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Button Layout

Lesson 3 from: Nikon D5100 / D5200 / D5300 / D5500 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

3. Button Layout

Next Lesson: Display System

Lesson Info

Button Layout

So we're going to get going on the button layout we're going to start looking at the camera and talking about what all the buttons do on it so we're going to start with the top deck and we're going to start with the most obvious button which is the on off button and so when you do turn the camera from off to on the camera goes through an automatic sensor cleaning it's got a special filter in front of the sensor and it shakes that really quickly too kind of knock off any dust that is on there if there is dust that is on there, there are ways of solving that problem but just be aware that it's trying to clean the camera every time you turn the camera on and off which I think is a good thing now as I say when the camera does come on it will go to sleep after a period of time hopefully you've reset your menus so it's a little bit longer to make this class a little bit easier to deal with. All right, right in the middle of that is your shadow released this is what you're gonna press to take...

a picture this is actually a multifunction button in some ways because when you press halfway down it's going to wake the camera it's going to activate the meter to read the light it's going to activate the autofocus issing auto focusing system so the lens will start focusing and then when you press all the way it's going to release the shutter and we're going to have some control over those features when we get into the menu system if you want to customize that to work us a little bit differently next up the big dial on the top that is your mode dial this determines how your shutter speeds apertures and possibly many other features on the camera are set so let's take a closer look at the mod I'il options first and foremost we have our full auto mode that's is where we talked about turning the dial earlier today this is the most simple mode on the camera where the camera is going to do shutter speeds and apertures figure those out for you as well as a number of other features. I don't really like this mode very much because it often restricts many menus and other features from being turned on or being turned off. And so for anyone who's using this camera on a regular basis this is probably not the mode that you're going to want to be in especially after you've taken this class you're going to know much more and you're going to be able to take much better control of the camera and get much better pictures than just using the auto mode now there is a flash off mode where the flash papa, which is one of the most aggravating things about the auto mode for me, is that whenever I press the shutter release, the flash pops up on me, and so if you turn it to the flash off mode, you could give your camera to your friend who doesn't know anything about photography, and they can take pictures in the museum where they don't allow flash photography. Ah, and so that's. The main reasons for using the auto where the flash off mode is to give the camera to somebody else to take pictures. In my opinion, you will hopefully know much more than these carry. These moz will do any good for you. Next up, we have a scene mode and below the scene mode. We have a bunch of other scenes, we have the most common scenes, but in the seed mon we can turn the command. I'll, which is the dial on the back of the camera, and we can change two different types of photography. These manufacturers loved to put in all these different modes. We have a food mode, night portrait, night, landscape, party indoors. Beach and snow sunset tons of different little modes that slightly tweak the camera for that type of situation. And if you want to play with those that's fine, my bet is, with a little bit of education, you're going to be able to get much better pictures in the full manual mode. Now, below that we're gonna have our most common scene modes we're going to have the portrait landscape, child mode. I don't know why childless one of the most popular modes, but it's their sports mode and close up mode, and these are all slightly tweaking the camera to that type of situation. I think you'll be better off if you really want to get involved with this camera in a good degree, you're gonna want to be up in the manual section, but you can kind of cheat by turning the camera to these modes and looking at how the camera sets things up. Then we have an effects mode, and this is in some ways an extension of the scene modes the effects mode our special effects modes, and unfortunately on lee jae pigs can be stored here. You can't shoot in the raw. And we're going to talk about rob versus j peg in a little bit but you can't shoot with the highest image quality you have to shoot in j pegs to get these special effects and we have night vision color sketch, miniature effect selective color silhouette high key and loki these are all things that you can do in the other modes of the camera if you know what you're doing and or possibly with some post processing like in photo shop but if you just want to have a little bit of fun and taken unusual picture well, there might be something that's kind of fun to play with in there were things start getting a little more serious is as we turn the dial around to the p mode p stands for program it means the camera is going to set shutter speeds and apertures for you but it's not going to limit the menus or restrict anything else it's just going to set the shutter speeds and apertures for you now one of the things that you can do while it's in program is you can turn the command I'll which is on the back of the camera and you can turn it left and right and you can adjust your shutter speed aperture combination now this will change as you move the camera around and pointed at different light levels but you do have a little bit of say as to the general direction are you getting more depth of field or you getting faster shutter speed so the program mode gives you a little bit of manual control which is kind of nice not a bad thing next up is thie shutter priority mode s and this is where you get to take direct control over a very specific shutter speed so by turning the command I'll you get to select a very specific shutter speed and the camera will try to figure out the best aperture to use very, very similar to that is aperture priority which is thie a setting and so a lot of photographers like the aperture priority mode because there's a relatively limit to number of apertures and for any amateur you choose there's likely to be a corresponding cheddar speed. The problem with going with shutter priority is that you could choose a very fast shutter speed let's say eight thousandth of a second and the cameras just not going to have an aperture wide enough to use for it and so it's a little bit easier to work with the aperture priority mode and that's what I find most serious photographers like to use as their automated mode and then finally we have m for manual this is where you get to select shutter speeds and apertures yourself to select the shutter speeds you will turn the command I'll which is what we've been doing for the last several notes now to change the aperture. There is no other dial on this camera, so what we have to dio is we have to find the little plus minus button up on the top of the camera by the shed a release, and we will press that button and turn the back dial to control our apertures. So to change the apertures, it requires two fingers working at the same time. And then when you take your for finger off and you just turn the command will that's going to be your shutter speeds. And so that's everything on the mod dial. So let's, get back to the camera at hand here and next up. But we want to talk about is the button that we were just pressing that plus minus button that's how we control the aperture but it's also used for exposure compensation. When you are in the program mode or the shutter priority or the aperture mode, you would press that button and turn the command dial. And you would either set a minus or a plus setting, and the reason you might want to do this is that if you have a picture and you're thinking maybe that's, not the right exposure, maybe it should be a little darker. Maybe it should be a little brighter. You could take a second a third, or is many shots as you want at different increments of brightness and darkness, so it's just a simple way to brighten your pictures up or dark in them, because sometimes the meter in the camera doesn't get things right, it tries to, but it's not always spot on correct right near that button is an information button, and this is going to turn on the lcd on the back of the camera and give you some information, and we'll be using this to pull up more information when we play back images and in some of the other different moz. So we may be going from that to time to time, and then we have this very cool little lever that is kind of on the outside of the mod dial. And when you flip this, you were going to send the camera into the live view mode, so rather than looking through the viewfinder, you're going to be looking at the lcd screen on the back of the camera. And the camera operates in a very different manner. When you go into the live view mode, one of the things that you could do is you could flip that on to turn the live view on you could hit the information button to pull up different sets of information. Here you can see our camera, can you see yourself? You know, if we can get out to show the camera that I'm looking at, but someone wrote their bicycle into work today and so that's what we're looking at here so we can pull up different sets of information, we have a grid screen and just different amounts of technical data that we're pulling up, that we're not going to worry too much about right now. If you want to start recording, there is a record button right on the top by the shutter release, and when you do start recording, I don't know if I can do this with my camera hooked up live, maybe not. You will get a red light in there, indicating that you are starting to record and that's going to blink while you are recording and see only have to press it wants to start, and then you will press it once again to stop recordings you don't need to leave your finger on it while you are recording now, the camera when it's in the live, you mowed the mirrors up and the standard auto focusing system does not work as normal in this l a and I forgot to mention before go into that there is a little zoom in and zoom out buttons, so if you are in live you, you can zoom in with a little plus or the minus button, which is just down by the rodham right hand side of the screen. But as I was saying about the autofocus mote, the camera focuses with a different system and how to change these melons. We're going to worry about in a little bit when we get to those in the menu system. I just want to make you aware of this right now is that the camera doesn't work in its normal fashion. It has some different options for focusing. The first option is it's got a face priority autofocus system that will try to recognize faces, and it will try to focus on the faces. Now this is going to be a problem that there's not a face in the screen, or if there are multiple faces at different distances from the camera. The camera may not know which one to focus on. There is a general wide area auto focus that is going to cover a pretty large section of the frame that's going to be a good general purpose for focusing there's also going to be a normal area which is just going to be a fairly small bracket in the middle and then there's going to be a subject tracking mode which nikon claims is quite good at tracking kids randomly moving around and I haven't had a good chance to experiment as to see how good it is with that one but it might be worth trying a little bit now beyond what the camera focuses on is how the camera will focus and we have some different options in here including single full time and manual and single in the single mode the camera's going to focus on the first solid object and then stop in the full time it's going to just continually auto focus back and forth as its finding objects that are out of focus it's going to try to bring those into focus and then finally there's going to be manual focus and a lot of people who have been using these new dslr is for video have found that the focusing system is too slow for use in the field in many circumstances and so the standard technique for a lot of people it has been to switch the lens and emanuel focus simply manually focused the lands and get your shot rather than trying to auto focus while you are shooting and so it depends on the type of video you're shooting, but just be advised that the autofocus system in these cameras while it's one of the best ones on the market in this case for the fifty, one hundred it's still a bit slow and uh when you are shooting videos you be limited to about twenty minutes in length. We're going to talk more about shooting videos in a little bit, so getting back to the top of the camera we have our record button right there next to our shutter release button, so a lot of important buttons right there in the top. We do also have a hot shoe on the camera so that we can mount additional flashes on the camera now the built in flash, which there is on this camera a little bit of a disadvantage is in that the flash is very small and it's very close to the lands and sometimes yields awkward shadows. So in this case, there's kind of a large shadow off to the side with a hot you on top of the camera you can get a more powerful flash that gives a more natural shadow that's going to be below the chin. Or you can use it to go off camera with the right chords and cables so that you can get much better softer light by just simply getting the flash off the camera if you do want to get a nikon flash they have three mainline flashes that you can look at they have the sb four hundred which really I can't recommend too well on this camera simply because the built in flash does most of what the sb four hundred does it doesn't add too much in the way of features or power to the camera if you want to get something that is noticeably better that isn't really overkill you probably want to put the sb seven hundred at the top of your list it's a good intermediate level flash it's going to sell for a little over three hundred bucks it's going to add a lot more power and versatility compared to the built in flash now if you want the absolute top of the line flash that's going to be the sb nine hundred that's going to sell for close to five hundred dollars it's going to offer even more power and mohr special effects there's some some kind of cool high end things that you khun d'oh with that flash that we're not going to have time to get into in this class unfortunately but it's a great flash if you're doing flash on a regular basis so back on the top of the camera we have over on the left hand side a little tiny marking that looks like you know kind of like a little ufo and that is your focal plane indicator, just indicating exactly where the plane of focus is in the camera. If you've ever seen some behind the scenes videos of hollywood movies being shot, sometimes you'll see somebody measuring the distance from the camera to an actor's face and that's the distance or that's the location on the camera that they're measuring, too on top right in front of that are a couple of little holes, and that is the speaker. When you are playing back your movies, that's where the sound is going to be coming from. And then of course, the camera does have a built in flash that we'll be talking about more in a moment. So going to the back side of the camera, lots of stuff back here, starting with the dye achter. So this is a little dialogue, right next to the viewfinder that adjust the focus of the viewfinder doesn't adjust the focus of the camera or the lands it's, just the viewfinder and your view of the focusing screen in what you see inside. And so you want to look inside press halfway down on the shutter release that you can see the numbers and display information and then turn that dial so that it is sharp and easy for you to see. Right next to that is your information button and this is kind of like the info button on the top, but this is going to allow us to go in and make changes on our information screen, which is where a lot of the basic features of this camera are, and in a few minutes we're going to be going through every feature on that information screen next to that is the auto exposure lock in auto focus lock and image protect button it's a multipurpose button that we're going to be able to customize a little bit, but if we want to lock the exposure in or lock the focus in as we have it in the camera, maybe we have it in the program mode and leave got it set to just the right shutter speed an aperture and we want to lock it in for a few seconds we're going to be able to press that button to lock it in. Now the image protect comes into play when we're in the playback mode when we're playing back an image and we don't want it to be accidentally deleted. What we would do is we would press this button and we would actually set a little key lock on that particular image and so if you have somebody that might grab your camera and delete an image accidentally, this would be a good reason to lock that image up just to the right of that, we have our command, I'll and we've already been using that to change our shutter speeds and our apertures, and we're going to be continuing to use that to change a lot of the different features in the camera that's kind of the soft dial that we use for a lot of different features as we work our way down the back side, we're going to have the playback button, so if you have an image, you want to play back, you can hit that button and that's what's going to bring your image back up on the screen, and then we have a couple of multipurpose buttons, the multi selector and the ok button, and I will sometimes forget the multi selector name, and we'll call it the mouse self, or the touch keys on the back. So if I I don't remember the multi selector it's, a little touch pad on the back, where you can go up, down, left, right, and at the middle of that is the ok button, kind of like the enter on a keyboard when you have a setting that you want to enter and that you would just simply press ok, right down below that has a little tiny light, is a card light, it indicates information is being written to the card, and if you take a bunch of pictures, it may take a second or two for information to get stored onto the card and so you what you don't want to do is you don't want to turn the camera off and most importantly you don't want to try to take the card out of the camera while that light is on because that means the camera is working and trying to store data on the card and you could corrupt that image and or all the images on the card potentially by messing with the card at that time right below that we have the garbage button if you're playing back an image, you know you don't want that image, you want to get rid of it quickly and easily hitting the garbage can we'll get rid of the image and just around the side of that is are resuming buttons and we saw how we could zoom in in the live view mode and we can also zoom in when we're playing back an image. So if you want to check to see if you've got an image really sharp, play it back, zoom in and then you can use the multi selector to kind of scan around that image left right up and down to see if you got it sharp this is a great way of checking your images in the field to make sure that you got what you wanted now the zoom minus button will also if you keep pressing it will zoom back to thumbnail so that you can see ah whole group of images at one time you can even see I think for nine even all the way back to a time scale of different images you shot on different days and this also is a multi purpose a purpose button that where axes a help button so as we get into the menus and you're not really sure what something does if you press that button it's going to bring up a little dialogue box helps you explain what that feature does we have our main lcd which one of the great things about the fifty one hundred is that they kind of up the resolution of the screen the lower end models had so about two hundred thirty thousand pixels on it this one has nearly a million's what's about three times sharper it's better than an iphone four, for instance and it's on par with all of the best cameras on the market. So it's got a great lcd that's really high resolution and then up on the top left we have a little infrared receiver there's an optional infrared remote that you can get with a camera and that's where you can point it out when you are firing the camera say it's on a tripod and you don't want to touch the camera and then of course right there at the top we're going to have our menu button and this is going to be the whole second half the class is diving in to the menu now those of you who are very observant will have noticed that there's a couple of little green dots on the camera right next to the menu and the information button and this is an auto reset mode with resets the camera back to the factory default settings for the menu settings and I don't know exactly why they needed to do this but in any case if you want to reset your camera back to the automatic sittings you would hold both of those buttons down for about three or four seconds continuously all right moving over to the left side of the camera still have a lot of stuff over here to work with right at the very top we have our flash button which does double duty if not triple duty it pops the flash up it's going to change the flash mode and it's going to allow us to do flash exposure compensation so why do you even want to use flash well first off if you don't use flash you might have a very slow shutter speed and end up with a blurry picture we could use ah hirai so or greater sensitivity on our sensor and use natural light but we will sometimes get a noisy or grainy image and finally, if you do use flash, you can keep your eyes so very low, so you get very good quality images and very fine detail as we can see they're good, clean skin tones. Now, if you haven't used flash very much, be aware that flash falls off pretty quickly. It's on ly good for things that are directly right in front of you in general, about ten or twelve feet or so, and so here you can see the penguins right in front of the camera are pretty well illuminated, but the ones further back don't have nearly as much light light falls off very quickly and it's not going to reach those mountains in the background. That's for sure, so a great reason for using flashes on people photography that people are right in front of you. And so a cloudy day is a great time to shoot portrait and adding a little bit of phil flash that's, a nice sparkle to the eyes, and so here you can see there's just a little catch light in the eyes and the faces illuminated a little bit more with just a little bit of phil flash and it's going to help out possibly quite a bit on a sunny day, a sunny day is a terrible time to take portrait's because we have highlights that air blown out and we have shadow areas that air concealing important information now we can try to brighten our image up, but that is going over expose the highlights and so if you have to shoot under bright sunlight, phil flash might be a good technique for filling in the shadows so that you can see the features of the person you're trying to photograph now the flash moz that we're going to be able to change by using this button there's a number of men, it kind of depends on which mo jerian is too which ones you can get teo, but in general, if you see a lightning bolt, that means the flashes going to fire the red eye reduction system in this camera fire some pre flashes so that you, your subject will not have red eye in them, but it does delay the firing of the shelter so it's something that I don't like very much because that could be fixed in a post processing program like adobe light room and many others slow stands for a slow shutter synch, meaning that you're using a slower shutter typical shutter speed might be a sixteenth of a second a slow shutter might be a fifteenth of a second, which is going to allow in mohr ambient light in the background to kind of mix with the flash with it it's, a kind of a low light specialist technique we have a rear curtain sink remember back when the description of the slr we had a front curtain in a rear curtain? Well, you could get the flash to synchronize with the rear curtain for a slightly different look in your photographs. Now to change any of these. What you're going to do is you're going to press the button to pop the lens up, and after that, you're going to turn the command aisle in the back of the camera and that's going to be able to change the flash mode on the camera. So you you're going to be able to see those different modes popping up in the back of the camera. Now some things to know about the flash is that you are going to be limited to one two hundredth of a second as your top shutter speed, and so if you're outside under bright sunlight and you have a thousandth of a second, that may be difficult to d'oh, the range of the flash on this is going to be about three meters or ten feet, it varies a little bit, depending on what s so you have set, but in general, the built in flash is not going to be very effective for things beyond three meters or ten feet. Now to make things really interesting this button this triple duty the third thing it does is flash exposure compensation and this requires three fingers to work. You have to press one button on the flash but you have to keep it pressed in you then have to press another finger on the plus minus button on the top right hand side of the camera and then with your thumb you need to go in back and adjust the command wheel and what this is doing is it's powering up or powering down the external flash and I do have an example here for you for that one let's get to that and so the normal t tl flash that fires on this camera is automatic t t l stands for through the lands mean the camera's figuring out for you and often times it over exposes people it does what it thinks is technically correct but aesthetically it's just a little too much flash. And so a lot of photographers like to power down built in or on camera flashes you could do tt l minus one you could do a t t l minus two and in this particular case I think t t l minus one it's the best compromise of these if we go to that day in the sunlight t t l has a very hard problem here because the the background is very dark and the woman is wearing a very dark top and the flashes trying to compensate by lighting up the skin to make an average tone over the whole picture. And so we're going toe tone down the flash here to minus one minus two, and we'll try a minus three as well, and in this case, I think t t l minus two is the best option, and so which one you want to choose completely depends on your situation, but it's a great way to take a little bit more control over the flash that you're working with next up. What do we have? Well, you do have your built in flash there and then right below the flash button, we have our function button, and this is going to be a button that we can program to do just about anything we want to start with. It comes program to be a self timer, so if we want to activate the self timer, we're going to turn this button and we're going to turn and they were going to basically just press the shutter release to get the camera into the self timer mt looking down on the lens actually, here is our auto focus and manual switch manual focus, which so if we do want to switch to manual focus, we would switch it right on the lens there this particular eighteen to fifty five, which is the standard kit lands, is goingto have vibration reduction on it. You can turn that on or off. It does use a little bit of battery power if you leave it on all the time, but I'd say it's probably worth it. For general hand held photography over on the side of the camera is a little rubber door that opens and inside here, a number of ports and the first one is one where you can plug in a microphone. You can use any microphone that has a mini jack, but nikon now makes their own microphone it's called the m e one it's a stereo microphone the cameras built in microphone is on ly mano sounds so you don't get that dual channels, and so if you want that stereo sound, you can look at the nikon microphone. There are other brands as well, like sign, heuser and road and many other brands that make very good microphones. But that's, one of your options with nikon right above that is thie hd on my part, and this is what you would use if you want to plug your camera into an hd tv and you want to use your camera kind of as a platform to do a slide show, which is one of the things you'll be able to do with this right above that is your usb and a v out ports, so if you're going to download your pictures to your computer, this is one option is to plug your camera into your computer and download your images above that is a remote and gps socket, so nikon has a wired remote called the emcee d c to remote release card and that's going to sell for about twenty five bucks and is a great tool the have if you're going to be using the tripod and you don't want to touch the camera while it is being fired because you don't want to bump it and cause any sort of blurriness and so great for landscape photographers or product photographers or anyone who works from a tripod on a regular basis. Nikon also has a gps unit called the gp one, and this is going to record data information about where you are and can communicate with the camera and attach that information to the metadata in the camera. All right, so we're gonna work our way around to the front side of the camera now, and right in front we have our red eye reduction light, which also doubles as thesis timer in doubles again, I guess triples again as thie auto focus assist a light so it's it's, a light that can come on for a wide variety of reasons. And we're gonna be able to control that if we don't want to have that turn on for say, the red eye reduction or the auto full focus assist light we can turn that off in the menu system are built in microphone is over there on the right hand side the lens mount index that's just the index that we a line with the appropriate in index on the lens for mounting the camera so we know how to mount the camera the lens on the camera our lens release button that we need to press into rotate the lens and take it off we have are mere inside we talked about the single lens reflex the reflex that's the mere part of it right there at the top of the ah opening there you'll have your cpu contacts and I just want to make sure that these are not damaged or dirty or obstructed in any way because that's how the camera communicates with the lens and then over on the grip side we have the infrared receiver so if you haven't infrared remote which is thie m l l three going to sell for a room probably a little under twenty bucks you're going to be able to get in the picture yourself and that's what you want to make sure you have line of sight with because it is a infrared remote and it works kind of like a tv remote doesn't work over a great distance and can have some problems in bright sunlight over on the right hand side of the camera were going to be looking at the memory card door, and this camera takes sd memory cards. Yeah, the newer versions air called sth see an std xy, and they're all the same size card that all work in this camera it's just that they designate different sizes of card. Now one of things to keep note up is on the side of these cards is a little switch that can sometimes inadvertently get switched in the downward position, which locks the card and disables the camera from basically working with that card. It's it's a way to lock images once you have already used the card and you want to download it, it prevents you or from anyone else writing more information on to that card or deleting images on that car. Now the cards have different speeds, and one of the things you're going to see is this little circle with a number in it. And if you shoot a lot of video with this camera or plan to, you're going to want to get a class six or higher it's kind of a minimum right speed that the card can sustain for a long period of time and that's the difficult thing with videos there's a lot of information going through continuously and so class ten is a very, very fast card, and they have recently introduced a new class of carl cards called a u h s and they have started with you hs one and they're going to go up to ten in that. So you hs one is a step higher than this previous grade of one through ten, and they have a slightly different symbol on that now with the cards for downloading it. I do not like to download from the camera. It's rather slow. I used the camera cameras, power and so forth. And so what I do is I have a card reader, and this is what most photographers have. They're not too much money. They sell anywhere from ten bucks to around thirty dollars, depending on how fancy of when you want to get and it's just a little peripheral device that you can keep plugged into one of your usb or firewire ports on your computer, and it makes downloading very, very simple and very, very fast looking towards the bottom of the camera. Well, this is where we're going to be able to put our battery and uses an e n e l fourteen battery nikon. As well as all the other manufacturers keep changing the batteries around, so you want to make sure that you get the right battery for this? As I said, the nikon batteries are a little bit more money, but they're very high quality and I would recommend them. We'll have our serial number. You might want to take note of ing for your insurance reasons, and it uses a standard tripod socket of a quarter twenty and so it's going to fit on any standard tripod anywhere out there. Very common feature. All right, as faras lenses go, the standard kit lens that most people end up getting with the camera is thie eighteen to fifty five lands. As I said, this is a good general starter lands this is what's called an a f s lens, and I'm going to talk about f s versus some of the other options in lenses just a moment. We're going to have our big zoom ring for changing your angle of you. If you want to manually focus, you will turn the focusing right, and if you want to put a filter on here, this particular lands uses a fifty to fifty two millimeter filter that's the size of the diameter different lenses might have a different number. There's going to be a little numbing around the edge of the lands and this is where the hood will mount the eighteen to fifty five hood is thie hb forty five and for any nikon lands there is going to be one and only one specific lens hood so you want to make sure you get the right lens hood now the lens hood is for creating a shade in front of the lens so that the front element is not in direct light and this is going to help out in preventing ghosting and flaring on your images. It also is going to give you just a little bit more contrast in a little bit more snap is they say to your photograph so I recommend using a hood as often as possible our focal length indicator right there and then our lens mount index, which we would align with that white index mount on the camera and then finally we have our cpu contacts on the back, which of course we want to make sure in good condition because they need to communicate with the camera. Now if you are a nikon user, you do need to be aware of the different types of nikon lenses and there's some different categories and the first ones I want to talk about our d x lenses and I don't know that they actually have anything called f x lenses, but it's and fx lands is anything that's not a d excellence and so a dx lands will very clearly state d x right on it if it's not a d excellence well, it just doesn't have d ax and the difference is is that the dx lenses are designed for their dx sensor, which is a smaller cropped sensor. The fx lenses can be used on either camera, but they're kind of mainly designed for the full frame cameras so when you have an image or light coming through on fx lands it's going to create a very large image circle for the full frame censor it creates this large image circle so that it can cover the full area there we go I'm sometimes a little behind on the button pressing it doesn't always go through so there you can see creates a large image circle that is fully captured by the large sensor. Now the smaller d excellence is going to create a smaller sensor designed exclusively to fit that smaller size sensor. There we go all right, so let's say you take your d x lands and you're going to move it over and try it on your friend's camera who has a full frame camera well what's going to happen well you're going to get a darkening of the corners or vignette ing and that is generally what we consider unacceptable now what if you take an fx lands and you want to try to mount it on your smaller frame camera? Well, you're going to get a crop frame in the middle, which is acceptable, it's going to be a narrower angle of view, and so, with this camera, you can use all the nikon lenses. You're not really restricted as to whether it's a dx or not a d excellence. However, you do need to be aware if it's adji lands or a non ji lin. So let me explain this. Ah, gee, lens has a g in it, right after the appetite area, and this is fully compatible with the d fifty one hundred. You'll also notice that there's no aperture, wring towards the rear end of the lands, nikon older lenses won't have a g, they might have a d or something else. They have a very visible aperture rain, and there was partial compatibility with this known icon is still selling these lenses knew because they I have other cameras that they will work with. So you do have to be a little careful. If you have this cameron, you're buying a new lands, is it a g lands or not? Because in this case, I think most users of this camera are going to want tohave, aggie lands, and so most notably, you're not going to have auto focus with this because the lenses work on a different type of focusing system. The lens requires the camera have a motor in it and a little drive shaft, and this camera doesn't have that little drive shaft. So you want g lenses for this camera? So what are some of the earth key options on lenses? Well, the eighteen to fifty five is a reasonable starter lands if you get into photography, you're probably not going to be satisfied with the lands. There are very few professionals that have this lands in their kit, so that limit teen just because thie aperture on the lens doesn't let in a lot of a lot of light it's not the sharpest lens that nikon has it pretty good, but it's not the greatest and it's not super well built for rugged, everyday use. It's a good general purpose lands if you just want to get the telephoto version of that lens, you're fine with that lands that fits your needs. Just find the telephoto version is the fifty five to two hundred it's a reasonable price land's going to cost you well little under two hundred fifty dollars and it's a good basic match to that eighteen to fifty five if you want to upgrade that telephoto and get something a little better quality the seventy two three hundred which sells for a little over five hundred dollars would be a good choice reaches out a little bit further is a little bit higher quality in the construction and the focusing system that it uses a couple of other really good options I think number one would be the thirty five millimeter f one point eight lengths this is a relatively new lens from nikon it's got a normal angle of you so it's not really wide angle it's not really telephoto but it lets in a ton of light it's in f one point eight lands let's in about ten times as much light as that eighteen to fifty five and they also just introduced a fifty millimeter f one point eight so if you want something a little bit longer and this is a perfect portrait lands if you love taking people pictures this is the lens to get with this camera it's a one point eight aperture now they do also make a one point four aperture that's even faster let's and even more light but this particular lands is less than two hundred fifty dollars and it's quite good optically and mechanically so this might be my first extra lands if I was owning the d fifty one hundred and those are a few of my favorite lens options for this camera, so we're going toe kind of go to the questions here and see what sort of questions are popping up about issues that we've covered so far. We actually don't have a lot of questions today, so let me see if any new ones come through. People are still wishing you a happy birthday. That was so yesterday, no one so much earlier today. So a random question is, is there much difference in quality using an std or cf memory card? Well, this camera does not use cf memory cards, so you can't put one in here. But in the general terms no it's, just storing data electronically. It doesn't matter if you could have a dvd drive in this and it's going to be the same quality, make the camera a lot bigger and more interesting to look at, but I know it doesn't matter what type of car it is far as the quality of image that you can get, maybe the number of images that you can get.

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Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

I love this class i am a new photographer coming into this world and i hope to one day own my own business and i really think i am going to be very successful in my life and so far this class is great for new beginners he goes slow he doesn't go into to many details he makes it short and sweet and that's what i love about this class.

a Creativelive Student
 

Harry Greenhalgh, Australia. I have had my D5100 for approx three years and with these courses I feel that I have a new camera. The idea of having the information explained on screen whilst you have the camera in your hand is fantastic. Cannot wait to try out what I hope I have learned. Explained in plain English for a change, WOW. Thank you.

Jim
 

I would recommend it to a complete novice. However, I did not get that much from it. While John is a great instructor he is not a Nikon owner or user. I am sure he knows how to the camera, but he is not into Nikon. He pretty much just went thru the manual. While he did mention how to use manual mode, he left some important concepts out of using manual mode. Namely that you need to adjust aperture, shutter speed and/or ISO until the meter reads something - he never really covered that. As I said, if this is your first real camera it would be a great course.

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