Lessons

Lesson Info

Right Side, Bottom, and Lenses

Over on the right side of the camera we have dual memory card slot, which is kind of cool put in two of the sd cards there's different size cards that you can get right now and this changes about every eighteen months with moore's law but right now kind of the sweet spot is thirty two gig not too far away the sixty four gigs will be coming down in value in comparison of the thirty two but get whatever size fits your needs and budget appropriately. One of the men you settings that we're going to go in and adjust is custom menu f seven, which tells forces the camera that if there is no cards in the camera you cannot take a picture so you'll no longer be able to take a picture without film in the camera and so it's just kind of a safety protocol that we could turn on, which is kind of nice be aware that on the sides of these cards there is a right protection switch if it's in the downward position the card is locked and you can't write or erase information off of it. So if your card is no...

t working checked the position of that slider switch there is different speed cards out there the average user doesn't need to be overly concerned about the speed of their card for day to day shooting if you shoot a lot of sports photography if you are working for sports illustrated in you're downloading your cards really quickly, it's nice to have a faster card but for day today were nothing particularly faster at the very extreme needs to be. If you do shoot video, you do need to keep an eye on what card class you are getting. This is a slightly different rating. This is how fast the card can continuously right data, which is how video is done, it's on a continuous stream of data and you want something class six or higher for shooting video. Many of the newer, faster cards have gone to this newer, faster you hs ready so you hs class one or class two is really a super fast card. The best way to get information from the card to your computer is just by taking the card out of the camera and plugging it directly into your computer. You can use the card readers there indefinitely a lot better than plugging your camera in, but if you do have a card slot in your computer or your laptop that's going to be the fastest way to get that information transferred over, all right, on the front of the camera, we have a little lamp, this does triple duty. Red eye reduction we talked a little bit about that before the self timer blanks let you know when you're going to get a picture and it's a very low powered flash to help in auto focus situations where it's very dark this irritates me not because I'm a private eye and I sit in a car and I have a light shining out of my car indicating that I'm trying to take a picture but it is just kind of irritating sometimes when you have this light shining into your subject's face, I haven't found it really necessary if you know what focus points are active and where to point them but we can control this in the custom menu a seven by going in and turning off this light or leaving it on kind of depends on your needs so we'll get to that in the full menu setting a meter coupling lever allows this camera work with older say nineteen seventies type lenses with the camera so you there's some pretty cool ends is that you can pick up on ebay and at garage sales with it that infrared receiver is on the back and on the front so if you want to get in the picture yourself you use that same m l l three to be in the picture we have our little index mountain we saw that before lens release for taking the lens on and off inside, you can see the mere this is thie reflex portion of the single lens reflex. Now, this camera has an f driveshaft. This is how the original nikon auto focus cameras worked. Is that a driveshaft like a car? And it drove the lens. Now, this can work all of those early auto focus lenses from the late eighties and all throughout the nineties. The step down camera from this the fifty, two hundred thirty two hundred. They do not have the auto focus driveshaft, and they cannot work with the older lenses. So that's one of the advantages with this cameras there's a much wider range of lenses that you can work with us on this camera down at the bottom of this camera, it has an all purpose button called a function, but and this button will do one of many different things that you program it to dio. And so if you go into the info screen or if you go into custom men, you have to, you can program what this button does, and we'll get into that when we pass that by in the menu setting after the break up above, we have a preview button. It's also a function button that you can program to do many different things, but by default many people have it as the depth of field preview. And so what this does is when you are looking through the lands you are looking through the lands wide open at the shallow a step the field possible when you press in on this button it's going to stop the aperture down so you can see how much depth of field don't do that again for you you can see on the left we're stopping the lens down so there's the aperture and over on the right you can see how much depth of field we're getting when we stopped that lens down and so it's a good way to see how much depth of field you're going to get in your actual picture. In many cases I'll just take a picture and look at it on the back of the screen it's sometimes easier but in some cases it's very bright light, bright lit situations outside and it's not easy to see the back of the screen so it could be a very helpful button. It used to be exclusively on the top of the line professional cameras and it's kind of filtered its way down to all the cameras and so that's what's going on on the front of the camera let's go down to the bottom of the camera and real quickly e n l fifteen comes with one of the batteries standard nikon battery's gonna sell for about sixty bucks if you want to go into the set menu, you can see some very specific details about how good that battery is, how many shots you've taken on it handy little thing that will take another look at in the menu, said there's, another little rubber door on the bottom side and this is for adding the indeed d fifteen multi power battery pack and so if you like to shoot vertical and people who shoot vertical portrait shooters and sport shooters, if you do a lot of shooting this is mork comfortable in the long term you can shoot from high levels low levels and your hands were just in a much more comfortable position. So if you do a lot of that, I would highly recommend the grip it's also good for people who just have big hands or anybody who uses a lot of battery park because you can use to batteries at the same time in the camera standard tripod socket so that's going to work on all the standard tripods you'll have your serial number down there so record that for your insurance purposes talk about lenses real quick so standard lens on this kit that you often get with cameras thie eighteen to one or five, in which case it has filter threads of sixty seven many different icon lenses have many different filter size and this is not the filter size for all lenses, but if you do want to get a uv or protection filter or polarizer, you want to get a sixty seven there's a little notch up towards the front that uses its for mounting a hood now the hood is going to help block bright light from hitting the front of the lens can be very helpful in bright light situations and then we have our standard things on the lens we're gonna have our zoom rain for changing our angle of you you'll see what focal length you're at you'll have a focus ring it does change in different positions on different lenses when you are in a manual focus mode and I'm in slight after this I'm going to go over the lens info the alphabet soup of nikon lenses the lens mount index which is what we mount we align with the index on the camera for putting our lenses on and off and then there are some cpu contact some electrical contacts on the back of the camera that you want to make sure our not obstructed or dirty or broken or anything like that because that's how it communicates with the camera itself now nikon is definitely at fault for loving the alphabet and calling their lenses with many, many different letters and so here's kind of ah definition of what some of their more common letters r a f obviously stands for auto focus they have two different abbreviations as faras I can see for silent wave to say really quiet, focusing motor that they use in pretty much all their cameras. Now d stands for distance information you're going to see this on some older lenses. The newer lenses are g so g is the new d general. Most of the lenses you find these days are going to be ji lenses dx means it's especially sized for the smaller sensor on this camera e g means it's got really good glass extra low dispersion means you're going to get good color, good sharpness on it. Typically it happens more of the telephoto lenses g means it hasn't electronically controlled aperture, which is all the lenses that nikon has been doing for the last well almost decade at this point and so it's very common lenses that you'll see out there now internal focus means it's probably a little bit faster in focusing micro simply means it's good it close up capabilities nano crystal coding the end is kind of the premium letter right now it's the most expensive letter in the alphabet, it's what they put on all they're really high end lens and said basically makes him sharper and makes sure that all the colors land in the right area vibration reduction is something that many lenses air having these days it's the built in pitch in your system where the lenses are adjusting for your hand move and you might see a roman numeral number two and this is not second generation vibration reduction but it's the second great generation of that particular focal length and aperture lens in auto focus the vibration reduction there are different versions of it you have to go back and look at the introduction of that lens to see which generation it isthe andi, I think you can find all that information out at the nikon website so finally on the lenses you need to be very clear between fx and dx lenses so let's explain it dx lenses are labeled as d x fx lenses are just not labeled your camera is a dx camera and can use d x or fx lenses. The full frame cameras from nikon require a full frame fx lens all right, so with your dx lands it casts an image circle that's big enough to fit the frame that you have within the camera now impossible roads down the future for you you might say is if you take your current dx lands and you upgrade to a nikon d six hundred eight hundred or something else it doesn't fill the frame with the image and you get these dark corners that air called vignette ing that most people see is unacceptable if you buy an fx lands for your d seventy one hundred, it is going to produce an image that is larger than necessary for the crop to size of the frame there's not going to be any problem with that? In some cases, you're kind of over buying on the lens, but in some cases there is no other option. If you want ah, five hundred millimeter lens, they don't make a dx five hundred millimeter lens. They only make an fx five hundred millimeter lands, and in the telephoto case, it's actually to your advantage to use those lenses so you can use anything you want with this, but if you do upgrade to full frame censors, your dx lenses are something that you're probably going to want to sell off. And as far as the lenses, we're going to end up with my recommendations on the lenses so the eighteen to one of five it's okay? You're nothing terribly wrong with it. It's not really fast in low light conditions, you're kind of limited with that five point six aperture, but it's a good starter, lands some people want to have more range, so they like the eighteen to two hundred, and so for somebody who travels a lot, that could be quite handy because you don't have to change lenses and you have a much bigger rage. If you do want to get into some telephoto work, which, if you have just the standard kit lens is probably the first thing that you're going to want is more telephoto capability. The main go to lens. I think for most people on this camera is the nikon seventy two, three hundred it's a good range it's, not too much money, the seventy two, three hundred going to sell for a little over five hundred bucks if you're going to africa on safari or you shoot a lot of sports that are pretty far off. The new nikon eighty two, four hundred at a whopping twenty, seven hundred dollars, is a very nice lands about the biggest lens that most people would feel comfortable in a putting in a normal camera back. But for a lot of people, that seventy two, three hundred is to go to lance for white angle work, the ten to twenty four would be the main option that would get you something that would be notably wider than the standard let's and now that's more of an intermediate or advanced level lens for users. And so it's. Not generally the first lends out of the gate. Uh, if you do get the normal kit lands, one of the things that it's just not really good at is low light. It doesn't let in a lot of light and if you do want to let in a lot of light let's say you do a lot of pictures in your home or you want to shoot portrait photography with shallow depth of field the thirty five one point eight lands is a bargain it's less than two hundred bucks it's fast it's just a normal angle of view so it's kind of a general purpose lance now these air all what are known as prime lenses they're not zooming there one angle of you and that set if you want to do portrait photography there are three really good choices fifty millimeter one point eight and one point for as well as thie eighty five for most people the fifty one eight is going to be the best value it sells for a little over two hundred bucks the one four is aboutthe same quality maybe a little bit better a little bit faster it's going to be four hundred dollars and if you liketo work outside and you have a little bit more space between you and your subject the eighty five is a nice lands and that's going to be about five hundred bucks for anyone interested in micro or macro photography probably the first lens tto take a look at is the eighty five f three point five good little macro lens will get you down one to one and we were talking much earlier about non nikon lenses so let me give you three options of lenses that nikon doesn't make that or they're much more money first off is if you want something really good wide angle this is my favorite wide angle lens for this camera though takina eleven to sixteen it's about the same amount of money is the nikon, but it is a full stop faster and so it's much better under low light conditions tamron has a seventeen to fifty two point eight nikon has a similar lands, but the tamron is a vibration control it's a two point eight aperture and it sells for quite a bit less than the nikon and is still very good quality and brand new on the scene this is the fastest zoom lens out there it's thie sigma eighteen to thirty five, which is not a huge range but it would be good for travel or street photography or general purpose, but it's a zoom lands with an aperture of one point eight, which is unheard up. Nobody is doing this s o this would be kind of a cool it's it's not super cheap it's around a thousand dollars on it's not super small, but it is another good options, so all of these non nikon lenses are some nice options of things that either a nikon doesn't make or they're quite different in price