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Shooting Menu: Reset Shoot-White Balance

SHOOTING MENU is going to control a lot of the shooting functions of the camera. And so these are going to be the pretty important ones. There's a lot of ones in here that you might come back to on a regular basis. There's a lot of ones in here that you may never use because they just deal with adjusting the image quality of the JPEG image. And whenever you shoot RAW images, you're gonna get the original, raw information. So, let's kinda dive into this. First off is just simply resetting this. And so if you've been in here playing around, and you might of made some mistakes and you want to correct for that, you can simply reset this by saying Yes and hitting okay on the back of the camera. The camera has different storage folders. There's a little submenu that you're gonna dive into here. And you can select different folder numbers and you can create different folders. So for instance if you had one memory card and one camera, and you took pictures for personal and business reasons, yo...

u could store those images in separate folders on the memory card. So when you go to download 'em you open up one folder, it's got all your business photos and the other one has all of your personal ones. And you can go in here and create those different folders, and select them. And so here's where you would actually select 'em. You'd go to the right and there would be the list of all the folders that you've created and named. The File naming is automatically setup and done for you. It uses a DSC, a protocol or naming file system for your images. And so if you wanted to go in and change this, you could change this. Now there's two different options. There's one if you have your camera set to sRGB and another to Adobe RGB. You can basically put in a three or four letter code, like your initials or a short word if you wanted to in here. And it just depends on how you like to rename your photos. For most people, it's not necessary to do this. Image quality is something that we have talked about before. It was in the information display on the back of the camera. One of the more important settings in the camera in my mind. And so RAW is where I like to keep my camera set for most of my important photography. Sometimes I'll shoot JPEGs 'cause I just need a quick easily accessible file size. And so RAW + JPEG is something I try not to shoot, and I prefer not to shoot. And I generally don't recommend, unless there is a specific reason that you need that JPEG. Because once you have a RAW, you can always make more JPEGs down the road, but if you have a JPEG, you can't make a RAW out of it. So as we go through this and as well as you have on the PDF at home, I will be making recommendations where I think things should be for most users in gray, and for more advanced users in red. And so if you just kinda looking, "Where should I set things to begin with?" This is just kinda my good default settings. I think Nikon has a few items in the menu system that just are not quite right as far as getting it straight from the factory. And so that's what this whole section is about, gettin' you all straightened out and gettin' this set so it's nice and easy to work with. Image size is for those of you shooting JPEGs, and this is the file size, and it's gonna effect the file size and the resolution of your images. And so if you know that you only want a small image, and you want to save that space either on the memory card or on the hard drive of your computer for as long as your gonna keep that image, you can reduce the size here. But for the most part, you're probably gonna want to leave this in the large setting. Next up is NEF (RAW) recording. We have the option and this is the only camera company that I know of that gives you the option of shooting 12-bit and 14-bit. And it's because of this one feature that I just kinda think of the Nikon engineers as a little bit more nerdy than everyone else. Now I have on other cameras gone in and done some testing to see what is the difference between 12-bit and 14-bit? And I couldn't see any difference in standard photos, as far as the image quality. Sharpness, detail, anything like that. And then I tried overexposing and underexposing and then trying to resurrect that data in post production and I still wasn't able to find any notable, reasonable difference between the two. And so this time around, I wanted to look at color. And so I wanted a color that changes slightly, just in gradation ever so slightly, and I wanted to enlarge it because in theory 14-bit has 4.4 trillion colors. 12-bit has the possibility of 68 billion colors. And so as something changes color, I would expect the lower number of colors to seem maybe jagged or stair-stepped or blocky, and I'm not noticing that in any way, even though I'm zooming in very, very close to the files. Now the difference is, is that the 14-bit is a larger file. It's a 23.5 versus an 18.8MB file at least in this particular instance here. And so there is more information in the 14-bit. So if there's somebody out there that says, "I just want the most information possible, "I don't care at what cost," then you wanna set it to 14-bit. But to any reasonable person, who's done testing, they're gonna tell you that there's no visible difference to the human eye, there may be a difference in a technical sense that there may be more information. But there's not enough for any of us to see or any way for us to detect this difference. And so, I always like to check around just to see what other people say and so, when I was preparing this class, I was just kinda poppin' around the internet. You know, typing in 14-bit versus 12-bit, to see what other photographers, 'cause there's a lot of other geeks like me out there that like to test things. And I went to three different, the first three people that came up on Google search, just you know looking for this stuff. I went and checked and read their article and saw their testing, looked at their photos, read their conclusion and in all three cases they said that they could find no significant difference between this at all. And all three of 'em recommended that you shoot 12-bit, which is exactly what I'm doing. So, four out of four doctors recommend 12-bit over 14-bit because there's no real difference other than it's gonna be a smaller file size and you're gonna get more space on the memory card with no apparent loss of image quality. If you're unsure about this, do your own test. If you see that I'm wrong, email me, show me some results, I'd love to see some data that proves me wrong. Next up is ISO sensitivity settings. We're gonna dive into a little bit of a submenu in here, and have some specific controls. So here is where we can get in and set our ISO from 100 to 25600 in those 1/3rd stop increments if we want. Next up, we have the option of Auto ISO sensitivity control. Now, this is one of the funky things about Nikon that I don't totally like. But it is what it is and it's not that big a deal, so it's not worth complaining about too much. But, turning the camera's auto sensitivity is done here and not with any other button or any other place in the camera. It is normally turned on when you get the camera and so if you're trying to operate the camera in a manual mode, this is gonna be kind of automatically adjusting ISOs in the background, which is a little bit weird. And so normally I'm gonna recommend turning this off. But it can be a very handy feature to use, so you should know how to use it. There are two subsettings within here that are important. The first is the Maximum sensitivity. And this is pretty easy to figure out. If the camera is gonna be setting the ISO for you, what is the highest ISO that you want it to use? And typically you'll set in a number that you feel comfortable getting the image quality from that number of ISO, as far as the noise that you're going to get. I think 6400's not a bad call. If you need a bigger range, you might go up to the next 12800 or the 25600. But some people with maybe a little higher quality of standards, might set it at 3200. Limits how far it goes, but it limits how much noise you're gonna get on the sensor. The next option is a little bit more complicated. It's the Minimum shutter speed. To start with, it's pretty easy. You can just choose the shortest shutter speed that you want the camera to use before it starts moving the ISO up if the camera is set to auto ISO. Now you can choose a number like 1/60th of a second or 1/125th or let's say you're shooting sports, maybe 1/500th of a second. But one of the most interesting options is the very first option which is Auto. And it's got an arrow to the right. So if you go to the right of that, you're gonna have a further setting in here that you're gonna be able to make. And this is where you can adjust where the camera starts making that switch from shutter speeds to ISOs. And so as an example, let's say you are shooting Aperture Priority. You have an aperture set of 5.6. Well that means the camera is in control of setting the shutter speeds, and is in control of setting the ISOs for you. So, for a given amount of light, let's just say that the camera is recommending a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second at ISO 100. Now, if it gets brighter, what happens? Well the camera uses a faster shutter speed to compensate for the brighter light. Now if it gets darker, it uses a slower shutter speed. But at a certain point, and in this case, 1/60th of a second is the key setting here. Once it hits the 1/60th of a second, it won't go any lower than that. If the light should get darker, then the camera uses the ISO to compensate for the low level of light. If it gets brighter again, it's gonna go back and use the ISO till it gets back to ISO 100, and then if it gets brighter, it's gonna use shutter speeds. So the big question is, "Is where do you want "that exchange from changing shutter speeds "to changing ISOs to be?" And so, under the Auto option, the camera will look at what lens you're using, what focal length you're at on that lens and use a reciprocal of that. So, for example, let's say that you have a 60mm lens, okay. That means if you choose auto, the camera is gonna choose 1/60th of a second as to be that switching point. But let's say you are really, rock-solid steady in holding your lens, you can use a slower shutter speed. So you might set it to 1/30th or 1/15th of a second. If you're a little bit more shaky or you're shooting faster action, you can set it a couple of notches to the faster side. So each notch is about one stop on the exposure scale or on the shutter speed scale. And so it's gonna allow you to use slower or faster shutter speeds than would be kind of the normal, automatic option. And so for those of you, who are as I say are really steady about holding your cameras, you might have this a little bit to the slower side. Most people can keep it right in the middle. And if you're shooting action, where you know you need faster shutter speeds, you can bump that up to a higher, faster setting. And so some important, little tweaking for those of you who want to use the Auto ISO option is. So I think Auto for most people, Auto slower if you're really good at holding at slow shutter speeds. White balance is a feature we talked about before, and that was in the information button on the back of the camera. But we're gonna have it here so that we can get in and make specific adjustments. You'll notice anything with an arrow to the right allows us to go in and make fine-tune adjustments. For instance, on the Fluorescent control, you can choose between the many different types of fluorescent lights that are available. Now to start with, I think Auto works quite fine, but if you know exactly what you're dealing with and you wanna get as correct of light as possible, you can do so right in there by going to the right on the fluorescent options. Next up in the Preset manual, you can either Measure or Use a photo and have that, and use that information for your photos. And so let's go ahead and do a little demo in here on this. And let's say we have unusual lights here in the studio, which we do. These are not your everyday lights that you might have. And so I'm gonna see if I can put this in live view so you can see what I'm doing on the back of the camera. And we can do this either one way or the other. We can either dive into the menu system, and let's just go ahead and do that, 'cause that's where we are. And so White balance down here, go to the right and there's all your Fluorescent options, go the left, come back out, come back down. Remember the scroll bar over here. Down here at the bottom, Preset manual, go to the right. We can either Use a photo or Measure. Well I haven't taken a photo of a white object yet, so I'm gonna measure and I'm gonna hit okay. This option is not available at the current settings and that is because I believe I have the camera in live view. So I'm gonna get it out of live view, go back into the menu setting, back into White balance, go to the right and I'm gonna measure now. Overwrite, yeah we're gonna overwrite, I don't know what's in there. Yes, take a photo of a white or gray object filling the viewfinder. And so, I got my little notes here. And so I'm gonna take a picture of that white. Let's see, let's take a look at that photo. It's gonna be a very exciting photo folks. Look at this photo here. Okay, I think I just measured and did not actually take a photo. And so White balance now is under Preset, and so now it's for the lighting of this particular subject and so, in here, let me do it the other way. I wanna show you. So I'm gonna take a photo of this white sheet of paper. There's my white sheet of paper. Press Menu, go into White balance, Preset balance, Use a photo, go to the right and I could select an image if I want. I could choose which folder it's in and then I can choose which image I want. I want the last image I sought, and then so I'm gonna hit okay. Use this image, yes. And so now I have calibrated the lighting of the camera with the lighting in here. And so it's gonna shoot photos that are correct in color in this environment. Now if I leave this room, I better change that white balance setting, cause it's not going to be right. So if you are shooting under unusual lightings, that's the way that you get in and you get it dialed in perfectly for that specific situation that you're in.