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Back Controls of the Nikon D750

Lesson 4 from: Nikon D750 Fast Start

John Greengo

Back Controls of the Nikon D750

Lesson 4 from: Nikon D750 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

4. Back Controls of the Nikon D750

Lesson Info

Back Controls of the Nikon D750

Back on the top of the camera over on the left hand side is our release mode which is actually a little bit easier to see around on the back side so let's jump around to the back side and on the release mode we have the control of what happens wing you press the shutter release do you take a single frame or do you take a continuous series of pictures? We have a continuous low and continuous high the difference is is that continuous low is currently set at three frames per second hi is always at six point five frames per second and if you want to go in and customized the low speed mode, you could do that under custom menu d two if you said I don't like three frames per second I wanted four frames a second or five or two or one you could make it anything you want we have a quiet mode and a quiet continuous mode which allows you to fire the camera a little bit quieter than normal and because I know there are some people watching this class that don't have this camera yet they can't do thi...

s themselves so I'm going to do a little test for you I'll hold it up to my microphone and I'll fire a couple of shots off with the normal mode and then I'll do the client mode let's switch it to the quiet mode now and I'll do the quiet continuous as well, I'll do actually continuous low and continuous quiet and so it's not truly silent in anyway, it is a little bit quieter and if you're wondering what's going on in the camera, the mirror which normally comes up as quickly as it can to get out of the way, but it makes a bit of a bounce when it comes up out of the way is being slowed down a little bit more and so it slows down the shooting. The quiet, continuous mode is three frames is per second, and the camera technically makes a little bit less noise. So if I'm doing street photography and I don't want people to hear the cameron, I just want to make it as quiet as possible. The quiet mode would be good little bit better also, for instance, for working in the theatre environment where you don't want to disturb anyone else. And so if you don't need to shoot really quickly, it's not a bad place just to keep your camera if you just want to tone down the sounds of it a little bit. We also have a self timer mode in the camera, and I like night cons because they're even. They allow you to customize the self timer mode you can set it to two, five, ten or twenty seconds. I don't know why they don't let you just set any time you want, but at least they give you four options, which a lot of companies don't give and so that could be controlled in the custom menu, the final one, the muppet mode or the mup mere up mode. This is for locking the mirror up to avoid vibration, and the reason this is in here let me do a little visual example for you is that when you press down on the shutter release, the mere goes up as quickly as it can, and when it does, it causes a vibration throughout the entire camera, right as the shutter is opening and you are capturing your exposure, and so in some cases you will find that the camera is moving wow, it is capturing the image and you get a blurry picture or a slightly blurry picture with the mirror up mode. Let's, go ahead and engage it now. The difference is, is that it takes two button presses to take a picture of the first one locks the mirror up where we have exact same vibration we had before, but now we wait a couple of seconds for it to settle out and then we take the second release of the shutter and that actually is the one that triggers the shutter opening and so it's a little bit slower mechanism but it is designed for people working on tripods doing macro photography, landscape geography maybe even product photography now of course you don't want to be pressing the shutter release on the camera because then you'll be touching and moving the camera and that is just a cz bad if not worse than the actual shutter units moving so you're going to want to use the cable release the c d c too you talk a little bit more about when we get to the ports on the camera is one of the cable release is that nikon makes that you can use to do this if you're wondering how big a problem is this just to give you an example I was shooting a photo and I looked at the results and I was thinking this doesn't seem very sharp for the way that I've set things up I'm on a tripod I got a good sharp lands and I remembered I'd better put my camera in mere lock up mode and you can see the difference between sharpness of those images between using mere lockup and not using their lock up and this is that one eighth of a second so if we look at the shutter speeds there is a range that I call the vibration zone and this is where you're likely to have vibration problems from a camera that is not in the mere lockup mode so it's roughly from a thirtieth of a second down to a half second with its peak being around one eighth of a second and this may very a little bit from lens the lens and tripod set up that you may have and so if you are in this area and you are using a tripod I would highly recommend using either mere lockup or live view which are essentially the same thing the mere is locked up and not moving before the shutter opens and closes so that is all the modes in the release mode next up the viewfinder that's where you look to see the picture that's pretty easy there isa diop ter that gets bumped all the time and it's going to throw your viewfinder out of focus so take a look through the viewfinder adjust the dye achter make sure that the numbers on the bottom of the screen are really easy to see because that means the doctor is properly I dusted in that case the little rubber I cup is a d k twenty one and if you wear it out you can get a replacement for it. The camera also comes with a dick a five which is an eyepiece ceo shield which is designed for putting over the eyepiece if you are using your camera in a self timer mode the issue with using the self time remote is that normally when you're using the camera, your eyes held up to the viewfinder and it's blocking the view finder and if you're in the self time remote, chances are that you're not looking through the viewfinder and there's light perhaps streaming in from the viewfinder into the light meter into the camera and that's going to throw off your light meter. So in that sort of case, you want to put that little shield on there in some cases I didn't have the shield with me, so I used a little piece of gaff tape or just and if you see the self timer mode, what I recommend oftentimes is just using manual exposure rather than auto exposure, but it may come in handy and that's why your camera came with that little accessory next up we're going to dive into the viewfinder, take a look at what's going on in the viewfinder itself. First off the frame that you see is what nikon calls virtually one hundred percent accurate, which means it's really, really accurate if something is out of frame it's not going to be in the picture, other cameras will be like ninety five, ninety six percent accurate so it's nice having a frame that is very, very accurate the viewfinder and this does have a point seven magnification, which is pretty normal on it and a twenty one millimeter I point, and that has to do with how far away your eye needs to be from the viewfinder in order to see things which is pretty good, not the greatest out there on the market, but pretty good for those of you wearing eyeglasses. Next up we have are focusing points, and we have an upcoming section that will be going into the focusing system on the camera, but you can turn these focusing points on and off, whether you want to see them or not. In the camp, we have a grid pattern that can be turned on or off in the custom menu. Some people like this for compositional reasons or for leveling the horizon architectural type photography one of things they've started adding in cameras is a role indicator virtual horizon lets you know if you are tilting the camera left and right or forward and back and kind of helpful for making sure that your horizons are very level and these air somethings that I often recommend turning off just simply because they clutter up the viewfinder and then if you find him useful, turn him on next up there's a number of warnings that you could turn on in this camera that'll warn you, for instance, if your battery's getting low, you don't have a memory card in there if your camera's been put in one of the special effects modes like black and white, the plus raw indicates well there's a custom function on the camera that allows you to be shooting in jape, eh? And with one press of a button, add raw for the next photo and lets you know that it's adding raw on that next photo and there's another mode that the camera allows you to shoot with a crop factor of one point two so if you would like the camera have a little bit more telephoto reach at the expense of some megapixels, you could do that in camera if you want, we'll talk about that in the menu settings for that particular function uh and so if you want to, you can customize the function button out on the front of the camera to do this one touch raw recording. So if you normally record j pegs and every once in a while you want to record a raw, you would simply reprogrammed the function button on the front of the camera. So you have pressed that once and you choose wrong the next shot. So these cameras they're getting more and more customizable all the time which is great to be able to fit all the different types of uses that we put him to next up is our led information on the bottom of the viewfinder and so there's a lot of things going on in here so let's just real quickly move our way through this over on the left is your focus indicator and one of the cool things about this is that this works in manual focus even with manual focus lens is the arrows on either side are telling you which way to turn lens for sharpest focus when you get the green dot in the middle that means you are properly focused next up we have are indicating of army during system then we move on to our auto exposure lock, which indicates the button on the back of the camera the a e l button has been pressed will talk more about that one later there's also a flash value lock where you khun pre fire a flash to get proper exposure and locked that power in for the next shot it's a way to get more perfect exposures with a flash unit when you're in the program mode and you have turned the back dial you have done a program shift you're adjusting shutter speeds and apertures and it lets you know that you've adjusted or deviated from the normal recommended setting. Next we'll see our shutter speeds and our apertures and then we'll see our light meter known as thie exposure level pay particular attention as to whether the minuses on the left side or the plus side of your camera nikon has switched in recent years in the air now putting the plus side on the right hand side if you are coming from an older camera say a nikon d three hundred, you'll notice that they are reversed and in many of the higher and cameras like this one you can reverse the light meter to accommodate whatever style you prefer hdr is high dynamic range there's a way to shoot hdr in camera we'll talk about that later in the menu system active delighting is a way that the camera adjust the exposure mostly of the shadow areas but a little bit of the highlights as well. On j peg images I'll show you some exams lt's as we go through the menus flash exposure compensation is the ability for us to adjust the power of the built in flash or any ad on flash that has turned on normally it's not turned on and so these air just simply warnings that you have turned him on the camera can do a bracketing siri's where it shoots a siri's of photos of different exposures I'll be showing you how to turn that on and what that looks like a little bit later on exposure compensation we talked about this this is the plus minus button up on the top of the camera it indicates that you have set the camera to overexpose or underexposed and so if you see this on that's a warning normally this is going to be left at zero. We have our s o setting next with our remaining shots in the bracket, and when you press halfway down, that will become an our number. And just, for instance, we've got a fairly large memory card in here. My camera says three point two k, which means I have three thousand two hundred images, but if I press down halfway on the shutter release I get are forty one, which means I have forty one remaining shots in the buffer. How many pictures can I shoot right now? And this is probably because I have the camera set on j peg images and I'm just going to change real quick to some raw images just to let you know. So now I have raw images. I have five hundred twenty four images. I can shoot left, but in the buffer, I only have twelve images. And so this has to do with how big the files are and how fast we can shoot those pictures right away. Finally, on the right hand side is our lightning bolts. And this is our flash warning light lets us know when the light is really low, so if I hold the camera here in the studio where we have some nice lights here but it's not real bright, it is blinking and you'll notice that it is orange is a little different color than the rest of the display down there and some of you who work under low light conditions you are probably going to get irritated by this light that's constantly telling you to use the flash you're a professional, you know what you're doing, you don't want the flash and so when we get into the custom in you let's, get it up. There is a way to customize and turn off that flash and so under d five in the custom menu, you can turn off that flash warning if you were tired of it coming up. If the whole display kind of goes dark on you a little too quickly, you can change that in the time by stand stand high timer see too so you, khun decide how long this information stays active in the viewfinder, all right, back onto the back of the camera. Next up we have our big, beautiful lcd screen over on the left hand side three point two inch it's, a twelve hundred dot screen it's got about twenty five percent more dots than the previous camera, but it's not really twenty five percent more resolution what they've added is they've added in some believe that added in some either white pixels or black pixels. I'm forgetting off the top my had white pixel said it is, and so they've added in some white pixels to make the screen a little bit easier to see under bright light conditions. One of the things that you can safely do pretty much any time you want on this camera is hit the info button, and what that's going to do is it's going to bring up information on the back screen of the camera and we will be able to do this and playback modes and shooting modes and let's talk a little bit about what you're going to see in this information display. The top part of it is your obvious exposure information shutter speeds, apertures what motor you in? Are you over exposed underexposed on the very top of that? They'll be a few other indicators that you might get as well over on the left hand side there's going to be a variety of settings? I'm not going to display and go through all of them here, but it's just basic settings that you have turned on or off on the camera. The next line is going to go through a variety of settings that we're going to go through in detail in the menu settings, so these are located in two different places you can access them here or you can access them are you actually see how they're set here, but you will actually turn them on and off when we get into the menu setting? So your image area the drive mode which actually we've already talked about the active delighting which we saw warning in the viewfinder and we'll get to that again picture control, which is a way of controlling the style and look of the contrast and sharpness of pictures when we shoot jpeg pictures where are white balance is set and whether we have that hdr turned on or off towards the bottom over on the left hand side there's gonna be a lot of flash options that we're going to talk about that we'll see down here, then we have our focusing systems as faras our area and what mode we're in, what side his image we're recording j pegs or raw and the camera has to memory card slot so we can use one or two cards and this will explain what type of files are being stored to what type of cards and then once again for the third time we see where how many shots we have remaining on that particular card. The very bottom row of this is indicating button assignments there are three buttons on this camera that you khun re program as you wish with the available custom functions and this is just letting you know what those buttons are currently programmed to do and so remember all of this is with the info button feel free to hit that at any time it's never going to harm anything. One of the newer buttons on a nikon cameras many nikon cameras is the eye button, and this is a shortcut button too many features in the menu that they think you should have a shortcut access to so you don't have to dive into the whole menu system, and I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of this because you can't adjust what is in this shortcut menu it's kind of nice cons pre selected grouping of features that you might want to get in and change, and so we're not even gonna bother going into making these changes because we're just going to go through the menu system were most people were normally going to find them if you use them on a regular basis than use the shortcut menu because it's a little bit quicker to get to than going into the menu. Do you realize that there is a scroll bar over on the right hand side so you'll need to scroll down to the bottom to see additional items listed in there on the back of the camera top left corner? We have our playback buttons, so let's talk a little bit about playing back images that you have shot in your camera first off, if you don't like him, you can delete them and you will need to hit the delete button once to activate the the delete function, and then you'll have to hit it again to delete that particular picture. It's kind of a little safety protocols so that you're hitting the button twice and you're not going to accidentally delete something that you didn't intend to. If you want to change images from first image the last image you can just turn the dial in the upper right hand corner to go to your next image. You can also use thie control pat on the back of the camera to go from one image to the next, and if you go up and down, you can select to seymour or less information. Now. Another little gripe I have about nikon is that this normally doesn't work right away because it is not programmed from the factory. To do this, you have to dive into the playback menu, go to something called playback display options and check off all the items that you want to see. What should you check off? Well, I would say check everything off, and that way you can have the option of looking at that information or not if you find that you are not using that bit of information. Then go back and unchecked that off, so we'll come back to this when we go through the menu displays, but if you do want to jump ahead, that is where you can turn that on and off if you want and there are faces in your photograph, you can turn the front dial on your camera and what that's going to do is it is going to if you were in a zoomed in mode, one of the things that you could do is zoom in and show that to you in just a moment here and you can check the sharpness of your image if you have multiple faces, you can select which face you want to zoom in and see on the camera. So how do you zoom in? Well over on the left hand side there's gonna be some other buttons we use the key indicates a lock, which means that you're going to lock that image and prevent it from being deleted. It's a very temporary type lock because you could reform at the card and delete the images so it's not the greatest protection it's a very light level protection here's where we zoom in and zoom out so I would encourage you to play back an image right now and I'm going to do the same and maybe we will take a look on our camera we can with our camera in the back here and so here is a photo that I took and if we want to zoom in we can zoom in and see if it's sharp and I can zoom around and see different parts of that image in the bottom right hand corner you'll see a thumbnail tow what's going on I can zoom back to see the whole image and I could go back further and I can see a group of four thumbnails or nine thumbnails or I think it's like a hundred some nails but I haven't shot that much with the camera yet and then you can zoom all the way back to a calendar this is really helpful if you're going on a long vacation you shoot pictures over multiple days and you want to show somebody from somebody pictures from the first day of your trip you could just simply navigate back to the first day go select those pictures and find that grouping of pictures so uh then once you gets the right day you khun just zoom in and you can start going through your images so play around with that little bit and that is the playback the menu is what we're going to be spending the last quarter or third of this class on so we're going to be coming back to the menu button there is just too much to go into right now, so we're gonna continue our peru's around the back of the camera so this next button is what we just used to lock our photos it is also the white balance buttons so if you just press the button right now it becomes the white balance button and one of the things that will make this a little bit easier is if you hit the info button and turn on the screen on the back of the camera when you press white balance you will be able to see this change being done if you don't have the info button pressed you're going to have to look in the top of the viewfinder to see what's going on and so it's you will be able to see changes and you're going to be able to make a change with the back of the camera back dial as well as the front dial as well so let's talk about what these dials are dealing first off the back dial that's going to change your white balance for instance from incandescent to fluorescent cloudy and so forth and so this is the color rating or color setting of your image sensor so there are three different settings for normal daylight situations and then we're gonna have a multitude of artificial light situations with one that is most different than everything is incandescent this is the type of lightbulbs a lot of us have in our homes and so if you're getting very orange pictures of people and things in your home it's because you have an orange light but your camera is set to cloudy or flash or shade or something else and so you want to match the white balance it's with the type of lights that you're working under and so beyond these, there are a few other options to have something is nelson there is called pre it's a preset manual option and what you do here is you photograph a white sheet of paper and then you tell the camera this is a white sheet of paper and I want you to calibrate it to make sure that all the photos are clean light under this type of lighting situation and it's pretty good if you don't know what the lighting situation is, but you have a great card or a white card to shoot but it's not something many people used in many cases. You could also set the kelvin temperature if you knew what the kelvin temperature wass this might happen if you are shooting in a an environment that you are regularly shooting in. So if you shoot product photographs in your office and you know exactly the lights that you have turned on, you could set the kelvin temperature to match those lights to get the color that you're happy with and it would be consistent from day to day as long as those lights don't change the camera also has an auto setting where it will automatically set the white balance for you. This is what a lot of people like to have because the camera does frankly a very good job under many different types of light of figuring out what color the light is correcting for it and doing it automatically. So this is my preferred setting as a default setting on the camera set it to auto, and if you see that you're not really getting good colors, then you could switch it into one of the more specific moz. Now you'll notice it says auto one there is an auto one and an auto too, and the difference is is that auto one wants to correct for all the lights one hundred percent to do the best job possible auto too keeps warm colors slightly warm the human eye and the brain kind of like warm colors. We like that incandescent look maybe not as heavy as the actual lamps are, and this allows us to keep some of that natural warmth of those lights there. And so it depends on if you want to do a full clinical reset of those lights or you want to keep some of that warmness from them if you do, you would set it to auto too, so back with white balance but in the back of the camera if you turn if you want to go in and change the kelvin setting, excuse me, you could do that using the control pad in the back of the camera so you would set the white balance to k, and then you could adjust the kelvin setting using that back dial. Now, if you turn the front dial on the camera, that is going to change the white balance a little bit more amber or a little bit more blue. So, for instance, let's say you had fluorescent lights in your home and you wanted to shoot with very clean color, but the fluorescent lights you had were a little bit warm or a little bit cool. You could set it to fluorescent lighting and then fine tune it by turning the front dial, and there'll be six levels. Either air be standing for amber, kind of yellowish or bluish on that spectrum, and so it's. Just a way to tweak the automatic white balance settings that nikon has already set up to make a match your needs a little bit more exactly. The next button down is the quality button. This is setting the file types that you were recording to the camera by pressing and holding the button while you turn the back dial will be adjusting between raw and j peg settings. You also have the option of raw plus j peg if you turn the front dial, you'll be adjusting the size of the j pegs if you have chosen j pegs to choose and so we just run through this on my camera here and see if there's anything unusual that comes up and so raw plus b, for instance is a raw file plus a basic setting as well, and I only have one memory card in the camera right now, so normally when I'm shooting high quality photographs I'm goingto want raw uh, the only problem with raw is that you need to have the right software to make everything run right and see your photos and so roz, what I would normally shoot, but in some cases I could see how some people would want to set a j peg and you'll know when it when it says j peg it doesn't say jay pickett says fine, normal and basic and if you are shooting j pegs, I would highly recommend fine as it being the best quality of the j pegs in there next up is our s o button on the camera, so by pressing the iso button and turning the back dial, we can adjust our isos from one hundred to twelve thousand eight hundred if we turn the front dial on the camera, we will change our auto sensitivity on and off and so auto sensitivity on eso is a little bit to me like automatic drive on a car, do you wanna have control of exactly what your urine or do you want to let the camera do it? And so normally I'm recommending for people to control things themselves, you start off s a one hundred and you bump up isos as you need it, usually because you are needing faster shutter speeds for hand, holding the camera or stopping action when you dumped when you jump up tio eso twenty five thousand, your camera will actually call it high one, and then you go the next step. It'll call it high, too, and this is just another way of saying twenty five thousand and fifty one thousand and it's letting you know that you're going into a very high region where you're likely to get very low image quality. So I wanted to test out the s o on the camera myself. So here are the results I shot my standard test subject, I blew it up, and the image quality on this camera is extremely good at the lower eso from fifty, where you can actually go down to and I'll mention talk about fifty for just a second here s o is the native sensitivity on the sensor? This is the best place to have this sensor set for image quality if you take it. Down to fifty, you're losing a little bit of dynamic range in order to get perhaps a longer shutter speed, this might be a place that you would go if you're trying to get a long shutter speed on a waterfall, for instance, and you're trying to get down to one full second and you're at a half a second. This is a way to kind of stretch that down there. Normally you're gonna want to leave it at one hundred up to sixteen hundred looks good where you really want to check things out is when we get up to the super high esos and in this camera, as in most cameras, those top two isos are pretty low in quality in this camera. I'm thinking that s o thirty two hundred is very clean, and as we move to sixty four twelve thousand, we really start to notice a fairly big dropoff sixty four hundred is still pretty clean as it is on most full frame cameras these days, and so somewhere between thirty two and twelve thousand eight hundred is going to be the upper limit, depending on exactly your needs and standards for your photos. So that is the s o setting on the camera. Next up is our auto exposure lock, and our auto focus lockets got too little letter codes on it right now. If you haven't changed it from the factory it's a e l it's auto exposure lock. If I was to put the camera in aperture priority, which I will actually dio, and I hold it up to my eye and I pan around the room, I will notice that the shutter speed changes because the light level in this particular room changes from one place to the other. If I found out that you know, this is the exposure I would like, what I would do is I would press, and I would hold in on that button, and it would lock that shutter speed in because I'm an aperture priority. It would do something different. It would lock in whatever controls it is in control of, and then that shutter speed is going to be locked in as I move the camera, the place that I would for see using this two scenarios, one would be a person is standing next to a very bright window, and when I point the camera at them with light from the window is over, exposing the shot and it's throwing off the light meter. So what I would do is I would point the camera off to the side, away from the window, lock in on the exposure, move the window back into the frame and then shoot the picture. Similar type situation will be with the sunset you photograph. You want to photograph the sunset with the sun right in the middle of the frame when you point your camera straight at the sun that's a lot of light and your camera wants to make everything really, really dark. So what you can do is point your camera a little off to the side of where the sun is going down, lock in the exposure there and then bring it back into the frame, and you simply lock it in by pressing that ate yell button with your thumb in. Now, when we dive into the menu system, you'll see that in custom menu f four, you can customize this, and if you would rather have this be a focus lock, you can have it do that, or you can have it be a focus and exposure lock at the same time. And it really depends on how you like to use the camera as to what you should do with your camera and customizing it. One of the things that I might suggest on this camera is if you don't use that button it all, you can re program it to be an auto focus button so it can activate the focusing system and back often called back button focusing, which is really nice for a wide variety. Up types of photography so this is gonna be one of those buttons that you get to choose how it works in the end we have a little speaker down here, so if you are recording movies and you're going to play them back that's where you're going to hear the information, the access lamp simply means that your camera is currently working storing images onto the memory card and there's another little infrared window and this means that you need to point your m l l three wireless remote at that area that's where the receiver signal is if you do want to use the camera in a remote mode all right, we're up to the live you and movie mode and this really changes how the camera works so let's dive in and talk a little bit about this first off there is the colored switch around the backside that switches from the movie icon to the camera icon and that all of course determine whether you're in a live view or in the movie mode and turn it on. You would actually press the button in the middle so let's, go talk about the specifics of how the camera is working in this regard, so first off hit that live you button right now on your camera and throw your own camera into live you so that you can see on the back of the camera what the camera is pointed at and what the exposure is for instance, if you are in the movie mode by pressing the movie record button press that once it'll go ahead and start recording press it again it'll stop record it'll stop it's recording you'll notice a recording symbol and a time usually somewhere up in the display of the on the back of the camera letting you know how long you're recording is as I mentioned before, it never hurts to press the info button, so if you want maura or less information you compress the info button on your camera and seymour or less information sometimes we want to see just the plain old scenes sometimes we want the grid or framing lines we can see the history graham or we might see our virtual horizon which kind of looks like you're flying a plane and you can see if you can see on the camera here you can see moving it around great way to tell if you are level or not on your camera so very handy from shooting landscapes and many other types of images. If you press the eye button in the lower left hand corner while your camera is in live view, what it's going to do is it's going to allow you to go in and change a number of menu settings that we're going to be talking maura about as we go through the full menu this is just basically a shortcut to those menu items so that you don't have to exit live, you go into the menu, make the settings comeback in the live you and and see that sort sorts of changes, you can do it right away very, very quickly. And so all of these were going to be talking about as we get through into the menu system. I'm trying to think if there's anything here, and the only thing that I can see on the camera is exposure preview on the bottom of this list allows us to get a preview in the back of the camera, so if we were to set the camera in manual exposure, I'm a f twenty one four hundredth of a second, which is we're going to need a lot of light for that, so I'm going to change to a slower shutter speed. I will change my aperture, and so the brightness on the back of the screen will mimic the brightness of the actual picture will see a light meter over here on the right hand side, and so in general, I like to have the exposure preview turned on where I don't want it turned on is if I'm working in a studio with flash equipment because then I'm going to have a camera set to a relatively fast shutter speed. Moderate amount of depth of field in some cases and it's fairly dark in the studio until those lights flash and so if you work in a studio environment, you probably want to turn this off for normal photography I would leave it turned on all the other features are once that we will talk about or have talked about already uh as we get through the menu system next off if you are in the movie mode, I'm going to switch my camera over to the movie mode throw it just in the program oh, just to be nice and simple about things and if you hit the eye button there, then you're going to get to a lot of the movie shortcut features that we're going once again talk about is we get to the menu I I apologize in this class there's a lot of times we're going to see information two or three times and I just like to consolidate and talk about it all at the same point in time rather than talking about it three times over and so most everything in here we're going to get a chance to talk more about but this is just simply a shortcut to a lot of different features that you might want to do it see if there's anything we need to talk about right now uh teo I think everything is going to be talked about in the menu system I will mention the multi selector power aperture one of the things that you could do on this camera is change the aperture when you're in the movie mode, but when you do it there's kind of ah lot of movement when you turn the front dial on the camera and so you can have it controlled by the multi selector on the back of the camera, which is a little less intrusive in the movements that you might have while shooting a movie and so that's one thing, uh, that is kind of nice to have if you do want to make those aperture changes and so that's where the power aperture would change on the multi selector on the back of the camera. Now some of the things that you can do is you can zoom in and zoom out to check sharpness, and so if you want to see if you're really truly in focus, you consume all the way in manually focused, perhaps or you can auto focus on dh, then zoom back out to get the full image on there. So that's something that I would do, perhaps in a product photography situation or a landscape or any time where I'm on a tripod and I'm not in a rush to get things in focus, I wantto really take the time to manually make sure that it is done properly really like that ability to zoom in very close so that you can see what you're working on and if it's truly sharpe so when you want to play your movies back, he'll go ahead and hit the playback mode, and you're going to use the a control on the back of the camera for either advancing or rewinding your images. You can either exit and pause your videos as well. You can use the back dial to skip forward or backwards ten seconds, and one of the things you can do while recording in the movie mode is record indices, which are just little index points by pressing one of the buttons on the front of the camera, and this can be reprogrammed if you do or don't like these particular features, but if you have, say, a particular moment that you want to go back to, you can instantly skip back by turning the front dial on the camera. If there is sound, you can increase or decrease the sound volume with the plus and minus button over on the left, and if you want to do a little bit of light editing of the movie, I believe you could. Trim the front and trim the tail edge of the movie so if you are putting the camera on a tripod, you press down on the shutter release and you got a little bit of camera movement for the first couple seconds. You could go back and cut that out right in camera if you want. When it comes to live you and movie mode, there is a distinct disadvantage when using this particular camera, and that is the camera doesn't focus real quickly in that mode and has to do with the fact that it is a single lens reflex camera and the mirror. The reflex portion in that is a partially so silvered mere, which allows light through, and it allows light through so it can hit a secondary mirror, which can bounce a little bit of light down to the autofocus sensor in the camera. And this is how your camera normally focuses when you're taking standard type photos. When you put the camera in live you or movie mode, the mirror needs to get up out of the way, and his light comes into the image sensor. It can no longer use that phase detection autofocus system that the cameron normally uses, so it is simply using the light on the sensor trying to detect. Just to see whether the subject is in focus or out of focus and the camera is just not as adept at focusing quickly in that regard. And so if you do a lot of live you shooting, if you do a lot of movie shooting, other photographers have found it easiest to manually focused in those cases. You can auto focus. It is a little bit slower. If you do manual focus, you can be very accurate with that zoom in option and zoom out option and so that's just part of the nature of the way this camera works while you are in the live you mowed or the movie mode, you can control the focusing with a button we haven't talked about yet, but it's over on the left hand side of the camera, it's, right in the center of the switch that controls the auto focus and manual focus, and we'll talk more about this switch when it comes to traditional focusing. But for live you and movie mode, what you could do is you press the button and you have to press and hold it while you turn the front dial to switch between the four different modes for f area mode, focusing so we have faced priority, which will look for faces. White area and normal area, which are just too different size rectangular boxes for focusing on these are my favorite modes. I prefer sometimes the normal area when I want to be very precise white area, when I just wanted to be a little bit easier to focus, and it doesn't need to be quite a purse. Ice. Nikon has their own unique subject tracking a f system. Now this is kind of designed for photographing or tracking the subject, say, of a small child moving around in front of you, and it may or may not work real well depending on your type of subject. As I said before, the camera is not super adept at focusing quickly when it's in the live you or the movie mode so you can try that mode out, see if it works for the situation that you are working in general. I prefer the wide or the normal area brackets because they could be adjusted manually wherever you want in the frame. By pressing that f mode button, you can change the focus mode by turning the back doll on the camera. The two options are single and full time. Most of the time, I would prefer to have the camera in single, which means it will focus. When I press down halfway on the shutter release and that is the only time it will focus and once it achieves focus it stops focusing in the full time mode it'll just focus all the time and if you're shooting video f f might be a better mode for general photography work, but the problem is is that you're going to be wasting a little bit of battery power and you're going to be having a number of out of focus images because the camera is a little bit slow at focusing in some situations and so I would approach with caution the f mode normally I would be in the s mode for most live you and movie mounts if I was shooting movies on this general technique that I would use is I would focus before I began shooting either manually or auto focus I would then record my seen however long that happened to be and then I would stop recording and then I would re focus for the next scene and so it's a little bit challenging if you're trying to refocus in the middle of a scene because the autofocus is just not real smooth, there are some people who are very skilled at manual focusing and they will manually adjust focus during the scene but you have to be very careful about jocelyn the camera in a way that doesn't work with whatever scene that you're trying to shoot so some tips on using the live you and movie mode some other points of interest things to know about it is shooting into movie files, which are very common files that you can work with on pcs and on max it's, a very common system that is being used these days you do have a limit of four gigabytes or thirty minutes at full resolution you'll only get twenty minutes if you are shooting at thesixty p option, which will talk more about which is sixty frames per second so there is a limit if you are trying to record for long periods of time. The preview button on the top of the camera, which is normally for depth of field preview marks those indices that I talked about. So if you were recording an event and you wanted to go back to a particular moment, just simply press that button while you're recording and it will mark an invisible index mark for you to reference later it has two different resolutions thie standard high definition and full high definition modes for resolution we have a number of different frame rates ranging from twenty four to sixty on the camera when you are shooting in these video modes for movie mode it is a sixteen by nine aspect ratio. If you do want to shoot a photo you can at any time because this device is primarily designed as a still photography machine so you can shoot pictures. However, it is on ly with a sixteen by nine frames, so the top and bottom of your image will be trimmed, and it will be a very long and skinny photo. One of the cool things you can do is if you do shoot video in this camera is that you can go back and you can selectively choose an individual frame and pull that as a still image. Now it is going to be on ly the resolution of an hd image, which is about two megapixels so it's, much lower than your normal resolution. But it's, nice to be able to pull a frame out of the video right in camera, you can adjust white balance for live you and one for photographs. So, for instance, if you were shooting in a studio that had tungsten lights on, you could set white balance to have a tungsten look to it, so that is correcting for it in live you. But when you actually shoot the photograph, your camera's white balance is set to flash because you had flash being set, so that would be something very handy for people in a studio situation. We have the option of recording in less than the full area, the dx area, so if we wanted record a small area in the middle. We can still do that and get full resolution because there's more than enough pixels to record video in this d x area, the fx, of course, is taking the maximum area from side to side, with little bits trimmed off on the top and bottom to meet the hd aspect ratio. So that is the live view and movie mode function on the camera, moving on word. Next up did you notice the little red format icon's on your camera? If you press the garbage can button and the metering button at the same time, which you're not likely to dio this is going to reform at the memory card in the camera. Did you notice the little green dot by the s o button and the exposure compensation button? If you press these buttons for two to three seconds and hold them down, it's going to restore all the picture control settings, the image quality, image size, white balance so a lot of the basic camera functions on the camera, and so you may or may not want to do that, but just be careful of pressing both those buttons at the exact same time.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Nikon® D750 Fast Start Keynote
Nikon® D750 Fast Start Outline

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

I am so glad I bought this class. I upgraded from a D5000 to the D750 about 2 weeks ago. This class help so much in teaching all the ins and outs that I never would have known by just trying to study the owners manual. I feel much more confident with my camera now. Thank you John and Creative Live. If anyone is trying to decide whether to buy this or not, I say YES do, it's a great help.

jessicasummerford
 

This class was well worth the money. If you invest in such a great camera, you are clearly invested in your craft. The best way to enhance that investment is to learn the camera top to bottom so you can use it to its full potential. Thank you John, this was so helpful! Now it is time to get out there and practice!

Robert Coates
 

Excellent educator! And fabulous print out guides! Having a D750 for three years, this course did not fall on deaf ears all this time later. This course put confidence back in my hands at the controls of this fabulous camera! Highly recommended.

Student Work

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