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Lesson Info

Backside: Additional Buttons

LCD on the back of the camera is a million dots, which is pretty typical for the back of the camera. The touchscreen is sensitive to many of the different types of touchscreen-systems that are being used out on the market, and so, when we get into the playback options, we'll be able to flick images back and forth, we can magnify images using the pinch and stretch technique. We'll take a look at that when we get into the playback option. And so experiment with the touchscreen, see what you can figure out from it. If you do not like using the touchscreen and you just, perhaps you use it with a particular eye, looking through the viewfinder where your nose bumps, this happened to me the other day. I was looking through the camera and the focusing point kept changing around and that's because my nose was hitting the back-screen of the camera. And if that happens to you and you just want to turn the whole thing off, you can jump into the setup menu, go to touch controls, and just turn that ...

off. Now, there's something very cool that I haven't seen on, I think on any other camera, on the market, period. Is that the back-screen can be assigned as a touch-function button. One of the trends in cameras over the last few years is function buttons. And these are buttons that don't have any assigned duty. You get to tell it what it does. And, so on this camera, you can go into the F-1 control section and assign a specific feature. So just by touching the back of the camera, even when the camera is held up to your eye, you can turn a feature on and off. I think they have it, it's a relatively limited group of collections. We'll get into some of the specifics when we get into the menu section. I think there's ten different options in there. I liked one where it turned the grid, in the viewfinder, on and off. Because sometimes I like a grid, but normally, I just want clutter-free environment. And, so, as I hold the camera up to my eye, I could just touch the back of the screen, once to turn it on and once to turn it off. And so it's a very cool system. And so something I think you'll definitely want to take advantage of. Alright, as I said before, the menu is the list of kind of the full, complete list of all the features and options available in the camera. We're going to be spending the second-half of the class going through every one of those items in there. So, we're going to pass by that button right now pretty quickly. The info button, something that we've talked briefly about before, but it never hurts anything to hit the info button. So, if you just hit the info button, you can get a number of different screens up. Now, there is a number of different formats. There's kind of traditional and a more modern format that you can have as far as the display format. You can choose different colors, and so whatever system that you like, if you prefer darker letters on light background or the reverse, or you want a little bit of color in there, you can choose that in the setup menu. Now you may have noticed on the back of your camera, that there are these two green dots. Did you notice that? If you press the menu button and the info button for two seconds, it'll reset most of the features of your camera. And so it's just kind of a generic reset on the camera. And so that's going to take it back to pretty much the factory settings on it. It's not going to reset the clock or the time on the camera, but it does do a basic reset on the camera. The AE-L, AF-L button are for locking the exposure or locking focus. And so let's do a little demo on the camera to show you what this is doing. I'm going to put the camera in aperture priority for this one. Press down on the shutter-release on the camera. And so, let's choose an aperture of 5. and we're getting a thirtieth of a second, but if I move my camera around, you can see my shutter-speed changes. or if I zoom back, zoom in, the shutter-speed is going to change. And if I figure it out that I really want a thirtieth of a second here, I can press in on the AE-L button, which shows up right here on the back of the camera, but is also going to show up in the viewfinder as well. And so now that thirtieth of a second is totally locked in. Now, the other option is for focusing and it can be used for focusing as well. And there is going to be a setting in the menu where you can customize exactly how that button works. Now, the fact-of-the-matter is some people use exposure compensation lock, or the auto-exposure lock, sorry, get the right name, auto-exposure lock, some people use that quite frequently. There's other people, like myself, who never use it, so I want that button to do something else. And so if you do want to go in and program that, that is in the custom settings, F-1, assigning a function button, and so you can get in there and you can control that. Next up is the playback button, so let's talk a little bit in-depth about some of the playback options on this camera. So, once you dive into playback, the controls change over to a bunch of new settings. And so, first option, is you can just simply scroll back and forth, looking at your images, you can delete them with the garbage can button, requires a second confirmation to delete, so it's not too easy to delete. You can use the touch-pad on the back of the camera to go from previous to next image if you want. You can also go up or down for more information. And this will allow you to cycle through different groups of data so that you can see how you had your camera set, exposure information and, to my frustration, I don't know why, but Nikon has all these options turned off. If you want to turn them on, you need to go into the playback menu and turn them on. Which is what I would like to do right now, because I'd like to be able to have these options. So, let me show you on the camera. If you haven't been doing the shortcuts so far, I'm going to go into menu, I'm going to go to the top tab, I'm going up and down in the wrench section, so I'm going to go left over into the wrench, up to the pencil, up to the camera, up to the playback, to the right, and down to playback display options. Now, if I want to enter this, I can either hit OK or I can go to the right, either one will get me in. If I want to go back, I just go left and that gets me back here. I want to go right in here and here is where we have different options. And so, down here at the bottom we have our instructions. If we want to select something, we go to the right and then when we're done, we press OK. I would like to see image only, yes. I would like to see the highlights, yes. I would like to see the RGB histogram, and the shooting data, and the overview and then, the mistake that I have made many, many times, is I go left. Yep, that's all that I want. Now I'm just going to back out and then it's telling me this here. Changes have not been saved, do I want to save them? Yes, I want to save them. No, actually let's say OK. So let me just double-check. I'm going to go in here, yes, they are all checked on. So, now, if I take a photo... Alright, big exciting photo there. Let's playback this image. Playback. Now I can come up here and... Actually, not that info, it's hitting up or down, so that if I go left that goes to the previous image, that's picture number 33, here's picture number 34. If I go up then I don't see any information and then I start cycling through all the other information. I'm not going to go through all the details, a lot of this is pretty obvious, but you have date, time, file, name, various settings of the camera, things that have been turned on, things that have been turned off, and this is one of my favorite, the histogram. It's a visual display of what's bright and dark. And so this tells me with the spike on the left, there's a big area of darkness, which is that block wall over there on the left. And there is a spike over on the right, which is the white wall on the right. And then there's basic information. Actually, that's showing our highlights and here, if you look in the upper-right-hand corner, it's blinking. And that means we have some very hot pixels that we might not be collecting proper exposure information for and it's warning us that we may want to change our exposure. And so you'll see this change depending on what you shoot. Let me shoot a photo of one of our studio lights in here and you're going to probably going to see a bunch of blinkies right there and so a bunch of blinkies, so that is an improper exposure of one of our lights here in the studio. And so go back and then you can just go up or you can go down to go through this. Now we do have two histograms. We have our color histogram, which shows you all of the colors. And then we have our standard histograms, which show you all of the colors kind of combined into one complete exposure piece of data. And so I like this screen for data and I like just the plain old screen for looking at the image, which, not that one, not that one, this one here, the one that has no information at all. Okay, so other things on the playback mode. Let's see, what do we got? We've got the zoom in and zoom out options. So, if you want to check how sharp your photos are, you can do that. You can also hit the "i" button and that's going to allow you to go in and rate your images and retouch them and so forth. And then, let's see, what else do we have? We can also lock our images. Did you see the little key lock right up by the AE-L button? That allows you to lock your images in here. So, let me show you a little bit more about this. Let's playback an image, and let's go back to an image, let's see, let's see if we can zoom in and check sharpness on this one. So we have the plus, minus down here, and so we can zoom in and look around and see if images are sharp. So that's a little over-exposed down here. Let's see if this is sharp down here. Now the other option is that we can use our fingers on the screen to just simply go back and forth. And so, let's see if we can, yeah, we can pinch to squeeze and so, we can go in like this and check out how sharp our subjects are. And so you can go back and forth, there's a little scale down here, on the right hand side which will tell you how big the frame is, you can see it getting more down to the minus side, or you can do it all with the plus and minus. Now, if you do go minus, you get into thumbnails and you can see a large group of images. And I want to show you kind of a cool feature. We did a little group shot here and so now I'm going to hit plus, plus, plus. And, if I zoom in, I've got to zoom in, let's say I wanted to check focus, alright? Well, there's my information. Hit my information. There is a face zoom, haven't you always wanted to have a face zoom? And so now, it's highlighting the faces, and I can zoom in and let's... It zooms from one face to the next, to the next, to the next. And so you can see are they sharp, like I got the front row in focus, but the people in the back row were not as in focus there. And so, it can recognize the faces and it's jumping around through the identifiable faces back here. And so I can back back out right there. And so it's a great way to check focus on different faces. And the way that I did this is I went in here on the touchscreen, I had to zoom in a little bit, hit the info button and make sure that face zoom is highlighted there. And if I want to cancel, I can just hit the "i" button and then back out of this for reviewing images. And so, great way to check focus to guarantee that your pictures are in focus.