Lessons

Lesson Info

Set-up, Retouch and Recent Settings Menu

And so next up, what we're going to be getting into is the setup menu, which is generally the set up of the camera, which has a lot of overlap in some pretty similar things to the custom menu. First option in here is to form at the memory card formatting the memory card and deleting the pictures on the memory card are similar type things you're kind of getting rid of the pictures. If I was to use the phone book analogy, deleting pictures is the equivalent of crossing them off with a line. Okay, formatting is more like ripping the page out and putting a new page in the book with deleting the images. They're still there, it's just the camera's not going to view them. And so one of the procedures that professional photographers have before they go out on an important shoot is they check their memory cards, see what's on them, make sure that they have been downloaded and backed up on hard drives, and then they form at the memory card it really it deletes the images, and it re establishes a...

line of communication with the camera, establishes a new folder for the images and basically just cleans everything up for a nice starting point of a new series of pictures. And so this is something you want to do on a regular basis formatting those memory cards saving the user settings is for the you one and you two settings, and so the the way that you do this is you go set the camera exactly the way you want it, too for you one, and you go to the exposure mode you want. You set your cameron to the focus mode that you want to be in, you set the meet oring anything in the menu that you want exactly the way you want it. Then come to this section in the menu and you would register this to either you one or you too, so you can obviously save two of these under you one in you, too and it's a great system for switching back and forth between lots of camera changes when you want to make that change very, very quick. If you want to just simply reset him back to default, you can simply go in and reset them and take out all the settings that you've had in there. Monitor brightness is the display on the back of the camera should be left at zero in the middle. If it drifts in the future, you khun brighten it up or dark, innit? Cleaning the image sensor and this is done best way to set this is for at startup and shut down so every time you turn the camera on and off it shakes dust and tries to get it off the sensor, leaving it there is good because it's constantly trying to keep it as clean as possible there's no real downside toe leaving it turn on now if you do get something on your sensor, you're going to probably need to go into lock mere up for cleaning and what this does is it locks the mere up opens the shelter said that you can see the sensor in the camera you'll need to take the lens off as well and there's some tools that you will need and here's the first step the first tool that you'll need is a air blower often known as a rocket blore and what you do here is you simply just squeeze this and shoot burst of air into the sensor hopefully knocking off any dust or anything that's sticky on the sensor I hold my camera upside down help gravity you pull it off and get it out of that mere box housing and that usually will do the job but there's something that stuck on there that the auto sensor won't be able to clean off if there's still something on the sensor and you still have little specks in the sky you may need to turn your camera in for a professional cleaning, but if you want to do it yourself what you can do is you can buy a swab and liquid solution and what you'll do here is you put a couple of drops of liquid on the swab and then you will take the swab and you will swipe it across the sensor cleaning off the dust. Now this is a process that not everyone feels comfortable doing and so I don't recommend everybody does this, but if you feel comfortable with it, you have a steady hand, you're fine repairing little things this is not that difficult to dio and so you can clean the sense of yourself. It is not likely to happen very often unless you're working in a very dusty environment now it's still possible that that will not get off all the dust and so there is one final step that you can go to called image dust off reference photo so if your photos look like this, you have a serious dust problem all right? What you do is you photograph a white sheet of paper which will show you the dust on your sensor very clearly you then come to dust off reference photo and you basically register the image and what happens is the computer looks at it figures out where all the dust is clones it out so the next time you take a picture it doesn't have dust now I don't like many other photographers don't like the camera randomly cloning pixels over pixels and so this is a last ditch effort in which to clean up the sensor and so if you're on safari in africa, there's no place to get it clean, you don't have any of the right supplies, and you want to get rid of the dust you could use this technique. You can read the instruction manual for a little bit more specific, detailed information on how to go through the process yourself scrolling down flicker reduction in some of the live you modes and movie modes with some video or some fluorescent lights, you may get a flicker flicker and you can change the hurts from fifty to sixty hertz to avoid that flicker and awkward look in the viewfinder time zone and date is pretty simple. I'm way off, I'm always trying to guess what time I actually will achieve this point. I know what day I'm going to do this class and I'm way off on time I thought it was going to be one fifteen and it's almost three o'clock I don't know why I'm so far off on I got to fix that for the next time, but you simply put in the dating time here be reminded that this camera does not have wifi and it does not know what time zone you're in and does not know about daylight savings time, so you have to change that manually when you get to that point. Language. Okay, who recognizes this language right here on this, of course is the very famous cling on language which I would be surprised if you saw in your camera or recognized, but I did have one student who recognised it straight away and I was being extra geeky actually went on the internet and not only did I want to get something that looked weird, I got the actual true cling on language for cling on and this person recognized it could read it. Uh, so choose the appropriate language here. Obviously you can tell it's getting late in the class, isn't it? Okay? Auto image rotation you want to have this turn on? When you suit verticals, it'll automatically rotate verticals when you download them to your computer that's a nice thing safety a lot of time battery info this is nice, you can go in and you can see how many pictures you've taken on that charge of the battery. You get to see exactly what percentage it's good too, and the general condition of the battery. So helpful information image comment this is where you can go in and put something like don't steal my photos and it's attached to the meta data of all the photographs that you take, you could put in something more practical, like your email address or your website you could put in a email address of somebody you photographed while you're out travelling you can put anything you want here that'll fit into that little small area similar to that copyright information you can put in a copyright with your name. You can put in an artist, for instance, it's your copyright, but there's somebody else who's actually shooting the pictures whatever information you want to put in here, put in your name. If your camera gets stolen by a stupid thief, a thief and you somehow find it and you could say that's mine camera, they could say no it's, not it's my camera, and you could just go into the image copyright information and go see it's got my name in there and so that's a little bit of proof that it's your camera granted, they could right over there name, and they're pretty easily if they know what they're doing, but one more thing that you can dio all right? If you happen to purchase two or more of these seventy one hundred and you get all the settings just right in one rather than trying to go over to the other camera and get him all right over there, you could just save all the settings in one camera and just load him up into the other camera my gut feeling is that this is designed for movies that are doing bullet time and they shoot with one hundred of these cameras and they don't want to go through and reset everything on every camera hundred times they could quickly just load up all the settings from one camera to the next. Unfortunately, it does not work from a d seven thousand to a d seventy one hundred or from a d eight hundred or six hundred two eighty seventy one hundred it's only between exact models of camera virtual horizon this is buried pretty deep in the menu is a little virtual horizon like a pilot house for leveling things. This is a good thing to link to the function button if you find this useful so that you could have faster access to it if you are using the older nikon lenses the ones that don't have the little chips in them the cpu chips in them you can go in and you can record in that scene nine lenses. So for instance, if you have a fifty millimeter one point eight lands, you could record that it's a fifty millimeter lands it's a one point two lands and it would record that fifty millimeter one point two lends information to the metadata for other information that you might use within light room or other photo programs and so it's a way to keep legacy lens is up to date with meta data that's going on all right, a f fine tune. You guys ready to geek out again? Get a little nerdy. All right? So focusing on this camera is incredibly good, but it's not perfect. Okay, remember that focusing system down below that was predicting where the camera should focus, and in some cases, it gets it just a shade wrong. So let's, take a look at a fine too. Your camera wants to focus on the right subject, okay, but sometimes it focuses a little in front or perhaps a little in back of the subject, and this could happen in a matter of inches or millimeters. All right, so you might have a consistent progress problem of your camera front focusing or back focusing. So what you need to do is you need to calibrate your camera and adjusted and here's, how you do that, you take a focusing target using fancy device called a ruler, and then you need a measuring device, and I use a thing called a yardstick, and I focus on the ruler, and I see if I'm focused in the right area. Now, if these sorts of fancy devices are not fancy enough for you, you would like something official you don't like this unofficial measuring devices, you can buy one of these lens align mark twos for about one hundred bucks you focus on the little target on the left and you see if you are in focus on the right because you can see if you're focusing in front or behind where you were supposed to do it, but in my low tech system, this is what it looks like for me, and I'm going to focus on the ruler and I'm going to look over on the right to see if the yardstick is properly and focused. So if I'm focused right, the number ten should be exactly in focus, and with any lens, you're able to adjust minus twenty two plus twenty, and these aren't millimeters this feed these air just increments. And so looking at these results, I would say that my camera needs to be fine tuned, tow plus five somewhere between zero and plus ten in order to achieve perfect focus. And so if you're shooting with a really fast lin, everything from a fifty one four, eighty five one four one o five left to one, thirty five f two, three hundred to eight anything like that, and you really are trying to get the most out of your lenses and you're using them wide open. You probably should be fine tuning your lenses and what you're going to need to do this, you're going to need all your camera stuff, you're going to need that ruler yardstick cable release you're going to need to set up your camera manual aperture priority either one will work you want to shoot a maximum aperture all the best image quality possible you're going to want to focus on your subject make sure that your cameras got the mere lockup on make sure you have vibration reduction off because we talked about turning the vibration reduction off and then what you're going to need to do is you need to manually unfocused the lands let the camera focus on the target locked the mirror up so there's no vibration fire the shutter, played the image back and then compare your images see if they're sharper now and then if they're not you go in and you adjust um plus or minus and you may have to take several pictures to really figure out the problem took me about an hour too do this with about five or six of my lenses so it takes a little bit of time but if you have fast lenses and you're hyper picky it's important to dio looks like we may have a question in class yeah regarding fine tuning their where you were saying playback and magnify is that something you could do well like shooting, tethered or something if you don't wantto yeah l city yeah you can't for for quick shooting it actually the back of the screen is going to be accurate if you zoom in you'll be ableto take a look on the measuring device if it's in the right area but you'll be able to do it even better on a full screen of the computer and it sounds like you said that you d'oh feint in all of your lenses but megan seven was asking if if you do this to all of your lenses I do it all my lenses just cause I'm a you're not if you have the standard kit lands that's the eighteen to one or five that's a three five two five six okay let's just say your average shooting is around fifty millimeter and you're shooting it like f for your depth the field let's just say is this and if this is off by two millimeters it's not going to make much difference but if your depth of field is this little tiny area here two millimeters is a pretty big difference and so its most important with very fast lenses and typically mohr important with telephoto lenses than white angles excellent thank you alright next line is hd mai and this is controlling your camera when it's connected up to an hd tv and it controls the output resolution and you can go in and have set some control so that your tv remote will be able to go forward and backward too pictures in your camera in the slide show if you do hook up the nikon gp one gps unit to the camera you can go in here and control various standby settings and how the camera uses the gps unit within the camera the wireless mobile adapter the w you won a for transferring images to a smartphone you can go in here and you can enable or disable this if you leave it enabled it will use more battery power, but if you want to get images transferred to your phone that's the way you do it next up there is a network setting too if you are choosing if you're using this device here called a ut one it's a communication unit, you could be transferring images to a computer through this it's kind of like a wireless system a little bit different. Most of the nikon cameras don't have this and it's not something commonly used with this camera, but it is another option for offloading images you probably won't see this order will be great out I fight hard and I fight card is a wireless card another way of wirelessly getting your images off your camera. One of the things that you could do with a knife I card is that you can shoot to it and have images immediately downloaded to your computer which is hopefully nearby if you go out and shoot, what happens is as soon as you bring your camera near your computer it automatically downloads the images to your computer so it could be very simple system for downloading because you never need to connect anything up. But the cards cost a little bit more there in very specific sizes. So you do have to kind of check into the hole I fi system if you want to get into that. And then finally, the firmware version, the software in the camera that runs all the operations, the menu and the picture taking is called firm where it needs to have something in there. And from time to time they have updates. And they have had two updates since this camera came out. The camera is now at version one point one. And if you go into your camera and I know this camera here is that version. One point zero zero you can update the firmware in your camera. You could go to night cons website and they will give you a link tow how to download the new firmware. And just a few days ago they came out with a new lens update, which is one point zero zero nine. And what this information has is the distortion control, chromatic aberration control problems that are in lenses that the cameras can read. And so remember, if you talked about the distortion, it just knows about more lenses now. And so if you don't have the current firmware version, go to your regional nikon website, there will be a download for the firmware and instructions on how to install it in very brief words, what you do is you download the software to your computer you put it onto a memory card you put the memory card in the camera, you goto firmware version and you update the cam it usually takes a few minutes to upload it and it's free and they fixed the bugs, so why not go ahead and do it and keep your eye on it usually about every six to nine months they often have an update fixing various little features in the camera. The final well, I guess it's not the final that they second to the final tab is the retouch menu and this is the one we're going to spend the least amount of time on because this is where you go into an image, you make a copy j peg copy and you do goofy things to it like at a fisheye effect or resize it one option here that's pretty good as it has a raw processing, so if you shoot a raiment, you can create a jpeg a copy of it for quick offloading if necessary and so when you're stuck in the airport with nothing to do for hours and hours and hours in and a little bit extra space and memory and your card go ahead and play around to your heart's content other than that, we're not going to spend much time on this. The final tab is recent setting, so every place that you have gone recently will show up within recent settings. So if you trying to remember where you were doing something, this is a good place to check. However, I would recommend going into choose tab and changing it over to my menu, and what happens at that point is that you can go to add items and you go through a list of all the nikon features in the menu, and you can add about six or seven items that you use on a regular basis so that when you hit the menu button, you immediately come to my menu, the things that you use most of the time and they're there for you and you don't have to hunt for them throughout the rest of the menu. So these are kind of like the radio stations that you have pre set in your car, they're they're they're quick, they're what you use all the time and it's very simple to go through that, and so I highly recommend taking a little bit of time and going through and customizing that to your desire, and with that we have come to an end of basically everything in the camera so that's everything on the outside that's everything on the inside daily shooter was asking about flash and they were curious how many off camera flash stones can this d seventy one hundred control? I don't know that number off the top of my head I know that you can handle several flashes within several groups. I know the maximum number might blow most people's budget on flashes it's not a small number like three or four five it might be nine or twenty or thirty or it might even be unlimited itt's a big number tonight um, and in terms of video, h dusky was asking does the picture control settings and color, space and matter for video settings like picture profiles on cannon, for example, would it be better to shoot video with the neutral profile? Well, it depends a little bit on what you're doing with your video, but it's an excellent question because when you shoot video you were shooting to a video file which is not a raw file. It is a compressed shaped file, you might say, and so the picture controls the picture modes do matter, and so where you have your saturation in yur color set is kind of important now it depends on who you are and what you're doing mom and pop shooting landscape and travel photographs probably want to get a nice vivid image that they don't have to mess with later on somebody who's shooting more professionally might want to shoot more neutral tone so that they can have more room to play with in post and so different folks different strokes for different folks and so think about how you want to use that video and how much work you want to do later on and that's going to dictate how you set the camera up ahead of time and so uh be your own best judge there okay, great on dh then we had a few there are always some competitive questions about this camera ever says that um you'll hurt her may ask is it worth upgrading from the d fifty one hundred to the d seventy one hundred? Most movies are saying the differences enough to validate the change I don't do much beauty a video, but what are your thoughts on it? Yeah well on any sort of upgrade the ultimate question is are the additional features of use to you that's what it really comes down to? So the one feature that the fifty two hundred doesn't have that a lot of people have grapes on and the reason it doesn't have is because nikon specifically left it out for this it's an upgrade reason whyyou want upgrade when you're in manual control you have your apertures and you have your center speeds front and back to dials dedicated dials very easy to work with with the fifty, two hundred you have one doll. You don't get the dial in the front, so you have to kind of share time back and forth, switching between shutter speeds and apertures and anyone who works manually very much, you know, it's like having shared time in a studio, you don't get to use it when you want to use it sometimes, and it just is a little bit cumbersome to go around at all the time and it's a minor little feature and I could go into other features. It's got better auto focus it's got better this better that but that's just kind of one simple operation and that's kind of the difference between this and the fifty two hundred is this has a lot more controls right on the outside that you can quickly access the fifty, two hundred in my opinion, is one of the best values and camera because it has a a good number of these features in the camera for a lower price. And so if you don't mind spending the extra time and button press is getting to those features, it's got him it's just not quite as easy to get to and navigate, and so it depends on how you dio your photography and what's important to you. Now the second question dealt with video and if you could refresh me on the video aspect they just said that they won't be using video as often so it wasn't a priority when they were coming cameras okay reboot on air and ruler and peace all through this people in the chat rooms were asking how is nikon d seventy one hundred verses nikon d six hundred d three hundred or cannon seventy okay, so there's a lot of different options there let's see thesixty hundred the big difference with nikon is that's a full frame sensor and I think for the like the average enthusiast it's going to be hard to find a better camera than this on the market and tio g o to the full frame you are going to be spending a lot of money more money on the camera not that much more but more money on the camera but you're going to need to spend more money on the lenses to really make that one sing as it should and so there is a financial cost for most everybody and so toe upgrade from this it's za noticeable hit you almost need to double your budget when going up to a six hundred and it's not really fair to do that comparison if you have to double your budget to do it but given this camera to d six hundred sixty six hundred in an instant I like the large sensor on it pretty much everything that this one does. The d six hundred does there's very few things that this one does that the d six hundred doesn't d'oh, but you're going to spend more money on the camera and more on the lenses now compared to the canon seven d it's a pretty comparable camera it's three years newer running as faras auto focusing this has more focusing points um, but number of focusing points is not always the most important. For instance, you could go how many cross points doesn't have, and, uh, I guess it's pretty equal that it's pretty quits a pretty close call between this and the candid seventy cannon seventy is eight frames a second, and this one is six unless you put it in the one point, three crop mode, so the cannon seventy is a little bit more russell robustly built than this and is a little bit bigger handle, which some people like this one in general, though, is three years newer technologies, so there's a lot of new upgrades to it, so it's I would consider the seventy still a slightly higher in camera, but we're also those of us who are watching the rumor sites are expecting a cannon seventeen mark to at some point in the near future. And the nikon d three hundred is a hard camera to compare it to because that camera is three and a half years old and that's just basically a very small upgrade from a camera that's about five years old, and we're also expecting a d for hundred at some point in the future that may or may not happen it's a little hard to tell whether what's not what nikon that's going to dio so some thoughts on camera forecast very like sense of rain, there's some theories that you know, whether we'll there. When this queen came out, they said it was the flag should have flagship of the a p s models, which for the size sensor and everyone's like what about the d three on red? You know, that was supposed to be the best, and maybe we're going to have a d four hundred and so it's possible. Nikon may just say no d four hundred by if you want a better camera, get a d six hundred or they may come out with a d four hundred it's hard to say, they could also be sitting there with one just completely ready and they're just looking over it cannon going to you're going to do a seventy mark too, because then we'll do this one if you don't do that, then we're not going to do this if you haven't fallen, been following canon, an icon for the last three years. They've come out with almost same price. Same feature cameras within a couple months of each other. And so the real comparison is with the new, newly introduced cannon seventy d. And so that'll be an interesting one as soon as we can actually get our hands on that one.