Lessons

Lesson Info

Setup Menu

All right, now we are into the setup menu. A lot of these modes in here are one-time features that we're going to set up for the camera, a lot of things we don't need to come back to. The notable exception is item number one in here, which is formatting the memory card. When you format a memory card, it deletes the photos, it deletes the data directory, ghost folders, and anything else that might be on that card. It's something that I like to do for every important shoot, every time I go on a trip where I'm going to be shooting photos. I want to leave with a fresh memory card. So, if you want to get rid of everything on the card, then you would select yes and let the camera go through its formatting process, which takes a few seconds. You can attach a comment to the metadata of your images and this is really nice for, what I would consider, a light security level. You can put your name in here, you can put your email address, your business name, copyright information, anything that you...

want in here. So, you would input a comment and then, you would come back and you would check the attached comment, so you can turn that comment on and off per chance if you needed to, but I think it's a good way to have some information in your camera. You can also have copyright information. Once again, put your email in here. If your camera gets lost or stolen, it gets picked up by the police department, if somebody comes in here and they want to find the rightful owner of the camera, you could have that information in there. I think that's a good thing to have. Time and zone date. That's one of the first things that you will be setting when you get your camera right out of the box, but you can come in here and make all the basic adjustments on it. Time zone, chose which time zone you're in. This makes it easier when you're traveling. You don't have to change the time and date, you just change what time zone you happen to be in. Time and date, obviously will be able to be set in here. If you have your camera connected up to a smart device, like a phone, you can have the time and date information, which it's getting from the nuclear clocks I think that they have the time running on, officially, and so, you can have that very accurate information passed down to your camera. If you do not do this, you will need to adjust every time we go into daylight savings time and when we come out of it and you'll find that the clock in the cameras, I don't know why, but for some reason, they drift a little bit, so they might drift upwards of a minute or two in six months. So, if you wanted to keep it really accurate you can do so by keeping that turned on. You can choose which date format you like, whether you like the years first or the day first. I kind of like the year first, that way everything stays chronological on the images and then, you can simply turn on and off daylight saving time as we go in and out of that. Choose your language for the menu system and all the operations of the camera in here. And, the beep. So, when you have the camera from the factory, it has the beep turned on and this is going to beep at you every time the camera focuses. It also works with some of the touch controls in the camera and let's you confirm that you are making certain settings and that you're focusing properly and is all well and good at the beginning, but then it gets a little irritating, gets tiresome, especially if you're working around other people and other photographers. It gets a little tiring hearing everybody's camera beep beep every time they're focusing, so to keep your camera nice and discreet, you can just turn this off. If you do have it turned on, there is an option for different pitch levels, enabling you to hear it, potentially, better if you're not so good at hearing. Next up are touch controls. If you like the touchscreen on the back, you want to leave this enabled. You can enable it only in playback. Perhaps, it distracts from you when you're shooting 'cuz you're bumping it with your nose or your hands or something like that and so, you can completely disable it if you want or you can leave it active only in the playback options. Monitor brightness is something that I don't expect you to change a lot. It's probably going to be set to zero, right in the middle. If you do need to playback images and you're trying to show some of the images in the back of the camera in bright sunlight, you may need to pump the brightness of that up a little bit, so that they can see the images a little bit more clearly, but if you do judge using live view, the exposure of your images, you probably want to leave this on zero just so that you're getting normal exposure reading off the LCD. Next up is info display format and we get to dive in to a little sub-menu here where we get to choose exactly what our display looks like. We have the classic setting and then, we have the graphic setting. The graphic setting is kinda cool for anybody who's new to photography, just for that aperture diagram that opens and closes. They did a nice job doing a nice visual representation of what's going on in the aperture in the setting that you're adjusting. The shutter speeds and ISO don't work quite as cool in that manner. There's less visuals to look at there. Choose whichever one, whichever color makes you happy. You can also choose whether they work one way in the auto scene and effects modes versus the program, shutter priority, aperture priority, and manual modes. I don't know why you need to have it looking differently than both, but you can have them looking differently depending on what mode you are in. There's going to be a couple of items in here that determine how this is turned on and turned off. What activates the info display, usually, just pressing down halfway on the shutter is going to turn on the display on the back of the camera. If you leave this turned off, you will have to hit the info button with your finger. So, if you don't like it coming on automatically you can turn this off and it will only come on when you command it to. Otherwise, it will every time you press the shutter. Now, when do you want it to turn off? Normally, it's going to turn off when the sensor detects that something is very close to the back of the camera which is usually going to be your eye or your forehead. It doesn't want that light turning on for you 'cuz it kinda distracts from you when you're looking through the viewfinder, but if you don't like this, for some reason, you can turn this off. The camera, as I mentioned at the beginning of the class, has an automatic sensor cleaning system that will do it automatically when you turn the camera on and it has a little sensor that has a little ultrasonic shake that tries to knock the dust off. If you wanted to just clean it now, you could. You could also just turn your camera off and on and that would clean it as well, but you can clean it with the camera turned on. You can also choose when you want it to do its cleaning, at the startup, shutdown, whatever you want, whatever seems to make the most sense. Usually, I like it at shutdown just because, when I'm starting up, I'm probably wanting to shoot photos right away and then, by pressing on the shutter release, that cancels the sensor cleaning. So, often times, the camera will never get sensor cleaned because I'm always in a rush to go shoot photos. When you're turning the camera off, you're usually not in a rush. Lock mirror up for cleaning. If you get dust on your sensor, and the way that you know that you have dust on your sensor is if you see black spots in the same spot on every photograph. You'll notice this more when you're shooting photos that have the aperture stopped down to a small setting like 16 or 22. If you wanted to do a test, what I do is I shoot a white sheet of paper at F22, and I don't care if it's in focus or anything else about it, just white sheet, F22, and then I look for black spots on the image. If they aren't coming off with the automatic sensor cleaning the camera normally has, then I need to dive into lock mirror up for cleaning. First step is locking the mirror up, taking the lens off, the mirror goes up, the shutter goes up, you can see the sensor in the back of the camera then, use a rocket air blower to blow clean air, hopefully knocking off any dust that is stuck to the front of the sensor. If that doesn't work, some of you may feel comfortable using a swab system, and there's a number of them out there that you basically are going to swipe across the sensor. The idea is to sweep the dust off. The one example I have up here is a swap and liquid. You put a drop of liquid onto the swab and you wipe it across, hopefully cleaning any sort of dust particles that have adhered to that front side of the sensor. Hopefully, you don't need to do that. Hopefully, the builtin sensor cleaner does its job, but if you need to take that extra step, that's how you do it. There is another option for people who get dust on their image and this is what really bad dust would look like on an image. I hope it's never that bad. The idea here is that you would shoot that white piece of paper, the camera would automatically set it up so that it could see the dust very, very clearly, it would then know where all the dust is, and then it would program and clone all of that out on future images so that you get nice, clean images without any dust on it. Now, this is a nice feature. I've never used it. The problem is that it does require using the Nikon Capture NX-D software. There's a lot of people who own Nikon cameras but don't really care about using Nikon's software. Some people like it. There's a few things that they do unique that's different than no one else, so there are some things to check out. It's maybe worthy of its own class in its own. We don't have time to go into it here, but it's where you can process a lot of RAW software as well as doing other things like this image dust off reference photo. If you were on a far off trip, you had no chance of cleaning your sensor, you couldn't do it out in the field, this is an option that you could do is to do that reference photo and then, take care of everything when you come back. If you are shooting under fluorescent lights, fluorescent lights work by flickering light, but they do so so quickly that we don't notice it with our eyes, but the LCD on the camera might show a problem when you are in live view or the movie mode. Typically leaving this is auto, the camera will detect for it and will adjust the settings so you do not get a flicker problem, but if you wanted to set it at 50 or 60 hertz, you could. Slot empty release lock. If you forget to put your memory card in the camera, do you want to be able to fire the shutter? Most people would say no because they don't want to think that they're taking photos when there's no film in the camera and so, it's probably good to leave this thing locked, that way you can't shoot any practice photos with no memory card in there. Just a good warning that you forgot to put your memory card in there.