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Intro and Overview of Nikon D750

Lesson 1 from: Nikon D750 Fast Start

John Greengo

Intro and Overview of Nikon D750

Lesson 1 from: Nikon D750 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

1. Intro and Overview of Nikon D750

Lesson Info

Intro and Overview of Nikon D750

Welcome everybody to the nikon d seven fifty class. I gotta be honest with you. I was a little surprised when nikon introduced this camera. It seemed that they had their full frame camera's pretty wrapped up with their six ten for entry level eight ten for their higher in high resolution and then the deformed before s for kind of professional sports market. And most cameras these days let's be honest, are sequels and updates of older versions, and this particular camera is kind of something they let the engineers designed from scratch, and then they borrowed other parts from other cameras to kind of build it up. And so it's it's really a brand new camera and they did a really nice job. It surprised me because they really brought together a nice mix features in performance at a very good, attractive price level. And as far as I know from my friends working in the camera stores it's selling like hot cakes out there. So you were part of a large crowd that has this so let's let's dive in a...

nd get to know this because there's a lot of controls on a lot of functions, and we're going to explore pretty much everything there is to do on this camera, so let me give you a little outline of what we're gonna be doing here in the class we're going to go over a little overview, maybe your new nikon. We'll talk a little bit about the whole system in general, we're going to do just a few camera basics. I know a lot of you already know your ways around shutter speeds and apertures, but we got some new people in our myths, and we want to make sure that everybody's playing on the same level field, if you know what I mean, most of the class is going to be going through the controls, the dials on the buttons to the camera, and then at the end, we're going to be going through the menu section on the camera, and if you follow along with your camera in hand, you'll be able to set your camera up and have it all ideally tweet for the way that you want to use the camera, and then we will end up going through some operational procedures of how I would recommend setting the camera up for a variety of situations. You know, something that you do get when you purchased the class is the pdf, which is the nikon d seven fifty pdf, which is the notes for the class and a lot of the there's a lot of visuals in here that I have in my key note that you can have printed out in the pdf a couple things in here that I think are notable that I really like and the reason I put him in here one of them is this is the entire menu system you have your camera all on one page. I have a hard time with cameras because I'm a very visually orientated person paging through trying to find there was something in here called playback displays, and I don't remember where it was, but my eyes can scan a single page very quickly for those words, and I confined him in a much shorter order of time. The other thing that I've done on here is that I've listed my recommended starter settings for the camera. You'll of course want to tweak the camera for your own settings, but this is a good place to start with, and I knew that everyone likes to customize their camera themselves. And so what I did is I just basically copy that exact page on the next one, but I took off all my recommendations. So you khun ad in your own little notes about how you would like to have it done there and then on the final two pages and mostly the last page are my recommended settings on how I would set this camera up for portrait photography or landscape or sports and what of the major tweaks that I would make to the major functions of the camera? And so this is a helpful device just you know so that you could take something out in the field beyond the video itself so that's one of those downloads that you can get right along with the videos for the class so let's get into this camera first off this camera has an incredibly large instruction manual this is the largest instruction manual I have seen to date it is technically half the length of warren peace in number of pages and so it's going to take you about seventeen hours to get through this thing as far as I can tell and this class is five hours in length and how is it possible for me to cram seventeen hours of information into the five hours of this class and I cannot do that and so what I am doing is I am choosing the major functions and trying to figure out how to get the highest quality images from this camera there's a number of things that this camera can do that we're not going to spend a lot of time on just as a for instance you can print directly from this camera to a printer and there's all sorts of pages in the instruction manual on how to do that and it has nothing to do about it taking high quality photos and so it's something that I'm going to kind of leave on the wayside and there'll be a few things that we don't dive too far into just because they're not important into the critical picture taking modes of the camera. Secondly, this is a class on the nikon d seven fifty, and it is not a photography wanna one class if you have never taken a photography one a one class where a basic photography class it's a great way of learning photography in this class, we're learning the functions and features of this particular camera if you want to see how that applies to other photography classes, I'm told by some knowledgeable people that there's some great online classes that you can take in photography, and we might even have some some references to those later on in this class. So we're going to be staying focused on this camera if you are new to the nikon world. Well, welcome to nikon. They've been around for close to a hundred years. I'm actually looking forward to the year twenty seventeen, not far off because I'm sure nikon is going to have some very cool hundred year anniversary products out and I don't know what they're going to do, but I just, you know they're going to do something they started making little range finder cameras shortly after world war two and they quickly got into the slr world, and so the nikon f, which is a legendary camera in the world of photography, uses the nikon f mountain in this camera uses an f mount as well, and so the basic size and style of mount is exactly the same, and they've maintained a lot of similarities in the lenses they've been the lenses have been involved evolving over time, and so you can't just throw on one of those older lenses on this camera, but you can use lenses that go back well well into the seventies and maybe even the sixties on this camera. So it's got a long lineage ah, big break took place in nineteen eighty six when they introduce their auto focus siri's of lenses so you can put all of those lenses on this camera with one hundred percent compatibility so focused aperture all that sort of information is passed back and forth between the lens and the body, so that's that would be a safe break point and using the lens is older than this, you're not going to get auto focus, and there may be some other things that you may not be able to work as well on the camera. Their first digital camera came in nineteen ninety nine d one I remember this camera it's sold for fifty five hundred dollars and had a whopping two point seven megapixels to it, so this camera has ten times the number of mega pixels, all right, so the seven fifty has garnered a lot of attention and immediate fans, you might say, and what I find most interesting and best about this camera is twenty four mega pixels at this point in time is a pretty sweet spot when it comes to having enough megapixels for a lottery for having a lot of resolution to make images, working a lot of different ways, but it can also shoot it six and a half frames per second, which is one of the faster cameras for a full frame sensor. We have the for the first time on a full frame camera, a flip screen in the back, and so we'll talk a little bit about this flip screen in the back, but this is really nice enable, which will enable you to shoot from lower angles or higher angles a little bit more easily it's not a fully articulated one that flips out it's just a tilt e one rather than a full flip one. But it's still a very nice feature to have for working with cameras in unusual positions and that's the first time that's been done, they've incorporated a very nice fifty one point autofocus system that is very similar to that on other higher and cameras from nikon and so we've got a good focus tracking system for anyone who's shooting action on it. We have a camera that has wifi on it, and we're going to see if we can play around with wifi system, so I'll show you how to hook it up to a phone and remote shoot later on in this class towards the end, and in general, they have just taken a lot of the features from the nikon d eight ten, which came out just a couple months before this, and they've put it in this camera, and so you really don't feel like you're getting a strip down camera at all. In this case, you really feel like it is fully packed with all the electronics and accessories that they could have packed in here, so nikon has done a very good job here. One of the greatest things about getting a nikon camera is that nikon has a fantastic full range of cameras, and so if you want, ah higher in camera, they do make hiring cameras. If you want to buy a friend or a relative, a lower and camera, you could do that as well. We have a tremendous number of lenses that you can add onto this camera will talk about some of those specific lens is a little later on. And we have a lot of flashes that we can add on nikon arguably has the best flash system out on the market, in my opinion as faras the seven fifty as I say, this is not a replacement model, this is a new model and it fits between the d six ten and the eight ten which are both full frame cameras and the seven fifty does have a little bit of lineage you might say coming starting with the d seven hundred, which is a beloved camera for a lot of nikon users they've kind of split the line into to the eight hundred and the six ten and those have become the d sixty nine and a ten and then they split the line again so that they now have three cameras that are shooting full frame. Ah no, I'm kind of holding the d for s into another category here and it is not a true carry forward of the seven hundred because the d seven hundred was mostly known for being extremely good in low light as its main attributes and this one is very good in the light it's just not carrying forward quite that level of interest in that particular field. Now, if you do dive into the instruction manual fairly early on, you'll run across these crazy warnings that all seem very obvious to the common sense person one of my favorite is when adjusting the diop ter, don't put your finger in your eye so we'll talk about the dye achter, but just don't put yourself in the eye, you three stooges out there and so don't be stupid with it. The question that is a pretty valid question. A lot of people have is aboutthe weather proofing of the camera. Nikon has put on a lot of weather seals on this camera to help avoid any sort of problems with rain. Water splashes things like that and it does a very good job, but you need to make sure that your lens is equally weatherize dde. Some lenses have more weather ceiling than others, and so you have to kind of take a look at the information about those lenses and let's see if I could do a little live demo here if we get a close shot over here on this lens, this lenses to twenty four to seventy one of the things it has is a rubber gasket around the back edge of this that you can hopefully see and this matches up with the camera, and that helps make a very tight seal when you mount it on to the camera and that's one of the things that you would look for in a weather sealed lens now. Something else that would be wise if you are going to be working in a wet environment is to use a filter on the front of your lens so that any sort of elements that move back and forth in the lens are protected as well even though it is a weather ized weatherproof camera I still would not recommend using this for a long period of time in a heavy rain so if it is raining pretty hard yeah go out and get your shot to get a few of them but I would try to get a cover over the camera because with enough water the camera will have problems and it will not be fixed under warranty even though they put the seals they say there's weather eyes ceilings on him if you do something to it to where it stops working because of water they're not going to fix it for free because there's always a way to go too far and it certainly cannot be taken under water another issue is use of non nikon accessories not gone has a very scary warning about using non manufacturer non nikon manufactured goods and I don't know that I've ever seen a non nikon accessory damage a camera it's conceivably possible but it's highly unlikely I think nikon makes great lenses so it's obviously a great first choice there however tokyo tomorrow on sigma all makes him very good options when it comes to lenses and they will work very well with the camera so I wouldn't dismiss those. I would probably stand to stick with the nikon batteries just cause there's, elektronik ce and I want to make sure that those really run smoothly, you can put other types of flashes on the camera, but having played around with some of those flashes, I think the night gowns are worth the extra money just because the communication is so good and the quality of their flashes is just that much better than the other one. So I I don't see a problem with the other ones, but I think value wise, you're better off spending a little extra money to get the nikon wants. So let's, make sure your camera's are ready for today's class you're going to need to charge the batteries takes about two and a half hours. You should get around twelve hundred shots with normal average usage. If you were going to be shooting video, just hd footage off the camera you're looking at around fifty five minutes. In that case, your mileage may vary depending on how much you play around, how much stabilization you use. If your lens has that how often you review images and play around in the menu. If you play around with padma lot during this class, you could end up at the end of this class, taken twenty pictures and destroy the battery because we're going to be in the menu system for so long. Make sure your lenses attach, go ahead and put in a memory card turned the camera on it kills me to say this, but you know, just put your camera in the auto mode for right now and go ahead and before we take a picture, make sure your camera is on auto focus there's a couple of switches over on the left hand side as you hold the camera, make sure your lens is in the auto focus position. There should be a switch on the body and the lens depending on what here a lens you have most modern lenses will have a switch on it make sure they're in auto focus and go ahead and press the shutter release and take a picture and I'm gonna take a picture of russ there and this camera's all working out good and if your camera's working out good, then we can proceed at this time. This section is just a few basics on photography, and so if you've been around photography for a long time, you could skip forward five minutes we're just gonna do a little shutter speed, an appetizer, depth of field thing here this is information that is downloaded from another class. I have a creative live called the fundamentals of photography, and this camera is a slr digital slr camera where we have individual single lens, which means we have one lens that we have a wide variety of choices on for white angle and telephoto light comes in through the lens, and it goes through its first control point, you might say, which is our aperture, which has various size openings, which lets in various amounts of light, and so a lens opening of one point four lets in a lot of light. And as we close our aperture down to f twenty two, it lets in much less light. So these are f stops and it's what we live and die by here in photography as faras our first way of controlling light coming in the camera beyond controlling the amount of light coming in the camera. It also controls the depth of field or how much will be in focus in the in the picture. So in this case, we're focused on the number seven here you can see red hash marks on the right and left, which indicate the forward edge and backward edge of focus, and as we stop our aperture down, you'll see that we get mohr and more depth of field. Now it's not a radical change with each f stop setting, but it is pretty significant from one into the spectrum to the other so that's what's going on in the lands as the light travels into the body we get to the are part of slr reflex, which is the mere which bounces light upward onto a focusing screen. From there it goes through a prism systems so that we can hold the camera up to our eye and see the camera and bright light low light situations and everything is corrected as faras mere in there and we can pan left and it looks very normal to us when we take a picture, the mere needs to get up and out of the way so that light can get back to the image sensor, but before it gets back to the image sensor it needs to get past the shutter unit. The shutter unit is in two parts we have the first curtain and the second curtain and the first curtain is blocking the sensor and we'll drop away. Let light into the sensor for that short period of time and then the second curtain will come down to block it off that uses the system so that each pixel is exposed to light for exactly the same amount of time and then light returns so one of the key things to think about here is that you can't see what you're photographing when you photograph it so shutter speeds are a great way of controlling light they're also a great way of controlling and freezing action, so if you have something that moves really quickly, you choose a fast shutter speed and it will stop the motion and you'll find that different shutter speeds are appropriate for different types of action that you might be photographing as we kind of page through a few shutter speeds here one hundred twenty fifth of a second, fast enough for stopping these camels walking in the desert. Once we get below a sixty, we start getting into our slower shutter speeds where we're going to see more movement, depending on how fast our subject is moving and how fast our camera might be moving. In this case, the camera's on a tripod you can see because the bridge is sharp and people are walking, so they're going to be blurry at one eighth of a second. If you want to blur those rivers and waterfalls, you'll probably need to get down to one full second and you could do long exposures with this camera. Thirty seconds would be good for light painting or star point shots like this. One of the most important aspect of the camera is the size of the sensor within the camera, and this camera uses a full frame sensor, which means it's the same sizes thirty five millimetre film and there's a lot of other cameras out on the market using different size sensors and this one's because it's using a very large size sensor has a distinct advantage in many, many areas. And so when we say a full frame censor, what were meaning is that it is exactly the same size as thirty five millimeter film and to be honest with you there's nothing magical about thirty five millimeter film other than the fact it was really popular and so that's our basis for judging sizes. Other cameras like the nikon d seventy two hundred and the lower in icons are going to be using a smaller size center. Nikon calls that a dx sensor nikon calls this one an fx sensor and other cameras from other manufacturers will use a variety of smaller size sensors. One of things I want to be sure up when you attach the strap if you do use your camera with the strap is to make sure that if you are using a normal type strap that has a strap adjuster that the tale and goes on the underneath side of the straps so that it stays pressured in there and stays locked in and is less likely to slip out okay quick quiz for all you knew be photographers out there pick your camera, hold it, tell me how you are holding the camera in your hand because there's basically, two ways you can put your thumb on the bottom or you can put your thumb on the top, and the correct way is with your thumb on the topside, so just remember thumbs up is a good thumbs down is bad. The reason is that keeps your elbow a little bit closer into your torso and you'll be able to hold the camera and a little bit more steady position also is you get to the longer lenses, you'll be able to hold the camera in a way that you'll be able to make adjustments with zoom and focusing a little bit more easily without trying to support the weight of it, as well as doing fine tuned controls. As we go through today's class, I'm going to give you lots of options for setting the camera in an automatic way or manual way, and you're just going to kind of have to keep track and figure out what's right for you, depending on what exactly you're doing, and a lot of this is going to come down to how much time, effort and knowledge you have about that particular feature on it. And so I'm always trying to encourage people to work there cameras manually as much as possible so that you can retain as much control of it over there. Operation and the final result. And so I'm always trying to push you a little bit to the manual side. But I will tell you about the automatic side and when and where that might help you out.

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.

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