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5. Menu System

Lesson 5 from: Nikon D5100 / D5200 / D5300 / D5500 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

5. 5. Menu System

Dive into the menu system on the Nikon® D5100 camera and find out what all of those icons do.
Next Lesson: Camera Operation

Lesson Info

5. Menu System

All right, ok, we are now going to be diving in to the menu system on the camera, and this is significantly different than many other nikon cameras, and so if you have a d thirty one hundred it's going to be a little hard to follow along because they've added a ton of features in this camera, so how do you get access to the menu system? Of course, you're going to be pressing the menu button, and when you do that, you're going to be looking at some different tabs or pages full of information, and they have broken it down into logical settings like the playback, the shooting, custom settings, the set up, a retouch menu, and then finally, a recent settings or my menu. And so these are the ones that were going to be working with and in here, you will also have a little help menu indicator that lets you know, oh, that you can always press the help button for more information, and remember that help button is down at the bottom, right hand corner of the back side of the camera, and what we'r...

e going to do is we're going to go into the menu system, and we're just going to start going through things one by one and talking about him, so we're gonna be starting in the playback menus, so navigate to the playback menu and press either set or go to the right and that will enter into the playback menu where you get a little blue playback symbol there and the first option in there is delete so if you want to delete images you can do it here you can choose individual images you can select all the images for a date or you could delete all the images if you wanted to for the most part this is not the best way to go in and delete images usually I'll just use the garbage can button as I'm playing images back if there's something that I knew was completely wrong I could delete it there but most of the time I'm just going to download the card and I'll delete it on the computer when I'm at home so that I get a good look at the image and this is not the best way to clear images off your card we're gonna be talking about reformatting the card here in a little bit which is a much better way to clean all the images off the card next up is the playback folder and this is where I'm going to recommend you make a change from the factory default settings as we go through this if I think there's a good change to make I'm going to let you know and here's the first one rather than having current folder selected I would select all folders if you happen to have another camera let's say you have an older d ninety or you got a new d seven thousand and you shoot pictures on that camera take the memory card out and you put it into this camera it's not going to show you those images unless you have all folders selected there are certain reasons why you might on lee want to look at images in one folder but for most part I think you're going to want to have all folders available to view so I would change that to all and the way that you were going to do that is that me go ahead and turn my camera on here switch over to the playback mode I'm going to go up navigate to the play and I'm going to go to the playback folder I'm going to press set and I'm going to go down and select all and press ok and so that's how you would change this feature or other features that we're going to talk about so back to the keynote the next option is playback display options and you can go in here and you can select a whole bunch of different options and frankly I would select pretty much all of them you're going to have options of highlights rgb hissed a gram's shooting data and over you and I would put little check box in all of those and then check done that way. When you play your images back, you can get more information about the images that you just shot. Now the highlights what that's going to d'oh help this video works here. Yes, it does. Is it's showing you blown out pixels? So you've? This picture was overexposed, and this is how the camera would show you what's overexposed pixels that are completely hot blown out are blinking at us and that's a great warning sign for shooting, keeping the exposure in the correct range and the other information will also be helpful for just reviewing information when you play images back. All right, next up is image review. If you don't want your camera to play back an image, you could turn it off, but I would leave it at the factory default of on this is where it will automatically play an image back once you've shot the picture rotating tall, I would leave this as off, and I'm thinking that this me double check in the camera to see what the cameras actually selecting here and the camera has it as off and that's where I would leave it. I don't think we need to change that right now, next up in playback is the slide show, and I'm not going to get too far into this, you can dive into the instruction manual and get the specifics on what to do here, but if you want to use your camera to do a slide show on a tv or even just on the back of the camera, you can set up what images are shown and how long they're shown in the interval between them and so forth. I think it's much better to just download the images and do it on a computer or on a projector, but it can be done in camera d p o f print order is a special format for printing you could hook a printer directly up to the camera in print directly from this camera. This is not how most people want to get a good quality print. Usually you're going to take it into photo shop for a similar type program, maybe do a little tweaks and set it up for printing in, and you'll generally get a much better print job in that direction, but you can print it directly from this camera. You can check the instruction manual for specific information on how to do it it's just not how most people work with their camera. All right, so we're going to change to the shooting menu, which is the little camera icon, and the first option in here is to reset the shooting menu. And this is an option that we already passed by those two little green dots on the outside of the camera and we can reset it there or we can go into the menu setting here and reset it next up is the storage folder you can have different staller storage folders in the camera you could have one for business and one for personal use and you could shoot images and this is we're selecting the folder can be kind of important in this case I most people are going to need to go in here and create a new folder and selected but if you do have that need you can do it in image quality this is something that we've already talked about but it's here in the menu system as well this is where you can select an any f which stands for nikon elektronik format otherwise known as a raw image in general terms or a j peg image if you want to get the best quality images out of your camera and you're going to want to have raw and you're gonna want to software program to read that rob you can also shoot j pegs and if you'd issue j pegs I would at least recommend shooting the highest quality j pegs so you can select this here or in the info screen which is something that we already have had gone through next up is thie image size which will allow you to change the size of jpeg images that you have shot or going to shoot. Excuse me, we have large, medium and small, and once again I would recommend shooting the largest quality j pigs to get the best quality image. If you do plan on shooting j pegs, next up is the white balance mode, and so here, once again, this is something we've already seen before. We're going to see this quite a few times we're seeing things for the second time, you can go in here and select white balance, frankly, it's a lot easier to get to the info screen it's just a little bit more of a direct button press by pressing the info button, but we can do it here a swell if we need to. The picture control is setting the way jpeg images are going toe look and it tweaks a little bit. They're contrast their saturation, their color tone into a school slightly different. Look, according to the type of setting that you choose here, if you should draw, this is not important at all. If you shoot j peg, if you're not sure where to said it, I would probably start it's standard and maybe play around a little bit with some of the other settings to see if there's one that you like. To work in more than others next up what we have here, we have managed picture control and this is where you can go in and actually adjust the sort of settings for jpeg images yourself and so sharpening contrast, brightness, saturation and he will work with the color images if you are shooting monochrome images there's some special ones that you can use just to affect the way the black and white images are going to look once again, I think this is going to look a lot better if you shoot raw and work it all in photo shop or light room where some program like that. But you can do it in camera if you want to. And then we have auto distortion control and what this is going to do is this is going to correct for some lenses that have distortion problems. So let me show you a visual example. In this case we have our horizon line that is slightly bending, and if we turn on distortion control, we can fix that horizon. So it is a straight line. I'll go back and forth a couple of times here so you can see the difference between these two and this is one of those things that I would probably go ahead and leave turned on, and so it will it will fix this in the j peg images and just straighten out those lenses that have a little bit of correction and that's one of the advantages of having a nikon lands is that your camera will know how to communicate and fix that problem so we're diving deeper into the shooting men you were at color space and I would recommend a change from the factory default here I would change this to adobe rgb which is a slightly low, larger color gamut than the standard srg be and so I always want to get as much out of the camera's possible and I want the largest color space and adobe is a larger color space so choose adobe rgb next up is active delighting and we had looked at this before when we were in the information screen this is where it lightens the shadows I would probably leave this turned off you can experiment with it if you like. If you shoot raw it doesn't matter but I would probably leave it turned off. Next up is hdr this is one of the first cameras of its style tohave hdr built into the camera. Now what happens when it when you put the camera in hdr is it's going to shoot two pictures so you need to have the camera on a tripod and you probably should be shooting pictures of something that's not moving because if it moves it's taking two pictures when the subject is moved and it's not going to look right and so it only works with certain types of subjects it's going to shoot one picture that it thinks is the correct exposure and it's going to shoot one more that's a little different and then it's going to combine those two and this is only gonna work inge apec so this is not going to work for raw images it's something you can experiment it's kind of a little play mode in the camera if you ask me and there are some settings that you can set in here that we're not going to dive too far into about how you could adjust it basically you can turn it on and off and you can turn off of how much hdr work it's doing whether it's working at ojai normal or a low rate but it's going to take two pictures and once again you need a tripod and it's going to be a j peck image. Next up we have high eso noise reduction and long exposure noise reduction these air kind of similar so I'm going to talk about him together we talked a little bit about esso and setting a higher higher eso causes more noise. Well, the camera has a built in system for reducing noise and it's pretty good it's not bad pretty good and if you want to reduce noise with high if you're shooting at a high rise so or very long exposure, you can do that however, other post processing programs like photoshopped light room and so forth, I can probably do a better job that you have more control over, so this is something that you can deal with later with as well and possibly do a much better job of it and so I don't know that I would keep those turned on I would probably keep those turned off next up is our eyes so sensitivity settings and this is not where I would go to change these this is much easier to change right in the info screen on the camera, but we can do it from here is well, all right, next is thie release mode, which is what happens when we pressed down on the shutter release. We've already controlled this from the info screen and it's a lot easier to get to, but we can get to it here in the shooting menu as well, changing from single the continuous most of the time I leave my camera in the single mode just cause I'm going to take one picture at a time, then we have multiple exposures very few sl ours have multiple exposures in it, so this is kind of a unique fun feature in this and you can shoot either two or three images and combine them into one image and there is some controls in there about how the exposure is controlled, so this is something to play around with but once again it's probably better to do in post processing where you could take them to the different layers into photo shop and control the opacity of the layers something where you'll have definitely a lot more control afterwards then in in camera towards the end of the menu we have our movie set its and this is pretty important because if you want to shoot this camera in a video a movie mode, you're going to want to select the resolution in the frame rate of it. So if you want to get the best quality videos out of this, you're khun shoot this at nineteen twenty by ten eighty in the movie setting. Now we also have options of thirty frames twenty four, twenty five frames per second it's going to kind of depend on what style of shooting you're doing for video shooting here in the united states thirty frames a second over in europe great in with pal systems there a twenty five frames per second and if you want to shoot like hollywood movies they shoot him at twenty four frames per second and so there's a number of different options I would generally have this set at the highest quality settings so that you could get really high quality video out of the camera and then we have an interval timer shooting, and this is a feature that definitely no other camera at this price range hands as this is a really cool feature. The upper end, nikon d seven thousand added this and it's a very neat feature, and if you've never done interval time shooting, I have some examples to show you I like shooting interval timer timer shots, and this is an example of the duck dodge here on lake union in seattle. I've always seen these boats moving around, but I've always kind of wondered exactly where they're going, and so I set up a camera to take a picture every was about every ten seconds or so for forty five minutes, and I was able to get it nice video out of it. This next one is from mexico. I recorded a thirty second exposure, and then I recorded another thirty second exposure, and I did that for about three hundred times, all during the night and got this nice little video of the desert and my final and maybe favorite one is from india, which is a very a busy intersection shot from a building top shooting a picture or probably every ten seconds or so over about a half an hour, and I think it's just fun, compressing time like that, so if you want to do that, take a look a closer look at the instruction manual for exactly how to set it up. You're generally going to be setting up ah, picture that the camera to take a picture every one second or ten seconds or every minute and you're going to do that for generally two, three or four hundred shots so that's a fun little feature that you have on this camera that you can play with so after that we're going to be moving over into the custom menu and this is where we get to customize the camera to our particular likes and dislikes, and so when you get in here, we're going to have a bunch of different areas that we can change and they're all color coded and we're going to start with auto focus and we have three different settings that we can change in here. The first one is a f c priority selection auto focus continuous when you are in the continuous focusing mode. For instance, working with sports, the camera can be set to focus priority or release priority and it's a little hard for me to tell you where you should set your camry. If you're unsure you can just leave it at the factory default for right now, some people want the release mode where when they press down on the release of pictures taken, whether the subject is in focus or on or not other people want to make sure that it's in focus so that it is a very sharp picture. In that case, you would want focus priority the release. The idea for release priority is that you don't care that it's a little out of focus. You still want the picture? You still want the camera to fire? Next up? A two is the built in auto folk auto focus assist illuminator, it's hard to say I would turn this off on my camera. This is something that is generally kept on. This is the little flashlight that turns on on the front of the camera. I just don't like sending that signal out that I want to focus. If I have a hard time focusing the camera can't focus, I might just manually focus it. Some people like this because it's a little light that helps the camera focus under low light conditions. Your call on that, but my my taste is to turn it off. Next up is the range finder, and what happens here is in the camera. Normally you're going to leave this turn off if you want to turn it on it's going to take certain indicators in the viewfinder, the exposure indicator from correct and it's going to help you manually focus it's going to tell you which direction? To turn the lands to manually focus. So if you use a lot of manual focus lenses, you might want to take a look at this because it might help you out in the manual focusing department. Next down the list. We're going to be dealing with mita ring and exposure. We just have one little thing to deal with in here. Evey steps for exposure control. The standard is one third, which is where I would probably leave it. You can take it to a half steps if you want, but third steps just gives you more options. And I like more options. Now we're moving to the timers and auto exposure lock area. C one is thie shutter release button, a l and what this is doing. I mean, refresh my memory on the ah, my notes here is this is controlling what happens when you press down on the shed. A released does it lock the exposure in? I would I would leave this off, which is the standard mode. Normally when you press down on the shutter release and you move the camera to a new area it's going to adjust exposure. If you don't like that, you could have it locked the exposure by turning this on. Next up c two is auto off timers, and this has to do with the timers that we changed when we started this class. If you want to get the camera back to normal, you could set the's timers back to their normal display. We have him on long display right now, and you can go in, and you can even customize exactly which menus are playback or live for how long. And so you can customize that to your heart's content. The self timer is next, and this is kind of nice because you can select exactly how long the self timer delays the shot anywhere from two, five, ten or twenty seconds. And you can also control how many pictures are taken once the self timer has been activated. And so, uh, typically I like a ten second self time, or if I want to jump around and get in the picture myself, but sometimes I need just a little bit more time. And so that twenty second is nice, remote on duration. If you're going to be using a remote sensor, how remote? How long do you want that remote to be activated? General? The standard setting on this would be fine when it make any change there digging deeper into this d one is the beep. This is one thing that I like to have turned off on the camera I don't like to have my camera screaming out when I'm focusing or when I've achieved focus, but some people night like that confirmation when you do focus on it achieves the auto focus, it will give you a little chirp chirp that it's got it in focus if you don't like that like me kind of bugs me, you could turn it off right here I esso display this is where I'm going to recommend a change from the factory settings I would turn this on and what happens is that this display for the s o will now appear in the viewfinder and it's going to replace the number of exposures remaining and so basically you have to ask yourself the question what's more important, the s o I'm shooting at or how many pictures do I have left? And I think the setting is generally more important than the number of pictures left but you could make your own call on that one file number sequence when your camera creates a picture it gives it a file name and it has a file name with a number on it and that number goes up to ten thousand at which point it resets back down to zero you can control exactly when and how it resets back down to zero I would probably leave this um at let's. See where? Where? Where do we want to change this one file number sequence? You can leave this at the factory default it's probably fine to start with, which you want to do if you end up taking a lot of pictures, is that you want to rename them once you get them out of your camera and into your computer because the camera just recycles the same ten thousand numbers over and over again. So if you shoot a lot of pictures, you're gonna end up with a lot of pictures with the exact same file number. Next up is the exposure delay mode. This is something that you're going to leave off for most of the time. There is a way to turn it on right here and there's a one second delay between the time you press the button on the camera and the time the pictures actually taken this is to help reduce vibration of you pressing the button on the camera so on lee would use that in very, very special circumstances. There is a print date mode. This is going to work on leon jpeg images. It will not work on raw images. It'll actually print the date on the front of the picture, which is not something most people want, and so I would probably leave this turned off. Now we're moving into the bracketing in flash section of the menu flash control for built in flash we can go in and change the tt l which stands for through the lens control to manual control and this is not something I would recommend for most beginning photographers but if you are experienced and you want to manually control the flash, you can do it right here auto bracketing set we saw this in the information screen this is where we shot pictures that were overexposed and under exposed it's a great feature of the camera but I don't know that I would access it from here finally we're just going through some of the controls on the camera the function button on the side of the camera right below the flash button you can customize that to do something else besides the time where the timer is a pretty good option and it has a lot of other options that you could choose if I was to choose another button for it to control I would probably change it to the because the I s o is something you change quite frequently and I would like a quick and easy access to it so that would probably be my my first mode that I might want to change it to the other options that I might like are the release mode or white balance but you can change it to whatever you want next one is that auto exposure lock button and auto focus lock button on the back of the camera can be customized there's five different settings that you can customize exactly how that camera works I'm not going to go into the details of how to do it, but are we why you would want to do each and every one of those because it gets to a real personalized way that you have your camera set up so you might want to take a look at the instruction manual and play around and see if you want to change that one reverse the dial rotation if for some reason you don't like the way the command I'll on this camera turns when you're making a change with shutter speeds or apertures, you can do that and you might want to do that for a setting that's coming up in just a moment slot empty released lock uh I would leave this unlocked what what happens then is if you don't have a memory card in the camera, it won't allow you to take pictures in that way you won't accidentally start taking pictures without a memory card in there, which means you want you aren't actually taking pictures so I would leave that locked reverse indicators now I mentioned earlier that the exposure indicator is a little awkward with the minus on the right side, which is just the way nikon does it if you want to switch it around to where minuses on the left side, you can reverse the indicators, at which point the dials might seem a little awkward, you can go back to f three and reverse the dial rotation, and so if you're going to do at five, you might want to do f three as well. Okay, so now we're into the set up menu, and these are just subtly different than the custom menu. The first option in here is formatting the memory card. When you are done taking pictures, you've downloaded them to your hard drive, backed him up on a second hard drive, and you're ready to go off on a new shoot. A good practice is to reform at the memory card. What reformatting the memory card does is it deletes the images it deletes the folders and anything else that's on the card that doesn't need to be there. It re initialize is the card for taking pictures, and this is a practice that pretty much all professional photographers do before they engage in a new and important shooters. They reformat the memory cards so there's a clean line of communication between the camera and the card, but just don't do it on a whim just for fun, because you're going to delete all the images on your memory card. Monitor brightness this is something that you can change in general and should probably be said at the middle setting unless there's something going wrong with the camera info display format the display on the back of the camera can be displayed in either a graphic or classic manner you get to choose I think for beginners thie graphic display is really nice because it shows you the aperture in the shelter with a little graphic display and I love graphic displays and so that might help you out understand a little bit better about what's going on as far as the aperture and maybe as you get more used to it, you'll go to the classic display which gives you a little bit larger numbers for all the other information. Next up auto info display the information display non display in the back of the camera well come on with the shutter release and some people don't like that if you want to turn that off you can turn it off in general I would leave it on next up is clean image sensor if you want to clean the image sensor there's that automatic sensor cleaning you can go in here and clean now generally where you're going to have it said it clean it start up and start down I think it's fine there's no harm having that sensor cleaned every time you turn the camera off and turn it on now if you want to get in and clean the censor yourself, which is sometimes necessary, if you get something on the sensor that just won't shake off, you may need to get in there and do that yourself and it's a two step process and not everyone wants to do both steps and the first step is pretty easy and what that's going to involve is a a bulb blower in which you're going to do is you're going to take the lens off, you're going to go into the lock mere up for cleaning and you are going to blow air in the sensor and hopefully knock off any dust that is located on the sensor. Now if you wantto clean it even further, the next step and this is not for everyone is to get a swab and liquid and do a sweep clean of the sensor where you actually put a couple drops of alcohol on this swab and you will swipe it across the censor. Some people just don't feel comfortable doing this and you can go to your local camera shop or repair shop and they can usually there have it done or have the camera sent out to have the sensor clean. It might cost you as much as fifty dollars and you can buy these materials yourself and do it much cheaper, but as I say, not everyone feels like doing it there is also a pre moistened swab that you can get so that you don't have to buy a big pack and these air going to cost you about five bucks apiece. The video mode is for changing from ntsc two pounds here in the united states, we use the standard of ntsc in many other parts of the world they use, pal. So, depending on what type of tvs you're going to be showing your videos on, you may need to change your video mode. Htm I this is controlling the output resolution and device control. If you're going to have your camera hooked up to an hd tv flicka reduction, the lcd monitor may not be compatible with certain types of fluorescent lights because of a flicker issue they have, and you can adjust the hurts in which it is giving you this display. It's generally not something most people would need to play with. But if you shoot video or you use live you around funky lights, this is where you would change it. You can adjust for the time zone in date in this is something that you do want to have set as accurately as possible. If you go traveling to a different country that's in a different time zone, you want to adjust it when your plane lands, so that all your pictures are set at the correct local time and if you have daylight savings time or any time adjustment like that you want to make that in your cameras well so that that information is properly recorded because that gets attributed to every photograph that you take in what's called the metadata all the data that goes with the photograph we can adjust for different languages and you can add an image comment at any time you want to any particular image if you want to add your own key words to particular images you take a picture of somebody on the street and they give you their email address well you could add that in to the image comments so that when you download that image you know who did email that image too we can rotate images if we want in here and I would leave this turned on so that the camera will automatically rotate images when you download it to your computer now if you get dust on your image sensor and you don't have the swabs and you don't have the blower and it won't come off one of the things that you can do is that you can register a dusty image and what you do is you photograph a white sheet of paper you'll want to look at your instruction manual for more information about this you photograph a white sheet of paper and you let the camera know that this should be a clean sheet of paper and it's going to find any sort of dust on the sensor and it's going to basically clone it out in future images and this is a really a last ditch thing that you want to do and so I don't recommend doing this unless you really really have to get rid of that desk because you can always get rid of the dust later on we do also have a gps mode in here and this is if you are going to get that g p one unit from nikon this is going to set some of the parameters about how the cameras timers turn on and off and how that information is recorded to the gps unit or from the gps unit to the camera I should say if you haven't I fight card which is a wireless card and allows you to shoot pictures in the camera and have it wirelessly sent to a nearby computer you can get into the eye fi menu and you can adjust some of the settings for that most people aren't using that it's not a real common feature so most people aren't going to need to worry about that and then getting near the very end of the set up menu the firmware in your camera the firmware in your camera is the software that runs the camera and from time to time they find that there's a little bug in the software and they need to making an adjustment, and rather than having you send your camera back to japan to have new firm were installed in it, what they do is they post new firm where at the nikon website for your country and you can go to that website, download that to your computer, attach your camera to your computer, or put your memory card in your card reader and transfer that file onto the memory card. Put the memory card back in the camera and there's full instructions at the website and an instruction manual on how to do this, and you can load up new firmware now with the fifty, one hundred still a pretty new camera, and it still has the original firmware, so there has not been any updates as of the taping of this show s o the current version right now is one point. Oh, but six months, one year down the road, they might have an adjustment and you would go to nyu cons website to find out what the current version is. So the next menu is the retouch menu, and while we could spend a lot of time in here, I'm not going tio this is kind of designed for people who don't have computers, and it is a way for you to go in and adjust images, and a lot of these things are pretty self explaining. Red eye you can correct for red eye in many of these images or many of these options like trim and monochrome filter effects you're actually going to be creating a copy of that image and so if you have a raw image and you make a black and white well it's going to create a black and white j peg version of that raw image so this is ahh good way to kill some time in the airports if you get stuck on a trip to go in and play around with your images this is kind of photo shop in your camera this is not something that you really need to dio all of this stuff can be done later on. We do also have a moment here at the very end for editing movies if you want to go in and trim the beginning and ends of when you started and stop shooting a video and so you can play around with the retouch menu a lot of stuff in there but most of that stuff could be done more effectively on a computer with the right software now the very last tab in here is thie my menu or recent settings and if you go into this you're going to see that you can add items, remove items, rank items and you can choose the tab you can either choose this to be things that you have recently gone too which is your recent settings? My preference is to set it up as my menu, that way you can go into add items and what you will do there is you'll go through the menu and look for things that you would like to add to your menu of all the things that we've talked about in the menu setting there's probably only about four or five that you're really going to want to go to on a regular basis, you could add those items you can rank amiss to the most important and that way, whenever you go to the menu, you're just going to see the things that you use the most. So this is something I would spend some time and go in and set up for the way you like to use your camera. And so it's a it's a great feature for diving into the menu. We complain and photography a lot about diving into the menu to make changes in here. They've just made it very, very quick and easy to d'oh, so with that that kind of takes us through the menu system there, uh, so get that menu set up and we're going to look for any sort of questions you might have at this point regarding things that we passed by okay, a question from black apple what does this automatic sensor cleaning exactly do automatic sensor cleaning has well there's the sensor and then in front of the sensors a low pass filter we're going to get into exactly what that's doing but it's filtering things a little bit and it's got a little tiny motor on it and it shakes that not the sensor but this filter right in front of the sensor and it will shake off any little dust that is in there now I haven't taken the camera part but what I am told inside around that area is basically a sticky wall and a sticky floor so that if dust falls off that it will go to this flypaper you might say and keep all that dust there ah and so that's what it's doing thank you a question from lisa s is it generally best to erase images first and then reform at the memory card or can you just reform at the card it's not necessary to erase and then reformat that's not really doing any good ah yuk unjust reform at the card and that's going to get rid of all the images and a question from mera was is there a difference between reformatting the card and deleting the images from the car uh yes that is good question does a lot of people will just delete and they are familiar with reformatting if you delete images on the card the folder that they're in is still there and when you go to shoot new pictures that's going to create another folder and those pictures are going to go in that new folder and you end up with these ghost in somewhat invisible folders that you don't see on your camera but there there on the card kind of in hiding and from time to time with people who just delete images they're going to get a card error message in there cameron what's happening is the camera is having a difficult time communicating with the card either there's no room or it expects a certain folder to be there and there's one already there or it wants to create one there's all sorts of little problems so every once in a while it's good to clean house and that's what we're doing when we reform at the memory card and g two asked is there a way to recover them if I do deleted image or you reformat your memory cards there is software that you can use in your computer that you might be able to get your images back there are services at certain businesses where you can take your memory card in and they can run rescue software and sometimes they can get that off it depends a little bit on the card and exactly which camera and how everything was done but there's a reasonably good chance if you reform at your memory card and you don't shoot any more pictures that you could get that information off. It would be very difficult to get images off that you have reformatted shot new pictures filled the card up reformatted that's going to be a most likely impossible scenario. Okay, a question from lisa s to update the firm where you download the new software from the web, upload it to a memory card and then put the card in the camera and go to firmware update setting on the camera to install is that how you doing? I could not have said that better. That is perfect. All right, thank you, lisa. A question from debbio animation going back to your the last interval shot in india, he wanted to know how you did the zoom. Ah, the little bit of move. No, I did not zoom lens. That was a little bit of post work, so I one of the great things about these cameras is that you can shoot really high resolution far higher than hd, so you could shoot a whole bunch of either large j pegs or raw images. And this is not a video editing class, and I'm not the person to teach that class, but you could do a little bit of moves, you can start cropped in and you consume back, or you could do a little bit of move from side to side and still have an hd resolution throughout that entire panning or zooming ken burns effect if you will and so I use final cut pro to do that particular little move you might say cool question from g two if we use a memory card in one camera and then use it in another of a different brand or the image is lost no you won't lose the images but if you were to take a memory card say from a blue and evil canon camera and put it into your nice nikon camera remember when we set up the folders I told you to change it toe all pictures chances are that you would be able to see the cannon I haven't tried this in real life, but I'm pretty sure that you could it's possible that it would throw it in a folder that this camera didn't recognize and you might not see it and so you do need to be careful about moving cards from camera to camera, which is usually why a lot of professional photographers will kind of have dedicated cards for a camera and they won't have a cannon in a nikon for multiple reasons but they won't be switching cards back and forth between them any time though you want to reset the card is when you want to reformat the card wherever it's been or whatever it's done by reformatting the card you're setting a clean slate for the camera that it's going to work with okay question from red he'll fan does the color space setting affect the recording of the raw image in any way or does that only affect the j pegs in which case for more accurate lcd display wouldn't you want s are jimmy it is only going to affect j pegs s so it's not going to affect the any f or the raw files and there is some argument to what he says they're for instance right now most of the internet is in srg be if you were to take a projector or even a standard computer monitor it's probably going to be an s rgb but it's a smaller color gamut than adobe rgb and I have a feeling that technology is going to get better in the future it's just a hunch and that you're going to look back in ten years and if you shot srg be it's going to be like well I wish I had shot in adobe rg because now I have a wider color gamut that I could use on all these new devices that we have that have white or colored gametes and so there is some argument if you wanted to match up more closely with what's currently available you could have it in srg b it's a pretty minor subtle difference but I always like shooting with as much capability as they give me we have a couple of questions about the h t m I support from black apple can you directly output footage and video mode using the itchy and my port if so, what will the resolution be that one act and so yes, we can we can put this camera in live you right now and so we have an hd my court coming out of this for live purposes here and we're going to look at the exciting keyboard in front of us on monitor and our bicycle over here this is our one bicycle we all ride to work on in the morning and so we are getting an hd feet out of here but we are also getting kind of other stuff we're getting in the camera and so I don't know if that answers completely has this question, but I think mostly this yeah and kind of follow on question from big steve will the camera shoot video that will that will play back on a large screen tvs? Or is it just more suited for the web? What type of video quality will they be on a big screen on the output from the hd just in general in general it's going to be suitable for the full hd and so you're you're set for the super highest quality okay and another question from red he'll fan on the d seven thousand and I'm sure it's the same on the d fifty one hundred they teach you my output won't work as a live replacement of the lcd screen unless a particular playback setting is changed to prevent automatic slideshow mode from being entered into went into when hooked up to a tv. Can you confirm that? Well, I think they have actually gone a little over my head there. Okay? I don't know that I have played with all of those settings exactly as they have I I'm not sure on that one, I'm just, if I don't know, I don't know, I admit it and that's okay, um, I think that we are good for questions right now. Oh, I do so question from pics of you when you shoot video and set an auto is so does that change? Yes, it will change as the light changes essentially, it'll change the ice, so to help accommodate for either lighter or darker areas, and a question from twitter that I missed earlier from at three point nine miles are the focus points only to set focus, or can they be used to measure exposure in a certain part of the frame? They're just for focusing there, not for exposure, and so the exposure will be through the matrix, the center waited or the spot metering directly in the middle.

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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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