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Playback & Shooting Menus

Okay, so we're going to dive into the heart of the four hundred forty seven page manual now getting into the menu system, and I know this seems a little tedious, and it is a little bit boring in some ways I hate to say that, but it's kind of important that you have your camera set up properly before he really go out, start doing something serious with it, and so we're going to take care of that right now and in general, as we go through the menu system, there's going to be a couple different types of things there's going to be stuff that you need to know about, and you need to make a change on there's gonna be stuff that you need to come back to to occasionally change, and then there's going to be stuff that you don't care about that has no impact on your general photography, and so you kind of forget about a lot of those things, but you just want to get upset, right? The first time through now is to get into these menus, you'll see that there's a lot of different tabs and there's a ta...

b for playback playback for shooting tab for custom and so forth, and we're going to go to these different tabs where all these features are customized in there. Now, something you do have to watch out for is the little scroll bar on the right hand side because you'll go to a shooting tab or another tab you like. I don't see what I'm looking at on that's because you have to scroll down and the way you scroll down is by tabbing down on the multi selector on the back of the camera, and so everyone take your cameras, press the menu button and you're going to want to go up to the playback menu because that's, where we're going to start, we're going to go through here and we're going to start off with the delete button. And so if you wanted to lead images, you can delete him here, but frankly, it's a lot easier just with the regular delete button on the back of the camera it's in two places because basically everything is in the menu system for the playback folder. I'm going to recommend a change from potentially where your camera is, and I would select all folders for this that way it is looking at all folders on the memory card to play back images. What may happen? Let's say you have a d seven thousand shoot pictures on that memory card, you put that memory card in this camera? Your camera won't see those because it's on ly looking for the d a hundred pictures, you then reform at that memory card and you've just gotten rid of all those pictures you took with that other camera. And so for most people, you're going to want to be able to look at all the folders on any particular card for hiding the image. You can hide an image so that it is not visible in playback or if you're going to do a slide show mode, uh, have fun with it. I just don't see a lot of use for playback display options in general, I like options, and so I'm going to go in this, and I'm probably gonna check off all of the options. Now, if you really know that you don't want one of these options, well, then you can not check it one of the options in there that is kind of interesting, that could be very helpful for some people is the highlight alert, and what it's going to do is it's going to blink hot pixels at u of pixels that are over exposed? If you were going to be shooting a wedding, you shoot a bride's stress, and the bride's stress is blinking white that's a big problem. And the blinking pixels are going to show that to you very, very clearly, and so this would be a good little hint to change your exposure in order to do that. I find this, frankly, a little irritating toe look out on a regular basis because in some pictures, blown out pixels are totally fine. It depends on the picture and so make your choice is to what you like to see and not in general, you might want to check them all off to start with and then see what you don't use later on down the road, you can copy images in this camera if you want between memory cards, which is kind of cool, you could shoot one memory card stick in another memory card and you don't need a computer to go and transfer those images back and forth. And so you're going here to transfer these, and I'll kind also mentioned that we're not going to go into the how to on every one of these menus. This is where the instruction manual khun b a little bit more helpful. I'm just trying to give you some helpful hints as to what's important and who needs to be aware of certain features in here normally, with the image review that's turning the image on the lcd on the back of the camera, I like to leave it on some people I don't want to use it if you were going to do a time lapse for instance in the camera was going to shoot for hours and you didn't want to waste battery life and you don't need to look at every picture in a timelapse you could turn it off for after delete there's a couple of different options as to what picture it shows the next one in the syria's siri's or the previous one I would generally leave this at show next and then we have rotate tall I would turn this one off I'm not sure if your camera normally has it on on I'm going to check my camera right now my camera's got it turned on I'm going to turn it off what this is doing is it's rotating vertical images so that you can see him properly in this horizontal format they become very small and normally I'm more than willing to turn the left to turn the camera to see it a bigger size. The reason that you would leave it on is if you're going to do a slide show it's a little harder to turn the tv vertical so if you if you're goingto do it on a tv or on a slide show mode is the only time you want to leave it on for rotated on your computer that's a separate issue and I'll talk about that when we get to that option speaking of slide show, if you want to put on a slide show with the camera, there are some parameters that you khun dive into so that you could hook it up to a tv for quick slide show there's a bunch of pages in the instruction manual on how to print from this camera. I'm not going to go into it at all, but if you wanted to, this is where you would go to in the camera, so what you're gonna probably need to do is hit the menu button to kind of back out of the playback stuff and then scroll down to the shooting menu and we're going to talk about things dealing with shooting. So first off we have a shooting menu bank, and I'm goingto go right on to the next one called extended menu banks to talk both of these at the same time way have four different menu banks a, b, c and d and you can go in and change the names if you don't like those and you can go up and set the camera pretty much any way you want and have it customizes bank a, b, c or d and so maybe you're shooting raws and spot metering actually spot metering would work, but we could do program modes we could set the camera up in many different ways. That we would want to for a certain type of activity and quickly switch between bank a, b, c or d now, extended menu banks are also going to lock in your exposure mode and your shutter speed and aperture. So if you knew you wanted to start or have the camera set a particular shutter speed an aperture, you could turn on the extended menu banks and lock things into the shooting men. You know, I'm going to recommend the manual again if you do want to get into this the exact settings on how to toe lock all these things in, and I know there's been a few gripes from people in the night con forms that it's not as customizable as they would like, so there are some limitations with this, but if you do have a couple different types of photography that you switched between, you could have the cameras set up for one and easily switch it over rather than going and find finding ten or twenty different menu settings to change so good, helpful things for people doing very particular things with their camera storage holders can be created and access, you could have different folders were you store different images personally, I think having completely different memory cards really keeps things separate, so if you have personal and business reasons that you're using your camera having separate memory cards is probably a better technique, but if you did just have one memory card after all, you spent all your money on the camera and the class you know have any money left over for an extra memory card. You could create different folders. File naming. You can actually change the three letter code on your files. And so it starts off with dsc digital. You know what? C stands for system. Just a digital camera system, possibly, but you can change it to like your three three initials. And so all of your images have your three initials on them. I still recommend refi are renaming your things, renaming your pictures when you download him into light room or some other type program. So it doesn't really matter. But you could customise it a little bit. We have to memory card slots. We have an sd and a cf card slot. You could go in and select how images are stored. Some options you could do overflow where it shoots on one card and then when that one card fills up, it goes to the second slot. You can choose to shoot raw on one card and jay paid on the other card now keep in mind if you shoot. The same size card in that situation it's going to stop shooting when the first card fills up and even though even though there's a bunch of space on that other card it's going to stop shooting because one card is for film and so you khun set the parameters of how those those things air set up and actually that's in this second card selection which card is your primary card and what's happening with the second card image quality? All right, so this is where we get to choose things like raw jpeg and tiff and so forth. And so if we are shooting I would recommend raw if you want to get the most out of this camera you're gonna get the best image quality the widest latitude. If you want to shoot j pegs, I would recommend shooting large because that gets you the thirty six megapixels if you are going to shoot medium, it is a twenty megapixel image and if you shoot small it's going to be a nine mega pixel image and there's not a lot of good reasons why you would buy this camera to shoot small j picks, but it might happen to you and that's. So so with the image size that's for the j peg cities large, medium and small, sometimes I get my head on my slides okay image area talked a little bit about this before, but let me explain this hopefully a little bit more. Clearing the image area that you have is a thirty six by twenty four frames, and that is the full frame sensor and that's, how most people are going to want to shoot this camera as an option, allowing you to shoot a little bit quicker. You can shoot with a one point to crop, which makes everything a little bit more telephoto, and so you're using a smaller frame rate. Excuse me a smaller frames so that you can shoot at a faster frame rate less data is being collected in the camera could process it faster, and the camera can shoot at five frames per second at this one point, two frame. Right now, if you want to shoot in the dx, which is an even smaller frame, you can shoot up to six frames per second. But you gotta have the cameras vertical battery grip in order to do that. And then there is one other framing option, which is a five by four aspect ratio, which a lot of people like for shooting. Vertical portrait ce a three by two aspect ratio is a little bit tall it's, nice for landscape horizontally, but when you get to vertically. Ah, lot of people don't like using up that much space and if you know, you don't use it, you can set it in your camera to a five to four aspect ratio, and in your viewfinder, it gives you a little crop guide, so you know where to frame up your shot. And so this could be really handy for somebody who's shooting a lot of portrait ce and they never use all that framing on the edge. And so ah, lot of neat little options that nikon has put in that we don't see on many other cameras, so good stuff. Normally, though, I would leave it at fx to shoot the full frame sensor. All right, jpeg compression, if you are going to shoot j pegs, you have two options. You have size priority, which crushes things down a little bit smaller, throws out some data or optimal quality. I would think for best quality purposes, you would be at optimal quality. Next up, we come to neff recording, and this is where we have to get some props. Help this out. All right, so we got some glasses here, and we're going to make this official cause we're kind of dressing here, okay? Now we're ready to talk about neff recording I'm getting this on because this does get a little techie and geeky here, and a lot of people were like, I'm not gonna worry about this and why is every student in this class taking pictures and kate's coming out from behind to take pictures as well? This is ridiculous. Are we getting this on camera? Look at all these people shooting pictures of me. Isn't this my normal look? Okay, so with the raw recording, we have a number of options of how we can set up exactly what's happening so what's happening is our image sensor is gathering data and it's analog and it's converting it to digital, and it has a number of different options in nikon decided with all their geeks to give you every option possible. So the first option we have is twelve bit versus fourteen. All right, twelve bit gives you eight million colors fourteen bit gives you sixty eight million colors. All right, eight million sixty eight million, which one's better? Well, obviously sixty eight million's a lot more. The question is, can you see the difference? Okay, and so I have run this camera through a number of tests. In fact, I shot it once and I couldn't see a difference, so I went out and I shot it again more extreme and I couldn't see a difference and so I shot it again even more extreme and I couldn't see a difference and so I went again and I shot it three stops overexposed four stops underexposed and I couldn't see a difference and so technically fourteen megabits is giving you more information but so far I haven't seen any difference I've done some checking around on the internet there's a few people who have found a smidgen of difference in the most extreme scenario possible and it's highly unlikely that we're going to see anything in any of your image yes and so I am going to recommend twelve bit because I think it sees everything just fine and maybe if you were shooting for large twenty four by thirty six prints you don't care how slow your camera works because we're going to get into a compromise here and you're just gonna shoot one shot at a time you could go with fourteen now there's un compressed lossless compressed and compressed all right so un compressed doesn't do anything it doesn't do any compression at all and you can look a fourteen megabit un compressed image is seventy four megabytes which if you don't know about exercise is gigantic okay it's huge okay your cameras going process things very slowly it's going to become very sluggish in the way it works it's going to be very slow to download ok then we have compressed we're it throws away some data not very much just a little bit and it gets the file size down really small then there's something called lossless compressed where it compresses it but it knows how to get the information back and they say it's smaller but it has a reversible algorithm and so if I was shooting this camera I think the trade off that I would choose is I would go with twelve megabit files because I cannot see a difference between twelve and fourteen make events and I would go with the lossless compressed I'm going to end up with a thirty two megabyte file size which is on the smaller size of the options that are in here if you set it to the largest settings which I know a number of people who haven't really tested the camera they just go oh mohr is better they set it up at un compressed fourteen megabit their camera is really slow to work with I mean it still shoots it four frames per second but the amount of time it takes to download it to the memory card is longer if you are in maur the sports mind it's not the best sports camera the world but if you need to shoot faster you want to have this file sizes smaller if you're shooting landscapes you might want to have it bigger but I can't see any difference with lossless compressed them with fourteen megabit un compressed am I wrong? Do your own test and out geek me because this's not who I naturally okay, that was awesome, john, just like I expected. I undid the microphone here, so sorry, guys, I'll get the microphone back on, ok? Hopefully we're good all right? So had to geek out there had to address those issues. So there you go and were we going next on this white balance? Okay, so we really talked about white balance, but you can set it in the menu system as well. Picture control? Well, you know, I think we kind of already talked about this a little bit before there's a button on the back of the camera that does it you could do it here is well, manage picture control. Well, if you don't like the vivid look that nikon has pre programmed into the vivid or landscape look, you could go in and customize it. This is photoshopping your image is before you've taken them. I don't really like shooting like this have added, if you want to get into it, it only works on j peg images does not work on raw images color space the camera can record in one of two color spaces I would recommend changing to adobe rgb it's, a slightly larger color gamut it's used for commercial printing a day if you want to print pictures definitely want to have it here once again there's a lot of options this is a common won it doesn't affect raw images it on ly effects if and when you shoot jpeg images adobe rgb is a slightly wider color gamut and I say why not shoot in the largest collection of colors possible active delighting this is going to play a part in jpeg images again and what's happening is the camera is going to go in and start playing with the tones of the image and a good example of this is we got a photograph like this and the problem with this photograph is that the shadows are a little dark if we were to turn on the delighting it might lighten the shadows up so that we could see what's going on in this particular shot I think it looks better with a lightening of the shadows you can see a side by side of what it might look like before and after using some of this delighting the problem with just turning this on all the time is that some images look better with strong contrast and deep shadows and this is something that can be easily done later on in the computer and so my feeling is that let's not have the camera do the work I would rather have a fine touch control on this later on so I would recommend leaving that off next up is hdr which stands for high dynamic rage and cameras these days are just starting to come out and including hdr feature on it now the way that hdr is done really well is that you shoot two three or multiple pictures you put him into a program and you combine them all to get the best tonal areas of each different image so you're looking at areas that have strong contrast and I wanted to see how good this camera does so I went down to our local gasworks park to shoot a very high contrast seen so we have areas in the shadow areas in bright light and it's beyond the capability of what the camera can handle with a single j peg image and by putting the camera in the auto low it helped out a little bit there's a normal a little bit more you can see them background highlights are getting a little bit easier to see in auto high and so it does help in contrast he scenes but just for kicks I decided to do things the way I would normally do them is that is I just took a raw photo and as a straight raw photo that's what you get but then I went in and adjusted the raw photo because there's a lot you could do with that raw data and while I don't particularly like the tonal range in this image I was trying pull out as much information as possible so you could see how much the highlights I've been able to bring back and how much the shadows I've been able to bring up. So just shooting with this camera the dynamic range of shooting in raw gives you a lot of capability and so you can play around with the hdr setting and see if it works for you but I think just shooting and raw sometimes you might need to shoot two or three pictures and work with some of the other programs, but I think it's a limited capabilities in this camera it's something that you will normally leave off unless you were actually working in that mode next up what we have we have vignette control all right? This is one of the areas where the camera gets to communicate with the nikon lens and it may not know about that other brand of linz one of the problems on many lenses especially the faster lenses is that they have a darkening of the corners which is called vignette and in some cases it's not very nice to have this been getting it's very obvious and it distracts from what was really happening it's not like what was really happening, but before you turn this on all the time realized that some photographs look nice with vineyard. I know when I shoot a lot of people pictures I prefer a little darkening of the corners it brings your eye keeps your eye more towards the center of the photograph where the information is and so this is something that I once again I'm going to leave to better control later on so I I like leaving this turned off auto distortion control so what's going on here is that not all lenses are perfect hate to break it to you even a thousand dollars two thousand dollar lands is not perfect and one of the problems with lenses is that they distort lines a little bit so in this case we see a little bit of the curvature of the earth which isn't really I mean it is there but it isn't if the problem is is that the lens is slightly distorted and so as you can see as I switch back and forth between off and on when you turn this on it's going to fix that distortion now once again this isn't going to fix it for a raw image but if you use nikon software or if you shoot j pegs it will fix it and we typically don't like our image is distorted so that's when I would feel okay leaving turned on hi s o noise reduction when you shoot this camera at very high esos we saw this earlier in the glens to aaron the sensor test we're up around thirty to sixty four hundred we do get a bit of noise and one of the things that this camera has is it has a noise reduction software built into the camera so on those jpeg images it will reduce the amount of noise that you see once again this is something that you can control later on with the right software this also will slow your cameras down it's shooting ability when you are shooting these low light scenes and so if you take a one second exposure it might need another second to process that information and so be aware that it can slow your camera turning it on so I'm going to recommend turning it off unless you specifically needed for something our s o settings are right here and we've already seen this there's nice button on the top of the camera access it but we can jump in here and set some of the parameters. For instance when we use auto first off we could turn it on and off but secondly, we can select what's the maximum sensitivity let's say we find thirty two hundred is so unacceptable we could set sixteen hundred is the max I s o you can also select what shutter speed your camera will go down to its not as customizable it's some people would like but you can at least set in some parameters so that your camera stays in the rains that you feel comfortable shooting multiple exposures is kind of an old time professional feature on cameras being able to shoot multiple exposures in camera. You can do it. I've joked about this it's not really an important feature tohave this is something that's better done in photo shop, but I have found where I am wrong, and that is a set when you shoot within in camera, it gives you a little bit of helpful information on the viewfinder about the visual of what it's gonna look like combining the two images. So there are some cases where you could do things out in the field a little bit more easily than you can later on because you're able to re shoot them because you're out there shooting at that time. And so if you are into multiple exposures, play around with it it's a little bit of a gimmicky mode and there are some subtle controls in there for doing that. Now this camera has two different interval timeline. They have an interval time shooting and next we're going to have time lapse shooting, which are very similar and different interval time shooting is re you shoot an individual picture one after another for a period of time, and I got a couple of interval shots, time lapse shots I can share with you, so this first one is here in seattle, the lake union duck, dodge, this takes place in the summertime. I believe on wednesday, night's still wanting to get out there on a boat and shoot this from a boat. I think it would be fun to shoot, but I'm taking a picture every ten seconds and letting the camera run for about a half an hour. Another one that I did that was kind of fun was down in baja california. Each picture in this case is a thirty second exposure, and then the resulting three hundred images is compressed in a video program to make a nice ten seconds video. And maybe my favorite time lapse I shot was in india on a very crowded intersection in varanasi, and so in this case here, I've added a little bit of post processing work. What I've done is I've added a little bit of a zoom in because the camera shoots in such high resolution. You khun do these little post processing moves either pans or zooms in and out, so once again, cameras set up to shoot a picture every ten seconds for several hundred shot, and in order to do that, you can simply go into the interval time shooting, and you can set up the number of shots when it starts. And the parameters of how you're going to shoot the interval timer now the great thing about using this mode is that you get all the individual images you can shoot him raw you can shoot him j peg and you're going to end up with a huge file three four, five hundred thousand images from the shot and that's different than the next mode I'm going to talk about here which is called time lapse photography what happens in time lapse photography is it takes all the individual pictures and it does all the post processing work and it puts it into a video for you the downside to this is that you don't get all the individual pictures you get basically a movie clip and so if you're really sure about what you're getting and you don't want to use up too much space you can use the time lapse photography but you don't get all the individual images movie said it's for anyone who wants to shoot movies with us this is where you're going to go in and you're going to select what size frame and frame rate you want to use and so for most people if you want to shoot the highest quality you're going to be a nineteen twenty by ten eighty that's full hd you could shoot it thirty frames a second the way most video is shot you could shoot it like hollywood style at twenty four frames a second if you are in a power country, you know who you are. You have different frame rates for that country.