Lessons

Lesson Info

Button Layout: Back Side

Well let's move on to the back of the camera so to start with we have a little eyepiece shutter back here which is kind of a unique feature on some nikon cameras and what it does is it blocks light coming in from the back of the camera and the reason this is important is if you are not looking through the camera light is coming through that you piece and it's going to affect the media ring system and so if you're doing a self timer with, say, the sun setting in front of you and you have your you have the camera set to take your picture lights going to be streaming in this you find her and if you have your camera an appetizer shutter priority or program it's going to throw off your center speed or aperture because a bunch of light is coming in here and so you would flip the switch to block the light in there and so any time you are not at the camera remember I learned this lesson the hard way I was in college working for the newspaper and I was trying to take a picture of a foosball tab...

le and I was having the camera mounted up against a bright light in the ceiling and I didn't know what the exposure was like well just put it an aperture priority and I shoved it up against this light and I got all these terrible exposures and I had to go back and reshoot the thing because a lot of bright light was coming in there and so if you are using live you are moving mode you may and you're not using manual if you're in manual you don't need to worry about it you can set it however you want it's just those automatic modes where you need to set it john I love this little known fact about you and foosball how many continents have you played? I have played foosball on I think four continents and is it not your goal to play and I would like to be the first person to plan all seven and I have the most difficult of plain in antarctica right done I just need to get to some of the easier ones like australia and europe I'm confident okay back to the camera all right. So next up we have our playback and delete a button and this is going to kind of go hand in hand with our multi selector in the back of the camera so playing back images deleting them this is gonna be the quickest way to do it. There will be an additional way when we get into the menu system it is surprising to me the number of nikon users that do not know if you go up and down with the multi selector you can pull up or take off information about how the picture was taken and so nikon has a lot of different information screens about what white balance shutter speed aperture hissed a gram all sorts of information and so you know, you're gonna go left to right to go through your images but go up and down to seymour information about that, and so this is what you'll be doing a lot when you're revealing your images is going through all that that stuff there, okay, so next up we have the menu button, and this is what we're going to dive the whole second half of the class into this is where basically all the features of the camera are located and you'll find a lot of things are located in there for the second or third time, depending on the type of pizza it is below that we have a button that does triple duty first off, it is in control of what's known as picture control. Now, if you shoot raw images, this does not matter if you shoot j pegs this is pretty important this proud. This is the processing engine of your camera when you shoot a picture and you shoot it in j peg, the camera needs to figure out exactly how you want your image toe look because there's different contrast, different saturation, a little bit of different color tone a little bit of different sharpening that it can do, and there's a lot of different pre flavored ways to have it seasoned, you might say, for most people, I would say you should leave it in standard and do it, and make your adjustments on your computer, where you have more control, you have better visuals of what's going on, and you can adjust it from image to image. And so we have standard, neutral, vivid, we have monochrome, which allows us to shoot black and white portrait and landscape, which all have different tweaks that you can go in and control for most people, I would leave it in standard now, there's one exception that I have on this, and that is every once in a while, I do like to shoot black and white, I do shoot raw, but when you shoot monochrome and raw, what happens is that the image on the back of the screen is black and white and it's, kind of hard to visually go from color to black and white. In your mind. I like looking at things I'm visual, and so you actually get a raw image when you download it, but in the back of your camera, you get to see what the black and white image looks like, and so, you know, if you're going from a national park and you're gonna take all landscape photographs and you could set it toe landscape but you could also set it to standard you could tweak it later, but it depends on your workflow. For most people raw, this isn't gonna matter. Everyone else probably standard zooming in and zooming out. This is going to come into play in two different areas number one, when you play back an image and you want to check for sharpness, you want to check for detail, did you really get it sharp? You can zoom in and zoom back you can also go back to thumbnail so you can scroll through images more quickly and it's also going to come into play when you're in the movie mode or the live you mode. One of the new techniques for people who really want to get critically sharpe images from a tripod is to put the camera in tow live you zoom in, scroll around and find to make sure that you are getting the depth of field and the sharpness than your lens is focused in the right place and so it's a very good technique to use with live you the ok button. I'm not going to tell you what this button does, okay, it's just the one button on the camera I'm not going to offer any explanation at all on all right so that's just a challenge for you to research that one on your own check out the youtube video on the ok button all right next up on the right hand side of the viewfinder is the die after adjustment off a surprising number of people don't have the diop ter adjusted for their eyes the key for this is don't look in the frame away your cameras focused that you want to look at the numbers at the bottom of the frame just make sure that their sharp in focus and so it's something that can get bumped from time to time and so on this camera what you do is you actually have to pull it out just a little bit and you'll hear a little click and then you adjust it and then you push it back in so if you have to share the camera with somebody else good luck because you're gonna each one have your own little adjustment for your eyes we have another dual purpose of button here the outside collar of this is a very simple turning which controls our matrix metering our center waited or spot choice and how light is metered on the camera now matrix metering started office this antiquated all was so quaint in the early days it was pretty sophisticated it had five different spot meters and it was comparing and contrasting the light and now the newest one is officially called three d color matrix three which uses ninety one thousand pixels to compare and contrast the light and it's using color information it's using tonal information to determine what the best exposure is, and in general it doesn't amazing job and so a zai talked about the dynamic latitude the on the exposure of this camera is really, really good most of the time, if you leave your camera in matrix, you're gonna be fine on this camera. Some people prefer a traditional center waited meter, which is customizable, and we'll see in the menu system how you could customize that it's basically a medium size circle that you could make smaller and larger and the spot meter can be very handy if you can't get up close to your subject and you want to measure a light reading off of a small portion so a portrait photographer might take a reading off of a cheek landscape photographer might take a reading off of a rock and a tree in the sky and then kind of work all of those into one setting that they're going to use most people. I think the matrix metering is probably a good a safe place to leave it most of the time within this collar button is a button it's called the a f l and stand this stands for auto exposure lock, auto focus lock and so if you want to lock the exposure in or lock the focus in this is a button that we can customize and in the menu system we're going to get in we're going to be able to customize the way this button works right now it's designed as an auto exposure lock so if I point the camera up to my eye my care was giving me a certain shutter speed a certain aperture as I move it around over here the light is different over here that it is over there and it's changed the exposure if I wanted to hold this exposure I would need to hold this button in you can't just press it you've got a press in and hold it okay I like that exposure I'm going to come over here and then I'm going to shoot the picture and so you got to be a little bit careful with the way that you worked this button and now we can use auto focus lock and we'll do that when we use another system who had the cameras self timer amount that's why it took so long to fire all right so uh it depends on how you shoot if you shoot manual exposure you're not going to use this button hardly at all it depends on what modes you use we have r a f on button when you press the shutter release on the front of the camera the shutter release first off it wakes up the camera it exposes checks, the light turns a light meter on and it starts focusing and so if I put this camera in auto focus, I can focus by pressing the button in front, but I can also do it by the button and back now the where the button in the back comes in really handy is if you don't want focusing to take place on this front button here there's a lot of photographers typically they're more intermediate and advanced level photographers that like to separate the control of the back button versus the front button, so a good scenario for that is if I'm going to take a portrait of somebody and I'm gonna have let's say the center bracket right in the middle of their face, but that isn't where I want to put them for aesthetic reasons I want to have them off to the side, so in order to take their picture, I focus on them and then I move it off to the side and take the picture actually let me get my camera set up here, so I'm focusing on someone in the middle off to the side and I take the picture well, that's fine for one picture, but what if I want to do this twenty times in a row? Focus across focus, move across focused with across that gets old and tiring and it slows up the shooting now I could use a point off to the side and there's a lot of different ways to set the camera, but one of the things that I could do is I could use the back button to focus, and if I've disengaged this and I'm going to show you how to do this in the second half of the class, then I can have the camera over here, and every time I shoot it's, not refocusing the camera on the background and so for certain types of portrait photography times where you just don't want the camera to refocus every time you take a picture, it's a good thing and I took me a while that toe win me over on this one, I had to play with it for a while before I decided I liked this feature, and so one of the things I recommend to the more advanced users is turning off the focusing here, and then we'll be using the autofocus button on the back, our main command. I'll I'm not sure what we use this for, but we'll pass by it anyway. All right? So the multi selector I sometimes forget the name multi selector, and I'll call it your mouse or the four way the down tab on the back of a camera this is how you navigate through all the different features of the camera. Nikon does not have a name for the little button in the back of this and so I have called it the center button they sometimes call it the multi selector center button, which I think is way too long for an unlabeled little button but you can also use that in conjunction with okay in various situations just entering something the focus lock selector something a lot of people don't know is well is if they are left I'd or they are right id and normal people r right, I'd I of course and left I'd and being left I'd the problem is is that my nose will sometimes bump up against this and has just happened a moment ago it would start move my focusing point off to the left hand side and so sometimes for those of us who are left, I'd or anyone who has philly thumbs that hit things you can lock this so that while this is technically moving it's not making any changes in the camera and so uh if you are left I'd you might want to check that out and you may want to use that lock so that things don't get changed on you we have our little speaker down there so when you're playing your movies back that's where you compress your ear up to here we have a light sensor back here and this is ah light sensor to see how much light is in the back of your camera to adjust the brightness of the lcd. And this is not something that I particularly like. I like to have my lcd at a standard brightness, and I'm going to show you how to change that later on, but you can have it adjust for different brightness levels if need be our information, but we're going to talk a little bit more about this later, but if you just want general information, you can hit that button and it's going to bring up a display that shows your senator speed aperture and a bunch of other information, as I say, we'll go into that a little bit more later. There is a small card light here that comes on when your camera is writing information to the memory card. This is when you really don't want to take the memory card out of the camera is when this light is on and it's probably not a good idea to turn the camera off either. So just be aware of when that's on that is writing it's kind of the I'm working don't bother me function, so you got to be careful with that one there is the card light, sometimes I speak one ahead of my slides, okay, so we have our new live view movie. Swivel switch in the back and so this is how we get our camera into the live you mowed or the movie mode which are similar but they are different and so the swivel switch on the back is how we switch from the camera which would be live you or the movie camera for shooting movies within there is how we can turn on live you so if you want to be in live view you're gonna have to have it in the camera mode and then hit the center but and there's just a lot of things that operate very differently on a camera in live you or movie mode so let's talk a little bit about what's going on in this case so put your camera in live you if you want and one of things you could do is you can hit that information button that we just talked about and that can pull up or take down information that you may or may not want tohave in there there's grid displays there's a virtual horizon in there and there's a history ram if we have that turned on this camera's not turned on right now but that's something we'll do in the menu system now the thing that surprises most people and I just can't stress this enough is that when you go into live ur movie mode focusing and I know you spent like three thousand dollars on this camera focussing is not good on these hd slr cameras in the movie motor the lifeboat and so I can't recommend enough going to manual focus but if you do insist on trying to auto focus there are a couple of options on this camera we can have single focus where the camera focuses on one subject and then stops or a full time focus where it's constantly tracking and it's working very hard to keep whatever it can in the viewfinder in focus but once again all the professionals who are shooting cameras like this are manually focusing the camera within the autofocus mode of single and full full time if you do choose single or full frame or full time auto focus excuse me we have different areas in different ways in which to choose what to focus on there is a face priority mt there is a wide area and then there's a small area and then there's a subject tracking mode which they say is very good for tracking children moving randomly around that can track their movement a little bit more easily now how do you change these well it's a secret button that we haven't really got to yet but it's over on the side of your camera on the left side of your cameras you hold it it's an unlabeled little button in the middle of the f and m switch when you press that button and you turn the back dial make sure you get my camera for the right moment here you'll notice on the back of the camera, you can change from full time to single focus now your camera needs to be an auto focus in order for this to work when you turn the front dial, you will see the different options for the focusing area mode, and so you can play around with this a little bit, but I can't stress enough that most people are shooting are just simply shooting manual focus. You focus before the shot, you do your movie mode, and then you re focus for the next shot. If you're using the camera in live you, you can try the single shot let's say you're doing a landscape shot, and you want to get everything in focus. You could pick a tree or a rock or something to focus on, and you could use the single focus, the cameras, slower toe work, it will work, but it's just not as good as it is in the normal mode if you are going to be shooting movies with this, okay, this is officially my least favorite slide of the entire day, because one of the things I hate about power point presentations is just a ton of bullet points in a bunch of text, but what can I say? There's? Just a bunch of information that I want to have on screen so it shouldn't we have we have the waves go out the way so it's a little bit of you gave it something something I put a little effort in thank you can I waken shoot to four gigabyte files in the camera? It is limited on that, which means if you shoot the camera had full resolution, you're going to get about twenty minutes if you shoot in lower resolutions and we'll talk about those in a moment, you can get up to twenty nine minutes fifty nine seconds and the reason that it can't do thirty minutes is it's not because nikon doesn't know how it's because there's an import tariff in the united states and other countries that if it shoots thirty minutes, it's a video camera and the price of the camera goes up by about five percent and so that's the limitation as to why it won't do thirty minutes. One of the things that one of things that you could do is you can use the depth of field preview, but we haven't talked about it but it's here in the front of the camera to market indices and these air basically little sections like if you're filming a movie and you're like, ooh that's a cut but you want to keep recording, you can press that button and it gives you little markers within the video file so that you could go back and find those cuts and edits and points a little bit more easily, you can have two options for resolution. You have h d, which is twelve, eighty by seven twenty and full hd, which is nineteen twenty by ten. Eighty there will be a variety of frame rates that you can choose not all options are available for all resolutions. For instance, you if you're going to shoot sixty frames a second, which is kind of cool because you can play it back in slow motion, you're gonna be regulated to twelve, eighty by seven twenty. There is also twenty five and fifty frames for people working with the pal system. It depends on what video system when we'll talk about that a little bit later as well. Did I say this already focus and then shoot? You just want to make sure you got that one? Uh, one of the nice things is is that, you know, there's there's some people who don't like the fact that video is in this camera, they're they're like, hey, I'm not that I'm ever gonna shoot video. Well, luckily, nikon has taken the stance that this is primarily a still photographic machine. And so if you are shooting a movie and you suddenly want to take a picture just press down on the shutter release you will get a still picture the one little caveat and I don't know how I feel about this is it is a sixteen by nine frames so it's not the normal full frame that you get which is a three by two aspect ratio it is going to be the same frame that you see the movie shooting so it's a little different than the full frame and then we also have choices for a full frame shooting as well as a d x which is a one point five crop frame in there as well and one of the nice things has been a complaint for some people is that you can have different white balance is set for what you see in the viewfinder and what the camera is recording and so there are separate white balances and that's sometimes necessary in a studio we do actually have a question in class that we're going to go to so I've just whenever I've shot a still photo within the video I nothing will read it live room won't pull it up my room for everything it's just it's not readable second download it to my computer but that's it that was downloaded to your computer is it a raw filers at a j peg file? How do you have it set I'm not sure but I've looked a lot online and I can't figure out anywhere how to get light room to feed those files I have not actually experimented with that option is one of those things where you can do it but I haven't actually tried that one I don't have an answer for you I don't have an answer for everything that's a good question I know I am interested in I'll have to figure it out now if you do let me know okay, maybe we'll figure it out at the break we'll see if we can do okay all right so moving on uh continuing on the back side of the camera okay, so this if I could be a little opinionated for a moment is one of the dorky ist things that I have ever seen on a camera it's this little cover that comes supplied with all nikon cameras and I know it's there to protect the screen and I really don't want to scratch up the screen and so I highly recommend protecting the screen and you know it just it looks a little goofy back there it falls off onda problem that I see kind of with cameras a lot is that it collects dust in between and so it can get very, very dusting you need to clean it and so what I'd recommend is there's the's covers their there's number different companies out there that have a very tight seal plastic that just goes right over the back screen of the camera and that will prevent scratches it's also very clear they're very sharp. They're very good and so you might want to think about upgrading the lcd protection on your camera there's nothing wrong with it and if you lose it hey it's, another ten bucks for a nightgown so you can support nikon buy don't buy more of those. Okay, uh don't recommend this, but just be aware of this on your camera are a couple of little green dots. Have you ever noticed those green dots? Well, if you want to restore all the settings on your camera, be careful handing your camera to eight and eleven year old press those buttons for two seconds and then press him again and that resets kind of all the states, all the settings on the camera. Now, if you want to get really scary, you can reformat your card by pressing the two buttons right next to the red buttons so you'll press those for two seconds, and then you have to press him again for, like, a half second or a second, and that will reform at your car and it was just put on there a long time ago it's kind of a legacy thing with nikon so that you could very quickly learn how our very quickly reformat your card if you want to without diving into the menu system.