Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction

All right, welcome everybody to dslr fast start. My name is john gringo, and in this class we're going to be looking at the nikon d seven thousand this is is a fairly new camera from nikon, and it is packed filled with features. I've been going through this camera for the last few weeks and exploring kind all that it has to offer, and I'm going to give this camera new nickname this's thie, new york city of cameras because it has everything for good or for bad it's just seems to have everything in it. It's got amazing number of features in and capabilities it should be a camera that I think any photographer would be happy to own from beginner to professional it's just got aa lot of features and a lot of capability, but you do, of course have to know howto access all those and what they do and when to use them because we're not going to use all the features. Nobody uses all the features on any particular cameras, knowing which ones to use and when to use him. And so hopefully in this cla...

ss, as we go through things, you'll be able to mark off the items that are most important to you. We're going to go through the camera from the outside to the inside, going through all the menus, all the buttons, and we should be able to figure out most everything that scammer khun dio and so hopefully it'll enable you to figure out how to use your camera for whatever it is that you want to do with it. So let's, go ahead and get started with this as we get started, I just wanna throw thanks out to be an h photo for supplying us the camera that we're going to be using here in this classroom today, it's a great source of photographic materials and they've been helping us here it creative live and I do want to thank you very much for that so kind of the plan for today is that we have several different sections that we're going to go through first off, I just want to talk about the product in general it's, a nikon camera talking a little bit about the whole system that you have gotten into by buying a by buying a nikon camera involved in working this camera is quite a bit of photography, and this is not exactly a photography class it's a camera it's a class on how to use this particular camera, but there are some photography basics that I want to make sure everybody has before we get too far into the camera then we're going to basically just going to get going around the camera button by button talking about what it does on dh how to use it we will go through the menu system line by line so if you recently got your camera and you want to get it set up the way you want to this is going to be a good opportunity as we step through the menu items to make those changes and to see what they d'oh then we're going to get in and figure out how to actually set the camera for real photography and that's the camera operation section where we will be making certain adjustments to figure out where all the most important adjustments are and I'll be throwing a little bit of opinions out there as to how to set the camera up for different types of situations where the you're shooting portrait sword action landscapes or other types of things how what focus mode what me remote things like that is best for that and then finally we'll talk about lenses and accessories and well I'm going to keep it fairly short and simple and just talk about a few of the prime things that you might be interested in if you're a new owner to the g seven thousand so let's go ahead and get started with this product overview so with camera you are going to get yourself a nice thick instruction manual it's got about three hundred twenty six pages, and I figure you can easily spend about eleven hours just reading through that manual and it's a very good thing to have there's going to be a lot of information in there that we don't have time to get to in this class. Our class is going to be around five hours, and so I don't know how to fit eleven hours into five hours worth of a time, and, uh, I am goingto skip over a few areas and I will talk about those areas when I get to them, but in general, this camera has a lot of capabilities, and a lot of those capabilities are for people who don't have computers, and they want to do all their post processing work in camera, they want to trim their images, they want to boost the color saturation and do a number of other things, and I'm not goingto get too heavily into that. Most people who have this camera are working with a computer and a software program like light room or photo shop or some other program. And so those that's kind of the main areas that I'm going to be skipping over, but we'll be talking about pretty much everything that's important to shooting good pictures in the camera. Now as I mentioned at the introduction, this is not a photography wanna one class and so if you're looking for just learning all the fundamentals of photography now this isn't exactly the right class I'm sure there'll be a lot of things that you pick up on here if you are new to photography, you haven't used a digital camera before or you've stepped up to an slr for the first time there's gonna be some things that we go by pretty quickly it's kind of assumed that you know at this point or it's assumed that you will get that information soon after this class and I'm going to recommend a photography class to you if you haven't taken one at this point it's great that you're here because learning your camera is probably the first an important step in and getting better at photography and so it's you're in a good place right now knowing the camera's a good thing, but once you've done that, learning more about photography will definitely improve the quality of your work. So let's talk about what you've gotten yourself into when you purchased a d seven thousand or maybe have received it as a gift. You've got yourself a nikon camera and nikon is a japanese company that has been in business for quite sometime they are pretty large company well respected in the industry, they make a lot of different cameras from amateur cameras to professional cameras they make spotting scopes and binoculars and they do a lot in the medical imaging industry so there are very large company and they have a lot of power behind them. You might say in making products they started back in about nineteen seventeen they were actually kind of a conglomeration of three of the leading japanese optical manufacturers at the time thing's really got going after world war two nineteen forty eight there brought out their first range finder camera, which is different than a single lens reflex and we'll talk more about that in a moment and then in nineteen fifty nine the established their first slr and that camera has basically the same lens mt that the d seven thousand house on it and the nikon len's mouth has been a big part of their heritage because they have not changed that in the entire time and there has been an evolution of lenses the lenses have changed and they are not completely compatible under all circumstances they've been, as I say, evolving and changing, but with this camera you can use pretty much any lens made over the last twenty years and you can use the lenses that are made for this on some cameras that are twenty, thirty or forty years old in some cases and so they have a very long lineage with their line with her lenses nineteen eighty six they brought out their first auto focus camera and that was kind of ah profound change for the sl ours. And then in nineteen ninety nine, they brought out their first digital slr the d one and when you think about this camera, which sells for oh, just over a thousand dollars or so and has eighteen megapixels, the d one had a whopping two point seven megapixels and cost five thousand five hundred dollars. So this this camera really blows that one out of the water as faras resolution and price for that. So with nikon, you have got yourself into a really good single lens reflex system. First off, they have a lot of cameras. As I said, they have beginner cameras, they have professional cameras, so as you grow or need different types of cameras, nikon is likely to have something that's going to entice you. Their lenses have been one of their strongest reasons. Why people have people have liked nikon is they have very, very good lenses. They have a wide range of lenses pretty much anything you want to do. They probably make lens for it and then for a flash system, they have a really, really good with flashes to merely they really have lead the industry in creative uses on the flash, making them easier, more sophisticated more capable of doing many different things, and so they have a great, great class system. So if you have any need for automatic flash, they're really very good at that. The g seven thousand itself it's kind of position and heritage within the nikon lineup. It's it's, kind of on the intermediate level of their cameras. It's kind of in the middle of the line. They have some cameras below it. They have some cameras above it. The g seven thousand came out in two thousand ten and it is roughly based on the d ninety, which is based on the d e a t which goes back to the d seventy and so it's about the fifth and a generation. And with each generation, nikon looks at what they're doing and they keep making it better. And so each of these cameras is incrementally better than the last. And this is just the latest in a long line of very, very good cameras. So the d seven thousand itself, I has some number of improvement over the previous model, and we just kind of want to go over those. It is sixteen megapixels. It's actually the second highest in icons lineup. It's not kind of the second in position with everything else, but it's it's a new camera? They have a lot more megapixels in there now. The previous camera had twelve megapixels, so the resolution is going to be a little bit higher on this camera. They're improving the video capabilities. The previous cameron was the first slr to have video capabilities, and they now have that at full hd standards, which is nineteen twenty by ten eighty, they've increased the I s l so that you can use higher esos in this camera, they've improved the focusing system more, focusing points, more cross type focusing, and they've improved the frames per second, so we can now shoot it six frames per second in this camera previous camera was only four point five frames per second, so when you buy a camera, what did you get in the box? There's a list of all the goodies that you were going to get in the box, and we're gonna go ahead in unbox, the camera that we have here in front of us, and just kind of take a look at what we're getting here. So let's, go ahead and open this guy up, so first off you're going to get some paperwork will be some warranty cards in here, there's going to be some software. And this is going to be so that you can download the raw images. They also have viewers so that you can view the images. If you have a program like light room, you may not need any of this software programs at all. It depends on what software you like. Personally. Eyes was a lot of other photographers, like using light room on that's, kind of a whole other class in itself. But they do give you some software if you don't have anything at all. Of course, they have the instruction manual. Find the english version. Here s o. We do have a good, thick instruction manual here, and it is good to kind of go through that and keep it handy while you are a new owner of the camera. So where do we start? Let's? Go for the good stuff. The camera, right here, way. Got ourselves a brand new camera here. That's. Nice. We'll set that down right there. Go for the lens. Next. The, uh, this is a kit that we have here, and it comes with an eighteen toe, one o five lens, which is a real good general purpose. Lengths. Looks like that. Right there does also come with a lens hood that I highly recommend using, but for in this class, I'm not gonna put it on for right now, but it is something that is good to have. We'll talk about those later on in accessories, and then we have a whole little box of accessories here. It's. Go ahead. Set this aside. And in here we're gonna have the battery, which is very important. We'll have a battery charger, very creative system. You can either use a cable or they have a direct plug in the you can plug it directly into the wall. We have cables for downloading the memory of directly from the camera to the computer. I personally prefer a card reader, but they do have this so that you could do it without anything else. We have cables, tow, hook the camera to a tv so that you can use it as a slideshow on view. Images projected kenneth from this onto your tvs. And then we have a camera strap and then a little eyepiece cover that goes over the back of the eyepiece. And so I'm going to set uh, this aside here this up and keep the important things out right here. And we will assemble this in just a moment. So on the battery charge, I will just mention this. It takes about two hours to charge the battery, and you're likely to get four hundred to six hundred shots out of it, but it completely depends on how you drive your car here. What sort of gas mileage you're going to get? Depends on how often your viewing your images stabilization live you movie shooting, it's going to very quite a bit, I highly recommend having a second battery, I think it's good to have a backup battery, just in case there's, something really good you run through your whole battery life and so on. Extra battery is definitely one accessory that I would recommend let's talk about the care in handling of this camera, because there's a lot of warnings in the instruction manual and it's it's it's, almost humorous. In fact, I think it kind of is a little humorous, just reading some of the things that says, like, don't get it too hot, don't get to call, don't drop it, don't get it wet, don't take it apart. Don't leave it by a giant magnet. Don't start with lots of crow corrosive chemicals. Don't store it with highly radioactive material, don't fire the flash it's someone driving a car, don't use around flammable gas and don't swallow the battery, which I think is a really good one, in essence, don't be stupid with it. I think we all kind of get that, but it does also have warning a warning that says something like, this camera is not waterproof do not get it wet, and this often concerns people because they're not really sure how wet do you mean? Because obviously dropping it in the river, you know where it was fully submerged is going to be a major problem and would probably die on impact in a below going below surface like that. But what about a light rain? What about a heavy rain? What about a moderate rain? What about a little bit of coffee that gets spilled on it? Well, it kind of depends on how much and where the water gets, too. The outside shell of the camera is plastic and so that's not really a problem with the water it's just that there's a whole bunch of electronics on the inside and there's a whole bunch of buttons and dials and places for the water to get through. And so if water gets through those gaps and get it gets on the circuitry that's when you're going to have a problem, if it was my camera and it was raining out. I would try to avoid shooting out in the direct rain for any prolonged length of time if it was just going to be for a minute or two and the camera wasn't going to get that wet I probably won't it father, I wouldn't worry about it if you could keep it under your coat if you had it under an umbrella and it got a little bit of water that's probably not going to be a problem I usually I don't have a problem shooting out of the rain but sometimes I'll have a plastic cover or I'll have a towel that I'm trying to keep the camera clean or covered with this much as possible and so I think a light rain for a short period of time it's not going to cause a problem and so you do have to have some some common sense as to how to use it in a wet environment the other thing that I will warn you about his use of non nikon accessories could damage the camera and may void your y inti there are all sorts of things that you can hook up to this camera different lenses, batteries, memory cards and then there's also two cables that you can put into it usb connections, video cables, remote gps units things like that and nikon does not want to be held liable if you decide to plug in something that's rather stupid on it in general, there isn't anything that's going to damage the camera that is commonly available on the market. You can put other brands of lenses on there. The slight downside is there may be a feature or two within the camera that is communicating with the lens and there's more of these things these days, and we'll talk about these when we get into the menu system that the camera may not be able to communicate with the lenses to what lends it iss, and it may not be able to perform a couple of special functions with batteries. Nikon makes their own batteries. There are aftermarket batteries that are probably going to be safe to work in there. I haven't seen a problem with him, but they may not last as long as the nikon battery he's with the nikon flashes, they make really, really good flashes, and I would highly recommend going with the nikon flashes. There are other aftermarket flashes you do want to make sure if you do use them that they're designed to work for nikon. You don't want to buy a product that's designed to work for another manufacturer because thie elektronik pins heard in different places and can cause a serious problem at that point. So let's, go ahead and prepare this camera for the class charged battery and we've already kind of secretly done that let's go ahead and attach the land so I'm gonna take off the body camp right here we do have a white mounting index right here we're going to take your lens cap off and we're gonna have another index right here on the lens actually right there in the lands mount those two up right there and give the lens a little twist. We'll take off the lens cap, set those aside and we'll install the battery on the bottom going to go ahead and flip open the door it's really only one way to install a battery clothes that in there and then we're going to take a memory card and this camera's kind of cool we'll talk about this as we go along, but you can actually put to memory cards in here and for now we're just gonna go ahead and put one memory card and push it in and close the door and so what we want to do and I wanna make sure everyone here in our live classroom are live students as well as everyone online just kind of follow along, go ahead and turn the camera on and turn the mod dial the big dial on the top left your camera to the green auto mode and go ahead and just take a picture just make sure that your camera's working I should see some flashes firing and hear all your flashes are popping up. I'm going blind I feel like this paparazzi crew here, all right? So I just want to make sure everyone's cameras working just to have a picture on the memory card to start with now we're going to do something really complicated right now we're going to dive in and do something very sophisticated, so hang on, I have full instructions, so follow what we're going to do here is we're going to turn the camera to the m mode for manual. This is where we're going to be for most of the class and I want to turn some the menus so that they stay on for a longer period of time and so we're going to get more into this menu system later on. But if you press the menu button on the back, your camera and over on the left hand side you want to navigate up and down to you get to the pencil when it turns yellow, you're at the custom setting menu. You want to go to the right with your little tab, your multi selector on the back of the camera and we're going to go to sea, which is timers a lock, then you're going to go to the right again and we're going to go down to see two we're going to go to the right on that, and we're going to change it from six seconds to something longer. I'm going to set mine to thirty seconds. We're going to press, okay? The brighton right in the middle and then we're going to go down to c four monitor off delay, we will go to the right and we're gonna go down to where it says menus, we're going to go to the right and we're going to change that to one minute. Next up, we're going to go to information display. It says ten seconds to start with and we're going to go down and set that at one minute now. These are things that you can go in later when we passed by him towards the end of this class, you can reset them if you want teo and there's a way, you can reset all the fun vengeance, but this way, when you're playing with your camera in this class, the meter won't continue to turn off on you. It'll just make the rest of the class a little bit easier to work with, and then you can kind of set your camera down and, uh, settle in for the next section. So, as I said, you do need to have a bit of photography knowledge to know howto work this camera, even though you may know where all the buttons and what all the features of the camera do, if you don't know photography it's going to be hard to get good photographs and so let's just talk about some of the basic fundamentals of photography. And this information is a part of a class that I teach here through creative life called fundamentals of digital photography. It's a ten week downloadable class that if you want to learn more about photography, it's ah it's a good way to get started, there's more than twenty hours of instructions, and it basically starts right at ground level and goes up to a fairly intermediate advanced level in the class. And so it's. A good way to learn about photography so let's, take a look at some of the most important information that I hope, you know, or I will be happy to let you in on on this camera. So this camera is a digital single lens reflex camera, and one of the most important parts about that is that it has one main lens, that the light is travelling through it's, a very high quality lands, and that is how you view the camera, you view the image as well as take the picture now there are lots of different lenses there are wide angle lenses there telephoto lenses and there are zoom lenses and there's there's a lot more in lenses but unfortunately the sky class doesn't have time to talk all about the lenses which is a great subject now when you focus the lens elements will move back and forth to adjust for subjects that are closer to you or further away from you within the lands is an aperture unit it's basically ah hallway of light that can open and close it never closes completely but allows you to control the amount of light coming in the lands. And so if we have a lens that starts at one point four and it's wide open and we as we closed down each f stop or aperture setting will close the amount of light reduce it by fifty percent excuse me by hundred percent fifty percent sorry one hundred percent that'd be a lot of light basically you're doubling or you're cutting the amount of light in half with each of these aperture changes and so it's a great way for controlling light coming in the lens now the second thing is is that this aperture also controls the depth of field and so if we were to take this imaginary lens and open it up to f one point four it would have a very shallow depth of field, and so you can see the red hash marks over on the right hand side, that air that's indicating the area of focus, the depth of field. And as we change this aperture from two point eight two f or we're going to get moored up the field and each step along the way, we get more and more depth of field it's not a dramatic change at anyone step, but it does add up to quite a big difference between the lens being fully wide open and the lens fully close down in using this for creative control and artistic reasons is very important in photography as well as thie simply controlling the amount of light coming in the camera, so back to our camera as light comes in through the lens, it will then hit the mere and that is the reflex portion of the digital single lens reflex. Now the mirror is going to bounce the light upwards so that we can see what is going on it's going to project an image onto the ground glass and in order to see that ground glass more easily, the light is going to be bounced around through a prism system and threw a diop tter, which is where we look through our camera in the viewfinder. And this makes the camera very convenient, easy to use, and it also allows us to see exactly what our cameras pointed out. We can see how telephoto are wide angle lenses. We could see the effects of using filters. It's, a very good sister time for a camera. Now, when you press the shutter release, the mere needs to get up and out of the way so the light can make its way back to the image sensor. And so the image sensor is a very important part about the camera. We're going to talk a little bit more about this, but the size of it and the capabilities in low light, as well as its resolution or some of its most important characteristics. But before the light gets back to the image sensor, it must pass through the shutter, and the shutter is a two part system there's, a first shuter and a second cheddar, and when you press the shutter release button, the mere goes up. A first curtain will open up, allowing light to come into the sensor to expose the sensor for the image. And then a second curtain will come down and block the light off when it's all finished the mere pops back down and returns the light through the viewfinder so that you can see what's going on. One important thing to notice that you do not get to see whats happening while you were taking a picture so if you if you saw it through the viewfinder you missed it you that's why you need to anticipate with these cameras now that shutter unit is really important for controlling the amount of light as well as controlling the way our subjects look in there and so let's take a look at some shutter speeds here we are two thousandth of a second a very fast shutter speed for stopping something moving very quick like a bird in flight ah five hundredth of a second is a good cheddar speed for stopping human action, so if you want to stop somebody in sports or dance or anything like that five hundredth of a second is a good shutter speed for that one hundred twenty fifth kind of a moderate cheddar speed uh is suitable for stopping some camels walking casually in the desert we go down to a thirtieth of a second, we're getting to a slower shutter speed here you can see that we've got a lot of blurriness because our subjects are moving very, very quickly down at an eighth of a second, you'll notice that the bridge at the bottom of the frame is sharpen and focus because a tripod was used for this shot, but the people are blurry because they're walking at a casual pace as we get into some slow shutter speeds at one half of a second here, water crashing over iraq is going to look very blurry because it moves quite a bit in that period of time and all the way down at thirty seconds this may look like mist or clouds around mountain tops it's actually water flowing in and around rocks on the shoreline of the beach. And so those very long shutter speeds can be very interesting on getting some fun results from that. So we talked a little bit about that censor and I want to talk more about the size of the sensory when you go into the camera store and you look at all the wonderful cameras that are available today. What may not be apparent to many purchasers of said cameras is thie size and type of the sensor in the camera and there is a variety of sensors in the cameras that are on the market today and that is as I said, one of the most important factors on the camera and what's really important is the exact size of the sensor. So let's talk a bit about the size of the sensor and we're going to be looking at the cameras that use interchangeable lenses. The main slr is out there and they use the three larger sizes the d seven thousand uses one of the largest ones out there now the largest one out there is the exact same size is thirty five millimeter film and those of you who shot thirty five millimeter familiar with that it's twenty four by thirty six millimeters in size and they do make sensors that are exactly that size and they call him full frame sensors and it has what's called a crop factor of one point oh, because it's exactly the same as the thirty five millimetre standard. Now these sensors are great. The only problem is is that they cost a lot of money and so in order to save money, different manufacturers have made smaller sensors. The one in use in the nikon d seven thousand is what nikon calls a d x sensor it's a little bit smaller sixteen by twenty four millimeters and it has a crop factor of one point five. It doesn't sia's much it's basically one point five times smaller than the full frame sensor. So lenses will look a little bit differently as we go from full frame to d x and we will talk more about this when we talk about lenses and accessories for this camera uh the other standard is used that is pretty common out there is thie a psc which is just a little bit smaller that has a one point six accent, sir, but the one in your nikon here has a one point five sensor so that's a little bit about the digital single lens reflex. If there is more that you would like to learn about this, you may want to check out the fundamentals of digital photography. It's, a downloadable class here at creative live and it's, a good ten week class, lots of ours goes through all the basics. We spend a bit more time than I spent just running through this, learning about the basics and so that's. Ah, good class for anyone who is new to photography, one of my absolute favorites. Thank you, thank you.