're in here is you're going to be using that little multi selector on the back of the camera to go up down left and right and then using the ok button to indicate that you want to make a change or work in that particular field now over on the far left is also a help button just to remind you if you're not sure what you're looking at, you can hit the help of button which is the question button down there by the right hand corner of the screen on the back of the camera which also nancy it's it's pretty close to the garbage can button and that'll pull up more information and tell you more about what you're actually looking at so what we're going to do is we're going to start over on the right hand side with the quality setting and look at what some of the options are over here so when we get into the quality setting if we go in there we're gonna have a lot of different options raw plus fine raw plus normal raw plus basic raw find normal in basic and this is the file type in which our images air being shot and this is basically the quality of image that we're going to shoot if you want the highest quality image that you can get from this camera you want to shoot in raw rob plus one of the other ones is also fine but raw is going to get you all the true information from the sensor j peg images which is what the fine normal and basic are are more common only used it for instance you want to email somebody a picture the problem is is that when you do created j peg in your camera you can't go back and get all the true raw information from it and so ross sounds a little more complicated at first and the real key to shooting raw is having a good software program to work with now nikon gives you a software program so that you could view and work with your images right and the right in the box that you get the camera with but other people prefer different programs I personally prefer adobe light room I will download a group of raw images in delight room I can look at him I can work on my images if I want to send somebody a j peg well light room could make a very quick j peg in just a couple of seconds and then I can send that j peg off I can throw it away and I still have the raw to work with to do whatever I want night always have all the original data to work with and so if you want the best quality you want to shoot in raw now if that still isn't going to work for you for some reason or another, which you probably want to do is shoot in the best quality j peg mode that you can, which in this case would be fine. There are different quality levels of let me get back in here so I can change this different quality levels of j pigs that you could star and fine is going to be the highest quality normal is the middle and basic is the lowest quality. Now, there are some reasons where you might want to shoot raw plus j peg at the same time, and if you wanted to, you could shoot raw as well as any one of the three different levels of j picks, but for me, I'm going to set it at raw because I like to shoot the highest quality pictures that this camera will allow right below that is thie image signs, which is pretty closely related to image quality. Now, this is only going to have to deal with jpeg images, and so if I said it at raw, I'm not going to be able to get, but if you did did set j pegs, you're going to have the option of large, medium and small, and this is pretty easy to figure out because it's, just a numbers thing, how many pixels are recording the picture? And like I said, if you do plan on shooting j peg, I would shoot the highest quality j pegs that you could shoot, and so I would set this at large. Next up, we're going to be looking at white balance, which is the next setting down. Now, in white balance, it gives you the ability to tell the camera what type of light source you are working under. Now, the options here are going to be anywhere from automatic to a bunch of different types of light bulbs or natural lighting conditions like direct sunlight or cloudy, and then we're going to have another option called preset manual, and so you need to explain a little bit more about white balance, and that is that your camera doesn't know what type of light is lighting the scene that is taking a picture up, and so it doesn't know sometimes what color white is, and sometimes it needs your help. It does have an automatic setting that does a pretty good job, but it measures light on a kelvin scale that goes from red to blue. Now sunlight is going to be around five thousand degrees kelvin cloudy is going to be very neutral at fifty, five hundred shade is going to be around eight thousand incandescent is going to be a very orange light bulb. Fluorescent lights have kind of an unusual greenish yellow light to it, and flash is going to be very even equal with cloudy at around fifty, five hundred now this if you can set your camera to auto if you want, but if your cameras getting funny colors, you can go into the white balance and adjust the setting for the type of light that you're working in. Now. The camera does have another option called preset white balance, and we're going to pass by this when we go through it in the menu system. But what you would do here is you would take a photograph of something you knew was white, for instance, a white sheet of paper, and then you would tell the camera that, hey, this is a white sheet of paper balance light to make all the pictures look like we'll make all the pictures look like this piece of paper is white and so it's a good way to correct for any type of unusual light source that you're in. Now. You may want to check your instruction manual for the exact specifics on how to do this, but this camera can do that, and auto white balance is kind of the final mode and as much as I don't like auto. And a lot of situations, I think here it's a good starting point for a lot of people. The camera does a pretty good job of figuring out the white balance, and if it's wrong that's when you can go in and make it a change and change it over to direct sunlight or flash or cloudy, or whatever the situation may be, so I would probably start with auto white balance and make adjustments as needed from there. Next up, we're going to be looking at s o s o is thie sensitivity of the censor, the standard setting on this, the sensor in the camera needs a certain amount of light, and that standard setting is one hundred that's. How much that's? Just a rating we're not going to get into exactly why it's one hundred not fifty or something else, but it just is one hundred and that's how much light it needs to get a good quality image. Now what you can do if you're working under lower like conditions is you can set the camera to two hundred and the camera is going to take half assed, much light and still create an image, a pretty good image at that, and you could do a go up to four hundred and eight hundred on up the scale and the cameras receiving less and less light. And it's just taking the light that it's given and trying to make it into his good a picture as possible. The problem is, is that as you go to higher and higher, I suppose you're going to get lower and lower quality images. So at one hundred you're going tohave very nice, smooth tones when you get all the way up. Twelve thousand eight hundred it's going to become very noisy pixels are not receiving enough information, and they're randomly turning red and blue, and they're kind of clumping up and they're not sure what to do because they haven't been given enough information. So for the best image quality you want to keep theis so as well, lois, possible as much as possible, but this camera does have a great ability to go to very high. I esos now you notice that the very highest ones they call high point three point seven one in two and in my opinion, it's a little goofy why they did this, it's just kind of a warning that you're going outside of the normal parameters of what they think is acceptable. High one means one stop higher than the last number, so the highest number of sixty, four hundred high one is. Double that at twelve thousand eight hundred and we do have other increments of high point three point seven and hi to in there and so you can feel free to set it anywhere you want just remote remember remember that the higher you go the lower quality image you're going to get when it comes to the censor's gathering of the light quick question for you, john on that sure, what is the from black apple? What is the moment to stop using the hirai? Esos is there a moment where it drops too much? Well, that is a great question and that's a great reason for everyone to do their own little test because everybody has their own requirements it's kind of like when you're driving a car and you drive it faster and faster and faster than a certain point. The car just gets really loud and rough and just doesn't drive very smoothly, but different people are going to have different standards. And so one of the things that you can do if you own this camera is to do do a little s o test shooted at one hundred and two hundred you don't have to do every third stop, so just go doubling the numbers one, two hundred four hundred, eight hundred, sixteen hundred and shoot a picture of each one of those settings and then look really closely at him and determine where you think it drops off. My guess is a lot of people are going to start seeing a pretty big difference between eight hundred and sixteen hundred, and they'll probably notice maurine mohr of a drop off. The more they go, the camera is going to be really good at one hundred, two hundred and four hundred um, but exactly how you see that curve is going to be slightly differently than everyone else? Good question. All right. Next up in our info display is the release mode, also known as thie drive mode. This is going to control what happens when you press down on the shutter release button. Do you take one picture or does it continually fire off pictures like in a sporting event? And so we have single shine press down on, but you're going to get one picture continues where it will continue to shoot pictures as fast as it can about four frames per second. You also have a self timer option, a two second remote and that is good if you have one of those wireless remote, so you want to get in the picture, but you don't want to be pointed the pointing the remote at the camera for every picture take gives you two seconds to hide the remote standard remote mode and then a quiet mode, which is kind of go off you our safe photographing in a theater and you want to try to keep the camera as quiet as possible you can put it in the queue mote it does slow down some of the movement of the mir and other mechanisms so you're not going to be able to fire as quickly as you would otherwise but it's good for lowering the sound by just a little bit next up we're going to be looking at the focusing moat we're going to have a number of different options now one option is going to be to go straight over to the lens and put the lands in ten manual focus or auto focus if it's in auto focus we're going to have three different options f a s and c is an auto surveil mode where the camera is going to try to determine whether the subject you are pointed at is moving or is still and I have found this to be somewhat inconsistent and I don't prefer this mode f s is single servo auto focus where the camera is going to focus on the first solid object it confined and then it's just going to stay locked in as long as you leave your finger halfway down on the on the shutter release button and this is going to be a very good mode for general photography a f c is a continuous mode which is great for sports or action anytime you're photographing a subject that is moving towards you or away from you, or just moving around that you are focused on that will allow the camera to track that movement forward and backwards, and does a very good job of it. So if you're shooting sports, you want to be in the sea for continuous mode. For general photography, I would recommend the s mode, and for some people, manual focus is a good, good thing to use for a lot of different types of photography, and I use manual focus in a fair bit of my photography when I just don't want the lens changing on me. I know where I want it, and I could just turn it right there. It's not that hard. Next up is our auto focus area mode. We were just talking about how the lens will focus. Now we're going to talk about what, what it focuses on, so if you do have it in auto focus, you have a number of choices. The first option is single point, a f, and I think this is a pretty good one, it's a tight, concentrated bracket right in the middle, and you get to choose wherever that bracket disappointed by just pointing the camera at that subject, it also has a dynamic area auto focus, button or setting and this is going to be good for sports where it's going to start where the brackets are but it will kind of reach out to the brackets nearby and use those to help find focus if for some reason focuses erratic for instance in a sporting event the camera also sports a fairly new three d tracking mode which is, well, frankly, a little untested on dso you may want to play around with that with dynamic area and see which one works for you you might find that three d tracking works great for your kids playing in the backyard but dynamic area works better for shooting a tennis match you'll find that different sports different types of subjects with different lenses different angles of you require different types of focusing and so you'll need to test out which one you want to use now auto area auto focus is focus uses the entire eleven points of focusing and what it does is it looks at all eleven points and whatever is closest to you is what it wants to focus on and this works some of the time it isn't always that what you have right in front of you is what you wanted focus and so it's a good general beginner focusing system because well it's got a lot to choose from but for the more discerning photographer I would recommend going to single point so you can very carefully choose exactly what you want. The camera to focus on that's where I leave my cameron that's, where a lot of other fairly serious photographers we'll leave their camera when they have it in auto focus. Next up is the meter in mode. We have three different metering options on this camera matrix center waited and spot. This is the way the camera reads light coming in through the lands through different patterns. The matrix metering breaks the whole scene up into a multitude of small areas. A comparison. Contrast all those areas to come up with. One great finish numbers to what the best exposure is. And I think this is probably the best meeting system in general on this camera toe. Leave your camera. Most of the time center waited is the way cameras used to be this kind of big fat area in the middle, which is good for general photography but could be misled with some types of bright or especially dark objects. The spot metering is a very selective tool for well advanced photographers. I think who want to very carefully read the light in a very, very small area. Most of the time, I would recommend leaving it in matrix and maybe from time to time, using spot if your type of photography needs that type of precision for reading certain types of light aa lot of times I'll just use the matrix metering, shoot a couple of pictures, look at him on the back of the camera and determine if I need him brighter are darker depends on the type of situation but matrix is the general recommendation next up we're going to be looking at the active delighting and what this is is it's a way for you to lighten up the shadows and kind of control the lighting a little bit and you're going to have some options in here of auto extra high, high, normal, low and off and in this particular image you can see that the shadows are a bit dark and if we make a change here and turn on the active delighting, we're going to get a little bit more light in the shadows and let's go toe a side by side where we can see what's going on and you might think at this point well, this is something I want to leave turned on all the time because I want to lighten up those shadows. The problem is is that in many types of photography you want good deep dark shadows and so it's not necessarily going to help out all your photographs and the fact of the matter is is if you shoot in raw, this is something that you can control much better later on in a program like light room or any other software program like photoshopped and so this is not something that I would probably turn on I would leave it off or maybe at the most leave it on low on your camera next up let's see where we're going from here that so that's the active delighting so I would probably leave it on low or are off the bottom on this list is the bracketing increment ah you khun set a number of different brackett siri's in here you khun normally it's going to be off and what a bracket siri's is is it it's going to be a serious let's show you this group of pictures here ah siri's of pictures where some pictures are lighter and some pictures are darker this is a one stop bracket siri's so we've shot one at minus one another one a zero and another one at plus one you can do a two stop bracket if you want so that the images are a little bit further apart as faras their exposure goes and you can adjust this to various settings in here. Point three point seven and so forth and if you really didn't know what the exposure was, you could use the bracketing siri's with modern digital cameras and being able to see information on the back of the lcd I don't use this much anymore I'll generally see the picture check out where the exposure is, maybe take a second picture. Ah, using that information on the back of the screen and being done with it. This was a much more important feature in the days of film when we didn't see our results and we wanted to really be sure of things in the field. Next up, we're going to be looking along the bottom row where we have four more little features down here, and the first one of those is thie picture control, and this is not going to be of importance to anyone who wants to shoot in raw, because if you're shooting and raw, you're going to get a straight all the straight information from the camera from the image sensor. If you shoot in j peg well, the camera is going to set certain parameters about how that image looks and you can go in here and control how that image is going to look. You could make it more vivid. You could make a black and white a monochrome image out of it. You could set it to be a little bit tweaked, morpher, portrait or landscape work. If you are going to shoot in j pigs, I would probably by default, just recommend setting this it's standard. But if you were going to go shoot a bunch of landscapes and you shot j pigs well you might try the landscape mode and see if you like the color and the saturation in the contrast of the images that you get from that it just tweaks the images the looks of the image a little bit and once again this is not affected if you shoot raw next up is the exposure compensation and this is something that we've actually already dealt with it was the button right on top of the camera the little plus minus button with the command wheel but you khun access this through the information display as well next to that is thief flash exposure compensation and once again this is something that we were able to do before with the three fingers we had the one button, the flash button, the exposure compensation and the command I'll all at the same time s oh maybe it's easier for you to go into the information display and change it from there and then finally we have the flash mode which could also be done on the side of the camera with the flash button in the command aisle in the back of the camera but you can go right in here and you can change the flash mode to turn on and off the red eye reduction the slow sink or the rear curtain synchronization with the flash and then finally over on the left hand side of that kind of center block, we have the area that indicates are focused points, so over there on the left hand side we have are focusing points we have eleven different focusing brackets in here, and when we're not doing anything else, if we have one bracket selected, we're going to use the tab on the back of the camera are little mouse pad to control, which brackett we are focusing on, so if you want to focus on the far left bracket, you would use the left hand tab to tab over there and move your center bracket over there. Now you do have to have just one bracket activated, and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my life camera here and I'm going to try to see if I could set this up I'm going to press the information button and make sure that I have one focus brackets selected, so I do have a single point selected and now I'm gonna press the information button to get out of that and we can see my brackets moving left and right as I move the tab on the back of the camera and so you can select one focus bracket if you want to put something off center in general, I'm probably going to leave it right in the center there so now we're going to see if there's any questions at this point that people have about things that they've seen or so can a what do you have? All right, big steve would like to know. Where did you say that? You leave your focus in the auto focus mode? Well, there was a couple of things regarding focus. Yeah, let me go to my life camera here. The first option is the focus mode, and this is determining how the camera focuses. We have single continuous for most types of photography, I'm going to be in a f s for single in the second area is thie area mode, which is right below that, and I tend to like to be in the center brackets. Ifyou're real new to photography. You might try the auto area and it's just going to pick up on whatever it can find in the middle of the frame, but I'd like to be kind of particular, so I'm going to choose the single bracket in the middle, right? Thank you. Uh sweating in the chat room guest one, six, six, three, three I would like to know I've looked in the manual and cannot find out how to set the preset manual white balance like they were elected, but how do I actually said it? Well what we're going to be doing this we're going to go into the menu system after our next little break and we're going to show you exactly where to do that so great hang with us great meira length is used to have a distant scale khun john comment and white was removed oh yes a sore point yes cameras used to have a distant scale and someone's is still d'oh now this lands which is a fifty one point four has the distant scale on it many of the more basic lenses do not they are trying to simplify the design they're trying to reduce the cost and some of those inexpensive lenses don't have focusing scales and so that's just kind of one little level jump that you can look at to determine is that lindsay lohan lands or a high end lens and I would say that probably about two thirds of the nikon lenses have focusing scales but it's those bottom third entry level lenses that don't and that does kind of irritate me as well as anyone who shoots movies and wants to manually focus another lens question from um not lens question but little miss picasso could he explain more about the focal plane position how do you determine the length from the camera to the subject exactly well this eyes referring to the little indicator on the top of the cantor camera as to whereabouts the sensor is in the camera and it's really not that big a deal? I get a lot more questions on this and I just I just want to point out with that little thing is it's the location the distance so if you wanted to measure the distance from the front of the lands to the sensor, you could it's more for theoretical reasons then for practical applications there are some people who do macro photography were you know it it says that it's a needs to be within nine inches for instance, of the focal plane and that's where you might use it. I have never really used it in real photography in the wide variety of things that I've done so it's highly unlikely that anyone is going to need it but it's just one of those things that you now know that your body doesn't fun fact right? All right question from pics of you if I hold the auto exposure lock button, can I keep shooting with that? Or do I have to hold and release each time? Or will the lock stay for a few shots? Well, let's see if I can take my camera here and moving around so I'm going to put it into a program mode and so we can see that the numbers right now are changing because I'm pointing the camera at different things and if I press the auto exposure in it stays locked as I moved the camera around and if I fire a shot and another shot and another shot I shot three pictures and I'm sure they're telling terrible pictures but let me just playing back and see if they're all we pull up some more information and yes, they're all holding so yes, it will hold okay, this is a question going a little bit back I think that I missed from a case dead when we're talking about the commando is there no sub command? I'il that's right that's one of the disadvantages of this camera versus the next level up would treat be the d seven thousand is the command wheel on the back is your one and only way to really change most of the information the higher and cameras in case you're wondering what ah higher in camera is one of the features is is it has another dial on the front so that you could change center speeds and apertures literally at the same time so you have two different wheels in this case we just have one and that means that we have to press this plus minus button down and the command wheel in back to change our apertures it's just one of the features that they've kind of held back on this camera compared to hire in cameras okay, do you happen to know from stand two thousand does nikon publish the details of their various scene modes in particular their specific differences will you know this is kind of interesting I'm going to see if we can go to our live camera here I'm going to go into a live view and I'm going to go into the scene mode right here and as I changed the scene mode you'll notice their settings on the right hand side that are changing so as we go into the night portrait we have changed the flash from no flash to auto slow sink so it's using a slower shutter speed which would be a little bit better for the nighttime moz and so you can see some of the features that are being changed around in here including eso shutter speeds and apertures and so while I don't recommend using the scene modes there a nice way to cheat and get recommendations from nikon as to how they might set the camera so that's some of those basic things right there in camera great uh red he'll fan would like to know is there a depth of field preview button on this camera we do not have a depth of field preview button that is something that is on higher and cameras like the d seven thousand okay and loomis picasso had also asked earlier on my d five thousand there are green dots one on the top next to the info button and one in the back on the other info button. Does that reset as well? That I think we talked about it in this one. But it's going to be the same thing on that camera, it resets the menu back to the factory default. So if you've gone in and made changes to the timers like we talked about at the beginning of this class, it would reset all those to the standard default settings, the way the camera comes straight out of the box.