Lessons

Lesson Info

12:45 pm - Menu

So the menu section is pretty deep there's a lot of stuff in here and a lot of ways to control the camera, so you're going to get the menu button, too turn on the menu, which is the full list of all the features within the camera and items are organized by tabs into different categories that are pretty, well, logically laid out. Nice job tonight con on this. Now, one of the things you will notice is that the question button down there is something that you can hit for mohr information, and so if you get to something that just doesn't make a lot of sense after this class and you don't have this class or the instruction manual for reference, just kind of hit that question button to help give you a little bit more feedback on what that particular feature is doing or not doing something else to be aware of. One of the things that I'm not super fund of is that nikon has relatively few tabs, which means they have a lot of items in those tabs, and they often have a scroll bar that you have to...

pay attention to. Are you at the bottom where the top of the page? And so just make sure if there is the scroll bar where it is because something may be in that listing, but it may be at the bottom or up above, and you can go up and down continuously to kind of jump from the beginning to the end and from the end to the beginning. All right, so if you want to take your camera, hit the menu button and navigate by going left and right, so typically what you want to do is kind of go left and then go up and down to go to the playback section, and we're just going to go through items one by one as quickly as we can, while fully explaining it all right. To start with is the delete button air delete item in the menu system, which is the same as the delete on the back of the camera. The main difference here is you can go in and delete all the images you can delete him by date if you wanted to, but I think a much better way of doing this is reformatting the memory card, and I will talk about that when we get to the setting for reformatting the memory card playback folder I'm going to go through, and I'm going to make some recommendations, and you will see my recommendations on the right hand side of the menu in gray when I have now, some of these items are going to be visible in the menu system on the right. Some of them are not, but there were things that I would recommend going in and changing, and this is my personal preference for how I would like to set the camera. You can have individual folders on the cameras, so for instance, let's say you only had one memory card, but you had business and personal photos that you wanted to keep separate, you could create different folders also, you have to do that in a moment, and you could look at them in different ways. So if you were just working with your business clients, you could choose which folder you're working with. Most people will have completely separate memory cards for for such a issue, and I recommend turning it to also that way. When you reformat the memory card, you can see if there are any images and all the images that are on that memory card. So I think it's a safer thing to do so that you don't accidentally delete images you didn't know we're on that card you could hide. Image is the reason that you would do this is that there is a slide show mode, and if you just don't want to have a picture included in the slide show, you could hide that image. Playback display options we did talk about this briefly when you play back an image and you hit the information but you can go into this and check off anything that you would like to see is an option in the information view, my preference is to check off those four items on the bottom. I kind of like having those there. The focus points not bad. One of the ones that's kind of interesting is thie highlights. So let me show you what that does. What happens here is that if you were to overexpose an image like this one is horribly over exposed. It is going to blink pixels that are over exposed at you. So it's a good warning for any really highlight situation. So that's what the little blinky zor zebras is the folks in video like to call it. Okay. Next up you can copy image is one of the cool things about cameras that there's two memory cards let's say you've been shooting on one memory card from a lot of photos. If you want, you can take all of those image and copy them too. The second memory card, even though the second memory card wasn't in the camera while you shot the pictures so you can just copy images from one card to another in this case image review you're normally gonna want to leave this turned on this means that when you take a picture it's automatically going to show up on the back of the camera kind of like checking my camera as we go along after delete this is a very nuanced way of once you deleted image what image shows up next the image that you were previously looking at or the next image most people would just show the next image rotate tall this one's kind of interesting if you keep rotate tall on it changes vertical images on you so it looks like this on the back of the camera I prefer to turn this off. The downside is is that when you sort of vertical image you have to look at it vertically on the camera the advantages is that the image is much larger in size and it's easier to see chances are if you just shot a vertical picture the camera is already in a vertical position s so it's easy to see whether it's on a tripod or hand held you can set the camera up to do a slide show mode we are not going to go in and talk about the details of this but once you dive in here you khun set when you wanted to start the image types that it's looking for the frame interval so how long it appears on frame so you can hook it up to a tv set into a little slide show another item that we're not going to talk much about is the print order you could hook the camera directly up to a printer and print images in here, you would select the images that you want to have printed and some of the parameters about how you want to print it. Very few people print directly from the camera all right? That's the playback menu pretty simple we're going to go ahead and maybe we'll take a break for questions at the end of the shooting. You all right? So the first option in the shooting menu is to reset it back to the factory default. So if you totally mess up the next ten minutes of this talk and you're messing with your camera, you can just reset it back to the factory with the way that it came from the factory. All right, here is the storage holder that we were kind of talking about before you can select and create different folders on your camera. If you only had one memory card, I prefer not to mix up a lot of information, but if you only had one memory card, you could stick certain images in one folder by selecting that folder. Not too many people that I know do this it's generally easier and the memory cards air cheap enough towards probably better just to have a separate memory card for separate uses one of the nice things about cameras that you can go in and customize a little bit of the file naming system. There are different systems that it'll use depending on what type of image it's recording and you can go in there and you get to choose the three letter code, which might be your initials. And you could just have your initials on the file naming system it's not the most important thing in the world. I recommend that most people renamed their images once they put him in their computer. So, for instance, I work with a program called adobe light room, and upon importing the images it goes through an automatic naming system that adds any sort of need naming system that I want at that time. But if you want to do it in here, you have the option role played by card in slot to so remember, I'm going to go ahead and use the camera over here, so if we want to zoom in on the camera on the side, we have to memory cards. The top slot is for memory card number one, and then what do you want to have happen with memory card, slot number two? And here are some of the options overflow when the first card fills up. Images get stored on the second card, and so I think this is a really good option. Now. One of the caveats of this is that when you put two cards in there, the number of shots left is only going to be for the first card, so what's going to happen let's say you put in to thirty two gigabyte cards and roughly you're going to get close to a thousand images on each card, your camera's going to say a thousand images it's going to count down to zero and then it's going to kick over to the second card and that number's going to jump up back up to a thousand. Another option is back up, and in this case, you are shooting identical files to both cards. And so if you were shooting a really important event that you were getting paid good money for and you wanted to make sure that all the data got written properly and you have backups, you could write to two different cards at the exact same time you do go through cards pretty quickly that way. Another option is to separate raw and j peg on two different cards, so you can shoot rod of first card and j peg two slot number two now being where if you're doing this whenever one of the cards fills up your camera stop shooting, and so if you stick in a very small card into the wound, so it would depend on the size of the card and size of the royal city. But whenever one card fills up, so I guess with the raw, if you stuck a small card in the raw slot on dh, that card filled up even though there's lots of room on the j peg card, it would only it would just stop recording at that point. Now, there is one additional one that we're not going to do right here, but you can separate shooting, still pictures versus video. You get to basically choose in the video mode where the videos get sent to either card, slot number one or card slot number two and that's, kind of on top of all of this, but that's one other one that will hit when we get to this image quality. Now, this is the same as the quality button on the back of the camera, and in this case, you can see that I have two suggestions, and when I have something in red, that means it's, typically for higher end users. And so hopefully I'm hoping that most people who use this camera consider them selves a higher end user, and are going to want to shoot this camera in raw which is what nikon calls their nikon elektronik format so that's what any f stands for for everyone else just kind of basically getting started they don't have all their software in place j peg fine would be the highest quality j p that you would want to set now if you do shoot j pegs, you want to make sure that you get the size of the j peg set as well when we talk about fine quality j pegs what we're talking about is the compression setting on that j peg finest their highest setting normalised their middle and basic is the low end, so you want fine quality large j pegs if you are shooting j pegs, but I would really recommend either shooting raw or plan on shooting raw in the near future. Next up is the image area now this camera uses an fx sensor and it's going to be best with fx lenses, so your camera's probably going to be set in an fx mode most of the time. If you leave auto dy ex on if you were to put on a dx lands, the camera would automatically crop in so they're you're not getting those dark corners, which is what most people would prefer so I would leave the camera in auto dx so that it will automatically switch if necessary but normally it's in the fx mode with the fx lenses we can further fine tune the jpeg compression in the options here are size priority versus optimal quality and it's roughly in most cases the difference between a ten megabyte file and a twelve megabyte file and in pretty much all cases that I go through on the set up of the camera, I am trying to get you the highest quality images, so in this case I want optimal quality and just to kind of reiterate I'm looking to set the camera to get the highest quality images with as little fuss and playing around in a lot of a different ways that you can do that on this camera. All right, next up is the raw recording and you can go in and unfortunately with nikon cameras, you cannot select different size raw images to shoot by pixel dimension, but you can go into raw recording and fine tune exactly how the cameras recording and I'll cause a little bit of an uproar in the forums with this one, but when you get into it there are two options you can either choose twelve but images or fourteen but images you can choose lost lossless, compressed images or compressed images. Now I've done a lot of internet searching I've done a lot of tests shooting and with my own examples and I've been doing a lot of research on this and what I have found is that twelve bit is not as good as fourteen bit, at least in theory fourteen bit is giving you more color information, but none of the printers and even human eyes our question as to whether they can even see fourteen bit information and so there's a lot of data that we're not able to make use of, and normally I recommend shooting everything in the highest quality mode, but I'm actually going to recommend twelve bit it's going to make your camera operate a little bit faster, you're going to get a few more pictures off of it, and there is no visible difference with anything that I have ever been able to test. I've done some pretty extensive testing where I would overexpose and under exposed by four stops in each direction to see if fourteen but held in mohr information than twelve it and I just I can't see any difference, and I have yet to see anyone that shows me that fourteen bit is better in theory, it's better, but it bulks up the file sizes, sometimes a fair bit by the time it adds up. I am going to go with lossless compressed is what I would recommend, and I don't like compressing and throwing away information, and you do that a tiny bit in the compressed city now I haven't seeing much, I haven't really seen any significant difference here, but I just prefer that one so that's kind of my little place that I would go to to compromise a little bit on that size the rye image but also help you keep a little bit of that speed going as fast as possible in the processing of that information white balance well, this is exactly the same as the white balance button on the back of the camera it's duplicated here. One of the options in white balance is preset white balance and this is if you are not getting the correct color. So here on my office desk I have a white piece of paper that is clearly orange in in very general terms you may want to consult the instruction manual for more detail setting of this, but you can shoot a photograph of a white object or at least an object that is supposed to be white. You will then come into white balance setting here to preset and you will need to select one of the destinations you could have four favorites you might say for different types of lighting that you work with, you will select the image and then you will basically click okay and the camera will correct for that white balance on the shots that you shoot next afterwards and so if you're going into a new environment that has unusual lighting and you really want it to be as accurate as possible just have a white piece of paper or something neutral and color a great card would work, for instance, and just photograph that and go through this and get locked into one of your presets picture control if you shoot raw images, this does not matter. This is for people who shoot j pegs, and they want to adjust the look of their image. There is a button on the back of the camera that does this, but you khun dive into the menu and set it here. I would prefer to set it at standard or a neutral standard is going to add a little bit of contrast and neutral is going to be completely flat lining on any other changes. And so if you like to make those changes later, I would probably set it at neutral if you maybe don't want to do quite a ce much work and just kind of leave it at the basic standard would be fine. Next up is managed picture control. Ok, so just imagine that the previous settings didn't tweak the camera enough from what you would like. You can go in and you can customize thes picture moz that they're saturated as contrast e as you like him to be, and in fact you can actually save the way that you like your image is done and you can transfer them from one camera to the next at least from one, six hundred to another d six hundred. But most serious shooters are going to be shooting in raw where this doesn't matter auto distortion control so let's bring up in image for this one. All right, so this picture suffers from a little bit of distortion so let's go back and forth between on and off. And so what distortion control fixes is barrel distortion in the lands and nobody likes barrel distortion unless they're shooting specifically a fisheye lens and so part of me wants to leave this turned on because there are some lenses that have a little bit of distortion in them and this will fix it if you are into sports photography, this might affect your frames per second in a very slight and subtle way. And so if you're into sports photography, I would say turn this off in fact, I would definitely say turn it off but for the average user it's not such a bad thing to leave it turned on once again this, like many of the other manipulation modes in this camera, is not gonna have any impact on raw images it's only going to effect if and when you shoot j pick images, color space is the range of colors that you can record adobe rgb is what you get when you shoot with raw images it's a larger color gamut it's what I would recommend for most people so that they have the most data to work with on their images if you don't plan to do any processing of your images you just want to take pictures straight from the camera and post him to facebook I would recommend just leaving it at s rgb so if you planned no post processing or you just want to take it straight out of the camera and put it on the web you could leave it at srg b but for the little bit more deliberate photographer who's going to spend a little bit more time I would stick it in adobe rgb now the difference between these two is very very small so don't stress this one it's not a huge deal all right continuing down shooting's got a lot of stuff in the menu so you gotta keep scrolling down active delighting this is where the camera is going to butt into your photographs and a just how bright and dark certain elements are one of those things that is not going to have any effect if you're shooting raw all right so now this picture suffers from the fact that people are kind of lost in the shadows if we were to turn on delighting what it would likely do is lighten up the shadows a little bit and in this case, if we were comparing the disabled versus standard I actually kind of prefer the standard I like being able to see a little bit more that detail that's in that area but some images don't look good when you were trying to lighten up the shadows it depends on the type of photograph and what you are photographing and so my general feeling with the lighting is to leave this turned off this is something that can be better control later in the computer you can do it in the camera but you could always do it better later on next up is high dynamic range and so hdr is something that is fairly new to being built into cameras. Traditionally people would shoot three, five seven exposures, use a program like photo matics and then combined them where they have a lot of really fine tune control about how they put those pieces together. But now they've included it in the camera and there are fans of hd are out there and there are haters of hd are out there boy no way to get a group of photographers talking than to walk into a room and say I love hdr or I hate hdr so the bill ten mode on this camera decided to do a little testing okay, so this is an image just shot with jake clearly a very high contrast image shadows and bright highlights using it in the hdr auto low mode, I saw a little bit of improvement in the highlights toning them down auto normal not that big a difference at ojai a little bit more difference in the shadows and then I did what I normally do with my photographs is I just shoot raw images and I'll take the image into either light room or photo shop and I'll adjust the highlights in the shadows and there's a lot you can do with just a single adjusted raw and so, as some of you might surmise, I'm not the biggest hdr fan in the world and there are certain very good reasons for using hdr but I'm not a big fan with the way it's implemented in this camera. However, if you want to dive into it, there is some fun things you can play around in here there's a couple of different modes as you can see by the screen shot playing around with the exposure, different differential and the smoothing between them. I'm not going to go into the highly detailed fashion really I mean I can appreciate that hdr image I'm not the biggest fan, but I can appreciate it and it's been hard to get a good hdr image straight out of the camera in many cases next up, another little picture control is vignette control, so vignette is a darkening of the corners and this is gonna happen with paul lenses and it's especially gonna happen with fast lenses. Fast aperture lenses are brighter in the centre than they are in the corners. And so in a situation where you have sky, you wantto have nice even lighting across the whole area. And so, in a case like this, I would prefer to have been vignette control turned on. But, you know, when I do people photography, I tend to want to darken the coroner's there's a nice look. In fact, I find that I add vignette control onto a lot of my photographs. I just liked the way it looks. It draws the eye a little bit more towards the center of the frame and away from the corners. This is something that could be handled in post processing programs like light room, so I tend to want to leave this turned off a swell in my camera. The next two modes are kind of similar long exposure noise reduction and hi s o noise reduction. They both deal with reducing noise in camera for different reasons. And the idea is that when you do shoot with higher you're going to get a very grainy or maybe a sandpaper re type look to your image. The built in noise reduction will reduce the effect of that noise. Unfortunately, it does this at the expense of time so let's, just say you're shooting a nighttime exposure of two seconds it's going to take an additional two seconds to process that information and that's two seconds that you can't be using the camera and so from somebody who's done thirty second exposures, it's really frustrating waiting for my camera process? Thirty seconds pictures and so in this case, this can all be controlled later on in light room and photo shop, and so I prefer to turn all this off unless you don't want to mess with the computer later on, you can turn him on, but I think you could do a better job of it, and it doesn't slow down the shooting process in any way if you just leave these turned off s o sensitivity settings. This is the same as theis. Oh, sitting on the back of the camera. But we do also have some additional controls that we can go in here and turn on you can. If you want to use the auto eso control you, khun set a cap for the highest so that the camera would go up automatically select. So let's, just say that you find s o sixty four hundred unacceptable in quality for no reason. Do you ever want to go there? You could set the maximum sensitivity to thirty, two hundred. With shutter speeds with for instance aperture priority or programme mode where your shutter speed is being chosen for you you khun also select what minimum shutter speed you'll let the camera select and you can go in and kind of fine tune this to something slightly faster than than the automatic were slightly slower than the automatic and so for anyone who does want to get in and worked with some of the automatic modes were that are selecting shutter speeds I encourage you to go in there and play with that a little bit for instance if you were shooting sports photography and you knew that you didn't want to go both below five hundredth of a second and you were having your shutter speeds chosen for you you could go into minimum shutter speed choose auto which is going to look at the lens you're shooting so let's say you're shooting eh two hundred millimeter lands it might choose a two hundred fiftieth of a second you khun bump that up to a little bit kind of the higher end so that it chooses something that's maybe twice as fast or four times as fast so that's why you would want to use that okay next up is the remote control mode so if you do have the wireless remote this is the little twenty dollar remote not the plug in remote there are three different ways that you can have it operate you can have it operate a two second delay which would be something that would be pretty good for, say, a landscape photographer where they fire the shutter lastly this we were pretty good in the self time remote so if you don't want to be in the picture yourself you press the button and then you hide you have two seconds to hide the remote the quick response would be kind of a general you don't want to be touching the camera but you want the camera to fire exactly when you press the shutter release on the remote and you could also use it in the near up mode so if you put your camera in the mirror at mode which it does need to be, you would press this once to take a picture and then once excuse me once the first time toe lock the mere up and the second time to actually take the picture hope that was clear all right, next up we have multiple exposure. This is still relatively a new feature in the digital cameras before if we wanted to take multiple layers, you might say we would go into photo shop with two completely separate images and stack them and then work with the opacity layer and I've always felt that multiple exposures on the camera don't make sense because you could go into photo shop and you have much more control over it and while that is true, I have found out the advantages of multiple exposure in camera is that you have you can see it out in the field, you can see what you're doing out in the field, which is a big advantage for that instant feedback. And so if you do want to play around with it, it's a kind of a fun little creative mode to play with next up are a couple of modes that are actually quite similar. The first is interval timer shooting, which will shoot a siri's of pictures at a given interval that you will specify and that's closely related to time lapse photography in most cases were in many cases, people are shooting the interval timer shooting to shoot a time lapse, and they want to collect a whole bunch of images, and then they will compress them and use a video program to make a video well, what's kind of new on this camera is that the camera itself will process all the images and create a video right in camera so that you don't need any other program and it's ready right away, or at least as soon as it can render and work with all the images, so if you want to end up with all the individual images for you to do the work later, you want interval time or shooting if you want to have all the work done for you with one simple file that would be time lapse photography and when you dive into either one of these modes you're going to get into these menus where you were going to choose when you're going to start your time lapse sequence how frequently you're going to shoot shots how much time between the shots and how many shots you were going to shoot and what you're going to get is something like this this is thie duck dodge here in seattle and I believe I was setting the camera to take one picture about every ten to fifteen seconds and I did that for almost an hour and compress that into a short video one of my favorite time lapses from india is another place where I was doing a picture about every eight seconds shot for about a half an hour and then compressed it into about a fifteen second video which could be a lot of fun now the little bit of zooming that I am doing this was done in the post which is why I like shooting the individual images so that I can work with all the data later and so personally I like working with interval time or shooting because I get all the individual images but that means I get a big memory card filled with hundreds and hundreds of images that I do need to keep track of all right next up getting into the movie settings and so if you want to shoot with a video movie section of this camera, this is where you can go in and select your resolution and your frame rates. And so there are kind of specific numbers that you can get in to set, but in most cases for most people I would suggest nineteen twenty by ten eighty which is known as high definition and thirty frames a second which is the way most video is shot. There are those that like the look of hollywood movies and their shot at twenty four frames per second and I'm not going to get into why and how but that's what it isthe we also have lower resolutions which will result in smaller file sizes and in some countries thirty frames per second is standard and in some countries twenty five frames his standards so you may not see all of these listed right now and let's jump to questions because that is the end of the playback and the shooting menus so if there's questions in that general genre we will take them yes, thank you mike from facebook has a question on the zoom in zoom out button is there a way to jumped up to one hundred percent zoom in mode quickly in order to check focus for instance when reviewing playing back images on the lcd ok, so there I'm digging fairly far back into the recesses here so the information I'm going to think is about ninety percent accurate no you cannot that is one of the advantages of the d eight hundred where they have kind of a kind of a snap jumped to a more magnified point okay question from driver forty nine saving time lapse to dot a movie what happens to all the individual files? Are they erased or kept on the card until I delete performer in the second of those they are just deleted they're just kind of put into a video file and they're there in the video file and all the individual images are instantly gone and relax now from pittsburgh the long exposure and hi s o noise reduction modes impact raw files are on ly j pegs they will affect on lee jae picks okay we had a question that I had to get clarified clarity on before I asked it so I understand what the question was okay this is from barney from harrogate north yorkshire the question is is the focus point on playback is that viewable on any third party software when you upload the images to say light room so for example is that information captured in the meta data where you can see right where you are focused and then how would you access that third party software and so I know it is not in light room okay and I would suspect that it's not in third party software I haven't checked to see if it's in the nikon software my suspicion is that it is interesting okay and then we have a question here from h pony conti how does he get that blue screen to show on the back of the camera the information button so we want to switch to my camera right here make sure the cameras turn on hit the information button once to turn it on hit it once again a second time to get into change the settings on the bottom but it's basically just hit the information button to turn it on. Thank you do have a question an audience? I think so yeah john on the custom y pounds once you set the custom white balance and then let's say you're in the field and you want to change it temporarily does it save that custom white balance you go right back to it there are four spots you can save the white balance so if you have one saved it d one okay, you could save the new one at d two and then you could jump back to select the one without having to re shoot a new picture. Okay, excellent thanks. No problem have a couple more questions one from am brick just high I s o reduction work in video mode no it's okay, okay okay and frank german I read that in live view if you put it in manual mode and then change the aperture and it will not show the result darker or lighter picture in the live view is this accurate okay let's go to the camera and you're going to read back this question and I'm going to do the exact same thing that they're doing so step by step so right first step one we're going to go live use that right that is correct okay I don't know what mode ran we have a very exciting scene here oh wait that's the pictures here I come all the way around okay so now what? Okay if you put it in manual mode and then change the aperture okay so I think that's where the problem is is that I can change the shutter speed and we can see down here that we're changing the shutter speed wayne live you yes ok nevermind we're changing aperture I was thinking movie moment sorry no that's fine thank you it will not show the result darker or lighter in prentice's picture in the live you correct? Because the lenses that maximum aperture until the picture is taken now depth of field preview I am noticing is not working in this mode so it will not show you the depth of field that you were going to get until you actually shoot the picture and so if I was to actually try to take a picture here of maybe the keyboard who isn't that exciting and we can see that it's very shallow depth of field I hope we're getting a reasonable image off of it we can change this to do much more depth of field that f sixteen let's see we're probably getting very very underexposed here let me pull up some more information there's our light meter over here so we get down to a shutter speed where this is going to come in handy and so it yeah I am not getting the depth of field when I shoot the picture and I play it back then I do see the depth of field and call it a bug or just a software crippling it's not the way the camera works okay thank you for the good field exercise that excellent excellent good we have a couple of one that's okay, I think we're going all right great. So a question from at home zero zero seven so can you say again in camera hdr on lee works with j pegs not wrong that is correct that is a little bit of a complaint is that you when you shoot hdr it's basically dumbing it down to j pegs and you don't get to keep the raw images that can be done on other cameras but this camera and so yeah if you do want to shoot hdr it's an abbreviated way to do it so anyone who's serious about hdr is not going to be using this they're going to be bracketing and bringing those into other programs okay? So driver forty nine menu says hdr options is not available in current settings what current settings do I have to change? Oh, there was a couple of things that through parameters on it this is a tricky one and I'm trying to remember and I not I don't think I'm going to get it right now but yes, there is something what is it? Um if you were to reset your shooting menu, he would probably be able to do it so let me jump in there actually, I'll do this so you guys concede on my camera here s o hdr scroll down where is my hdr there it isthe hdr off and oh, somebody knows this and I don't know this right now and they're like john say this and I don't know what I'm saying what is it now? It's not color space I'll know it when I hear it one comment here gotta be in j peg mode for hd are well, you know, I said it to a little bit of a delay yeah, what there and so right now I'm gonna go ahead and set this toe fourteen bit raw is for us the type of raw okay, way. Our get out of live new it's probably ruin rana and j pick. So let me. So if I have raw set and it black gray's out hdr so you simply have to switch over to j pick so it's, just simply j pagan rock. I was thinking it was something less obvious than that because there is another camera that has something less obvious that doesn't allow you to do it with. All right. Great. Well, thank you, everyone. For your questions. That's. Keep moving. Okay. All right. So the next grouping of image features is called custom menu, and this is broken down into additional categories. And you will see the little colored ass trick if you have gone in and made a change to that particular feature. And so if you've changed it from the factory default, you will see the little ass trick. And so let's start with group a, which deals with things in the auto focus group. First off is auto focus continuous priority selection. The continuous mode, if you recall, is the sports mode for having your camera. Now, the default system is that your camera has a release priority, which means that if you want to take a picture, any time you press that button, you're going to get a picture whether it's in focus or out of focus, the camera is going to try it's best to keep things in focus, and this is what sports photographers, for the most part, like they want to be able to take the picture, even though it's not perfectly and focus because sometimes when you asked for something to be perfect, it takes a long time for that to be one hundred percent perfect. They're more than willing to take ninety nine percent perfect and get the shot, and so this is the way I would normally leave it now in the s the single shot mode single focus mode, the camera is in a focus priority mode, and so in this case, the camera will not shoot a picture until it's in focus and this let me go ahead and switch my camera around finger on the button there, and so lens has to be an auto focus that always helps so in the s mode. The camera will not take a picture in this mode here. This is the number one problem people have with cameras, beginners my camera won't take a picture, I pressed the button look at this. Then that's a terrible camera it just won't take a picture I'm not giving it enough time to focus on something if I d'oh then I can shoot a picture and so you just need to get those brackets on something that can focus press halfway down and once it's halfway down then the camera can fire the picture and so generally I wouldn't change this either a three focus tracking with lock on okay we have thirty nine focusing points how quickly do you want the camera to switch from one focusing point to the next focusing point? Well, it depends on the situation let's say you photograph a sport that takes place on a court or a field that has a lot of players and referees running around. Chances are that when the referee throws their arm in front of your player that you're photographing you don't want your camera to switch focusing too quick if that's the case, you might want to set the f to number four or maybe even number five if you're tracking subjects that don't have a cz many obstacles maybe a runner in the marathon race or a skier on a fairly open course you might wanna have it at a f one or two if you're not sure I would probably just leave it at a f three and see if your sports photographs if the camera is not switching to new focusing points fast enough and one of the ways that you could do this is in the playback mode that shows you the focusing points that we're used if you keep those turned on is one of the viewfinder options you can kind of keep track of this I'm sorry I can't give you more specifics for every sport available in the world it's going to depend on how you shoot them, what lenses what angle you shoot with what level of competition there at but in the very, very basics I would say just leave it on three normal and see if it works out if it doesn't figure out what's going wrong and either adjusted upwards or downwards from there a f point illumination I would leave this in auto what happens is the focusing points will light up in either red or black depending on how bright it is uh around the camera and so in general they're going to show up in red when it's dark and black when it's bright out next up is an item called focus point wrap around and I think its name should be changed to wormhole okay wormhole all right so let's say you have the centre focusing brackett activated and then you want to go over to the right hand side because you're goingto shoot something over on the right hand side and then suddenly you want to go way over to the left hand side so rather than pressing the left arrow a dozen times, you compress the right arrow and wrap around and go right over to the other side, which I think is a nice feature, which is turning the rap on number of focusing points. Thirty nine is the maximum number. If that number is just too big a number for you, you can reduce it down to eleven points. Not too many people want to do this, but it is available. The auto focused illuminator that's, the little one on the front. So if you don't want that to be a beacon every time you want to take a picture under low light, you can turn it off. And I think many of the more advanced users I would prefer to turn this light off so that it's not a distracting element for subjects that you may be shooting. But if you shoot under very low light conditions in fairly close environments, it will help you focus a bit of a compromise there. All right, moving on to section b things dealing with mita ring and exposure. Normally, when you change the iso settings, you khun go into one third increments. You can change this the half steps if yu want, most people are fine with it at one third steps. The same thing for exposure control. Most people like to work in third stops, but some people prefer half stops and you can set that if you want easy exposure compensation. So if you recall exposure compensation from the beginning of the day, we press down on the little plus minus button and we turned the dial in the back of the camera. If you turn easy exposure compensation on, you don't even need to press down on the exposure compensation button. You just turn the back dial when you're an aperture, priority, shutter, priority or program. And so a very advanced user might like this on I'm going to give us a lot of warnings. A lot of people may not like this because you can bump that exposure sometimes a little too easily. And so for most people, I would say leaving it turned off is the right call. Next up is the centre waited meet oring area for center waited metering. You can go in and you can customize from eight millimeters to twenty millimeters. How large that circle is on screen. Most people don't use center waited metering so it's not a big issue have at it. If that's what you want to go in and manipulate fine tune optimal exposure, the camera is set at the factory to read light correctly as middle tone grey if it drifts long term in the future or you don't like the way that your camera reads, you can go in and you can adjust exposure by one sixth of a stop in exposure. Most people don't want to don't need to go in and do this. This is something that you would only do if there is a problem with your camera, at least you wouldn't have to send it in to nikon toe have it adjusted by one third you could make it the same adjustment with exposure compensation. The difference is here it's kind of hidden behind the scenes and you can work with finer steps all the way down to one sixth of a stop. Next up, we're gonna be dealing with timers and the auto exposure lock first up, shutter release button e l normally this has turned off on what this means is that when you press down on the shutter release button, it does not lock the exposure, it continues to adjust and so is I'm pointed at the light. Let me put it an aperture priority and make this really work change it down to a reasonable aperture, so I'm at a thousandth of a second if I point it right at the light and down here I'm at a hundredth of a second. If I wanted to turn this button on, it would lock that exposure. Most people don't like toe lock the exposure with the shutter release some people do, which is why they give you the option, the standby timer, how long the meter stays on and here's a careful balance between convenience and using up too much battery life. Six seconds is the normal setting, and I would probably leave it there, but you can adjust it shorter or longer by your needs. The standard self timer in the industry is ten seconds, but if you want, you can go short in this down to two seconds or take it all the way up to twenty seconds, so it depends on what you're doing. Why you're using self timer? Are you using it just to take your hands off the cameras so there's no vibration or do you want to get in the shot yourself? Now? One of the additional things it's kind of fun in here if you're going to do a group shot is that you could set a ten or twenty second timer and then set the camera to shoot, say, three, four, five pictures that way in a group of pictures. If somebody blinks on one image, you don't have to go back to the camera and set the camera up again. You can set it up once to take many pictures and you can also control the interval between the shots depending on if here going to do something exciting and fun in between all the shots next up monitor off delay and so you can go in and really tweak off how quickly the monitor turns off to save battery power in certain types of modes and functions and once again, it's going to be a compromise on your part between battery life and convenience. The standard set up is pretty good when you're working with the camera in the class it's probably dying on you quite a bit it's a bit inconvenient, but under normal shooting conditions, the settings that they have are pretty good but feel free to customise away remote on duration. If you're goingto use the remote on the camera, how long do you want the camera to stay on? And once again it's a balance between convenience and battery life if you are using the remote control the wireless remote control one minute is the standard number in there general shooting modes and the display mode the beat? Okay, this is one of the one of the screams of amateur photographer baby pp er, meaning that the lenses in focus at the very early stages of photography, this could be kind of handy to confirm that the camera is focusing, but very shortly into that I would recommend turning it off so that you're not drawing attention to yourself and that you are confirming that you can confirm this visually in the viewfinder with the little green dot on the left hand side, along with what you see in the viewfinder, you find her grid display. Some people like this and some people don't like this. I turned it on and off depending on my needs. In general, I had like to have a clutter free viewfinder, so I normally leave it off, but if for some reason I'm doing a lot of horizons or I'm doing architecture or working with a perspective control lens, I might want to turn that on some people just like it for composition reasons. Next up is s o display an adjustment normally on the top deck of your camera here a number of pictures left is going to show up here. I prefer changing this to show folks I think s o is more important. Then the number of pictures left at least a ce faras on the top of the camera. A number of pictures left is important and you will see that in the viewfinder, but I think s o is a nice one to change it on there and there is also an easy e I s o, which means in the program shutter priority and aperture priority mode, the unused dialled can automatically change the so very quickly. So if you're the type of person who shoots in a situation where they're changing so very rapidly and you want to do it with one touch, you khun do so by putting it in the easiest next up screen tips these air the little helpful hints that come up every time you go to a new setting at first, when you're on the camera for the first few months, you might want to leave this turned on toe let you inform you a little bit about what you're looking at, but after you take this class once you get to know your camera it's just going to block your view of what you want to get to so I would turn it off. For the more advanced user, the continuous low shooting mode is normally at three frames per second. You can take this anywhere from one frame per second up to five frames if there's something particularly you're trying to time. I know that I've worked with the continuous low mode with lights that don't recite recycle at three frames per second, but they recycled at two frames per second so I would lower it down to two f p s for some reason nikon puts the maximum continuous release at one hundred shots, which generally is not an issue for most people but if for some reason you wanted to limit that down to shorter bursts of shots so that you accidentally didn't run through the buffer of images you could do so but most people don't mess with the setting file number sequence I would normally leave this turned on its the way numbers files they should be remembered once you get him into your computer so it's not a big deal but you could reset images so that they start at zero zero zero one but it's better in general just to leave this turned on so that you don't have duplicate file name says often information display I would leave this in auto and what this is is on the back screen of the camera somebody was asking about the blue screen well, generally it'll it looks one way under bright conditions and it looks differently under darker condition and it will automatically change back and forth according to what it thinks is the correct brightness on it. You could manually choose black lettering on a light background or white lettering on a dark background if you do auto, it'll switch back and forth between the two lcd illumination is turned off, but if you're constantly looking at the back of the screen for information, you could turn the lcd illumination on and it will light up when you go up to the off on switch and you flip the lever over to the light switch that does use more battery power, but it does flip all the lights on at the same time exposure delay mode delays the exposure by one, two or three seconds. This is something that might be used in a scientific or potentially a studio environment where you're not trying to get exact timing of the shot, but you're concerned about vibration during the shot, for instance, a mere lockup shot a two second self timer is another version of this, but I would mostly think of this in a scientific, scientific realm where you're delaying the shutter for some reason, mostly due to vibration flash warning. If you don't have enough light on your subject, the lightning bolt will blink at you in the viewfinder that blinking bothers some people, and they know when and when they don't want to use flash and personally, I would probably turn this off in my camera because I know when I want to use flash and when I don't want to use flash and I would prefer not to have something blinking at me telling me what to do when I know exactly what I want to do the vertical grip for this camera. If you want to use different types of batteries, you can use those different batteries, but you should program into the camera whether you're using standard doubles, lithium doubles or rechargeable double a's in that vertical graham when you're using the vertical grip, you can use the battery in the camera first or you can use the md fourteen battery first. In most cases I would recommend using the md fourteen battery first because it's a lot easier to access moving into things dealing with bracketing and flash so normally the maximum flash sync speed is one, two hundred. Technically, you could get up to one to fiftieth of a second with the nikon flashes, but it does reduce the range that the flash works in and so I don't recommend it. I think two hundred is going to be fast enough for most people in most situations flash shutter speed what shutter speed is chosen by the camera when the flash is up and the camera is in charge of choosing cheddar speeds and here's where I have a really wide variety of choices for the more basic user, I would set something around a thirtieth of a second because that's a still a ce you can hold your camera for people who are more advanced, you might set it all the way down to thirty seconds because then you could have the option of having a thirty second exposure with flash, the question is do you know if you're going to be on a tripod and how steady can you hand hold the camera? And so if you're pretty steady and you might be using tripod, you could set a longer time like an eighth of a second a quarter of a second one second so it's a kind of a little love ah, how good do you think you are sitting in this one? The longer the better you are flash control for built in flash you know, this is a real disappointment here. We could have an entire class on this one slide right here, but we're not going teo there are some other classes but here's, the cool thing is that you can use the built in flash to work with other nikon flashes multiple nikon flashes that work in different groups to fire and create really interesting lighting situations. My general opinion is that it seems really, really cool, but in order to do it, it costs a lot of money because all these flashes cost a fair bit of money from nikon and there's a lot that you could do with basic lighting and emmanuel setting okay, kind of drifts off into a whole other world, but if you had, say, the on camera flash, you can take that off of the camera, leave this inn what's called commander moz. Select the commander mon. And then you put the flash in the remote mode and this flash would communicate with the external flash about how much and win two fire. And so for getting fairly simple off camera flash it's very, very effective and does a good job. And so there are different modes that you can work in you. Can you work in a t t l mode? You can work in a manual mode there's a repeating flash mode as well. Where the flash will repeat numerous times like a strobe light during a fairly long shutter speed. And so there's a lot of cool things you can get into here. Unfortunately, we don't have the time to do all of them there there's a whole world weekend workshop in doing off camera tl type flash with these cameras, but this is kind of the tip of the iceberg. Now, once you get in here one of things you khun dio like with the repeating flash, you can control the output you khun control how many times the flash fires, as well as the frequency of the flash. To get some nice kind of stop motion type animation, when you get into the commander mode, you will have control over the built in flash. Group a and group b and you can use different channels so that if different people have the same camera they can have different channel set so that they're not triggering other people's flashes you can go in and set calm compensation mode so you can power down the flash in group a powered up in group b to have a different lighting ratio and so there's a lot of fun things that you can do in here and it's all going to start when you buy one additional flash and then we'll get to be a lot of fun when you have two or three flashes but as I said from the very beginning three or four five six lashes it's really cool there's some photographers who've done twenty light setups with this and I think of the lighting system that I could buy that you would spend behind twenty of the nikon lights with you could buy giant soft boxes all sorts of power packs and things and so there are other ways of doing it but different strokes for different folks it is a good system if you do want to get into it it can be a little pricey for for what it does next up exposure compensation for flash for the more advanced users I would recommend background on ly for basic users I would recommend entire frame what this is doing is it's combining exposure compensation and flash exposure compensation for the beginning, photographer who's just getting ahold of how to make pictures brighter and darker. The entire frame will just make the whole thing brighter and darker. For the more sophisticated person who knows how to separate the flash exposure versus the ambien exposure, I would set this to background. Only modeling flash turned on this bothers some people, but when we hit, I believe the function button. Sure, this turned on at the right here. Okay, this is a modeling light which will help show me where the shadows are. It's also a great way of wearing down your batteries very quickly. So if you want to kill the batteries now, some people, when they use the flash, they accidentally hit this and that's irritating. They can turn it off. Auto bracketing set. So we saw we saw how on the side of the camera there is a bracketing button and that what I talked about before it was just for exposure reasons you can go in and do bracketing with flash white balance or the active delighting options in the camera. Most people are sticking with the exposure and e on lee and so that's where they would have it said, if you were going to do bracken unit all but just so that you know it, khun bracket in other ways as well, all right picky, picky, picky some people are so picky they don't like the way the camera shoots it's bracketing because it normally shoots the normal exposure first and then the dark one and then a light one and when I look at it on screen when I get all my images back, it is kind of nice tio dark middle light but the normal system is to shoot the normal picture first if you don't like it, you can switch it right here to under meter and over, all right, continuing through the custom menu, customizing exactly the way we want our camera to work. Okay, so that ok button on the camera normally reset is a good option. What that does is when you press the button and you're shooting, it chooses the center focusing point. If you want, you can change it to highlight the active point or to turn it off so that it doesn't do anything for many people just selecting the center focusing point is a good option the function button here are all your different choices you have twenty three options for choosing a feature in the function button choose one that you like to work with let's see what would I choose hello focus on that's not exactly where I would like that if I was changing metering system who I would kind of like the frame ingrid because that could turn it on and off real quick or maybe even better yet the virtual horizon that would be kind of nice I like that one um who my menu access that's not a bad idea yes, so there's a number of good choices and they're finally the one that you like the most and program it in you can also reassign the depth of field preview but if you don't find the depth of field preview handy with your photography change it over to something that you find valuable here on the back of the camera is thie a l a f l button and you can go in and you can customize it here doesn't have quite a cz many options as the buttons on the front and for many of the more advanced users one of the downsides of this camera is that it doesn't have to know if I could show you the back of the camera here the d eight hundred has a separate button right about where my thumb is now for activating the focus this camera doesn't have it it just has one button so if you're not going to use a l f l you can change that to auto focus on so you would press the back button for focusing so you would focus with that and then you could take a picture any time you want which is a favorite mode among many many photographers on I will tell you right now that if you do want to change your camera over, it takes a little while to get used to it's, not something that you'll instantly say, hey, this works for me, I would say, if you do want to give it a try, give it a week or give it several hours of regularly use but ah lot of people like separating, focusing and taking the picture with two separate buttons next customizing the command iles ok, picky, picky, picky. This is where you can really get in, and we're going to solve one of the problems from our earlier viewers who had an issue. Okay, so within here we can reverse the rotation of the dials, and I'm going to recommend that you reverse the shutter speed and aperture dial. And here is why, if you see the light meter on screen right here, which direction would you turn the dial to get this light meter centered out at zero? And the question really becomes, are you turning the back of the dialogue? Or are you thinking about the front of the dial? Because if you want to turn the front of the dial to the left, you're turning the back of the dial to the right. So nikon thinks that you should move the back of the dial to the right to fix the problem, and if you reverse this, you can now move the dial so it's a little bit more intuitive, and so I would highly recommend checking this shutter speed aperture, reverse rotation. The other part of this is on menus and playback. I would turn this on and see if you like it. What that will allow you to do is would allow you to use thie back dial of the camera to play back to rotate through your images that you've shot so you can go very quickly, dial through your images just like kanan users. All right, some people don't like it, and they're just like pressing down on the multi controller on the back, but I'd give it a try release button to use dial. Normally, I would leave this turned off or say no for this setting, depending on whether you're in or just looking at the outline of what it's doing, what this means is for buttons like the white balance quality and s o button, the normal way you set features on a nikon camera's pretty simple, you have to press and hold the button, and while you turn a dial, so it does take two fingers the way canon does things differently and if people are coming from a canon camera toe a nikon you could turn this on and what happens then is you would press a button you then have about six seconds to go over to that dial and make the change if you wait more than six seconds, the camera goes back into the standard shooting mode and you would go back, press the button again and then turn the dial. Some people may like this it's a personal preference slot empty release this is what I would leave locked this means if you don't have a memory card in there you won't accidentally think here taking pictures continuing on the controls all right, so here is nigh cons sorted history in the past there light meter has had plus on the left side of the zero which for anyone who deals with mathematical numbers this seems a little bit awkward having plus and then zero and minus and so with the g eight hundred they have I changed it so that the plus is now on the correct side and the minuses on the correct side. But as people are upgrading from older cameras maybe a nikon d seven thousand or a d seven hundred they might be so used to the old system they want to change this camera back to the old awkward system you could do that or you can go with the new system but it seems like most people are preferring to put the plus on the right side and the minus on the left side so usually for most people no change necessary here if you have the vertical grips, you can customize the button on the back of that grip that is thie f l button some people might prefer to have that as a f on as we talked about earlier okay, we're getting into the last sections of the custom menu so these air things dealing with the movie mode while you're shooting movies what do you want the function button to dio what it normally does is does index markings, which will be kind of cut marks that you khun see later on in a video editing program preview but normally works has a depth of field preview but you can reassign it if necessary you can re assign what the nfl button in the back of the camera does it see if there's anything you can have it work basically the same as the function button as you want if you want and then you can reassign the shutter release normally still photographers like to be able to take pictures whenever they want by just pressing the shutter release you can change this over to recording movies so that you're not using the tiny little button you're using the big button so if all you were doing with this camera was shooting movies I would change this over to record movies, but for typical still photographers, I would leave it at take photos, so that takes us through the custom menu, which is a lot of goofy little things, but let's sort of see what questions people have about these goofy little things. Sunny day wants to know why doesn't my sixty four gigabyte sandisk ard work in the d six hundred? It should work. I would hopefully get all the data off of it. So if you have any data on your card, make sure it's downloaded to your computer and reformat the card at the very beginning. It's possible that if you have brought that camera from a either bought it brand new, or you brought it from a cannon or other brand camera and put it in your camera, there's a communication there, and you need to reform at that car and so make sure you have the data off the card because you'll lose it otherwise and then reformat it if it still doesn't work at that point. But I guess even before that you should check that little switch on the side of it. Make sure that it's not in the downward locked position, make sure it's in the upper position beyond that it could be a defective card, but that's not very common. So john, you went over the flash function someone if I can ask a question about that roscoe to fifty had asked when using the built in flash rear curtain sink why does the flash still fire at the beginning of the shot? Is there another setting that I'm missing and roscoe two fifties in northern canada? Well, it shouldn't do that let's go ahead and give it a try with our camera here so I kind of get over here to the side so they can see what's coming on so I gotta pop the flash up and we're going to put it into the rear mode and let's see if that fires at the beginning or the end of the flash and I'm just gonna take it out auto focus okay, so come something completely different but now that I saw it, I can remember it fires at the beginning of the shot it's actually not at the beginning of the shot it's before the beginning of the shot it's a prequel if you will it is a pre flash to test the light to see how bright and how far the subject is and so the first flash is not the real flash the second flash is the real flash so let me point this straight ahead and I'll do it again so the first flash is a little less powerful than the second one and so the second one is the actual flash and so that's what's going on just question in the audience. Yes, for the self timer. Is there an option before putting an audible beep to it so that you can actually hear? I know that my d ninety had that option, but that is the standard beep that you would turn on and off in the camera. And so you can have that. But what's nice about the self time remote. If you are in the front of the camera, let me put it in the self timer mode here is that even though you have the beat turned off, you can see that light blinking, right? And it goes steady for the last two seconds. And if you're good with timing you khun time like jumping up in the air, right? Right. At that time, you can turn the beep on it's. Just the normal beef in the camera. Okay. All right. Thank you. Sure. Okay. Just a quick follow up from hb unicorn una conti. How do you change that? A l f l button to be a focus button. I was disappointed that the button was missing, right, so let's see if we can get that do that, so we're gonna go into the menu system we're going to go down to controls and we're going to go to assign a l f l button gonna go to the right and we're going to go down and select f on and we're going to hit the ok button and so now it's on on and as long as I have my camera in auto focus and I'm going to change us back to normal mode if I press the button in the back of the camera let's go! We're gonna go over here so they can hopefully see it on camera actually, I still have it in self timer. No wonder now the nice thing is is that I can shoot pictures whenever I want, whether the cameras in focus or not and I can choose to focus by pressing the back button and let's see, I'm gonna have so that's how you do it so just while the camera while the camera was still on there you had a driver forty nine you had mentioned the modeling flashes activated through the preview button. Just say again what that preview button is it's uh, let me just re reiterating the question I just asked it's just the top button on the front of the camera. Ok, so that just kicks that light on for about what, three seconds, two seconds so that you can see shadows okay, I know what I was wanting to ask was where is the depth of field previa button depth of field preview button? Make sure on this one is stuff this down hopefully I haven't well, that is the depth of field preview button, but when when the flash goes up it turns into c I don't want to flash myself it does stop the lens down and add the flash at the same time, so it depth of field preview button is the top button and that always works, but when the flashes up, it has the added effect of adding the flash at the exact same time, which might be a little annoying in some situations, which is why you can go in and turn it off in the custom menu. Okay, details, details we'll do one more from dave g using adobe rgb and movie mode makes colors a bit muted should rgb always be used for movies? Well, uh, from my understanding it's not really gonna matter in the movie mode because movies air not raw, they're not j peg, they're compressed into a movie file and I am not one hundred percent certain, but I don't believe selecting either one of those is gonna affect the colors that you get in the movie mode okay, now, having said that, what does affect things in the movie mode is your picture modes how you have your camera set too vivid or natural or standard so if you want to effect your movies you would want to go into that mode and there's the button on the back of the camera the picture mode there's also in the camera setting where you can set that up here we are in the setup menu and so in here the first option is to format your memory card. And so the first thing I do when I buy a new memory card is I put it in the camera that I'm going to use it in and I formatted when I shoot a bunch of pictures I downloaded to my computer and then I put the card back in the camera and I format it you want to format it in the camera that you were going to use it in and that is going to get rid of all the data. So do be careful about formatting cards with images on them because they will be gone save user settings all right remember the you won and the youtube mode well set your camera up exactly the way you want it to come to save user settings and save those settings thievery the u one or the u two city if you want you can go in and you can reset one or both of those by going into the reset user setting and that just clears it out so that nothing is going on in there monitor brightness this's the monitor in the back, the camera and I would recommend taking it out of the auto mode and into the manual mode and just leaving it at zero so that it doesn't get brighter and darker on you clean image sensor okay, so the camera will normally clean the camera at startup and shut down if you wanted to you could dive into the menu system and you could manually do it right then and there but frankly would be a lot easier just to turn the camera on enough because that's which is a whole lot easier to get to then diving into the menu setting but you could turn the cleaning off if for some reason something was going wrong with it and I can't imagine what that would be and I have never seen that but you could turn it off if you wanted to now if you do get dustin on the sensor which is inevitable it's just going to happen on this camera because you take the lens on and off there's air moving in and out you gotta zoom lens you got focusing there's a little bit of air currents going on in there there's going to be a little bit of dust on the sensor so cleaning the sensor there's a couple of different step step one is one of these little rocket air blowers every digital photographer should have one of these so that you could take the lens off clean the mirror box housing off put your camera into the mere lockup for cleaning mode the shutter opens up you can then have access and see the sensor in the camera you would then blow air in there I generally will hold the camera upside down to hopefully knock off any dust in that situation now if that doesn't completely do it you need to go to step two which is a little bit more serious not everyone is comfortable here this is using a swab and liquid and you'll put a couple of drops of alcohol on this very clean kind of like a fancy q tip and you will wipe across the sensor to get it clean and that is what I will generally do I probably have to do it maybe two or three times a year depending on how dirty oven environment I am in with my cameras related to these is the image dust off reference photo and this is where if you have a picture and it looks like this you've got serious desk problems on your image okay so here's what you do find yourself a white piece of paper and photograph it at f twenty two and this is going to show you how dusty your image really is go into image dust off reference photo it's going to take a look at that photograph and it is going to clone out all of those specs so that the next image you take is nice and clean. Now, I don't prefer to have my camera cloning over pixels, so this is what I would consider any emergency situation, so you're on safari in africa, you don't have any of your supplies with you there's no camera re spare shot for miles and miles, this would be a quick way to fix it in the field so that you don't have to deal with dust spots on that many images, so emergency situation there only so apparently, and that there is a big controversy controversy with oily sensors with this particular camera and so day photo bug eyed dbn fx and other folks have asked, I understand that nikon has acknowledged that there is a problem with dust and dirt accumulation on the d six hundred sensor, and that removal may be difficult using normal measures. Do you know if nikon is doing anything to correct this? Do you have any additional suggestions? I have no behind the scenes information that everyone else doesn't. For those of you who don't know, nikon is kind of like a five year old kid, they don't like to fess up and admit that they broke the lamp no, no, the dog did that get analogy, we don't have a dog, no, the neighbor's dog came in the house and broke the lamp I didn't do it and so they tend to be a little bit slow in fessing up to these problems and it was well described you as well describe there is a situation where it appears that in the manufacturing of the camera and the lubricating of the shutter blinds, there was a little too much oil put on or there it wasn't in an enclosed area and some oil specs were getting on the sensor and this is caused dust specks on the sensor and if you own a d six hundred, I would do periodic tests shooting a white piece of paper during the first year of service. If you have issues your camera's covered under warranty, I would send it back to nikon and have them fix it in general. What I have heard about this problem is that it dissipates in time and so this is a good encouragement teo get out there and shoot through at least two thousand images in your first year of ownership of the camera and seeing how the camera's still brand new. We're talking about the first year, which is what most warranties are and I've heard the problem completely dissipates or diminishes greatly after well really a thousand shots but definitely two thousand shots and so I would just let nikon clean it up now it does mean that you might be without your camera for three or four weeks, depending on how long it takes them to clean that up, I can only imagine that this is something that they're fixing on new dc six hundreds, so in the year, twenty, fourteen or twenty fifteen, if you're buying this class and watching it, then it's probably not an issue. It was just a matter with the early ones, and I think we're getting people saying it's, not an issue for them now. And, well, that tr p says the nude batch seems to be good and his didn't have that issue of hers. Tim w said the newer cameras coming out are fine. When I got mine in january, there was no dust issue on it, even after seven thousand plus images, shooting rodeos, so they're going to get dust and appreciating radio. One of the things that is kept a fairly quiet secret in the industry is that they do change things on the camera, and they are very subtle. Remember there is one nikon camera that I owned many years ago, and it was documented that there were one hundred and fifty changes in the camera over the course of a number of years from generally, they won't go in and change like something noticeable, like a dial, but they have done that on cameras without issuing an upgraded version of the camera with a new name on the camera, and so there could be many different things internally that they're doing different and that's a pretty unacceptable issue oil on the sensor, and so I have to think that they have addressed it and it's not going to be an issue in the future, but if you did buy the camera new, keep an eye on it if it gets bad, if you can't clean it off yourself, I feel more unhappy, sending it in and that I would trust that nikon could fix that pretty easily. They they're probably pretty good at this point, the elephant in the room, right? Okay, so we're continuing along in the setup menu hd my is the port that you're going to use if you want to look your camera to tv and you can adjust the resolution out of this, if you have different types of monitors, we're going to put up with flicker rate reduction. This has to do when you're shooting in the live you mode or a movie mode, and you're working under fluorescent lights, you might get an unusual flicker in new york camera, and if so, you can change it between fifty hurts and sixty hertz, or you could just let it automatically choose, and it usually does a good job at that. Time is omen and date something that a lot of people forget when they're travelling is that they need to change the time zone on their camera because your camera is not wifi enabled at least these cameras or not, this camera is not, and so it does not pick up that time, and so when you go through daylight savings time change, you need to change it in the camera as well. Language okay, so if you see these symbols in your camera, you are in a major, major problem, because the that is cling on and that is not one of the languages involved in there, so you would of course, choose whatever language is appropriate image comment this allows you to go in and add a comment with every picture you take you khun right along little short, you can write a twitter story about every picture you take in reality if you had, I don't know someone's name or an email you wanted to attribute to them, you could add that right there in the field, so if you're trying to copy down somebody's name because you're going to email him a photograph, you could just type it right into your camera you don't have a pen and paper and that's going to get tagged with that image right along with all the other meta data. Now this auto image rotation you wantto have turned on it's different than woman when we talked about earlier this one refers to rotating vertical images when you download it to your computer and that's a very very handy time saving device they're so leave that turned on in most all situations if you want to go into the battery info, you can see how long the chart, how good the charges, how many number of shots you've taken on that battery charge and the general age of the battery as faras whether it's new or whether it's old one of the advantages of getting nikon batteries is that you'll get full information here there is some aftermarket knockoff batteries that do power the camera but they don't have the chip inside that has this information. You can also put your name in your camera in the copyright information you can add a copyright say to your business name you can have this particular artists say if you had a another photographer working for you or your individual name you could put your email address in here there's a lot of different names that you could put in there for information but it kind of labels it as your camera if you have to d six hundred you can save up all these custom settings that we've been going through and transfer him to another d six hundred and no, this doesn't work transferring him between different models of nikon camera like a d seven thousand or d eight hundred, you can't trade because they don't have exactly the same set of settings, but if you had multiple cameras would be a quick way of getting in program correctly. If you do have the nikon gps a device, you can go in and work with the parameters here, get those all set up properly. The virtual horizon is one of the little shortcuts that you could put with the function button that I thought was kind of nice on this just gives you a little pilots type display, whether you are tilting the camera correctly, and I found this quite helpful when getting the camera and unusual very low or high angle positions. One of great thing about nikon is that you can use older manual focus lens is like this fifty eight millimeter, one point two lands. Unfortunately, these older manual lenses don't transfer what focal length, what aperture they are into the metadata, but you can manually input that and keep that you can keep nine different lenses data for nine different lenses in there, and when you put that lens on, you can tell the camera which lenses on the camera and all of that metadata is stored with justus if it was a new elektronik focusing lens. And here we go with a f fine, too. So this is what they were asking for. All right? So for those of you who don't know, your camera focuses on the subject you pointed at and sometimes there's a little bit of a focusing here, where the camera will focus in front or possibly behind your foot, your subject and we call this front focus or back focus. So let's say I was focusing on a model and a model's eyes, and the nose was in focus. That's front focus. If the ears aeryn focus that would be back focus and that's a bit of a problem and kind of the problem will let you know why aren't things perfect? I spent all this money. Everything should be perfect. Well, two thousand dollars on the camera and a thousand dollars on the lands is still not enough money to have absolute perfection all the time, and what happens is sometimes the cameras are a little biased one direction and lenses are biased in one direction, and when they're both biased in one direction, that is often causing the front or the back focus. And if you want, you can go in and fix this yourself. What you will need is a couple of items, a focusing target I use a ruler for this and then you need some sort of measuring device I use a yardstick for that and what you're gonna do is you're going to focus on this target and you're going to see if it's in focus in the right place or is it focusing in front or behind now if you want to spend a little bit of money for the lens aligned mark too which is around eighty dollars you will focus on the target on the left side and then on the right side you will see if the cameras focusing in front of or behind that target now my cheap set up looks like this the yardstick and a ruler and I'm just going to focus on the ruler right with the number ten ten inches is and what the photographs from the camera position look like is going to be something like this and you can go in and you can adjust fine tuning anywhere from minus twenty two plus twenty and it'd just where your camera focuses and if you look at the results from this lens that I tested you can see that when I have the camera at zero which is the standard position the camera is fun focusing by about a sixteenth of an inch now that's not a big deal I may not even notice that in normal photography but with a one point for f too fast lens you want to get it as right as possible, and so you'll notice that plus ten is back, focusing by about a sixteenth of an inch and so on that lens I said it to plus five. And so if you are working with the kit twenty four to eighty five lands, this is probably not an issue because the focus is not that shelf. This is for people who have fifty one force eighty five one, four, eighty five one, eight one o five f two's one, thirty five f twos and potentially any of the really big tele photos like three hundred to eight, four hundred to eight and forward, if you have anything that shoots with really shallow depth of field, you should do a little bit of testing, and if you want to do the testing, here is basically the things that you're going to need and what you're going to dio you're going to need all your tools, all right? And then you're going to need to set your camera for shooting very, very shallow depth of field with the highest quality of everything. I prefer to use manual exposure, but you could use aperture priority. You're going to want to choose the shallow a step the field, which is your maximum aperture lowest eso single focusing near lock up to make sure there's no vibration when this is done you are going to be doing this on a tripod don't try this handheld you will screw it up and you cannot do it properly and make sure you turn off the v r the vibration reduction and what you'll do is just manually unfocused the lands let the camera focus on the target make sure you're in mere lock up so you don't have any vibrations take the picture, play the image back and see if it's in focus see if its front focus see if it's back focus makes him setting changes and try it again and again for somebody who has three or four lenses I'll be honest with you here it's going to take a now er it's going to take an hour by the time you gather all your goods and set them all up and really go through and check this and so on some rainy sunday afternoon set up in your living room make sure that your tripods on a good solid surface that's not moving around us well and so there's a number of little geeky things that you need to do to really get the most performance out of those high end fast lenses that's thie f fine tune okay, so next up you probably don't see this on you you really weren't kidding when I asked that question earlier and you we have a very haven't nailed the explanation did that explaining I believe so. Thank you. Thank you all right, I fyi this is probably not showing up in your camera right now and you're thinking it's not in my camera okay, this only shows up if you have what's called a knife I car if you don't know what a knife I card is it's related to wifi and what happens with a knife I card is you go out, you shoot pictures and you bring it back and you set your camera next to your computer and if you have it all set up right it just transfers the images to your computer automatically if you're nearby your computer while you're shooting images it will transfer while you are shooting pictures it's not real fast it doesn't have a great range, so it does have some limitations and this is where you would go in to set it up all right firmware version checking your firmware to see if it says c which stands for camera at one point o one go ahead, do that in class here yeah and lens one point zero zero six this is the most current firmware running this camera as of april third, two thousand thirteen because they just came out with the firmware adjustment and my bet is that the cameras in your hands right now here in the audience is one point zero zero is that correct? Okay, so what you could dio if you want to upload the new software is you go to nikon yusa, for instance or whatever your local nikon affiliate iss and they're going to have some sort of place to go for downloads I think they call it the download center and you khun say firmware for my camera find your camera and there's gonna be a whole disclaimer and you're going to download the new firmware to your computer from there you can either hook your camera to your computer or you can take your memory card into a card reader or plug it into your computer and transfer all of that information to your memory card. Put the memory card in the camera, go to firmware version and then it will ask you to update the firmware it'll usually take about two minutes to update the new firmware and things that they have changed on version one point no one is now when you are using the hd am I out output which is the port on the side of the camera it is a hundred percent output previously it was somewhere between ninety one and ninety five percent and you ended up getting this black border around the edge of your frame and they fix that bug in the camera it also supports the new nikon eight hundred millimeter five six lens and they've improved some focusing issues that happened in the a f c the continuous focusing mode what they improved they did it specify but they improve something there was a couple of other minor bugs that they also fixed that were well unusual bugs but they fixed those things as well and so that's the changes that they made to that firm where and that is how you do it as well and seeing how it's a free upgrade I would highly recommend going in and doing it some people are always a little bit antsy about downloading new software so they might wait a few weeks to see if there's a problem with this one we've only had it out for a couple of days so I don't know but it's pretty rare that they have problems with the firm where but it does happen from time to time and next up is the retouch menu and we're going to fly over this very, very quickly because this is where you can go in and tweak images in any image that you take let's say you take a raw image and you tweak it and you trim it you change it to monochrome what's happening is the raw image is untouched the camorra creates a copy image for you to work on and so you're not going to ruin any images by playing with this so feel free go in there play photoshopped in your camera there's a lot of good things you can do in here to goof around one of the more valuable ones is neff processing rob processing? If you have a raw image and you want to create a jpeg image in camera, you can go in and create a jpeg image right there in there, in the camera you can also resize an image and make it a little bit smaller you can't make it bigger. You could make it smaller, though, to make it more suitable for email. So if you were say, traveling, you didn't have your computer with you. The internet cafe that you were working with has really terrible slow computers. You could do some of that work in camera and so don't worry about ruining an image in here. This is all for fun and for goofing around and for anyone who doesn't have a computer to do this with or the programs to do it with, but I'm not going to get into all these because they're not critically important for taking clean, high quality images. Now the last setting is generally called recent setting, and so this is all the things that you have done recently on your camera, which could be quite convenient, but an even better system is to dive in here and to change it to my menu that way when you hit menu you can go in, and you can program the favorite items that you use on a regular basis. This is kind of like your car radio programming in your favorite stations. What you been doing here is you go in and add items. You would find all the things in the menu system that you use on a regular basis and adam in there, you can rank him so that the items that you use most often are at the top of the list and it's. Very simple, then, because you just simply press the menu button, you pop in here and it's all your favorite settings. So I would highly recommend taking a little bit of time going into my menu and getting that totally customized for the way that you liketo work.