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10:45 am - Buttons Continued

Lesson 3 from: Nikon D610/D600 - DSLR Fast Start

John Greengo

10:45 am - Buttons Continued

Lesson 3 from: Nikon D610/D600 - DSLR Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

3. 10:45 am - Buttons Continued

Next Lesson: 11:30 am - Displays

Lesson Info

10:45 am - Buttons Continued

Let's move on to the left side of the camera and so we're just going to kind of work our way top to bottom down here in the first button is the flash button. So the first thing is you're going to press that button to pop the flash up and down in any of the manual mode. So once you get into the automatic, moses goes up and down for you, but it also is a triple duty button. Once the flashes up, you khun do flash mode and flash exposure compensation. So let's, talk a little bit about flash photography. So first off, flash photography has a limited range in which it works. All right, so if you got penguins that air, you know, say, ten feet in front of you yes, you're going to be ableto light them up with some flash, but it's not going to illuminate the mountains in the background. It has a limited distance and it falls off very quickly if this is of interest to you. Creative life has about a hundred workshops on lighting that you could take a look at. So a great time for using flash is whe...

n you're photographing people that are very close to you. One of the terms that we use his fill flash, which is you are filling in the shadows with a little bit more light. And so even on a cloudy day, it could be helpful to add a little bit of glamour to the eyes can also be very helpful on a sunny day. Sunny days could be very, very contrast e and a built in flash can help fill in those situations where you need to fill in those shadows because you have no other tools where you're forced into shooting situations that you don't have a lot of control over and so that's kind of the one exception that I do find very, very helpful with the built in flash. Now there are a number of different modes that you can use on the camera, and it uses all sorts of different symbols and here's what some of those simp lt's mean, basically, the lightning bolt is the symbol for flash whether you're going to use it or not, slow refers to slow shutter speeds, and so you could do something called dragging the shutter curtain at a slow shutter speed. If you want, we have red eye reduction that you can do on the camera, I'm not a big fan of in camera red eye reduction the problem is, is that it turns on a light. Which delays the shutter release by about a second and a half, which means that you are going to miss critical moments when you have that red eye reduction turned on. We have a special kind of a special effects movie, which is rear curtain sink, where it synchronizes the flash with the rear curtain rather than the front curtain and then just good old automatic. Now, the way you make these changes is first off by popping the flash up with the flash button and then pressing in on the flash button and turning the command aisle in the back of the camera, and you can cycle through the flash modes. Now, not all modes are available in at all times, and so it kind of depends on some other settings that you might or might not have turned on in your camera. So don't expect to get through everything if you were to try this right now, but you will be able to get through a good number of them beyond that. If you press that button and you turn the front dial, you will control what's called flash exposure compensation, and this is essentially the output of the flash. When the flash fires, the camera is figuring things out, using a system called through the lens technology tl flash and sometimes and actually quite often when doing people photography. The flash will automatically put out a little too much light, and if you've ever know if you've ever asked or wondered why pictures of people seem a little harsh in there, look it's, because the flash went off a little too bright. The camera's not really designed, you might say at the outset knowing that it's going for skin tones it's just thinking general photography. And so what I have found most photographers do is they powered down the flash any usually around two thirds of a stop tau one stop. And so if you were going to do a lot of people photography with this camera, I would just dial it down to minus and so in this case, it would be minus point seven and so that just takes a little bit of the edge off the flash gives people a little bit more natural skin tone on their, uh, images. Now, this gets to be really important in some sunlit situations. And so in this case, what's happening is the dark background and the dark top that she is wearing is throwing off the light. The flash meter in the flash just continues firing more and more power. And in a situation like this, I believe t ell minus two is going to be the best skin tone option, and so I would leave it at minus two thirds two minus one, and then you might need to power it down even further in situations like this and so uh, very simple control in the manual modes whether you're going to pop the flash up or not basically think about is there something directly in front of me that I can like with flash and so anything beyond about ten feet he's going to be very difficult to work with? As I said before, one, two hundred is the top shutter speed it's not something that you need to be too concerned about, but just realized that if you do do try to change the shutter speeds, the camera knows the flashes up and will on ly limit you to one two hundredth of a second, so you're not going to be able to get up to two, fifty or three hundred unless you put on an additional flash unit and put it into the special high speed flash mode, which is a special effects mode. I'm sorry we don't have time to go into but really be aware that the flash is only good for a very short distance around you. Now the flash can be used to trigger other nikon tl flashes, and I will speak more about that when we get into the menu system, where we can program that information into the camera. But that does need to be set up you can't just have him hanging around they have to be all tuned in to the right mode and in order for that to happen so that's the flash button on the camera right below that is the bracketing button so what you would do is you would press down on this button you would turn the command ill and you were able to put your camera in a bracketing mode which allows you to shoot and quick automated three pictures darker, normal and brighter. This was used in the past in film photography to ensure that you got a picture that had the right exposure with digital cameras it's less important for doing that now but some people will still use that where most people are using it is in hd our photography high dynamic range photography where they want to take a syriza pictures that are overexposed underexposed and then they'll combine them later to work with in other programs. Now one of the nice things is that if you do want to ensure you got the right exposure and you only want to shoot two exposures, you can certainly do that and you can also combine this so that all of the pictures or darker or all of the pictures are lighter if you want. So for some people who are shooting hdr, they want to shoot a five bracket siri's well, what you would do is you'd do one like I did here on the lower left of minus two minus one and zero, you would do another one zero plus one and plus two and then eventually throw away one of those second ones at the normal zero exposure. So one of the complaints is that a lot of people wish nikon would put on five or seven frame bracketing on the cameras, which seems like that would be a pretty easy software tweak, and maybe someday they'll do it. If there's enough complaints all right below that is our auto focus and manual focus switch. This is very important. I would leave this in auto focus one hundred percent of the time, with only some rare exceptions. Inside. That is a button that controls the auto focus mode and the area, and I'm going to highly detail this, but I will just quickly draw your attention to the fact that most of today's lenses have a manual and auto focus switch on the side of the lands that's, where I would recommend going into manual focus. So if you do want to manually focus, flipped the switch on the lance, I would leave the one on the body in auto focus. The exception to that is if you are using lenses that are at this point in the fifteen year an older rage they don't have a switch on the lands so you have to do it on the body but for all the current stuff just leave the switch in the auto focus and inside that the mod and area button is what we're going to talk about right now so by pressing that button in and turning the command ill on the back of the camera you were going to change the camera through the three different auto focus modes that it has available single is for study subjects that are static and not moving towards you or away from you the continuous mode is essentially the sports mode it will track subjects as they move towards you or away from you and then there is an a mode an automatic switching mode which will switch back and forth between the two of these and having used all three of these modes I can tell you that I leave my camera in single mode most of the time because I'm not doing sports most of the time if you are shooting sports you absolutely are going to want to switch it to a f c so that your camera contract movement back and forth a subject is running around the field or running towards you I have not been real happy with f a a because the camera gets to choose wind to switch and I think a very easy question to ask yourself is am I shooting sports or not, if you're shooting sports go to kfc and that's probably where you're going to want to be for general photography, I would leave it at f s. I would tend to shy away from the f a mode next up. By pressing that button and turning the front dial the sub command, I'll you get to choose which area within the frame that you are focusing. The options are going to start with a single point, and you could choose any one of the fifty one points available. If you are in the continuous mode now, this will only work. If you were in the continuous mode, you can select the nine point dynamic area auto focus. There is also a twenty one point available only in continuous. There is a thirty nine point available in the continuous few more here and all go through. Go back through these there is a three d tracking mode and then an auto mode. Now, if you are in a f s for single frame, which are single shot excuse me, which is where a lot of people are going to have their cameras. A lot of the time you either have the choice of one point or all the points and it's a very simple selection. If you know what you're doing for the deliberate thinking photographer, I would recommend a single point one of the ones towards the centre would work out fine for most people because they would use that to focus on their subject by pressing halfway down in the single mode the camera locks that focus so that you can recompose the camera and so you focus lock he moved the camera off to the side and then you take a picture with the camera and that's a good technique for a lot of basic picture taking when you get into the sports the nine twenty one and thirty nine point will be much better than just choosing a single point let's just take a sport like soccer football for the rest of the world choosing a single point is often going to be so small on your subject that it might fall off of them or if maybe it's on there jersey and there's not a lot of contrast it won't be able to pick up on that typically when I'm shooting sports I like to choose a point system nine twenty one or thirty nine point that roughly matches the torso of the subject I'm shooting so if I'm shooting people and nine frame fits on their chest pretty well that's going to work out pretty well so that it I can keep it locked on an individual and it's not going to get distracted by arms of other players or referees crossing in front you don't want to choose an area too big so it's a matter of figuring out which works best for the types of sports now, I wish I could go in and explain how you would set the camera for every single sport that humans play, but we don't have time for that, so you are going to have to play around a little bit. I will tell you that I do like the nine point area probably the most I like having a little bit bigger target, but not overly large with some cases, though I could see setting thirty nine points because there's not a lot of distracting elements around. For instance, if you just have a single runner coming down the street towards you, thirty nine points would work quite well if you're in a crowded basketball court, thirty nine points is going to pick up on other players at the edges of the frame and so that's not gonna work as well. The three d mode I'll be honest with you, I haven't done a lot of testing and supposedly that's going to work pretty good with kids that are moving around in a random fashion, and so you might want to try that mod see how it does? I don't know if a lot of sports photographers that air using that mode, but it's something to play around with to see if it works. In your specific type of melt and so most of these, as you can see, are only available in the continuous melts, their kind of sports specialist mode. If you do choose the single point or the nine point or even the twenty one point, you can move those groups or individual points around by using the multi selector in the back of the camera, and so you could just have that off to the left if you want to focus on subjects over to the left. I know certain times I've wanted to have a race car or person on one side of the frame, and I want to track them as they're moving towards me and they don't want them in the center of the frame. I'm going to move those nine points all the way off to the side and so there's some implications it won't work quite as well, and I'm going to explain how these brackets work next, but play around with those focusing mode, see what works out with the types of sports that you shoot and there will be some additional menu settings where you can go in and tweak the focusing for anyone who is really into the sport shooting and they have unusual sports that camera's not quite tracking just right, but for right now I want to explain how some of the focusing points work and this is this is a little bit of basic photography, so hang with me if you already know all this stuff within cameras are different types of sensors. One of the types is known as horizontal line sensors. This camera has some horizontal line sensors, and when a vertical line is going through that box, it can't see it all right. And even if the line is directly in the middle, it can't see it it's on ly sensitive toe horizontal lines, it looks a horizontal lines that are out of focus that are broken essentially, and it gives the lens instructions on how to focus to get a good, solid line. This camera also has something known as vertical line sensors, which work, as you might expect, looking for vertical lines in correcting those problems by focusing the lance, the information I'm going to give you in some of the cases you're going to hear about focussing points, that might be like a f two eight horizontal line sensor. Now what that means in particular is that that little bracket on your focusing which your camera has fifty one or excuse me, thirty nine of these are on ly looking for horizontal lines, and you need a lens of f two point eight to make it work, so you need a fairly bright lands in that case. An f four vertical line is on ly going to look for vertical lines, and it needs a lens that air that is f four or faster, which is some, but certainly not all the lenses across type sensor would be the best type sensor, because it's, looking for both horizontal and vertical lines and if it's, an f five six cross types answer that's great, because every lens that nikon makes right now is an f five six or faster lands. And so the type of sensors that you want in your camera would be an f five six cross type sensor that's kind of the holy grail. That's ah, great thing to have now it can get better than that, but that's a great thing to have now these outside points that you see here illustrated in green are on ly looking for horizontal auto focus point. They're not detecting vertical lines. The blue three at the top in the blue three at the bottom are on ly looking for vertical lines, and the nine in the middle are the cross type auto focus points. So if I was shooting sports, I would prefer to use the middle bracket if I could get away with it, compositionally and so that's, the ones that are going to pick up on the subjects the best. Now, if I really want to get him off to the side, I have no problem putting those nine points off to the side because there's probably going to be some horizontal points that it can pick up, and so that's the direction that these different points are looking at. So now let's talk about what type of lenses they're good for. So all of the points will work with lenses that are f five, six or faster. So, on any current nikon autofocus lands, all the points are available for use the outside edge ones are not available in a very special situation. This would be let's. Say, if you have a five hundred millimeter f four lands and you have a nikon one point seven, tell a converter, which would give you an aperture of f six point eight, and so you're not going to be able to use those outermost, uh, focus points in that particular combination. Not real common, though. All right, we know those were the good cross type points. They worked with all lenses. Five point six if you were to be using a lens that was at f ate let's, say, a five hundred millimeter with a doubler or and their new eight hundred five six with a one four converter. These are the points that are going to work with that lands and finally that center focusing point is the best point because it is a cross type point that you can use with virtually all lens combinations that you could use so a five hundred four with a w on it you're still gonna have cross type performance with that single focusing point, and so just be aware that focusing points in general are better closer to the center. Yeah, so if you want to track subjects that are moving erratically, you want to choose focusing points more towards the center and that's why you might get lower performance with focusing brackets off to the side but feel free to try him off to the side because sometimes that's really good artistically and compositionally with what you're doing so little bit of review here you're going to be using the button on the side of the camera and then you're going to be turning either the back dial for the mod or the front nile for the auto focus area. And so this might be a good time to check back in with some questions because there's always questions when it comes to focusing they're absolutely are john and first just wantto start with our studio audience but also say I love how john you preface certain subject matters with well bear with me if some of this is basic and then you go into things that people are like wow, so that's what you mean, huh? Don't ever so, there are people who are getting something out of it. So there's a lot of ah ha moments happening. So thank you. Absolutely. I have a guest who wants to know if you spot meter rather than matrix metering using flash for a portrait. Would this eliminate the need for flash exposure compensation? Okay, that was like throwing a ton of bricks at me really quickly. So read that again more slowly. Ok? If you spot meter rather than matrix, meet oring using flash for portrait would this eliminate the need for flash exposure compensation? It might, because if you're getting that media ring on skin tones, which in some cases not all cases are lighter than what the cameras averaging that might work, I would I'm going to plead a little bit of I'm not one hundred percent on this one because I would have to see how the camera is flash metering, not just regular meat ary and so sounds like a good test to me. Yeah, and so in general, that minus two thirds works really well because it's hard to keep the face right in the center because a lot of times the face is a little bit higher in a vertical frame, okay, cool, right question from nataliya rhona I just switched from canon tonight khan and my biggest issue has been right here with auto focus I used to be able to change my focal point by toddling and now I have to click the mouse every little move it is so time consuming is there a way to actually change how you control this for selecting focusing points when you once you select one or nine and you want to move it around no you're gonna use the little mouse toe dd dd yeah can you do that noise again tio okay yeah no uh and that that little control the mouse thing is the only way teo I'm trying to think if I can reprogrammed the dials I know you can re program the dials for other things but I don't believe you can do it for focusing points sorry okay do we have time for one more question roscoe to five o question when using the cable release does the camera have to be in remote shooting mode or is it just for the nikon wireless remote ps love the one oh one course you did okay good you only I needed to put it in the remote mode when you purchased the wireless remote so if you have the nikon cable ace you would work the camera as normal now we also have a question in class I believe yes so I have a question with auto focus they're some of my lenses seemed to perform better um than others a sfar speed focusing speed and I'm wondering if it's these combinations that you're discussing or is it is there something inherent in certain nikon lenses that make them better focusing or slower focusing? Okay, so I'm saying so you've just opened pandora's box right there and I am so sorry do you have any particular examples about lenses that were working better or worse? Sure, so I regularly shooting eighty five one eight and it and I shoot a lot in low light and it focuses relatively well I got really curious about a one four at one point and I so I rented that from glaciers and it didn't seem to focus is well in low light and I'm like it's inherently the same focal length the same right but is the focusing still on those focusing points or is it the way interacts with the lens? Well, that's that's an interesting problem because that's opposite what I would expect because typically what's happening is more light comes in and so there's more like to work with so I would expect that it's gotten better data toe work with now the downside with e eighty five one four is that it's a bigger lens and it's probably moving bigger elements and so I would expect it to potentially be slower to focus but as far as thie accuracy I would think the accuracy would be as good generally accuracy is not a big problem it's more about speed it's the speed that it was focusing because I shoot movement so that's important yeah and so other things just kind of the pandora box that we're opening up here is yeah the lens place a huge portion in it and some things to pay attention on the lands is the aperture of the lands obviously the more light it lets in generally the better how big the elements are they have to move and that's not something that's clearly labeled but obviously if you have a six hundred f four there's probably more elements moving than a fifty millimeter one point eight and then there's different types of motors that nikon has been putting in those cameras whether it's a silent way of motor or not and kind of how high end the lenses and the design of the lens fixed lens should probably focus a little bit faster than a zoom lens because the the elements that are moving are either group together it's or it's a simpler combination I don't have a good reason for your particular situation because you're saying it's focusing slower correct with the faster lands and if I had to throw out a guess it might be because you're working with shallower depth of field and the cameras taking a little bit longer to get it spot on and it's a little bit easier to do with the eighty five one eight, but that's just simply a pretty wild guess on my part, all right, but interesting questions is a good question, and actually there was a similar question online from oswald, so thank you and let's say another question from t dog just to clarify shooting wide open would it not be best to use the focus point closer to the area that you want to focus rather than center focusing and re composing as the curve of the glass could affect the focus at such a shallow depth of field? Okay, so let's, start some internet arguments right now, and so I should probably do some more testing, but I have a one thirty five two, which is a reasonably fast lands with a fairly shallow depth of field and just bringing up to speed everybody on the issue. When we want to focus on somebody that is off to the side. We have two options. We can use the center point, come over here, focus on them and then bring the camera back around now by turning the camera. That may change where our camera is focused at because where it's focused at here and over here is slightly different, so the other option is to use one of the focusing points off to the side. But obviously disadvantage there is that it's not as good a focusing point, and so at least with my one thirty five hundred, I think I'm going to go have to try this with a fifty one four is I tried the focus lock and recompose and the there was a slight change in what was in focus, but it was so incredibly small I would not have a problem doing that now different lenses may behave differently in fact, different lenses do, and so perhaps with a wider angle eighty five one four fifty one for that that might become more apparent, and so some people will choose the focusing playing off the side and it's a tradeoff because neither neither one is perfect and so try that out and see what curvature your lens and how they depth of field works on it because I can't speak for all lenses when doing that. All right? Well, the argument has begun driver forty nine um, who is also saying well, since the single out of focus point in the centers of most responsive horizontal vertical, why not just leave it there and focus recompose since you can't get a focus point very far from this since idea, so I'll be honest with you, when I did my test, I was putting the camera like on a tripod and I was rotating it and then I tried a handheld, and I think the biggest problem with focusing and re composing is that your subject and you with really shallow depth of field lenses were talking one eight one four type lenses is that just a little lean forward or backward by you and your subject can affect it. So if you have, if you're photographing a subject and they lean back by an eighth of an inch and you happen to kind of twist teo in your slight turn an eighth of an inch that could throw off the focus right there. And so that's why some people I think are having problems as well is because there's a very subtle movement and there's a lot of things involved in photography. Okay, so moving on from the focusing issue on the lenses on many lenses is thie vibration reduction on off switch win handheld I would normally leave it turned on it doesn't draw that much power, but when you do put it on a tripod, you want to turn it off, and I talked about the two different auto focus switches on the camera. I would leave the one on the camera and auto focus all the time with modern lenses and then flip back and forth on the lenses. There is an index mount which basically tells you where to align the lens when mounting it and then we're gonna pop inside the doors and see what we have. So one of the features a lot of people like now on these cameras for shooting video is a headphone jack so that they can plug in standard headphones and monitor the sound that their recording, if you want better quality, sound the problem with the built in microphone it's, it's, only mono and sound, it picks up a lot of the noise of the camera zooming, focusing you holding the camera things like that and external microphone is nice. Nikon makes a microphone that sells for around one hundred fifty dollars, but there are plenty of other brands as well, but that one's going to be one of the more compact stereo ones that you're going to find on the marketplace? I don't highly recommend it, but if you do need to plug your camera into the computer for downloading images, there is a usb two point oh, connection and then we have an hdmi port, which allows you to get un compressed video straight out of the camera, and they've had some changes with their new firmware, which I will address when we talk about firmware, because so we can now get a hundred percent of that image if you do want to plug in the remote that someone was just asking questions about the emcee dc two cells for a whopping twenty five dollars, which is very affordable in my book is a simple cable release for doing a longer time exposures for any time you don't want to touch the camera and you don't want to use the self timer mode, which can be a very nice cheating shortcut for it. You can also plug in icons gp one, which is their gps unit sells for around two hundred bucks and we'll add distance. Latitude longitude information to all your pictures right in the metadata, which is a neat little feature tohave, but unfortunately you do have to kind of mount this thing up on your hot shoe of the camera and have a little cord, and it does draw power out of the battery in the camera, which is convenient, but it will wear your battery down a little bit more quickly, so those are the plug ins for all the accessories on the camera over on the right hand side of camera. The only real thing of note over here is the duel memory card slot, so using to sd cards and having two cards does have some nice advantages because you can go in and you can customize things as I will show you in a moment. One of the things that you can jump in and customize is if you don't have a memory card in the camera this will lock your shutter so that you can't take pictures, which is a good thing because you don't have a memory card in your camera prevents you from taking pictures without film in the camera. Another little option that you can go into is to customize the role played by card in slot to the top slot is number one and that's the main place that you would put a memory card. But if you want to have to memory card's in there, there's a number of cool options that you can do by going back and forth shooting data to both memory cards. Now this uses the sd cards. A lot of people are getting the hc and the xy versions of the cards, which are just higher capacity versions of these cards. Something to note is on the side of these cards is a right protection switch, so if you want to prevent data from being deleted, you can flip that switch down. If you have it down and you put it in your camera, you won't be able to shoot pictures or delete them, so that might be why a card is locked. There is also the card speed. This is how fast information is written to the card and pulled off the card for downloading. For the general populace using this camera, it's, not a big deal with the speed, is for a sports photographer or anyone who's rushing to download their images, you're going to wantto get faster cards rather than slower cards so if you've got a really good deal on a cheap card, take a look at the speed to see if it's a speed that's going to work with what you're doing beyond that there is another little card classifications and this is mostly important for people shooting video and they have this rating system that goes two through ten and then just because they want to make things more confusing they added another u h s class that's even faster than that and if you want to shoot video on one of these cards you want to make sure that you have a class six card or faster. Most of the good cards these days are a u h s class one and they're going to be coming out with u h s class too if they're not already on the market right now and so that's specifically for people who are shooting video because video has very special demands because it's constantly writing data to the memory card for downloading the information the first thing I would recommend is if your computer just has a card slot, just plug it into your computer if you don't have that I would recommend one of these card readers it's going to be much faster than the camera connection which can be very slow and if you have a thirty two gig card full of data that's going to take you a long time to download straight through the camera so highly recommend getting one of these card readers they sell for anywhere from twenty to thirty five dollars, working our way around to the front of the camera, we have a little light, which is a triple duty light. It is the red eye reduction, so it will turn on for about a second and a half and delay the shutter release and I don't particularly like that shutter delay and I don't like the light in the face of the subject and red eye is so easy to fix later on. I would prefer to fix it later, but some people have so much red eye that they're dealing with, they don't have time to deal with it. You might want to leave it turn on for the self timer blinks let's, you know as you count down, it will stay steady for the last two seconds, and it is also a a poor man's flashlight. When the cameras trying to auto focus under low light scenes, it'll turn on to help the camera give a little bit of light on the subject to focus now, obviously, this light is not very powerful and it's not good for very much distance. I would say that it is only good for about eight to ten feet and it's one of the things that I would prefer to turn off the menu system just so that there's not a light turning on letting people know that my camera can't focus and usually I'm focused on something further away so it's not helping out so it's something that I just like to turn off the camera and if you want to go in and adjust that you could go into custom menu a seven and you can turn that auto focus assist light off it works if you're a private investigator who sleeps around in the dark at night shooting pictures from their car, you definitely want to turn this off, okay, so certain paparazzi will have that turned off okay there's a little meter, a couple in lever and this just allows the camera to be used with older manual focus an icon lenses, which is cool being able to support those legacy lenses. If you do get that little wireless from out there's a little infrared renda window that you'll be pointing it towards, so that needs to be clear don't put any gaffer tape over right below that is the microphone the model microphone for the camera we of course have our lens release for taking lens on it off we have are mere inside and this camera has the drive shaft, which allows it to work with all of the nikon autofocus lenses back to their original siri's, which came out in about nineteen eighty six. And so if you do get those older lenses, that drive shaft will help drive the auto focus on the older lenses, the newer lenses using electronic focusing, which are quieter and faster. The function button down here is something that you get to choose what it does. You can go into the custom menu, and you can assign what feature you want to work with the function button, which is kind of nice to have one of these programmable buttons to do whatever you think is important. Now that button above that is the same thing, and you get to choose what it does to start with. It is depth of field preview, which means that it's going to stop the aperture down to the working aperture so that you can see what sort of depth of field you're going to get in your picture, which could be very handy in many situations. Ah lot of people will simply just shoot a picture and look at the result and adjust the aperture from right there, but the depth the field button is very handy under bright light situations. You get to see exactly how much depth the field you're going tohave we're going away down to the bottom of the camera. We have our battery compartment, which uses and e n e l fifteen, which has been a pretty common battery for nikon, so thankfully, they haven't changed too much it's gonna cost you around sixty dollars, and you're expected to get around nine hundred shots, depending on how you use the camera. And one of the great things is that you can go into this setup menu and get detailed information about how good that battery is, how many pictures you've taken, how much life expectancy it has left left on its current charge. There's a little rubber cover down here where you can take that off by yourself in mbd fourteen, which is the vertical grip, and this is something that I would highly recommend for anyone who shoots a lot of people photography, whether you're doing fashion, portrait or sports photography, you're going to shoot a lot of verticals, and this gives you a vertical shutter release on the camera and gives you new controls to work with so that you don't have to reach over the top or down below the bottom when working with the camera. And so, once again, I can't stress out how much this is going to help you if you are doing a lot of people photography or just shooting a lot of verticals. It does give the camera a little bigger grip so anyone who's got big hands might like it as well it does also make it look a little bit more professional so if you want to be taken a little bit more seriously uh just throw that grip on there and everyone will watch out for you standard tripod socket so it's going to work with all the standard tripods and then the serial number will be down there so make sure to record that for your insurance purposes so that if ever gets stolen you can report the numbers to police there's also websites that track stolen and lost equipment and so always nice to know what those serial numbers are let's talk a little bit about some of the lens options that are available on the camera the twenty four to eighty five for many people is kind of the standard kit lens this lens has a filter size of seventy two other lenses are different but that's what size filters you would get for this particular lands there's little robert or theirs plastic mounts there were you would hook up the lens good this is going to block light hitting the front of the lands which will improve contrast reduced flair and each lens has its own specific lens hood so this is not the lens hood for all nikon lenses it's for this one particular lens and it sells for about thirty five bucks we have our zoom ring out in front that shows our focal length on it we have our focus ring a little bit closer to the camera body kind of nice when you have a distance scale in your on the top of your lens not all of nikon lenses have the distance scale it's one of the features of their middle toe higher in lenses we have their lens information that we're going to go through here in just a moment our white dot which we match up to the index mark on the body for mounting our lenses and our cpu contacts we don't need to worry about but just make sure they're not obstructed or dirty in any way because that's how it communicates with the camera now nikon lenses the auto focus which can be a little confusing the more basic lenses have a very simple em and a switch is a pretty obvious manual focus and auto focus if you haven't m slash a option on your lens, that means that if you wantto manually focus you can have the lens in either location it will primarily auto focus first but if you want to manually touch it up you can press down on the shutter release halfway home we go ahead and do it with this lands here you focus down halfway let me focus on something actually make sure that everything is an auto focus here we go let the camera focus and then if I don't like it, my fingers still halfway down, I can readjust focus right here and take a picture so they call it touch up, so you're just kind of touching up the auto focus and that's one of the things you could do with some nikon lenses, but not all cleanses all right? It appears to me that nikon is extremely fond of the alphabet. They like using different letters to designate features of their camera, and I believe they're trying to use all the letters at some point in the future on one lands all right to start with a little translation, a f means auto focus a f s means it's a silent wave, which means it's, quiet and it's fast. Sometimes they'll use s w m sometimes they'll use a f s on most current lenses they're using the f s nomenclature and just backing up for a moment, you'll notice that these air nike or lenses made by nikon it's just their lens manufacturing division d is a letter that you might see following an aperture of an older lands, it stands for distance, and it transmits distance information to the camera to help in exposure situations it's generally considered an older lands at this point, d x is on the lenses that are designed for the smaller format, the twenty four by sixteen format of the d seven thousand and fifty two hundred I would not recommend the dx lenses on this camera. They can be used, but with serious implications that you'll see in a moment. E d is extra low dispersion glass it's something that they used tto save for their very highest end lenses and it is still kind of a nella meant that they only put on certain lenses of a higher nature, but they have been putting those on a wider range of lower and lenses. G is electronically controlled aperture and that's kind of what they're putting on all their current lenses. So if you look at their current lineup of lenses, look after the aperture number and g has replaced d g is the new di okay on dso. This camera can use the d lenses and it can use the g lenses I f simply means it has. The lens has internal focus and it's probably going to be a little bit faster, focusing because of that. Micro lenses are lenses that are very good close up. Focusing in is the new hot letter with nikon. It is the nano christo cold cody and this is a coding they put on their lenses to make sure that they are as sharp and getting the correct colors as possible, corrects and something called a chromatic aberration and it's something that you're typically finding on their highest end lenses. I don't know that they have any lenses that I have an end that are less than a thousand dollars just to get to give you a ballpark idea on that one v r stands for vibration reduction, which is a nice feature to have, and if you see a number two on it, it just means it's the second generation of that lands. Sometimes you'll see the number two after v r and it looks like we are, too, like its second generation of v r no it's, the second generation of that lens so it's the second time they've made a seventy two, two hundred lance in the case of this particular lands here. Now let's, talk about those different lenses, thie, f x lenses and the dx. Now you remember that this camera is a f x sensor lands the fifty, two hundred thirty, two hundred, the d seventy one hundred, those air all d x cameras that can use the dx lenses, and so here is the difference between the lenses. The fx lenses are designed for full frame sensors. The dx lenses are designed for the smaller, one point, five crops sensors as light comes through the fx lands, this always reminds me of the old steven wright joke. Brown lenses rectangular pictures what are we missing here? We're losing something all right? So what's going on is we're taking a large rectangular area within the circle. All right, now the same thing happens on the d excellence is but it has a smaller circle but it's big enough to fit the dx sensor. So what happens if you start switching things around? Well, let's say you're moving up to the d six hundred and you put on one of your old dx lenses from your old camera. Well, here's what's gonna happen you're going tohave vin yeti or darkening of the corners. Now, one of the nice things that you can do about this camera is that you can still shoot with the camera but the camera is probably going to be in what's called an auto dx mode and it's gonna automatically crop down the area you will not be shooting with twenty four megapixels you will be shooting with roughly fourteen to sixteen. I forget the exact number of mega pixels so you can still shoot with the dx lenses but you're not going to be getting the same view from side to side and what you see in the viewfinder will show you the darkening of the corners. All right, let's say you take your fx lenses for this camera and you mount him on to a friend's camera who's got a crop frame camera one of the fifty to seventy one hundred so forth you don't get the darkening of the corner you're just shooting a smaller rectangle in the middle of that circle so you're getting a cropped view which is why they call it a cropped sensor and so it's perfectly doable but you kind of lose the effect of the white angle lenses so with this camera I would generally recommend thie f x lenses so let me go through a few of my favorite and most common lenses that you're going to find for this camera the twenty four eighty five sometimes supplied with this camera's a kit lands is a good starter lens you're not going to find a lot of heavy dude duty professionals using this for a variety of reasons partly due to the variable aperture on it there are some other choices so some good lenses that I can highly recommend the eighteen to thirty five is really nice if you want to get into landscape photography wanna do architectural work? You want something that's notably wider this is the lens that I would probably go for first it's not too much money going to be in the seven hundred and fifty dollars price range which as you will see in the lenses I'm about to talk about is generally affordable if you have basic telephoto needs the seventy two, three hundred v r lands is going to make a nice telephoto combination with that and so that's a pretty good three linds kit right there however for those who want a little bit bigger telephoto nikon just introduced an upgrade to their eighty two, four hundred lens I haven't had a chance to play with this it's still making its way to camera stories at this time but if you're going to africa on safari and you're really looking for bigger lands this is the biggest lens that is easily handhold herbal in my opinion and so if you want a long lens that you can put in a reasonable size camera bag this is going to be the biggest lens that most people are going to get for that purpose and I am going to go outside of the er outside the gates here and recommend a non nikon lands the tomorrow in twenty four to seventy two eight is a pretty sweet little lance it's about thirteen hundred bucks and if you want a good basic zoom range with a two point eight aperture this lens has gotten some pretty good reviews and it would be a very, very good choice to put in here because it's quite a bit less money than the next lenses I'm going to talk about which are sometimes referred to as the holy trinity of lenses for nikon which are the two eight zoom's the fourteen to twenty for the twenty four to seventy in the seventy two two hundred these are the lenses that you're going to find in the serious professionals bag in fact they might just purchase these sight unseen they just know that they're going to get a lot of use but knowing how this is theme or affordable full frame camera the lenses that you might be interested in if you're looking in the more affordable version of these lenses nikon has finally clinton completed the f four version of these lenses, which means they're going to be less money and they're typically going to be smaller in size and less in weight so anyone who's into travel photography or backpacking with cameras I would forget to eight lenses I think the f four lenses are a nice sweet combination and there quite well matched up with this camera so the sixteen to thirty five gonna run you about a little under thirteen hundred bucks the twenty four to one twenty about thirteen hundred bucks the seventy, two hundred four around fourteen hundred bucks whereas the two eight lenses are going to range anywhere from nineteen hundred dollars to twenty four hundred dollars and so I think for the d six hundred user those f four lenses are like the perfect match for this camera now beyond those zoom lenses if you just want to spice up your lens collection with a couple of fast primes and you know I know nikon makes higher in primes but the's airway really good value lenses in fact one of the recent test reports I saw with a lot of different icon lenses had the eighty five one point eight lens as their sharpest lens available from nikon and so any of these lenses if you have any need for a fast fixed lens I can't recommend him enough they're going to range in price from five to seven hundred bucks the twenty eight is the more expensive at seven hundred bucks the really affordable one it's the fifty one for less than five hundred bucks for that and this might be a good time to just take a few questions about lenses I don't know are people interested in lenses john people are always interested in lenses so we'll start in the studio and I just wanted teo to make sure for people who might be beginning can you explain what a prime lens is a prime linz and why is that there's a zoom lens and a prime lands is one number and it doesn't zoom so it's a fixed lands that doesn't zoom and so I apologize for not no that's okay that's fine but why do we call them why do we call it fast glass fast glass basically because it has an aperture that's very large and lets in a lot of light and allows us to use faster shutter speeds which could be very handy. So for instance, a zoom lens typically has an appetite of f four and so just for fun I'm going to set my camera aperture priority and if I was to try to take a picture in here at f four let's see where I'm at I am at actually I was playing around with my exposure compensation we're gonna get that corrected I am at well it's very in a little bit but let's call it one quarter of a second and with a zoom lens one quarter of a second I'm not going to able to hand hold that but this is a prime lands this is a one point four lands so let me go down to one point four and now I'm up at a sixty eighth of a second which is hand holding so it allows me a fast enough shutter speed to work indoors under moderate lighting conditions and just to review a question from driver forty nine why the recommendation to turn off the ar on tripod so yeah kind of counterintuitive you're on a tripod let's have vibration on well, what's happening is that within the lens are couple of lenses working on a pitch in your system and they're working with the gyro constantly moving around and they're looking for movement to kind of balance the movement out and clearly you don't want these things moving around when you're camera is rock solid on a tripod and so that's the reason is that they tend to move and so what happens if you do shoot on a tripod with v r ron, you're likely to have a very soft blur to your pictures. Okay, great. Thank you. So let's save people love knowing what you think about the real world and about these lenses for shop girl. Have you used the newest seventy two, two hundred eight point eight I have played around with it. I've shot some a few pictures with it. This might be a good time to break in and say that I'm not paid by can an icon. I'm not paid by cannon or not kind. I'm fully independent, I say whatever I want. And so the seventy two hundred is just, you know, without a doubt, an awesome lens. There's been some complaints about the fact that it's not at full two hundred when you're focusing up really close, which is a minor gripe aboutthe lens, no lenses perfect, every lens has some little attribute to it that some people don't like, but in general, just not enough recommendations on it.

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Ratings and Reviews

catfish252
 

What can I say John Greengo is the best photography instructor and the best prepared instructor I have ever witnessed. His visual aids are second to none along with his presentation style and years of experience you can't ask for any thing better. He covers the D600/D610 from top to bottom and doesn't miss a thing. If you have this camera and don't feel you are using it to the best your ability, then try this course. You will come away with a much better understanding of how to better use your D600. If you are new to digital photography or if you might need a little reinforcement of the basics then I highly recommend his 5 day course "Fundamentals of Digital Photography 2014." He covers everything in this course from what different camera brands offer, along with exposure to composition, and from focusing to lenses and lighting. He doesn't miss a thing and neither will you with John's clear and concise teaching style.

Martin
 

I am a fairly experienced UK user and wasn';t sure what to expect, but was very impressed. I like the slick CL website and well produced HD videos. John is certainly a very good teacher, who is clearly spoken and tells you what you need to know about the D600. I was able to sit with my camera in hand and go through all of the controls and picked up some very good tips, which I will use in Bhutan tomorrow! So I like my new teacher and on that basis will be coming back to take John's Fundamentals of Digital Photography and also the Olympus EM1 courses, which represent good value for money.

Thomas Lanik
 

I am about half way through this D600 course. Like many people it turns out I learn significantly better visually (and hands-on). Thanks to John's well spoken and clear style absorbing his presentation is very effective. I have already applied even simple D600 features. Even if you are thinking about this model I strongly recommend this course- If you're like me, you already made the plunge. That's O.K.- this will maximize your experience. Do it.

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