Skip to main content

Setup Menu: SnapBridge & Wireless Controls

Lesson 20 from: Nikon D5600 Fast Start

John Greengo

Setup Menu: SnapBridge & Wireless Controls

Lesson 20 from: Nikon D5600 Fast Start

John Greengo

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

Lesson Info

20. Setup Menu: SnapBridge & Wireless Controls

Lesson Info

Setup Menu: SnapBridge & Wireless Controls

Alright, HDMI port over on the side of the camera. This is gonna go in and have a sub-menu controlling how the camera connects outside of this and so auto is gonna be fine if you're gonna hook this up to a TV. It'll usually figure out the TV's resolution and match the appropriate resolution of the images going out, but if you need to manually set it, you could if you need to. If you have a device like a TV that has a remote control, that remote control for the TV could control your cameras forward and back throughout the slideshow and so if you are trying to do a slideshow, you could use that option. Location data, so once again, if you have a smartphone, you have your camera hooked up with Bluetooth connection with the SnapBridge, which we're gonna get into shortly, you can send GPS information from the phone to your camera and have that added into the metadata, which is pretty cool especially if you wanna track where you shot your photos. Having that, can pull that information up and...

make grouping and collecting your images much easier and give you just a lot more data to work with and so it's a great option to have. The downside is that it's gonna wear down the batteries on your phone and your camera at the same time and it does so a little heavy handed in my opinion and so if you're concerned about battery consumption, you probably wanna leave this sort of stuff turned off. There's many different remote control options for this camera. The cable release, the MC-DC2, is a nice option as your traditional cable release, electronic cable release, at least. We have a basic ML-L3 and then there's an MR-T which are both infrared wireless remotes that have a relatively limited range. We're talking about 15 feet, about five meters or so and so the WR-T10 has a function button on it which is kind of interesting as well. And so on this, you can control what happens when you press down on the remote shutter release. Does it record movies or does it take still photos? And so you can choose which one of those two you want and then the function button on the one remote is something that you can program to do something else and so they'll be some options in there that you can adjust for that to do if you have that remote. The airplane mode turns off all of the WiFi signals in the camera. There's WiFi, there's Bluetooth, there's NFC, and the airplane mode will just turn all of those off and in general for most users, I think it would be smart just to enable this, which means there are no signals leaving the camera which means you can't hook it up to your phone or anything else, but it's in its battery conservation mode. And so if you do know that you wanna use some of these other features then you disable this and that will allow all those other features to work. But if you don't think you're gonna be the type of person that's gonna be downloading images to your phone, just turn this off and save yourself some battery power. Alright, is it time to connect to our smart device? I think this is about time where we're gonna have to connect up to our smart device and so we're gonna be hooking this up to the phone here and I'm gonna be doing a little demo here in just a second, but I wanna talk to you a little bit about what this is. So Nikon has recently made a change from a standard WiFi connection with the phone to a SnapBridge option. So let's talk a little bit about SnapBridge. So SnapBridge is an always on connection between the camera and what other smart device, usually your phone, could be a tablet, in there and what's gonna happen here is that if you shoot photos, those photos, or at least a small copy of those photos, will be sent automatically to your phone and you can take them from your phone and you can email them and you can post them on all your favorite websites and do whatever you want with them. And so they've tried to use a very low power system here so it doesn't use up too much battery power when it's communicating back and forth because that's one of those things that is a bit of a problem with it and so if it's left on, there's one stat that says it's gonna use about 20% of your battery power and so it might use 20% more than you would normally use if you didn't have this turned on. And so there's a number of things, the auto sync means it's automatically just sending every image to your phone. Now you may not want every image and you can go in and choose specific images if you want. You remember that from the playback menu. You can add geotag information, so all your local GPS stuff from your phone to your camera. Auto uploads for your JPEGs. You can download firmware so you don't need to go through this traditional system of loading new firmware up on the camera. You can get it right through your camera. You can register it. You can use the remote control, clock update, and data imprinting on your photos, so there's a lot of different things you can do. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna walk you through the setup of this on the Keynote and then I'm gonna actually try to do it here in class, which is generally the most dangerous time of this entire class. So there are things you need to do with your phone and things you need to do with your camera. The first thing you need to do with your phone if you want this to work is you need to go to your local app local international, you need to go to the App Store and get the Nikon SnapBridge and after that, then the next step is that you're gonna have to go into the camera. Next step, here we go, alright, is go into your camera and right here in the menu where we have arrived which is connect to smart device and then we're gonna have an OK, an OK we're gonna have to press again, and then we're gonna go up to the phone and make sure that the Bluetooth is turned on. We're gonna open the SnapBridge application and we're gonna go into connection options and I'm gonna show you all this in just a moment. You're gonna have to select the 5600 then you have to select the 5600 again 'cause it's a computer and you have to say yes twice and then you're gonna have to pair 'em up, so there's a lot of little OKs and steps that you're gonna have to go through and then in the next step, we're gonna have to come back to the camera and we're gonna have to confirm all these settings that this is indeed what we wanna do so we're gonna press OK, OK, and then we're gonna be able to shoot photos and then if we wanna review photos, if we wanna remotely shoot video or pictures, we don't use the SnapBridge for this. This gets a little complicated and if you like things simple and I love things that are simple, you're gonna struggle a little bit with SnapBridge. In theory, it's a great program. It's been a little buggy and it's a little slow and it's a little cumbersome and so it's not perfect for everyone. I think it meets certain people's needs very, very well, but not everyone, and so if we can leave this up on the main screen. I need that for my instructions, but I am gonna show you 'cause I got my phone out here. And so the first thing I need to do is I am going to turn off my do not disturb, which I've had on for class and so I'm gonna turn that off. Let's make sure that my camera's Bluetooth is turned on 'cause I'm gonna be using Bluetooth to connect up to the camera. So in the camera, I'm gonna have to hit the menu button and navigate to our options, which are at the bottom of this page here. Connect to smart device. So I'm gonna hit OK. So we're gonna connect to SnapBridge. Use SnapBridge to send photos to your smart device and share them online. I don't wanna skip this item, I'm just gonna hit OK and so now it's activating, well, it's gonna check. Do I wanna do NFC? I don't have an NFC device. If you did, you could then hold it up there, but I don't have an NFC device and so I'm gonna go and hit OK and so now it's now running on SnapBridge so what I need to do is I need to go open SnapBridge, which I have under my WiFi camera options down here and I'm gonna open up SnapBridge. And so in here, it's connected up to the D5600 and I think I may have forgot that I already had this connected up here. Usually there's a connect option in here and so I'm gonna try to end this pairing. I wanna try to do this from the beginning, so I'm gonna try to delete this. End pairing, yes. And so I have to, and if you have a camera and you wanna get rid of it, you can sometimes have to come here where it's gonna pull it on and off. Let me take a look here. Something's not set up right. It's looking for it. This is what happens when you practice for class and forget, okay, here we go. This is what you're normally gonna get, is you're normally gonna get this connection options and this is where the phone does not know what it needs to connect up with and so this is sending out a signal and when I press this it's gonna look for the signals. So now it's looking and it realizes there's a D5600 with a particular serial number and I need to now select this. That's the camera that I want and because it's a computer, it asks me again, are you really sure that's what you want? So it's kinda checking and select an accessory, yes. This is really the item I want. And so now this is good. It's communicating back and forth and yes, I wanna pair these up. These are gonna become a pair and so now this is kinda waiting for confirmation over here and so now I'm gonna press OK on the camera. It's establishing a connection, so that's working, that's good, that's good, I like that. And so it's establishing a connection. Takes a little bit of time so now we have our connection. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna shoot a photo and if somebody would time this at home, how long does this take? So I'm gonna shoot a photo. (shutter clicking) There's our photo. And let's see if it downloads, how long it downloads. So there's the image. It's starting to come so we're downloading the image. Now this is not a full scale image. This is not a full raw image. This is like a two megapixel JPEG image, and there. It just finished, so it took, I don't know, 15 seconds for it to download all that time. Now, if I wanna go look at that image and I wanna do something with it, I can hit the gallery button down here at the bottom and I can take a look at the image that I've shot there and I can look at previous images I've shot. I can go back here and so I can look at other images I've shot on the camera. If I shoot a couple of images like this and I go back to connect, you'll see that it will start downloading the first of those three images in a moment. It's not communicating yet. It's not sending them yet. Alright, it's waiting for 'em. Connect, I thought we had had them going in there. Let me try another one. So we definitely shot a photo, we should have it automatically downloading two megapixel images and so it takes a little bit of time to get there. So that's one kind of hassle with it. Now, if you wanna use this as a remote control to the camera, you need to come down here to the bottom to camera and you're gonna hit the camera. Now if I wanna do remote photography, well, one option is to download images. I wanna do remote photography. I wanna go take a picture of myself but able to compose it in here so I'm gonna press remote photography. Now, it does not use Bluetooth and this is where it gets a little complicated. It does not use Bluetooth in order to do the remote photography. Bluetooth isn't powerful enough apparently for this. You have to use the WiFi system and this hasn't established the WiFi connection yet. So on here, it's giving me the notice that I need to go in and connect up with the WiFi system and it's asking me here on my phone, do you wanna connect up with the WiFi of this camera? And I need to go into my WiFi sections and select the D5600. So yes, I wanna do this, so go ahead and take me there automatically. It's going into my settings. It didn't take me to the right spot in the settings. I need to go somewhere up here where I have WiFi and I need to look for the D5600 in here so it's the D and I'm gonna select that and so now it's selected up here. So I got the checkmark so I'm good and wait, I saw something funny there. Did it stick in? Okay, it's good, it's good. So now I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna open up SnapBridge and I'm gonna open up remote photography and now we can do the remote shot so I'm gonna back this off a little bit and what I would do is I would take the phone with me 'cause now I can see myself in here and so I can see where I'm at. See, I don't wanna block that camera. I'm gonna stand over here and then on this device is a shutter release button and a few controls so on the back of the camera we have a shutter release button over here and when I press that the camera takes a picture. Not instantly, there's a little bit of shutter lag in there, that's for sure. There's a settings tab up in here. I'm not gonna go through all these different settings, but you can adjust some of the tweaks on how things are controlled in the setting. It's a fairly simple app. There's not a lot that you can do. There's not a lot that you can adjust. You need to have your camera kinda set up beforehand. And so we have Bluetooth, which automatically sends images to the camera, and then we have WiFi for remotely shooting photos like this or if you wanna use your phone to go in and see what it is on your camera's card and so we survived the WiFi demo. I'm always happy when that's over with 'cause that's always tricky. There's something that's always bound to go wrong in that. And so how you set this up is really gonna depend on how you shoot. I generally don't recommend leaving it turned on all the time unless you specifically need it because it wears down batteries on both devices and let's face it, it's no fun when either one of these things runs out of battery power. Use that according to your needs. It's got a number of little issues that they tend to be improving. They introduced SnapBridge about a year ago. They've had a number of problems that they've already fixed at this point. There's a few things that I think that they could improve going forward and I'm sure that this whole type of feature, set of features, is in its infancy in the camera realm and so I'm sure that we're gonna see many, many, many changes over the coming years in the future of photography. So that's how you do it right now on this camera and it does provide us with some new options for shooting which I do like and so it's overall a good thing. Not perfect, but it's a good thing. Alright, if you wanna turn off the automatic sending to a device, you can do that right here just as a single, simple quick switch back and forth and so in this case what happens is if you are, let's see. Photos are automatically uploaded when the camera is turned on when you leave this turned on here. For using the WiFi system, normally all you need to do is what you saw in my little demo previously, but if you need to go in to the WiFi system, you can take a look at some of the information. So for instance, in the network settings, if you wanna take a look at the exact Service Set Identification number of the camera and you wanted to change it 'cause you had multiple cameras or you wanted to give it different names, you can go in here and give your camera a different ID name. You could change the authentication or encryption if you need to. Once again, this is something you don't really need to change in here. This is whether you use a password or not. We can choose which password is the name of the camera in here when you are entering that into your WiFi system of your camera. And then you can have it choose a different channel if necessary depending on what network is available. And so once again these are things that most people are not gonna need to worry about as far as what the current settings are and if you need to reset everything in here, you can do so. And so that's just controlling the tidbits of the WiFi. For the Bluetooth, you can also make a few little adjustments in here. Network connection, you can look at what paired devices you have in here and you can also have the Bluetooth send information to your phone when your camera is turned off. Let's say you shoot a bunch of photos and then you turn the camera off. Well, the camera would secretly turn on, sending that information, making sure to get to your phone. That is gonna wear down your batteries as well and so be aware if you really want that information continually sent out. Conformity marking. I really don't have a good explanation of this, but it meets those conformations. Firmware version, this one's kind of important. The camera has software that is running all the operations on the camera and from time to time, they have updates. In fact, they've had two updates. I can tell because they're on version 1.02 at least right now at the recording of this class and so in order to get new firmware, what you need to do is find the new firmware online, usually at the Nikon websites, download that software update. There are some instructions and basically you're gonna download a file onto a memory card, put the memory card in the camera, go to firmware, right here, firmware version. It's gonna see that there is new firmware on the memory card and it's gonna ask about uploading that. It'll take, I don't know, three to five minutes to upload that new firmware and then you'll get the new firmware operating the camera. Now, from my understanding, from 1.00 to .01 and .02, there's been no major changes. It's just been kinda some bug fixes and so they've been some really small changes. Just as a company side, Nikon does not make a lot of major changes on firmware adjustment and so there's not a lot of things that are hugely important here, but the firmware is free. They're offering it to you. It's very easy to do and it doesn't take too much time, so there's no real good reason why you shouldn't keep your cameras up to date when it comes to the firmware version.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Nikon D5600 Recommended Settings

Ratings and Reviews

Margaret Lovell
 

I received my D5600 as a Christmas gift, and while I picked up a few things on my own, this class was wonderful. I learned more than I would have picked up just by reading a book about the camera. Thank you, John!

John Acklen
 

John is a fabulous teacher. So clear and easy to follow. I will take many of his classes as I learn photography! Thanks John!

Adrian Todd
 

Really great review as there was some features of my d5600 I wasn't too sure about. It's probably one of the best instructors I have come across as he's explains things in simple terms that I am able to understand.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES