Lessons

Lesson Info

Camera Introduction

Welcome everybody to dslr fast start my name is john gringo and today the subject is the nikon d seventy one hundred seven thousand one hundred or I might suppose it's the seventy one ooh so it's a great camera and its can we're going to talk about today so let's go ahead and dive right in and show you what we're going to be doing today so in this class I want to give you a little bit of overview maybe you are brand new to nikon sl ours and you want to know what you're getting involved in so I'm going do a little bit of that we're going to go through a few basics it's not a photography class that you're watching here this is a camera specific class but there's a few basics I want to make sure everyone is up to speed on civil spent just a few minutes doing that the great majority of this class is going to be going through all the buttons on the camera we're going to discuss every button dial on the camera talk about what it's good for and when you're going to most want to use it on any ...

implications of using it we're going to go through the displays what you see in the viewfinder what you see in the lcd on the back of the camera and I know it sounds terribly tedious but we're going to go through the menu line item by line item we're not going to spend a lot of time, but I will give you some recommended settings for both general users and advanced to users on dh obviously everyone's going to have their law, I'll set ups, but I'm going to kind of give you some tips and hints on how to set the camera best for the type of photography that you want to do, and then to kind of put a bow on the and if it all around all of it at the end of the day, what we're going to do is we're going to go through in practice, setting the camera up for different scenarios, so portrait landscape, how to get maximum sharpness out of the camera and things like that kind of which buttons are you going to go to most of the time? So let's dive in and talk about this camera first off, you should reference this manual from time to time, although sitting down and reading it cover to cover will take you a little bit of time. There's a lot of information in there there's a lot of valuable information, and I am not going to replicate or duplicate everything that is in the instruction manual. I am going to go through and whittle down what is in there, too what I think is the most important elements of this camera there is no way that I could stick eleven hours of information into our five hour class. They're the extra information that I'm not going to be covering covers a lot of areas that I know a lot of photographers don't really spend a lot of time on their cameras, for instance, there's a whole section on this camera where you can essentially photoshopped and tweak and a just images after you've taken them. And while you khun doing and it's fun and might be a good way of wasting time while you're in an airport it's not the best way of working with your images, you should be working on a computer with a large monitor that's color, correct and working in a good program like adobe light room or photo shop for any of another number of good good programs. And so I'm not going to spend much time on things like that or doing slide shows or printing directly from your camera toe a printer and there's pages in the instruction manual on that, and we're barely even going to touch it in this class we wanted really figure out how to obtain the highest quality images with the greatest ease that's what this class is all about now if you are new to photography if you haven't taken a photography class before if you wanna learn about depth of field and shutter speeds and apertures, you are going to be just woefully disappointed at this class because we do not really go into that in this class. This is really a gadget class on the nikon d seventy one hundred and so if you don't know photography with theirs other classes out there that I'll talk about that would be good for knowing about that so let's get into the overview on this camera in particular if you are new to the nikon family welcome they've been around for a long time they have one of most respected names in photography started way back in nineteen seventeen they have pretty much dealt with thirty five millimeter cameras their entire time. These full frame cameras air now digital of course things got pretty serious in nineteen fifty nine when they developed the single lens reflex f which has the same basic lens mount as our camera right here in front of us now there is some limitations on lenses and we'll talk a little bit about that as we get more into the lens section on the class but the lens mount has remained for the most part unchanged nineteen eighty six marked a big year because they started introducing autofocus lenses and auto focus cameras and this camera can work with all the auto focus lenses that have ever come out and so if you see something on sale on ebay or at a garage sale or something like that if it works it's going to work on this camera lenses that are manual focus can still work but with limited features as you go further and further back, obviously you're not going to get auto focus, but if you go far enough back, they may not even mount on the camera and so you do have to be a little bit more careful with the older manual focus lenses and then in nineteen ninety nine they were kind of first to the market you might say in they're professional digital camera and if you're familiar with megapixels and cost of cameras now this camera had two point seven megapixels and sold for five thousand dollars and it was a revolution at the time and people bought it up like crazy because it was the best deal out there because the previous cameras were fifteen thousand dollars that were modified frankenstein cameras from kodak using modified nikon camera bodies. And so they've come a long ways in that time with their digital cameras. So for the seventy, one hundred good chance that if you're watching this, you already own it and I'm not trying to sell you on the camera but coming from what's been before in the line up of nikon camera's what's great about this camera is the new twenty four megapixel sensor, so for really high resolution, you now have that in here you have an improved fifty one point auto focus system. It's just got a few more points than the previous thirty nine helps out a little bit in sporting type events, they've increased the frames per second. You could do six frames per second, and if you put the camera in a special one point three crop mode that we'll talk about, youqing squeeze seven frames per second out of it, albeit at a cost to the mega pixels. It is also desk, dust and water resistant, the same as the d six hundred eighty eight hundred siri's cameras. And so, while it's not quite submersible, it is pretty resisted to dust and rain. And finally, uh, kind of ah lot of talk about this it's not really important in this class, and that is that this camera does not have what's called a low pass filter there's this filter that they usually put in front of the sensor to reduce moray, which is patterns that kind of matchup inappropriately with the pixels in the camera, and they've taken that often here because they have so many mega pixels it's in general, not a problem it's supposed to yield higher quality results, and it does but only in a limited number of cases and so while it's really interesting to read about in the review of the camera in the actual operation of the camera it's not really going to affect what you do or how you do with anything so it's kind of a small point will be done with it at this point. So one of the best things about buying into the nikon system is that there is a huge collection of cameras from nikon from low end to high end cameras and so if you wanna upgrade if you want to buy your friend a similar mount camera but of much less money than this camera there are plenty of options out there you have tons of lenses nikon has been known for their fantastic lenses for many, many years and so just about anything you want to do they make a good lens for it. Most likely they also have arguably the best flash system on the market today. And so if you need flashy shoot event photography, wedding people, photography or any of the other things that use flash macro photography, for instance they have a fantastic line of flash is going to give you some recommendations on flashes when we get to that section of the class as well. All right, so the d seventy one hundred sits kind of in the middle class category of the nikon lineup it's, strongly based off of the g seven thousand that came out a few years ago and basically just comes down a long lineage of cameras, each one improving on the others and just for reference. I owned the d seventy, that was my first digital slr, because it was the first camera that nikon brought out that broke I think it broke the thousand dollar or was darn close to the thousand dollars mark, that really became a good camera, and just every successive version of this camera tends to get better and better, and this is definitely the best in this lineup so far. All right, so if you do page through that instruction manual, you're going to get to these pages and pages of warnings about things that you are not supposed to do with the camera, and they could replace all of those pages with just a simple line that says, don't be stupid with it, and I think we would all, you know, we're not we know we're not supposed to drop the camera or throw it in the water, but there's a couple of questions that people do have that are valid questions, and that is aboutthe waterproof nous of the camera, because nikon says it's not waterproof, but they do say, it's dust and whether sealed, and what exactly does that mean? And they leave that very ambiguous and they do that for a reason is that they're not promising you it's going to work under any specific conditions I guess that the fact of the matter comes down for most people with rain if it's raining outside should I go out and take a picture well I would not be afraid for a moment to go out and get a picture but I want to hang out there for a long period of time if you're going to be shooting your kid's football game you don't want to spend all game out there shooting in the rain I have a friend with an umbrella or get one of the many different rain covers for it and so you do want to be careful around dust especially changing lenses while that may not damage the camera and may get dust on the sensor so just be aware of that changing lenses in a dusty environment is not good either. The other issue that people have questions on is about nikon accessories nikon lenses, batteries, flashes and things like that nikon tests all of their cameras with all of their lenses they know they work there will be nothing that is damaged if you put on something else nikon doesn't know exactly what's going to happen in general I don't know that I've ever seen a nikon camera damaged with another piece of equipment like on there like that on there it's possible I will say from experience that if you do want to add an additional flashing it I would highly highly recommend nightgown flash is one of the most complicated areas of photography and the nikon system is very good may cost you a hundred dollars more but it's well worth that money for that nikon flash when it comes to lenses nikon is a good first choice but sometimes they don't make exactly the item you want and when we get to lenses I'm going to recommend some different glass that is non nikon glass that I think address is an issue that nikon has not addressed and they're totally fine they work very well on the camera I can't say that they worked one hundred percent because what happens is some of the nikon lenses have little issues in the nikon camera knows about it and it fixes those issues and when you put a toki no or tamron lens on their nikon doesn't know what minor issues that lens might have and it can't fix them this is a very very minor minor issue and for people who shoot rod's going to be a non issue at all and so if I had this camera I would have no problem having one of these other brand lenses in fact I do own off brand lenses for my camera's not a problem at all as faras batteries the nikon ones are going to be best but you'll find aftermarket one's knockoff ones that are a lot less money and I have found them to be not as good but overall kind of good value and so it's a backup battery on emergency battery maybe if you're traveling a lot and you want a kind of a third battery is maybe not a terrible choice for that I just I would kind of take a stick to nikon for the main batteries so that's my thoughts on some of those accessories now for the class hopefully you have charged the battery takes about two and half hours to charge you're going to get close to a thousand shots and that depends a little bit on if you're shooting in live you because that uses up more power how much flash you use and how much just playing around looking at your pictures, looking in the menu that you do, you'll get less than that but about about a thousand shots and hopefully you've got your lens on you've got your battery in there and I went through last night made sure my battery was charged up for today you've got a memory, you've got to memory card slots we'll talk about that in here so have some memory and they're just cause we're going to take some press practice pictures in here and so for right now just turn your camera to the green auto mode I'll do that myself and what I want you to dio is there's the mod ill to the green auto mode yes there we go kills me to say that and then I'm just gonna go ahead and just take a picture make sure that this camera's working pictures of our two students here now I got a couple of pictures in the memory card and that's all you need to worry about for for right now you can relax you don't need to worry about taking notes because we're going to go back to the basics and I just want to kind of bring people up to speed on a few basics of photography now if you are looking for a photography class I do have a class called fundamentals of digital photography this is a downloadable class available with creative live and if you want to know more about what I'm going to talk about over the next couple minutes you confined it through that class so this d seventy one hundred nikon camera is a single lens reflex camera single lens we have one lens on the camera very high quality lens they make wide angle lenses, they make telephoto lenses. They make lenses that zoom back and forth and do all sorts of crazy things in the lens is an aperture it's an opening that the light comes through in the opening is something that you can adjust from very small two very large and so that's our first way of controlling light in the let's if you have a lens that goes down to one point for that's, what we call a fast lens and it lets in a lot of light, allows you to use a fast shutter speed. We can stop our lenses down to f twenty two let's end very little light, but it will allow us to do something very creative later on. But this is the first way that we can control light with each one of these setting adjustments were either doubling or cutting the amount of light in half beyond, just letting in more or less light. The aperture also controls depth of field you can see in the photo on the right. Here we have very shallow depth of field. The red line's over on the right hand side indicate the front edge and the back edge of focus. And as we change this aperture down, we're letting in a different amount of light but were also increasing our depth of field. You can see those numbers on the yardstick are becoming more and more clear with each city until we have maximized the amount of depth of field that we can get in this particular situation, so we're using that aperture for multiple reasons in the camera, so once the light enters the camera, in a normal mode, you might say it's going to hit amir and bounce the light upwards so that you can see what's going on it's going to project an image onto a focusing screen, and that is something that you can see because the light is bounced around through a prism system and out the viewfinder. And so when you look through the viewfinder, you're actually looking at that focusing screen, and so that near in there is the reflex portion in single lens reflex. Now, when you press down on the shutter release, of course, you need to get that mere up and out of the way so that light can make its way back to the image sensor. And the image sensor is a huge part of out cameras and the twenty four mega pixel one, and this is one that will talk a little bit more about in just a moment. In front of the image sensor is a shutter unit, sometimes called a shutter curtain because they used to be made with cloth, but now they're made with metal blades that move very quickly, out of the way and there's, two curtains there's, the first curtain and the second curtain of shuter and the first one opens up the second one closes a short time later, exposing each pixel for exactly the same amount of time. And then the mere returns and you can see what's going on again. So remember if you're shooting fast action in this camera or any other slr if you saw it you missed it because the mirror is in the upward position when you were actually shooting pictures now that shutter unit is very important for controlling the light you can set a fast shutter speed to reduce the amount of light the cameras capturing but it also enables you to capture very fast action so one two thousand of a second it may just say two thousand but it's actually won two thousandth of a second. These air fractions up here one five hundredth of a second does a good job at stopping human action so general sports dancing things like that one hundred twenty fifth is kind of a pedestrian shutter speed you might say stopping the camels walking in the desert getting down to slower shutter speeds like a thirtieth of a second will cause blurriness if your subjects are moving quickly in this picture, you can see that the bridge is sharp and the camera was on a tripod not moving at all but that's how much blurriness you can expect with people walking at one eighth of a second if you like shooting waterfalls and rivers with slow shutter speeds, you'll get this fun effect kind of cotton candy, misty effect and that's just simply the use of a long shutter speed and you can use really long shutter speeds for very creative stuff that's picture I took down in death valley thirty seconds was good for capturing a little bit of the stars in the background as well as a light swinging around for thirty seconds in the middle of the night. So we talked about the sensor being a very important part about this camera and one of the things that some people aren't real big up on if they don't know cameras very well is thie size of sensor in the camera that there's a huge deal as to what type of pictures the camera is best taking in the capabilities and characteristics of that camera. And so all of these cameras here is examples have different size sensors were goingto not talk about the really small cameras the point shoots in the muralist for the most part the d seventy one hundred has a fairly large sensor in it it's not quite as big as thirty five millimeter film, which was kind of that the holy grail of digital sensors you might save right now. So thirty for all of us shooters that shot thirty five millimeter film it was really convenient when things switched over to digital to just have a digital sensor that was exactly the same size as film because all of our lenses and everything else worked exactly as normal this is what we call a full frame sensor nikon has their own designation, which is called f x basically it's a full frame sensor and it has a crop factor of one point o which is a very fancy way of saying it's a full frame camera and all the lenses work exactly as they did with thirty five millimeter film in order to save money and make smaller cameras, they came up with a smaller size sensor nikon calls this crop factor one point five a d x sensor and so we'll talk about dx lenses you might hear about dx cameras and they're talking about a camera or lens that works around this one point five crop factor sensor and there are other companies out there that you have some very slight bragging rights against because they have a one point six pack. There are a variety of other sizes that are both smaller and larger than these examples here, but these are some of the most common cameras that you will see on the market now before we get into the real instruction of the camera. One of things one of the things you should check on is to see if you have the strap to your camera connected correctly. I would say that almost fifty percent of the people that I see have the strap connected incorrectly and the key thing on the strap is that the tail goes underneath in that way pressure pushes down on that tail so it does not slip out a lot of people will put the tail around the topside and it will wiggle its way loose after a period of time next up another is just a real simple basic here holding the camera okay pick camera hold it in your hands and think about is your thumb on the top or the bottom of the camera what what's most comfortable and natural to you and if your thumb is on the bottom that is actually incorrect you want have your thumb on the top of the camera and the reason you want to have your thumb on the top of camera is that if you have your thumb on the bottom your elbow is out here kind of a a chicken wing flapping in the wind and if you haven't underneath it's generally right up against your torso which gives you better stability and holding the camera also when you have a longer lens you can put the base of the lens in the palm of your hand while you were adjusting focus and it gives you a little bit more torque and control either over for focusing and zooming and I know a lot of people grabbed the camera like this but if you look at the professionals they're all holding their cameras like this and so it's good to just start practice doing that right now okay so let's, go to the next slide and so that's your slr, if any of that seems like new and or interesting information, you may want to check out the class fundamentals of digital photography that is, of course, available for download through creative live right here. If you go to the catalog, find my name john gringo, and right under there. It's, one of the top list of classes that I have er and so it's got all that basic information for those who need to know more. I was gonna say, maybe we have a few questions here. I feel like I've been talking nonstop and I'm just getting started. No it's, great it's, great regarding your quote if he sought you missed it, sam cox says, does that advice apply when using the live you mood? Aren't you looking directly through the sensor itself in life? It is also true in live you what happens there is that you are seeing exactly what the sensor sees, but it needs to cut out and prep for the actual photograph, and so it does go blank the moment before you take it, and actually when it's capturing it it's recording is busy recording the information and not sending it out to the lcd on the back of the camera, so you have to anticipate the moment no matter what using these cameras at least for the current crop of cameras someday in the future I have hopes to see better something different on everyone. A few people are asking where you purchased this little tripod you hope you know our audience everyone wants to know why what you got and where you bought it, right? No it's it's a very sturdy little tripod. In fact, I remember using it down in los angeles at a track meet and while it's not built for an eight hundred millimeter lands I had an eight hundred millimeter lens on this because I wanted it right on the ground where I had a little bit of adjustability with it and the fact of the matter is is that I've had this tripod for more than twenty years and so I don't know if they make it anymore. This is a bogan which is now known as man photo and this is a three zero zero nine three thousand nine and I believe they make a new version of it. I saw one not too long ago in the store so look under manfro tripods tabletop tripods and it works great for these classes because it's got it's the bald head is a little wimpy it's just barely okay for a setup like this if you had a seventy two, two hundred you would really be taxing it anything other than perfectly level