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Setup Menu

Lesson 32 from: Nikon D5 Fast Start

John Greengo

Setup Menu

Lesson 32 from: Nikon D5 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

32. Setup Menu

Next Lesson: Retouch Menu

Lesson Info

Setup Menu

Alright folks, last big menu is our setup menu. Alright, so formatting the cards, you can choose which card you wanna format, the card in Slot 1 or Slot 2. You can choose different languages for the menu system. You can go in and tweak the time and date or what time zone you are in. And realize that when you do travel with this camera, it does not automatically change the time and date for you. The brightness of the monitor can be adjusted. Normally this is gonna be left to 0, but if you're trying to show somebody images in very bright light, you may need to pump the brightness up, but I would normally leave it in the middle section, because that is how you judge exposure in some cases. If the color does not look right, you'll be able to go in and tweak the color of it. Hopefully that's not necessary either. The virtual horizon, I demoed this earlier in the class. It's kind of an awkward, buried place in here. And the reason it's here is just so that you can assign it to one of the sho...

rtcut buttons. If it's something that you use a lot, you can turn it on with one of the shortcut buttons. I believe we were accessing it with the info button on the back of the camera, but it sometimes takes a couple button presses to get to it. Next up is the information display on the back of the camera. It normally wants to go back and forth, depending on the lighting conditions, from dark lettering on light to light lettering on dark, and it automatically switches back and forth. If you don't like that, you can choose either dark on light or light on dark. Earlier in the class we did and automated AF fine-tune. And this is to correct for focusing errors that might be caused by lenses and cameras just being slightly different in their tolerances. Normally we focus on our subject, we know where we want it to go. Pay attention to your photographs and see if they are constantly focused in front of where they're supposed to be or in back of where they're supposed to be, even by very small amounts. If it is having a problem, you can go through the automatic fine-tune that we did, in, I think it was the live view section of this class, or you can come in here and you can manually do it yourself. And to do it yourself, you're gonna need to test your camera to see where the problem is. You're gonna need to focus on a target and you're gonna need to measure whether you're focusing in front of or behind that target. What I often use is just a ruler and a yardstick. You can buy a fancy device like this from LensOnline, which gives you a focusing target and then gives you little increments that show you how much your subject is in or out of focus. I'm gonna focus on my ruler and I'm gonna look on my yardstick to see what's in focus. In this case, I can set the camera anywhere from -20 to +20, which is gonna change the focus from the foreground to the background. And in this case, you can see at 0, it's not quite right. And judging where +10 is at, I would probably set this to maybe + to correct for the focusing of this particular lens. This is something that you may want to do if you have faster lenses, if you have longer lenses, or any lens that has very, very shallow depth of field. It's something only probably the more advanced users are gonna wanna use. And you can go in and save that data for a particular lens. And if you happen to use two different lenses of the same focal length, you can actually give them numbers and separate them. By default, it's always at 0. And you can show the saved values that you have in there. That's AF fine-tune. I hope you don't need to use it, but if you do have those faster lenses, chances are this is something that you're gonna wanna check into. If you are using one of the older lenses, metadata is not carried forward to the images that you are shooting. If you want to use an old 50 millimeter 1.2 lens, that's great. You can actually add that information and say, hey, I'm using a 50 millimeter lens, the maximum aperture is 1.2, and give it a particular number. I think there's 10 different numbers, so you can have 10 of these lenses that are kinda in your system, as you go through them. You would then come here and tell the camera which lens you're using and that way, all of that information is now a part of the metadata, so you'll be able to track that in your computer later on. The camera has a system that it automatically cleans the sensor that I talked about at the very beginning of the class. There is your sensor, there's a filter in front of your sensor that does a little ultrasonic shake to knock off dust, which should work most of the time quite well. You can tell the camera to clean it right now. And you can have it clean it either startup, shutdown, or both. And this is gonna help keep dust off the sensor and not be spots on your images. This is something that most people will be leaving turned on on a regular basis. If you do need to clean the image yourself, you'll need to go into the next feature, which is locking the mirror up for cleaning. This is something I would not recommend to those who are very nervous or shaky with their hands. You wanna be very careful about the way you do this. Step 1 is pretty easy, everyone can do this, it's just blow some air in there with one of the rocket air blowers. If you need to go to the next step, that would be the swab and liquid. And this is where you're gonna pour a little bit of liquid, a drop or two of liquid on the swab. And then swipe the deck and sweep it clean of any dust that seems to wanna be sticky and stay on the sensor. This is, once again, something not everyone's gonna wanna be doing, but it is an option for cleaning that sensor when you do need to clean it yourself. There is also a software option for getting rid of dust. If you have a photograph that looks like this, you have a serious dust problem. One of the options that you could do is photograph a white sheet of paper, which would show you all the dust that you have. And from there, using software, the camera will automatically clone over all of the information in your final image. Now, in order to really work with this, you are going to need Nikon's software, their Capture NX-D and their RAW Processing software, in order for this to work. And there's not to many people that I actually know that use this, but it is available if you don't wanna deal with it yourself and you wanna deal with it in an electronic fashion. You can attach comments to photographs, if you wanted to add a person's name, or email, or other information, that's gonna be carried forward in the metadata, you can do that. It's a little bit slow-working with the tiny screen in the back of the camera, typing something in, but it is possible to add that information at any time on any image. This is pretty cool. This is where you can put your name in the camera as artist information and copyright information. With every photo, this gets attached in metadata form. Now, granted, it can be written over by anyone who wants to be malicious, but let's just say you had your camera stolen, the police found it and they needed some sort of evidence that it was your camera, this might be the type of thing that would help you out, 'cause if you look in the copyright information, it could have your name, or your website, or your company's name, or other information, contact information, right in the camera. IPTC, this will jump us into another sub-menu here. Here is where we can add additional information beyond just comments. And this is for the International Press Telecommunications Council. And this is where you get to add in a bunch more of data. For instance, if you were going to the Olympics and you were covering the Olympics for a certain country, and you were in a certain stadium covering a certain event, you could add all of that information before the event even began, that way when your camera was tethered up, and you were instantly pulling images from your camera, all of that information is added in even before you shot the photo. This is something that sports, press photographers may be wanting to use in certain situations. It does require a little bit of time to set up in there and go in there and add all that information, but it is available here, and it's not available on, I think, any other Nikon camera other than D flagship series cameras. Voice memo options, we do have a few different options where you can control how you overwrite them and the audio output, memo control on it, how you hold the button in, and so forth. For anyone who does a lot of voice memos, there's just a little bit that you can control in there for that. The beep of the camera requires its own sub-menu here, so we go to its own sub-menu. First option here is the volume of how loud that beeping is. And this is something that, as a non-photographer, I find irritating when someones camera is constantly beeping and it's trying to focus. And I can understand wanting to leave it on, 'cause it's a confirmation that the camera has focused. And it's nice to have that reassurance that the camera is properly focused, but if you pay attention in the viewfinder, there's a little green light over on the left side that gives you that confirmation without being a distraction to your subject, or other photographers, or other people around you. If you do want to control the pitch, you can control it in a low and high setting. So if you just wanna turn it down a little bit, you can adjust the volume up at a little bit there, as well. Next up are the touch controls for the screen on the back of the camera. We get another little sub-menu in here. First off, we can either enable or disable the touch screen. So, if you don't like it, you can turn it off. Next up, you can control the flicks. Which way do you flick? Do you flick to the right, or do you flick to the left, as far as going forward and backward through your images. Not exactly real important, but if you want to control it, it's there for you. If you wanna connect your camera up to an external device, you can connect up through the HDMI port on the camera and you can go in here and you can control the resolution that you are pulling off of that HDMI plug. And if you wanna get into the advanced, that goes into more detail. So, you can choose the range that you are choosing, in limited or full. We have our display size, where you're getting either 95% or 100%. You can see the on-screen display. You might want to be recording the straight image without any information. So, if you're recording, you might wanna leave that turned off, depends on what you're doing with that monitor. If you want to have a dual monitor, so that both monitors are turned on, for whatever reason you need to, you can do that a well. That is all in the HDMI section. Location data, so if you are using the GPS GP-1A unit, you'll have some additional controls about how the camera is communicating, 'cause you don't wat the camera dying on you, going dead because it needs to be able to communicate back and forth. You can check your position, actually, on the camera with that data as to where you are. Also reset the clock from there. There is a wireless remote option with the camera when you do use the WR-T10. And you can choose the LED Lamp or Link Mode on how it's connecting up with the camera. And then there is a function button on there that you can choose to customize to do one of the many different functions that you find most useful if you have that control. Okay, folks, Network. This is where your camera is connected up to a computer, laptop, some other device, and you are downloading images to this. And this is where I got to the section in the menu and I said, "How am I gonna deal with this?" Because I looked in here and I said, "There's a lot of stuff in here." And I decided I'm gonna completely skip this section, other than this next slide. Which is, I think, the prettiest slide in the entire slide deck. It also took the most amount of time. In case you're wondering what is in the network connection, there's a lot of stuff here, folks. It's building, it's working, the computer is working, here we go. You have five basic options in here. And if you go into each of these, you're gonna have a number of more options. And buried inside of these, you have additional options. And this is all about connecting your camera up, whether you have a Mac and a PC, and what type of upload, and transfer, and control system you're having. And, I'll be honest with you, I have not fully tested this thing. I have not gone in and done the full tethered downloads on every single one of these options here. This is my subway map of explaining all the different things that you can do in the Network setting. And, perhaps, now you might have some appreciation as to why we are not going to be discussing, at length, every feature on this list right here. If you do want a particular class in how to set up networks on this, you can write me a letter. I would prefer it to be a handwritten letter, sent into my home address. I will put it in a three-ring binder, and when that three-ring binder fills up, I will make a class on network connections for this camera. But until that time, this is one area that we are just gonna kinda glance at and say, isn't that pretty. That is the network connections, and there is a network guide if you do wanna know more information. I apologize that we are not going into it. As I say, it would be a full, five-hour class in itself, I'm pretty sure. Moving on. Slot empty release lock. Okay, so, for those of us who have forgotten to put film in their camera, raise your hand, and pretended to take photos with no film in their camera, this is kinda that prevention with the digital cameras. It prevents you from firing the shutter if you forget to have a memory card in there. The only people that really wanna be able to take pictures without a memory card in the camera are people who work in a camera store that are trying to show you what the camera sounds like and feels like when you shoot photos when they don't have a memory card in there. Most of us wanna be able to have that engaged so that it will not fire unless there is a card in the camera. Battery info is very cool, it'll tell us how much of a charge we have on our cameras. It will tell us how many shots we've taken with that battery charge, and it will tell us the overall age and condition of that battery. Lots of good detailed information to check on a regular basis. If you have multiple cameras and you wanna take all the settings from one camera, you can transfer them to another camera. Now, granted, it has to be a D5 to a D and not to some other model camera. So, if you are hooking up a number of cameras, you've made a lot of adjustments, and you don't wanna try to go through and find all those settings, you can just save everything to a memory card and then transfer it over to the other camera. If you have not been paying attention for the last two hours in this class, you can reset all the functions of your camera back to the factory reset settings right here. Firmware version, this is the software that runs the operation on the camera. At the time that we are recording this class, we are currently on camera firmware version 1.10, which is a little bit of an update from when the camera first came out, so it may be different than your camera. There is also a lens distortion data and a lens firmware update that you can get from Nikon. Now, in order to get these updates, what you need to do is you need to hop on your computer, and you can just do a quick little search for Nikon D5 Firmware that'll probably take you to Nikon's site. You're gonna download that software, put it on a memory card, put the memory card in the camera, come here to the firmware version, it will sense that there's new firmware on the memory card and then it's gonna ask you about updating and give you a little checklist of things that you're supposed to do. It takes about three to five minutes to upload the new firmware. I did it in this camera just the other night, just to make sure that my camera was as up-to-date as it could be. These are free updates that Nikon has available. You do need to go to Nikon's website to find out about them. Although, sometimes on other Nikon websites, they'll tell you there's new firmware, go get your new firmware. It's an update that happens maybe once a year, it depends on the camera.

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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