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Nikon D750 Menu: Shooting

Lesson 10 from: Nikon D750 Fast Start

John Greengo

Nikon D750 Menu: Shooting

Lesson 10 from: Nikon D750 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

10. Nikon D750 Menu: Shooting

Lesson Info

Nikon D750 Menu: Shooting

Come back down to the shooting menu and let's go through what we have here. The first item in here is to reset the shooting menu, so if you have been playing around in your camera and you don't no, if you've got things quite set right and you just want to reset them back to the factory default settings, you could reset them here the storage folder in this you'll be able to select and create folders if you only have one memory card so let's say you only have one memory card. You have personal pictures and business pictures. You could create two different folders and the shooting specifically into one folder were viewing from another folder, and this is probably easier done just having separate memory cards, but you could do it with one memory card file naming the camera gives file names to your images that start with the letters d s and see, and if you want to, you can go through and change those initials to your initials. And so you'd have your initials on the beginning of any of the f...

ile names that you shoot in this camera, which is not a bad idea. It's the start of renaming your pictures I do recommend in my other photography classes that people renamed their pictures when they download them to their computer, and the reason is is because your camera only has four numbers that it attributes to any particular photograph, which means it has a limit of ten thousand photos, which is what I call a y two k problem, and you're gonna want to rename your files when you get him down to your computer. As I said before, this camera has two card slots in which to put memory cards. Most of the time you're going to put the card in the top slot, which is known his card slot one if you have your camera set to overflow when the first card fills up, it'll simply start putting pictures and storing them on the card in slot to another option is what's called backup, and in this case, it stores duplicate files on both memory cards. At the same time. If you were very paranoid or concerned about losing images or you're shooting something really, really important and you just want to have two copies, maybe because they needed to go in two different directions, you could shoot two files for every picture you take. We also have the option of separating out the raw or the j peg images and having them go to separate cars. Be very careful if you do this to make sure that you get the right size card into the right size slot, because whatever card fills up first. They stopped shooting and so you don't wantto stick all your ross on the really small car that doesn't have much space on it and so we'll also see in another area where you khun have videos stored on one card and stills court stored on another card we'll see that when we get to the video section of the menu image quality, we did see this on the back of the camera there was a button for it, but we'll be able to see it a little bit more clearly here in the menu system this is where we can choose what quality of j peg we want in what type of raw we want and whether we want a jpeg stored with that raw. Now one of things you'll notice as we're going through on screen is I'm showing you the nikon options on the left and over on the right hand shot side I am showing you in gray what are my general recommendations where most people are going to want to have this camera set if you see it in red it's a little bit more of an advanced users setting and advanced user can be anyone and don't think it's not you if you don't have a lot of experience with your camera just if you want a little bit higher and setting and so for the people who want to get the best image quality out of this camera I do highly recommend that raw setting the j pegs are of fine quality but having that original information is a very handy thing to have so you will see this on screen and you will also see it in the pdf notes that you get if you do choose to j peg you could choose small, medium and large and of course most of the time you're going to probably want the largest full twenty four megapixel image that you could get from the camera. There are some special situations where you know you don't need a large image out of it and you can shoot smaller medium just remember to switch it back to the full size once you're done image area you can choose what size image area you are collecting obviously you bought a full frame camera probably because you wanted to shoot with full frame so you're going to leave it on fx but you can shoot in the one point to crop or the dx crop if you are wanting mohr telephoto capability out of your lenses. Unlike some other nikon cameras, this does not have any impact on the motor drive speed of the camera you cannot shoot any faster even though you were shooting a smaller area and a smaller file size and so there's not a lot of great reason for doing this other than ending up with the picture directly in camera cropped a little bit one of the other options in here is the auto dx crop. I generally recommend leaving that on if you do happen to stick on a dx lens, which are the lenses designed for the smaller sensor cameras, it'll automatically crop the frame down so that you don't have that vignette ing or darkening of the corners. Jpeg compression, we have a simple option between size, priority and optimal quality. I'm generally going to be opting whenever we get through the menu system for the higher quality settee, so if you are shooting j pegs, are you getting a higher quality or lower quality? And so generally I'm going to say optimum quality, although there might be some situations where you would want the size priority chosen and where that might affect this in how fast the camera can process images, and so if you were he sports shooter and you needed to shoot as fast of frames per second, it doesn't change the six point five frames per second, but it might change how quickly it can store those cards on a given memory card, and that would be the only reason that I would go to size priorities if you'd shoot a lot of pictures very, very quickly and you know you don't need that extra resolution. All right, we're gonna we're gonna nerd out here, folks, because, uh, the nikon techies who designed this allow you to get in and make some very, very subtle adjustments, and we can adjust what type of raw image we're getting from this camera. The first option is the type of raw we can choose a lossless, compressed raw or a compressed when the compressed means we're throwing away a little bit of information. So what's happening is that on the lossless compressed, it compresses the raw file by twenty to forty percent with a reversible reversible algorithm in the compressed, it is thirty five to fifty five percent smaller, but it is going to be compressed in that regard so it's better to choose lossless compress. That way you're not throwing away any data the way that they determined in the instruction manual, which is just a little bit tricky. You should get into the fine wording of it is the compressed is thirty five to fifty five percent smaller, with almost no effect on image quality. So it's that almost no effect on image quality that concerns me just a little bit. Now the second factor that you can change in here is the bit depth, you can either choose twelve bit or fourteen bit, and here I might shock some of you is I'm going to go with twelve bit rather than fourteen bit and that's only because I've done a fair bit of testing with the camera, and the difference between twelve and fourteen bit is the difference between eight million colors and sixty eight million colors and of course, sixty eight million is more than eight, and more is better, but there is a limit to human vision and there's, a limit to what we can print and see on screen, and I've tried to shoot twelve and fourteen and compare the best I can, and I can't see any difference at all. I have actually looked online at other people who've done testing to see if they can show me any difference as to why I should shoot fourteen bit, and I can't find any good reason. In fact, I tried over exposing it under exposing and then trying to make up for that in photo shop in light room and it's still made no difference, and so it just seemed like if you set the camera fourteen bit it's using that more data, but it's, not data that you were using, and so what this means is if you shoot at twelve. And the lossless compressed your file sizes air going to hover around twenty one megabytes and size and that's just a little bit smaller than the twenty seven or twenty for that just seemed to be a little bit unnecessary, so it seems to be a good compromise and a good place to be when it comes to file size and image quality. You're not losing anything an image quality, but you've saved a little bit on file size white balance now this is something that there is a button on the back of the camera to do, but if you would like more graphics and visuals toe work with you, khun, do it here in the camera as well. It'll give you the option for adjusting and tweaking those white balance is like we've talked about before to adjust those preset colors that nikon already has in there for you picture control. So this is the first of several different features that we're going to see in the camera where the camera's computer wants to go in and manipulate your photos. And this is always a little bit scary because how does the camera know what you want done with your photo and it's got some standard things that it's going to do, and it may or may not be what you want to have happen in your images, so first off, if you shoot raw images this nor any of the other image manipulation modes has any impact on your images if you shoot raw you get raw no matter what if you shoot j peg though you can control exactly how your image looks and what you khun dio is you can go in and you khun select neutral and vivid and monochrome landscape portrait and so forth and it's going to slightly tweak the saturation and the contrast in the color of that particular image in a slightly different way in a portrait photo we want a little less saturation in the landscape photo we want a little bit more the flat option is a relatively new option that nikon has brought out and it is very popular for people who shoot video and we're going to see this in the video section as well for people who want to get a very neutral image that they're going to do color grading or color adjustment on later on now one of the things you'll notice at the bottom of that menu is that adjust and it's indicating aboutthe little control pat on the back of the camera if you want to just one of these settings you can go in and adjust the sharpening clarity contrast brightness saturation and hugh of any of those particular modes in there so you could really tweak this if you know you are shooting j pegs and I know there are some people out there that either just our shooting j pegs or they need to be shooting j picks because they need to come off the camera they need to be ready to go right away. Maybe you're uploading them to your website very quickly and you know that everything going up to your website needs to have a little bump in the saturation a little hit in the contrast and a slight little adjustment well, this is where you khun dive in and tweak and adjust the exact look of your j peg images managing the picture control and so in here what you can do is you can create and save favorites essentially from your settings you can in fact save if you were to create them in one d seven fifty camera and your friend had a g seven fifty camera you could copy your picture controls over onto their camera so you can transfer him from one camera to the next with this system color space is the range of colors that you our recording with the sensor when you shoot in raw you are naturally getting adobe rgb which is the largest color gamut that this camera can record when you record in j peg the camera is initially set to s rgb and you can change it to adobe rgb if you plan to do professional quality printing from your camera used to choose adobe rgb because we'll be recording a greater range of colors if you plan to use your camera just simply to upload pictures on the internet or for view on computer screens, your fine leaving it at us rgb. So my recommendation is shoot for the stars with adobe rgb, a greater range of colors active. Delighting is yet another way where the camera goes in and does a little bit of image manipulation. So let me show you, in example, with this, so in this photograph, the shadows are a little bit dark. We've lost a lot of information in those shadows. Thie delighting in the d stands for dynamic range. If we raise up the brightness of the shadows, I think it makes it a better looking photograph. And so if you want to turn this camera on there's going to be auto extra high, high, normal, low and off, and despite the fact that I like the way it looks in this particular photograph, it doesn't always look better lightening up the shadows. It depends on how much contrast you have in your scene and how much contrast you want to have in there. So this is something that by default, I kind of want to leave turned off, and if I want to make those adjustments, I can do that later on hi dynamic range, so this has become a popular type of photography for a lot of digital photographers shooting multiple photos and then creating one photograph that has essentially the best tonal areas of different parts of that scene this camera we'll do it in camera but I'll have to admit it's less than impressive this is a straight shot with a jpeg image, so we have a very high contrast seen and our highlights have been completely blown out. This is the type of scene that should be rescued by hdr images so let's take an hdr siri's well, set it on auto low you can see how we can see muchmore in the background now it's starting to do the job auto normal maybe a little bit more auto hi it's rescue in those shadows and holding those highlights back a little bit more but just to test it out the way that I would normally work which would be to shoot a raw photo and then work with it and pull back those highlights raise those shadows and you can see that if you just shoot a raw image it's going to give you quite a bit of leeway that you can work with nightgowns have a very good dynamic range and for tricky lighting situation, so I think it's better just to shoot a raw photo than to try the hdr if you want to try the hdr just for the unique look or different style to it given it, play around, see if it works for what you want to dio, but in general, I think it's something that you're probably gonna leave off most of the time vignette control this is another image manipulation mode, so the problem here is if you have an image that is shot with a fast lands or lens that vignettes or darkens in the corner, it doesn't look so good when you want a nice even sky. And so the camera knows how much it's different nikon lenses vignette and can automatically fix it. And so this is something in general that seems like a pretty good idea until you get to an image that would actually look better with vineyard when I do a lot of people photography, for instance, I like to add a little bit of vignette ing to the scene, and so I'll be actually adding maurin later on, and so my default is wanting to normally turn this off, although I could see how a basic user might want to have that fixed. So the little tends a little bit on the type of things that you shoot and how much work you do after the fact in post next up is auto distortion control out of distortion control controls barrel distortions, so in this picture you can see that we have a curvature in the horizon line and this is caused not by the curvature of the earth but by the curving of the lens, and so I'll switch back and forth between these two lenses so you can see the difference between turning this off and turning this on and generally people don't like curved horizon lines in that subtle way, and so this is something that you might as well leave turned on now once again for those of you shooting raw it's not going to help you out and rob, but if you do shoot j pegs, it will help out in that situation. We're going to talk about the next two items together, the long exposure and the high eso noise reduction this is where the camera is going to most likely have a noise issue with either long exposures or from shooting at a very high I s o and the camera has a bill ten program for automatically reducing noise with its own read noise reduction system. However, compared to the world of photo shop and other programs it's a bit limiting in what it can do in noise reduction. So if you have the time and the patients and the tools, you will be able to get better results by turning this off and doing the work yourself that way you can customize it for each individual picture that you were working on if this is something that you don't want to dive into you can leave it on and leave the hi I igh s o in normal, perhaps, and it will take care of some of that for you. But for the more advanced users, I definitely recommend turning it off and doing it by hand yourself. We have our s o settings here, which is the same as the sow button on the back, but we get a few extra controls in here so we can turn the auto esso on and off, we can set the maximum sensitivity to a particular number, so if we know we don't want to shoot above, a particular is so that can be said, and we can also set either a specific shutter speed that triggers the camera to go up to a different eso or a range according to the lens that we're on. And so the auto city is normally set at basically won over the focal length of the land, so let's say you have a sixty millimeter lands the camera wants to give you one sixtieth of a second, but you can have it the one hundred twenty fifth of a second or have it slower at a thirtieth of a second. So let me try to illustrate this a little bit if you are in aperture priority justus a, for instance, and so let's go ahead and set our aperture at five point six and that means that the camera is going to choose the shutter speed for you, depending on the light level. Now let's, think about where is our s o going to be once our shutter speed is set, as I say typically wants to give you a shutter speed of a sixty eighth of a second or faster. Now, if we have our s o and we have auto, eso said, what's gonna happen. As the light gets brighter, you're going to go to a faster shutter speed up to eight thousandth of a second. Now is the light gets darker it's going to use a slower shutter speed until it hits year cut off shutter speed a sixteenth of a second, for instance, with a sixty millimeter lands as the light gets darker rather than changing shutter speeds. It's going to switch over and start changing the isos and it will go up to whatever your maximum. And so, as it gets brighter, it's going to adjust the so until it gets back down to one hundred, and then if it gets brighter again, it's going to go and start changing over at the shutter speeds. And so this really fine tune controls in here allows you to adjust where that switch over takes place when you switch from changing isos. To changing cheddar speeds and so this may take a little bit of tweaking to figure out exactly where you want it, but it's a great, really fine tune control way of using esso and auto esso in a really smart manner, the remote mode that we've been talking about that little m l l three it sells for about twenty, twenty dollars or so you need to actually turn the camera on so that it's receiving the signal for this and this is where you would turn that mode on the camera has multiple exposures built in. I thought this was a pretty stupid idea to put this in the camera because you could do this in photoshopped with layers very easily. But then after trying it, I realized that there is a little bit of an advantage doing it in camera and seeing it right there out in the field as you're shooting it, especially if you're trying to line up kind of tricky shots, whether it be the moon over a cityscape or anything else lining up those things, being able to see that writing camera out in the field can be an advantage. And so this would be a bit more of an artistic experimentation, a place for you to play around with. Normally these things will be kept off the interval timer shooter. Will allow you to shoot a series of photos at a specified interval of time between the shots. You can go in here and you can program how many shots it's going to shoot what's the interval. When does this interval ometer siri's begin and you can take those shots and you can compress them into a video. And so, as an example, here is a time lapse video I recorded at mount hood down in oregon. Now, I did put the camera on a sliding motorized rail in order to get that shot. Another one of my favorite time lapses is from india. This is from varanasi at a fairly busy intersection there. Now these slight zoom back in the scene that is done in post. I just basically cropped in at the beginning of the video, and then I moved my frame back. Ken burns effect for those of you familiar with that and so that's, a lot of fun to dio and so that's, where you can go in and program that all in camera. Now we're going to see this again, and the difference is in this one, you get the individual photos. So if you wanna work with the photos, if you want to manipulate the photos, you want to make them lighter or darker if you need to eliminate one or two frames in there. This is the place to do it. So if you want to have a lot of manual control, this is where I recommend shooting your time lapse photography. We will sit one other place, and what it gives you is a finalized video, which is convenient but less editable.

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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