Lessons

Lesson Info

Product Overview

All right, well welcome everybody to dslr fast start I'm john and today we're going to talk about the fairly new very cool nikon d fifty one hundred and so we're going to be going through the camera this is kind of your in live in person instruction manual we're going to go through all the buttons and all the menus to the camera so let's go ahead and get started the ah d fifty one hundred is a very very nice camera my opinion I've gone through it gone through the whole instruction manual and if you own this camera you should be quite proud because it's quite nice so here is kind of what we're looking at for the day we're going to go through a little product overview to let you know what you've gotten yourself into there's a lot of people who have purchased this camera it's their first nikon camera it's their first slr and this is kind of a whole new world to them for many other people they've been involved in this for quite some time but for a lot of people who want to kind of introduc...

e where you are we're going to go through some photography basics to make sure everyone is kind of up to speed on some of the most basic elements of photography and they were going to go through that kind of the whole camera on the outside all the buttons styles and so forth talk about what they do and when you would use him, we're going to go into the display system, talk about how it feeds you information and how to interact with it, and then we're going to go through the menu system and look at all the different ways you can set the camera for your own particular style of photography, and then finally, at the very end, we're going to put everything that we learned to practice, and we're going to practice setting the camera for different types of photography and that'll be a real good tutorial for beginning photographers on what needs to be changed for different sorts of things. So when you get this camera and you open up the box, you get this really large instruction manual it's got about two hundred forty pages in it, and I figure if you spend a couple minutes per page, you're going to spend about eight hours going through that entire instruction manual. Now the class that you are about to see right now is going to last roughly four hours in time. How is it possible for me to take four hours of information or eight hours and cram it into four hours? And the fact of the matter is, is I can't there's just a lot more information in the instruction manual that we're not going to go over today, his camera, as I have discovered fairly recently has been designed for people at least for some people who don't have computers and don't have any access to post processing programs like photoshopped or light room and so I'm going to bypass certain features of this cameron time to time I will tell you to reference the instruction manual for more information I'm tryingto look at the way most people use the camera under most usual situations so you will need the instruction manual in addition to this class for some things and then secondly this is not a photography one a one class it's kind of assumed that you know a little bit about photography but if you've never taken a photography class that would probably be a lot of help after you take this class because once you know how to work this camera, that doesn't mean that you know how to take great pictures there's a hole a lot of other stuff that goes along with that and I'll actually recommend a pretty good class for anyone who does want to learn more about photography so let's get into the product overview and talk about the whole night gone system that you've got yourself into you bought a d fifty one hundred recently so this is obviously a nikon camera and nikon is a japanese company that specializes in optical products they make cameras, binoculars all sorts of camera devices you might say they make a lot of sport optics binoculars telescopes and they make a number of medical and other technical instruments with their optics now they started back in nineteen seventeen they were a conglomeration of three of the leading optical manufacturers in japan and then in nineteen forty eight they brought out their first camera than nikon one range finder and if you have one of these it is worth a pretty penny these days especially if it's in good shape they're quite rare and then in nineteen fifty nine they brought out their first professional slr was thie nikon f and it featured a new lens mt this was a single lens reflex and we'll talk about what a single lens reflex is in a moment but the lens mount on it is essentially exactly the same as on this camera here in front of me so you could interchange lenses to some degree it's it's a bit of been a bit of an evolutionary change so there's a lot of things that are incompatible but the basic size and structure of that lens mount has changed and that's been one of the reasons nikon users have love their cameras is that they've maintained the same lens mount so when you invest in a large collection of lenses it holds forward as you get newer in your cameras in nineteen eighty six things started to change a little bit because they introduced their first autofocus camera and they spent the nineties kind of refining the auto focus system. And then in nineteen ninety nine, they introduced their first digital slr kind of then, you know, the mainstream professional camera. And remember when this camera came out because it was it was a big deal, it was just a fantastic deal and photography. It was about fifty five hundred dollars and had two point seven megapixels, and that was revolutionary at the time. And now we're getting cameras that are sixteen megapixels for well under a thousand dollars. So we've come a long ways in less than ten years. One of the great things about being a nikon owner is that nikon has a full range of cameras to choose from. We have entry level cameras all the way up to the top of the line professional camera. So is you. Grow us a photographer, your needs change. There's going to be a camera for you to step up to to step up the game. Nikon is also known for their great collection of lenses. They have a lens for pretty much anything that you might want to dio so there's. Probably a lens out there. That's next on everyone's list. If you want a nikon camera and then of course they have. Great flash system they've been known as having a very comprehensive and sophisticated flash system, so if you want to add a little bit of light control light yourself night, khan's got a great system for that now, where the fifty one hundred fits in the big scheme of things you might say is it's what we're calling these days and upper entry level camera, we used to just have entry level and intermediate level cameras, but they've kind of broken the lines up even further. So the true entry level it's the d thirty one hundred, which is very similar to this camera, it's just kind of got a little stripped down features, and they've kind of packed a lot of extra features on to this fifty one hundred, and this is based off of the d five thousand that came out a couple of years ago, and that was based off the d sixty and so on and so forth, so each we'll probably every two years or so, they update their cameras and refreshing with new features. Now there's, there's one feature about this camera that I haven't heard anybody talk about and it's a it's, a revolutionary change in cameras for nikon, and I just want to point this out here is that if you look at the full nikon line up of cameras they all have this very particular red nubbin where you put your finger and the red nubbin on this camera is shaped a little differently and I think this is just truly significant and I haven't heard anyone else mention it, but I think my khan's got a big change underfoot with this and I just wanted to point it out to everyone out there it's my little joke for everyone. Okay, so the d fifty one hundred and you know, we probably have a lot of people tuning in who might own d thirty one hundred's as well because it's a very similar camera on and so I just wanted to compare how this camera compares with that one as well as the previous models say the d five thousand or the d three thousand and the previous cameras had ten to twelve megapixels on the d thirty, one hundred has fourteen megapixels and this one has sixteen megapixels. We've increased the esso settings on this, which is the sensitivity of the sensor. We can now go up to twenty five thousand on this, which means we can shoot under much lower light. We have live view and this camera as well as the thirty, one hundred and the previous models did not have live you so that's a new feature and we now have video in these entry level cameras the thirty one hundred shoots at twenty four frames a second and this one shoots at thirty frames a second so it's a very good quality hd video that you can get with us the frames per second in the fifty one hundred is a little faster than thirty one hundred or previous cameras and this one has a higher resolution screen on the back and included with that it's also an articulated lcd so it's got a little flippy out screen that you can flip out and angle around which makes shooting video a lot easier to work with because you don't have to have the camera held up quite toe high level you can shoot with it at lower or higher levels now when you get the camera most people get the d fifty one hundred with the kit lens which is an eighteen to fifty five lands which is a pretty good starter lands I think it's fine for anybody who's getting into photography but you may grow out of it just be aware of that depends on how fast and furious you get into photography you're going to get the basic things like a battery in a battery charger on a very various other little things like eye caps and covers and so forth you'll get it the instruction manual and then of course you'll get some software so that you can download view images and view the raw images and so forth I will recommend some other software that I think might be more useful for for other photographers the battery itself will take about an hour and a half to charge and you can expect to get around six hundred or more shots. It'll depend a little bit on how you use the camera if you review images a lot if you have lenses with vibration reduction on it and you use that a lot or you just do a lot of auto focusing and not really taking pictures you'll get less shots but they just your mileage will the very depending on how you use it now as far as the karen handling of the camera there's a lot of dire warnings in the instruction manual about what you can and cannot do with the camera and you know justice for instance it says don't get too hot don't get too cold don't drop it don't get a wet don't take it apart don't leave it by a giant magnet don't start with lots of corrosive chemicals don't fire the flash that someone driving a car don't use around flammable gas and one of my favorite is don't swallow the battery in essence this is just don't be stupid with the camera and I think pretty much everyone understands that portion of it what a lot of people do have questions on is thie waterproof nous of it you know cameras not waterproof don't get it wet well how what do you mean? Well if this was my camera and I paid good money for it and it was raining out and I really wanted to get a shot I would go out and I would get a shot and then I would get out of the rain I wouldn't leave it outside in the rain you don't want to be out there for a prolonged period of time does not have weather ceiling there are upper in nikon cameras that do have whether ceiling that you could stay out in a rain and shoot a whole soccer game with the camera in the rain but this is not one of them and so if you're going to shoot in the rain I would try to keep it under cover as much as possible you might want to keep a soft house so that you can mop up any water that's on the camera as much as possible or you can either buy or build your own rain cover so that water is not really falling on the cameras and getting in all the crevices next use of non cannon accessories could damage the camera and may void your warranty it is true nikon would like to sell you their accessories and their accessories are designed to work with this camera most notably you can put on different lenses and I have not known other lenses to cause any sort of problem with the camera but there are certain things where the camera and the lens will communicate to solve a particular issue maybe there's some sort of lens distortion that the camera knows about in the lands and can fix if it doesn't know the lens it can't perform feature thie other thing is is in batteries. I found that the nikon batteries are very good batteries there, sometimes slightly pricey and there are cheaper aftermarket once, but they tend to be pretty low in quality. I haven't known him to damage the camera, but they've been generally just low in quality, so you're not likely to damage the camera, but you may not get the best performance out of it, so preparing the camera so hopefully your camera is ready for today's class. One of things you want to do is you want to make sure the battery is charged because we are going to be using the camera. We're gonna be going through the menu system, so you want to have a good charge on the battery, make sure your lenses attached we do have our lands attached right now. Um, your battery's installed way have a memory card in there. We'll talk about specifics of memory card and so forth, but we got a memory card in there so we can shoot pictures and let's take our lens cap off, which I'm going to do right now and, uh, go ahead and turn your camera on main dial right on the top, and this is probably the last time I'm going to tell you this, but turn that main dial on the top of your camera to the green auto camera mode, and this is just so that everything is set up in the camera automatically for you, and just go ahead and take a picture. I'm gonna point my camera over at cana and take a picture, and I'm not even looking through the viewfinder and okay, so I didn't get a great picture, but at least the camera's working, and so I just wanna make sure that everyone's camera is is up and working right now, if, if not your battery's dead, good time right now to go run and throw the battery on the charger, because we're going to go through something else, so you may not need the camera right away. Now. One of things that happens in these classes is that we're going to going through the menus a lot, and the camera win it, you turn it on, it goes to sleep after a bit of time. And so the way you wake the camera up from taking its little nap, flynn to rest is by pressing down on the shutter release halfway to activate the camera and what we're going to do right now is we're going to go in, and we're going to change some things in the menu so that the timer stay on longer, so basically just follow this set up here, you're going to press the menu button on the back of the camera and you're going to need to navigate up and down to the custom menu, which is thie pencil icon. And when that turns red, that means you can enter into the custom menu settings, go down to the section c called timers and a lock and go to the right and then go to see to and enter that either going to the right or bypassing set and you can go in and set it for long. Or if you wanted to get real elaborate, you could go into custom and customize everything which I have actually ready done on this camera, but you can just set it too long and press ok, which is the button right in the middle of those little that little mouse pad on the back of your camera, and so this will keep the menus on longer and make the rest of the class a little easier to deal with.