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Menu Functions

Lesson 17 from: Nikon D5 Fast Start

John Greengo

Menu Functions

Lesson 17 from: Nikon D5 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

17. Menu Functions

Next Lesson: Photo Shooting Menu

Lesson Info

Menu Functions

Okay, folks, so it is time for us to dig into that menu system and as I said a couple of times, this menu system is extensive and so, the PDF that comes along with the class is gonna be handy here 'cause we're just gonna be working our way through this, top to bottom, and I know it sounds tedious, but we are gonna go through things line item by line item, so let's go ahead and get started and not waste any time. Alright, so the menu system on the camera is activated with the Menu button, surprise, surprise, surprise. So, things are organized in a pretty good manner, I'd have to say, into different tabs that we will navigate through and so, you can see those tabs listed here, and keep track of items that you really think are important, that you might change on a regular basis because you're gonna be able to input those into My Menu. You can have a bunch of your favorites put in there. Now, a good portion of the items that we come across are gonna have no impact on your photography. It's...

just minor little tweaks in the camera, but you wanna tweak things to get things as best you can. A bunch of the other things are things that you're only gonna tweak once, and you'll have it set up and you won't ever need to come back to it again, and then just a smaller number of them are ones that you're gonna wanna come back to on a regular basis, and those are ones that you might wanna put into My Menu. Alright, so one of the little tricks about the Nikon menu system is that they have very long pages and so you have to pay attention to the scroll bar over on the right-hand side because sometimes you'll go to a particular feature, let's say, in the Movie Menu, and you'll look at the first page and you're like, ah, I don't see it, it must not be here. Look over, see where the scroll bar is and see if you need to scroll down to see where there is more information, and so that's something that often tricks me when I forget about it going through the Nikon menu system. So, we're gonna start at the top, work our way straight down. The first one is one of the less important tabs, I would say, which is the Playback Menu tab. So, you will be using the Left, Right, Up, Down on the multi-control, the dial on the back of your camera, the Up/Down controller. And so, for deleting your photographs, you can either delete all of them or you can go delete individual ones. Now, there is a garbage can button on the back of the camera, but if you are gonna delete a bunch of individual images, it's a little bit quicker here 'cause you don't have to press quite as many buttons doing it. There is a theory that you should not delete in the camera because that's a form of communication with the camera where it may cause a problem, so some people who are maybe on the little bit more paranoid side don't delete in the camera, they just download everything and they'll delete it from their computer. I have not had any problems, but there is the possibility of a problem. You can select and playback from different folders and this is a change, normally the camera is from Nikon Camera D5 selected there. The problem when you have that one selected is that if you were to take a memory card from, let's say, your D500 or some other Nikon camera or another brand of camera and you stuck it in this camera, it would not look like there is any images on that memory card and you may be tempted to format that card and delete all those pictures. And so, when you put All folders, it looks at everything on the memory card in order to play it back, so I think that's a safer position and you are less likely to delete photos that you didn't know about being on that card. If you wanna hide images, you can. You would do this if you were gonna be doing a slideshow, not something a lot of people use very often. Playback display options. If you recall earlier in the Playback section on the camera, we went in and I showed you turning all of these on, and so, these are all the options that you get when you playback an image and you press Up or Down. And so, the Image only gives you a nice, good view of the image, but then the File into tells you about your file size and the time you shot the photograph. And so, there's all sorts of other important information here that you may find very useful by tabbing up and down. One of the ones we did see briefly in our earlier demos was the Highlights which blinks pixels that are overexposed, and this can be really handy for anyone who wants to make sure that they are not overexposing their images. And so, I think having these turned on is a wise option and if you find that you really never use some of the options, then you can go in and turn those individual ones off. Because you have two memory card slots, if you want, you can copy images from one card to the other, and so, if you need to make copies for somebody or you only have one card in your camera and then you wanna back it up, you don't need a computer for it. You can do it and you can do it with the XQD or the CF cards, copying from one to the other. Most people like to have their camera show them the image that they've just shot and so they leave the Image review turned on. If you're gonna be doing, say, time lapse work or you know you're not gonna be shooting the images or you wanna save a little bit of battery power, that might be a time to turn the Image review off. When you delete an image, what's the next image that you want the camera to show you? Do you want it to show you the next image or the previous image? Very minor little difference, most people just go to the next, but change it if you like. So, when you shoot a burst of images, do you want the camera to playback the first image so that you can kind of walk through the series or do you want it to show the last image and you will back up through the series of images? And so, if you do a lot of sports and action photography, you may find that one system works better than the other for you in this case. Scrolling down. Auto image rotation, something that should be left on most of the time for everybody. What this does is it rotates vertical images when you download them to your computer. And your camera has a sensor in it, it knows when you're shooting vertically, no matter which direction you are holding the camera, and it will automatically rotate those images for you which will save you a bunch of time, so leave that one turned on. Rotate tall is similar, but a little different. This rotates the images in the camera and I recommend turning Rotate tall off in this case so that when you shoot vertical images, it uses up and shows you the image as large as possible on the back of the camera. My personal preference is, I don't mind turning the camera 90 degrees in order to see a bigger, better image of the image that I have just shot. You can hook your camera up to a TV and you can do slideshows and go in here and select which images and the interval and how you're gonna view them and so forth, and that's all that we're gonna talk about that one.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

NikonĀ® D5 Recommended Settings
NkonĀ® D5 Fast Start Class Slides

Ratings and Reviews

Michelle Mealing
 

As usual, John Greengo has provided me with a wealth of information, this time to decide on my next Nikon camera purchase. John has a talent for explaining technical aspects in a simply to understand, yet intelligent, language. I feel very lucky to be able to tap into the knowledge of such experts and thank the day I found out about Creative Live. Unfortunately I had to miss a little part of the live broadcast due to international time differences. I will definitely be watching the class again and again (there's so much content). Thanks John and Creative Live. Looking forward to my next class.

a Creativelive Student
 

Already set the Fn3 button for Voice Memo - easy peasy thanks to this and so many other "buried" ( in the manual ) treasures. Notwithstanding three years with the D4 and one year with the D5, I am substantially more familiar and comfortable with the available tools / features of this amazing camera, Nikon's D5. Thank you, John, for the relaxed, easy-to-follow yet informative, professional instruction - well done!

Dave Safley
 

John Greengo does a fantastic job of going over all the great features of this camera. Yes, there is a lot of information, but the format of the class enabled me to drive right into the features I needed for an upcoming shoot. I am new to Creative Live but this class is showing me the fantastic value of this platform. Happy Shooting!

Student Work

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