Nikon DSLR Photography: Getting Started with Your DSLR

1. Welcome to Class: Welcome to the Nikon camera course. I'm so excited that you decided to enroll, and will and I are so excited to help you learn about your new Nikon camera. Now, a lot of night cons have similar functionality, similar menu systems, and we want you to walk away knowing how to use all the buttons, what everything means and how to get shooting with. If you have a new Nikon camera, you just got one for a gift. If you purchased an old used one, this is a great course for you, especially if you are newer to photography, even though this course is mostly about the buttons, the features, the menu options and how to get started with your Nikon camera. We also cover basic photography concepts like how to expose the different things that weaken due to expose a picture using aperture shutter speed. I. So the's settings that as a new photographer, it's crucial that you understand. I'm really excited to shoot this class. I actually started shooting Nikon back with an end 2000 when I was in high school shooting film, and I graduated very quickly to a cool pics and then went back to the DSLR is when they first started coming out shooting with a Nikon and 90. Eventually I got a D 200 a D 300 and then a d 800. And so I have been shooting Nikon pretty much my entire life. So I'm really excited to share my old Nikon knowledge with my new Nikon knowledge on how to shoot with your new. We want to make sure that you get the most out of this class. So, of course, we've provided video lectures and downloadable guides to help you out. If you ever get stuck, have a question. Make sure you posted to the class. We also have the photography and Friends student group available to you. As a student. You get access to that group, where you can connect with other like minded photographers, post your questions and even if you want to post photos and get friendly critiques, joined competitions take part in weekly activities. There's lots going on in that group, and we'll share details on how to join that group in one of the next lessons. Thanks so much. I'll pass it back to will, and he will get you started with your Nikon camp 2. Getting Started with Your Nikon: So before we get into all the advanced stuff, you may want to take your camera out and just start shooting photos. So how do you do that? Let's get started. First, you're gonna want to put a battery in it from the bottom of the camera. Is the battery to right here? You just open that tab there should already potentially about her in it. And since we've started, if you haven't, you take it out of plastic and there's a little yellow tab. You move up to get it out, you put the arrow. This is pointed up directed in, and it clicks in and you should hear and feel it. Click. Then you close the door. Should feel it click better. Shouldn't come out at all like that. So now that we got the battery and we want to get the memory card in now on camera, right, there's a little door right here, and all we need to do is slight it towards the back of the camera, and it will pop open like that. Now, on a lot of these icons, there's a little picture of an SD card right here where it says push to eject and the picture actually matches the SD card And where the top right corner has sort of, you know, sort of kind of, ah wing there. It's cut off, so it's not totally cornered. And you could match that with the picture on the camera itself to know which way to put it in. So match the picture. It looks like this. So it's gonna go in just like this. We're gonna push it in until it stays. It's kind of a spring loaded sort of deal there. So push it in, it pops out, push it in. It stays there. Okay, now that we have it in the little green light says, then we close. We pulled back towards the camera. Now you want to put the lens on? Next? There's a little button right here on the left side of the camera. Camera left. Where will push And then we'll turn clockwise to open up the port cap. We'll have our lens a little white button on the lens. A white sort of marker will line up with the white marker on the bayonet. Line that up very carefully and we'll turn counterclockwise. Make sure you grab a hold of the actual lens and not consume dial, and it will click in the place. I hear it again. You hear it click and it should be good to go take off her lens cap. We're pretty much physically good to go now. We'll turn the camera on. Here we are. We're up and running. And on this camera there's a small little basically, it's an L, and it keeps the retractable kit lens inside. You can open that up and the camera will ask you when you started up, rotate to take photos or take the zoom rang to extend the lens. And that's just to keep this part of the lens safe while it's not being used. So open that up now. We're good to go, and on the very top, we're gonna go ahead and move it to the green Auto. Now, this is full blown auto mode. This means that the camera will be taking all the decision making out of your photography, and it will decide what the correct exposure is for this specific automotive now because we're in a studio we're shooting. When I pushed down halfway on my shutter button gonna ask to use a flash is not gonna ask. It's basically going to demand to use the flash because it's so dark and where we are right now. If we were outside, it would not pop up the flash like So we're in full auto mode. We're ready to go now, just for prosperity reasons. If you haven't taken photos before with an auto focus camera, basically you lightly push down on the shutter button, which is right here, which is how you take photos and it will start to autofocus. Now in this camera, because we're in a dark place, you can see that light on the front of the camera is illuminating its subject. It does this because it's trying to put light on the subject so it can see it itself in the dark to focus. And again, we're in a studio. It's dark auto focused. When you hear that beep, it's good to go. You push down the rest of your finger on the trigger, takes again halfway. I think that so because we're right out of the box and we're shooting photos right away. Let's talk about what a DSLR actually is now. DSLR stands for digital single lens reflex. Now back in the day with film cameras, they were called single lens reflex. Digital denotes that it's a digital camera, right? So there's still a mere inside your camera that has to move up and down to open. Its is called The shutter opens up, and it lets the light in and hits the digital chip there, right, so that mere in there is allowing you to have the light come into your lens, bounce up into here and then back out towards your eye. But the digital part is right here, so we have to move that mere up so the light will hit the digital spot, which is when you see through the eyepiece. You see that little shudder? You see that little shut ago and you don't see the photo for a second, right? So that's what's happening in your digital camera. Now, the reason you can't see it on the back right here your back LCD screen is because that mirrors in the way. This camera is meant for you to look through here. Now there is a small button on the top called LV. It's right here. It's right near the big dial on, then icons and usually near the top. Somewhere we pushed that it moves the mere out of the way. Do you hear that move? And now I can see my live image on the back of my LCD screen. Now we can do this. Weaken, weaken, Look around. We can focus, and I don't have to look through the eyepiece. But as soon as we decided to take the picture, you heard the mere close. Then it took the picture than it opened up again. So again, it has to close the mere reset itself, take the picture and then opens it up because you're in life Live view mode. Um, it's a little cumbersome sometimes if you're out there shooting like that. But that's kind of the difference between a DSLR and like, a mere lis camera. Or you don't have that problem of the mirror. Typically, you're gonna be using this new bill. Take pictures right away. So this was a DSLR camera. Now the mere lis camera works a little bit differently, mostly because it doesn't have a mere later on in the course, we're gonna go over exactly how the mere list camera would fit in the Nikon world. 3. An Overview of Your Camera: Okay, so let's go over the physical camera itself and all the buttons and dials and whatnot. So, of course at the front, we've got our lens. We're gonna take off our lens cap right here, and you can see right away on this kit lens. There's a zoom ring that we would use to zoom the camera in and out, and then in front of it is a manual focus ring. It's not engaged right now because we're in auto focus, but that's how you zoom. That's how you focus on this lens. It's a little small now, coming around to this side. Ah, in sort of a top view. This is our shutter button right here and are on and off switch so you can see, uh, we go off toe on shutter button to take our photo. This little red button right here is how we roll for video. We push. That will start video. This is our exposure compensation button. Usually this button works in tandem with the dial button, so we would be holding it down. We'll go more into exposure compensation later. This also acts as your F stop button on night cons. Because of the smaller bodies. You don't necessarily have. Ah, spin dial up here on this Nikon on other in icons you will that will control your F stop on the smaller ones. You have to hold down this and spin the dial when you're in a specific modes which will go over later to change your f stop now moving back. We talked about this earlier, but this is the live you button and basically we would push that in and we go into live. You push it to go off to the right of that is basically a multipurpose dialled was talking about earlier that you'll be shifting with your right thumb most of the time. It will be adjusting your shudder when you don't have any other button pushed. When you hold down your F stop by adjusting your F stop Next to that is the big master dial . Now, basically, this style has all your settings going from auto. Ah, no flash mode portrait mode, sports mode, macro mode, night mode effects mode. We're gonna talk about all these later on, and then it goes through your normal camera modes, which you'll find on any camera really at this point in the world. P for program Auto s for shut A priority A for aperture priority M for manual total manual control Again, we'll go over all these individually later. Now moving to the back in the camera. We have your eye piece right here. Now through your eye piece is a little tiny dialled that some people end up hitting on accident quite a bit. That's called the Diop ter on. Basically, it's the die after control button so you can change the glass that's inside the eyepiece. So in case you don't want to wear your glasses, you can kind of adjust your piece right here. Next to that is an info button on fern icons. It will allow you to bring up all your info information right here on the back, basically turning the screen off and on like that. Next to that is the a l A f l, which is the auto exposure lock in the auto focus lock. Talk more about the later of course you. There's also a little key that you see there. That this button will act is two different things below that is the play button we can review our photos. Here's a photo I took of the camera You're seeing this through which will get us into being able to move across other photos that we've seen here using the D pad dial below that menu , uh, obviously takes you to the menu. Another info button. Basically, this info button changes the way your screen looks as opposed to this info button that turns it off. And on this I changes what information you're looking at, sort of an italicized I now below that is the deep hand or the circle pad. And this is what allows you to move around within your menus. You can move up, down left, right, basically anywhere you are, this will allow you to move through whatever you're looking at. Um, the fun thing I like about this one, too, is when you're in live you this button will be able you'll be able to move where you want your focus going. You see this little red red square moving around basically, as I hold down the deep at telling the camera exactly where to focus. So the deep has really multifunctional and all different sort of ways. Look out here. So down here we have different different buttons. These this plus on minus button will do different things in different modes again, if we go back to live you, this plus button will help you zoom in on that red square, which will lie to manual focus or check focus. You consume out using the other button. Um, this little basically, um, release mode will tell you how you want your shutter to be working, whether that's taking a single frame, multi frame, Ah, quiet mode frame or setting a timer for yourself. It's quick access because a lot of times you might be changing that quickly, depending on what you're shooting below. That is the trash can button trashcan button really mostly only works when you're reviewing photos saying it like that photo of Phil. I'm gonna hit the trash can and I hit it again to delete or hit play to cancel that. So that's how you go through playing back modes like that. Now, if we move over to camera left on the camera left side, we have a flash button. So the flash, but is actually the button that opens that silly little flash on top. Push it again and we'll open it up right away. So it is very good. Quick access. You can use your left thumb when you're shooting, and I'll open it right up. Um, it's also ah, button that you used with your exposure compensation. When you push down on the right exposure competition and the left exposure conversation, you can get to it right away. So that's something we'll talk about more later. Um, yeah. And then So if we moved to the bottom of the camera now much here, other than your tripod quarter quarter, screw more information, your serial number about your camera, the battery door, which we talked about earlier, and that's about it on the camera left side. We have a port here for several things. There's a little Bluetooth insignia here that will tell you that this camera does have Bluetooth connected it later, uh, the USB symbol for USB and the HTM I symbol. Now there's a little tab here. We would open sort of a plasticky tab, and here we are. We have our USB port and our HTM aiport. If we spend the camera around like this, you'll see a sort of Gap here for one of your camera straps. It goes with the correspondent gap on camera, right side for your camera strap. There's a little there's two little holes on the top of your camera here. If you're wondering that those are that's actually the speaker for when you're playing back videos. So case your thumbs covering and you can't hear anything. That's probably why the little witness marks symbol right here. People ask me about that all the time. Actually love this symbol because it actually denotes where your sensor is in your camera. It's where the magic is happening. It's where the light is hitting your sensor. It's along that plane along your camera. In case you're ever wondering, and they have that, they're just so you can tell the exact distance light is coming in through your lands into your sensor. Going on top, of course, is the hot shoe mount. There's plenty of things that we could mount up here. Um, a flash, a microphone, um, a remote flash. Ah, bigger monitor screen. If you're shooting videos with a bigger Nikon camera, plenty of things you can do up here. And then, of course, we have the flash hit that flash button and we're good to go. So that's the general in depth overview of what all the buttons are specifically for a Nikon. As you start to move up in numbers or you get into the FX Nikon cameras, the bodies start to get a little bit bigger, which means there's more room for buttons. So a lot of things like the dual plus minus exposure button and the F stop button are actually their own dedicated buttons. Or there might be another dedicated dial on the front here. It depends on your style of Nikon. Generally, all the cameras have the same buttons, these air, all stuff that you're gonna be needing to basically get along with your camera. If you're confused on your specific camera, check out your manual that came with your camera. It will have a total lay out numbered for all the buttons, or download one of our pdf camera guides, and we break it down and show you what every button is and where it is for your specific Nikon camera. 4. Introduction to Exposure: so one of the main facets of photography is exposure. Now we're gonna go over exactly what tools you'll be using within Nikon cameras to get your exposure. Now, the three things that we usually control our F stop shutter and I s So now the really cool thing about this camera in particular is that it has all three of those dials right at the top three easily to see. So basically, we're gonna go through each mode and how each mode will allow you to achieve your exposure correctly. Whether that's through controlling everything at once or just the shutter or just the aperture or using their in house in camera, basically special effects for specific situations. Let's get started. 5. How to Expose with Your Camera: So in this lesson, we're gonna talk about how to expose using your camera. Now that means learning how to read the exposure meter that's on your camera, where it is in your camera, and then what variables you'll be using to control your exposure. Now exposure is how much light you're letting in to create your photo, right? It's a very basic thing about photography. There are three main variables that your camera can control that is your F stop your shutter speed and your I s. So now what are those things? This is a very basic part of photography that I think you need to make sure you know when deciding what to do with your tool. Your camera F stop or aperture is the hole in your lens that allows amount of light to come through your lens. Now the bigger the hole, the more light that will come through. The smaller the whole, the less light will come through. And so that's denote it on your camera and in photography through your F stop numbers. Now it's a little counterintuitive, but the higher the number, the smaller, the whole, the lower the number, the bigger the whole. So NF two would be probably the largest hole you're going to get on a kit lens or enough to eight. In this case, we have an F 3.5, which is this Bigas. It can get in the most amount of light that will let this lens in now in the other direction, and F 16 or F 22 is a very small hole, and I will let a lot less light in. So you have to decide. Uh, we'll talk more about this with exposure triangles in the next lesson. How much light you want to let in or not? Let in based on your f stop. And you can control that on your camera shutter speed. That denotes how fast or the speed at which your shudder in your camera is moving. Now that is basically the mirror or the mechanical part inside your camera that opens and closes. It opens it, lets light in and closes a stops light from coming in. Now that is time, right? How much time are you letting your digital sensor receive all that light? How long are you letting it stay open? How long are you letting at state closed now in camera speak that is usually denoted by fractions of a second. Now, a fast shutter would be a very fast second, right, actually, faster in the second be like 1 2/1000 of a 2nd 13 thousands of a 2nd 1 a 1000th of a second . That's super fast. You're not letting a lot of light in on the other direction. What if we opened it for half a second or 1/4 of a second or just a full second? That's a lot of light coming in now, thinking about your f stop, how much light we're letting in and for how long would be the shutter f stop. How much shudder, how long I eso is the sensitivity of your chip. Now that comes back from the film days when how reactive the chemicals on the film were to light. Now with I S O. And digital photography, how sensitive is your digital chip to light? And we can actually control that in photography now. So the more sensitive it is delight, the more react the quicker will react. The more conceit into the dark, the higher the number, the lower the number less sensitive. It is still light. So the lower the number, the more light it needs to actually see what's going on. The higher the number in your in your camera, the less light and needs to see what's going on. So now you can see that these three variables will have a huge effect on your actual exposure, and your meter in your camera will allow you to read what's going on based on those three variables. Okay, so let's talk about how to read and adjust the exposure with your camera now again to start off right off the bat. Let's talk about the camera being in our green auto mode now in green auto mode, the camera on we're in automatic mode. That means the camera is going to automatically decide what it feels. Exposure should be used. So if I take this and I am the camera right at one of our other cameras, it's gonna tell me that it wants to use the flash and it will take it. And basically, here's a photo that's exposed. Wish with the flash. Now I have no real control over this because the camera is deciding that that. So let's take a look at looking straight into the light. If we look straight into the light, the camera thinks that the light that sliding me right now is super bright and it doesn't want to use a flash and see how it's exposed just for that light that we just took. So basically, the auto mod is using the flash, using its i e isso and using everything in it to adjust the exposure. Let's do this again, but I'm gonna actually turn off this flash. So let's turn down and on the on the far left. I could push in on the flash button and you can see it illuminates the bottom menu with my right thumb. I'm going to adjust it to be flash off. Now I'm in auto mode. I've turned a flash off so will not ask me to use the flash when I go back to shoot this way, see? No flash pops up. We take the picture. Here's our photo. It's well exposed. Now let's go up here. Let's take the picture of our light again. It's exposed for the brightness of the light, so let's take a picture of this camera right here, Okay? And we've taken that photo. Now, when I was looking this way, I can see that the isso is changing on the camera. It's deciding that it wants to change the I s. So now when I hold it up to take a picture of the light that's really bright, it's actually adjusted the f stop and you can see when I move it it, adjust it, adjust the f stop and adjust the I S. O. And it has moved the shutter once or twice. But what I'm getting at is that your camera is adjusting all three of our different variables to get the correct exposure. Now, you can't really see uh, in this camera, specifically the meter inside your camera at this point, because it's just it doesn't think you need to know because it selected its. So now if we were to switch it into manual mode on top of the camera here, that's the M. We can now see a meter right here on your display and inside your eyepiece. Now, the meter denotes what exposure is on the Nikon camera. On most cameras, zero means you're at exposure plus and minus means your overexposed or under exposed. Now, what I want to show you is as we adjust the shutter, we should be changing the exposure. But because we're in auto before the camera is countering my shuttering. So it's changing the eso to counter what I'm doing as far as shudder. Which means this camera itself right now is an auto ia so mode and you can see are not changing the eye. So I'm changing the shutter and it is changing. I So So what we want to do is you want to go into the camera, we want to turn off auto eso so that we have control over everything. So we're in, man, you were gonna shifted, Teoh. Normal is so so we're going to go to our menu. We're going to go over to the camera, uh, selection on the left here, and we're gonna go more into these menus later in depth. We're gonna go down to I s O sensitivity settings were gonna select that, and right now it says auto I S O sensitivity control, which means that it is automatically controlling of sensitivity of your eyes. So which is the sensitivity of your chip. Two of your digital sensor to light. So we're gonna turn that off now. We're completely in manual mode. We're gonna go back to our normal screen and now watches that shift this button shift Shutter. The ISO is not moving whatsoever. And our meter here is now shifting in different directions. So right here, because the camera's pointed in the darkness. It wants me to shoot at 1/3 of a second. I I s 0 100 at an F five, and it's telling me that if I shoot at that level, we're gonna get a nice exposure. Now, I wouldn't shoot a 1/3 of a second because that's gonna make my camera shake. This shuttered ill obviously allows you to move up and down your shutters from 101 101 60th . We'll go all the way down if we keep going. 1/4 1 half and these Aaron second fractions of seconds. And once we pass this threshold of 1161 1/3 we go to one second. It's a long exposure, right? That's you. Open up your shoulder shutter and letting all this light and you can see now on our meter. We're incredibly overexposed because that's a long time to have your shutter open. So it's kind of how you would be reading exposure here now, typically, in a situation like this, I know personally that once you start shooting below 1/60 below 1 50 if you start to feel a handshake in the shutter, right, your shutters open for too long and will detect sort of the feeling in your hand. So I want to stay at a 1/60. That's about as low as I want to go now, looking at our exposure and pointed in this direction, we were way under exposed right. It's still too dark. So what are the other things we can change? Are are two other variables, right? So let's look at our F Stop now on this camera again. If you remember, we have a little F stop symbol right here. We're gonna have to hold this button down and spin this style to get to our F stop. So let's hold this button down and we spin down a five. A. Four. A 3.5 of 3.5 is how low we can go on this specific lens now, we haven't moved much on our exposure meter, so that means between our shutter and R f Stop with those Muchas weaken dio eso Now we got to go into our third variable, which is R I s o. Now again, we're gonna hit the I button to get into being able to control this information down here. We're gonna cycle over to I s O hit, okay? And this opens up all of our I s O again. This is a sensitivity of what our sensor is able to pick up and light. We want to make our sensor more sensitive to light, so it will pick up the darkness. So let's just go ahead and let's just go ahead and crank it all the way up to 3200 and go back to our menu. And now you can see our exposure is right at zero for this scene that we're shooting down here into the corner. There you go. A beautiful shot of the floor. But basically the idea here is that you're gonna be able to control all three of your variables in conjunction with what your meter looks like. So let's take a look at a bust I have here off to the camera off the side of the camera. I'm basically gonna zoom in and you can see the F Stop changing on the back of the camera when we zoom in on this particular camera, because our F Stop cannot hold throughout the zoom, typically on kit lenses. When you zoom in, it has to close down the F stop because the the glass and it is just not at as quality. And as we open up a Zoe widen out. It'll go back down two or 3.5 that we requested earlier. So let's take a look at our bust of William Shakespeare here. We'll zoom in and assuming a 56 we'll take a picture that's pretty well exposed. Now you can look at our meter. Was our meter that I was picking up was actually just above zero. Now I'm going to pump it up, so it's on the plus side now. How would I do that? I need Teoh overexpose that I need more light, so I'm actually going to open up the shutter, so I'm going to use the dial and move it down to 1/15 of a second, which is pretty slow. And we might get some shaking here. Now, my meter is telling me I'm about three. I'm over. I'm very over exposed. We're gonna move it so that it's about two stops overexposed. And you can see this on the meter because there are little, um, check marks, little ticks. There's bigger ones and smaller ones. The bigger ones to know a full stop the other ones to know about 1/3 of a stop. So I'm gonna go to stops over, and that would mean my shutter would need to be at 1 25th And it's hard for you to see right? Knocks. I keep changing the position, but basically the meter when I look at it is showing me the second big marker. Now I'm gonna take the picture. Two stops overexposed. Sure enough, William Shakespeare is much brighter in this photo than in this photo. You can see how the over exposure meter is showing that now. If we go the other direction, Uh, and we take the shutter, we'll take the shutter up past 60 which was at zero, and we'll move it, Teoh, it's asking me to shoot it at 1 4/100 of a second were at the second bigger tick mark to the left of the zero. That's in the negative space and we're gonna take the picture. And now you'll see William Shakespeare is about two stops under exposed. Now, I take a difference between these. These three photos at exposure, two stops over exposure and two subs under exposure. So using the meter and using the buttons around to control that exposure, that's how you would sort of do it. So hopefully now you know, and understand what the exposure meter is trying to tell you when taking a photo in the difference between auto and manual. Now we don't don't don't get too worried about that stuff. And the next lesson we're going to talk about the exposure triangle and when and why To use specific variables between F stop shutter and I s O in a certain situation for your camera , 6. The Exposure Triangle: Okay, So now that you know how to use your exposure, meter your buttons on your camera, let's talk about why you would use them with the exposure triangle. Now that's deciding what to use and when to use it, and why to use it in the type of photograph you're creating. The's variables do more than just allow light to be captured by a camera. They have specific traits that you will use depending on the setting that you pick. Let's start with F stops or apertures. Now, remember I said, the higher the number, the smaller the whole or the lower the number, the larger the whole that will affect your focus. So basically, when you hear people talk about a shallow depth of focus, which means there's less, there's less in focus and more out of focus. That will happen when you're using a larger whole or a smaller F stop. If you go the other direction and you use a smaller F stop or a larger number, uh, Mawr, things will be in focus and that that creates like a distance, right, So if you use an F 16 a lot of things will be in focus. If use an F 2.8 on Lee, a little bit will be in focus and the rest will be at a focus and then go in any direction , right? So a lot of professional looking cameras when they have lenses like this will create that sort of shallow depth of field look that looks professional, and chances are they're probably shooting at a bigger open F stop, like a 2.8 or four, or even a 1.4 times. So if you want more in focus is a practical example. When you're shooting landscapes, maybe you want everything to be in focus. Um, so you would use an F 16 or F 22 to get MAWR depth in your photo. Now, using that in conjunction with a shudder value Shudder value Again. We talked about how long it's open to let light in. Now the faster the shutter, the less time light is coming in, which means you can freeze your subject a lot faster. If you want a blur, your subject or you want motion in your light or in your subject, you wanna have a slower shutter because it allowed time to come by and allow light to be streaking across your sensor. So if I'm in a sports photography mode and I'm trying to capture it instantly, I want to freeze that baseball or freeze that football in the air. I want to shoot a high shutter. Now, if I'm shooting a bicycle going down a street and I want the background to be blurry, I want to shoot a low shutter so the background will sort of look like it's moving in the background. So remember, deciding what to pick your shutter will allow you to create that sort of look in your art. Now, the 3rd 1 variable I s O that will really create sort of the sharpness or the noise that's in your photograph because you want to get more light in on your sensor and you need a higher I s so you'll start to see grain in your photos. So if you want it to be a little bit green here or you're just trying to get him or light, you have to remember that you are going to hit Mawr grain when you start up your I s o So knowing all these three things in conjunction you're gonna want to try and remember what you're trying to achieve and deciding when you want more of one and less of the other. So deciding what you want to do is far exposure triangle, and the variables that you're going to use really depends on your style of shooting, what you're shooting and how you're shooting it. Ah, lot of times for me, it depends on the situation I'm in and deciding what the balances between setting your sensitivity picking your f Stop picking your shutter. Um, and your camera really allows you to do all those things. The really cool part that we're going to get into here eventually, is all the different settings that your camera will decide, so you'd only have to decide one or the other thing. You don't always have to decide all three variables. For instance, when we goto aperture priority, you decide with the aperture is your camera will decide everything else. So if you know you want to get that shallot up the field and you go into aperture priority and you tell your camera, I want to always shoot it. A 2.8. The camera will decide everything else adversely. When you go into shutter priority and you know you want to freeze your subject you like. I always want to shoot at 1 2/1000 of a second, so I know something's frozen. Your camera will pick the f stop and pick the eso. So again, it's all about deciding the balance between those three variables and how you function with your camera settings. 7. Aperture Priority Mode: Okay, so let's talk about all the different modes up top. Now we're gonna talk about the A mode, which is aperture priority. But we select aperture priority. It means that the camera is going to make the aperture the priority and it will decide everything else now for this particular camera. We already were in manual mode for an earlier lesson, So we want to make sure that we switch the top from M to a. But then also, in addition, we want to turn back on the isso auto sensitivity control. So now we'll put that back. And now we're on on. So this means that the cameras back to selecting its own eyes. So based on the scene or an aperture priority so we can decide which aperture we want to make a priority. Now, this dial up top was originally the shutter selection because we're manual mode. Now that we're in aperture priority, it will allow us to decide what the F stop is he As I spend this, our center thou here will show us what our aperture R F stop is, and it's changing everything else around it. So let's decide that we want to be at an F 4.5 in this scene where the camera's pointed. Right now, it's changed our Isoda 4000 and it's changed your shutter to 1 50 Now, why would we want to do this? Well, this goes back to when you decide that an aperture might create a look that you want Mawr of versus less of. So in this case, we're shooting an F 45 Uh, and we want that shallow depth of field. Or we want Mawr things out of focus and less in focus to get that really cool. Ah, shallow depth of field professional Look. So now, no matter where I look, I'll always be it a 4.5 from running around an event running around a wedding. It won't leave that sort of setting. Now if we decide we want Mawr and focus, I would change my aperture priority selection up to I don't know, an F 16 now, because we're in such a dark situation. You can see that our camera has bumped us all the way up to 25,600 eyes so and it is bumped are shudder, eyes kind of staying at a cool 1/30 because it knows that that's going to start to get shaky. Now, Within your camera, you can go into settings and you can select a range of IAS owes that you may want your camera to stick at. So say you don't want it to go over 3000 I s o or say you don't want it to go under 400. I s o something like that. You can go into your menu and you can select that and then icons. Basically, you go and you find the ISO sensitivity within the shooting menu. We hit OK, and you can see here we can set the maximum sensitivity and we can set the minimum shutter speed. Now, all of this is on auto, which is the way it will come out of your camera like that because if you pick aperture priority, you want just everything else to be selected. A little bit more of an advanced move is to go in there and select what you're doing. I would suggest practicing with everything in auto mode, letting your aperture priority learn your aperture that you want. And then if you decide that you feel like you're in a situation where it's too grainy or your shutters being too slow. Then you can go in and decide what to shift as far psychos. 8. Shutter Priority Mode: Okay, so let's talk about shutter priority now, Shutter priority. Your cameras exposure mode will make sure that it prioritizes the shutter that you pick shutter priority. So let's go ahead and take our dial up here on our camera and move it to s. That's s for shutter priority. Now on the night Cons It's really cool. Has a big s in the upper left corner You can see if we cycle through We goto a We got a M for manual A for aperture Priority s for shutter priority. It'll show it in the upper left corner. Now, originally, when we're manual, the dial on top right here became the shutter selector And oddly enough, when we go to shutter priority, it stays shutter selector. So you can see now as I go through shutters, it's deciding to pick the f stop and the I s o as we go down. So the further down we go or the less like we go, it changes. R f stop and I s o make sure that we are exposed where we want to be exposed. Now, why would you do this for any reason? Well, the shuttered creates motion and creates freeze frames in your photography. If you're shooting something where you want there to be a frozen picture at exposure, you're probably gonna want a higher shudder. And you don't have to think about anything else. Nothing else matters to you. The picture, your party and pick your higher shutter. So you're shooting sporting of it, and I say you're shooting water and you want that water to move through your photo and make it look really pretty. But you don't really care about the eso sensitivity or anything else. Picked the shutter priority and go pick your 22nd or 32nd shutter to allow you to get that movement. Now again, the really cool thing is that if you're shooting event, you don't have to think about all these other things, right? You just know that you want that shutter shutter priority. Let the camera do all the rest of the work 9. Program Mode: so our next mode on our camera is program mode. Now that's denoted by the P. So we shift to pee Warren P. Now, when you see in the upper left corner, it says Program. Now a program mode is a little bit similar to the full auto mode. We have a little bit more control in the program mode. I'm actually able to still go in select I s O or shift the F stop a little bit so that it will then select everything else. It's kind of like a hybrid between auto mode and the other priority modes have a little bit more control. The big thing for me in program mode is that you can control the exposure compensation, which you cannot do in the auto mod. Now, what is exposure? Compensation? Basically, exposure. Compensation happens on this camera when I push down the exposure conversation button and I use the style to spin it on other Nikon cameras. It'll be its own dedicated dial, or you pull down what looks like a plus and minus with a white and dark background, slash the middle and use your dial to change it. Basically, exposure compensation is telling your camera to shoot at over or under what it thinks. Exposure is so in program mode. If I like shooting a stop over exposed or I like all my pictures to be just a little brighter, I'm going to tell the camera to go on exposure mode and go to plus one, which means one stop overexposed. So now, in program mode, it won't just go to exposure. It will go to plus one exposure, and it'll adjust its settings for your photos now adversely. If my style is a little bit darker and I want to under exposed by a stop, I'll tell my exposure compensation. Hold down the button. I'll spin it back in the other direction. You can see the meter right there. I'll tell it to go to minus 1.0. And now program mode will pick the settings in order to expose under exposed by one stop. And that's the cool thing about program mode is that it's still auto. But you have a little bit more control over your specific exposure versus the little green auto. You have no control 10. Camera Scene Modes & Effects: So let's talk about the rest of the dialogue on top of our camera. Now to start with after we've done M A S and P manual APRA party sharper in program On the other side, we have these little figurines right here and you can see here. The 1st 1 is what looks like a little person with a hat posing like this. And that is portrait mode Now in these modes air scene modes, your cameras going to select the optimal settings for what it thinks that ah situation requires. So for portrait mode, if we select it here, it tends to look for soft, natural looking tones in the camera will adjust it sort of color spectrum. It'll pick an F stop in a shutter that it believes is good on it will let the background be softened. So in portrait mode, it's really looking to create a really nice, beautiful portrait moving on. We go down to sports mode and in sports mode, it's gonna want to freeze the action, right? So it's gonna pick a faster shutter, uh, and a more clear f stop so that things arm or in focus for your speedy sports activities under that is a little what looks like a little flower right here. And the flower is for close up mode. And this is for, like, insects and and macro things and things that are close range. And basically this will start to pick maybe a different sort of focus metering and a different spot metering. So that exposes correctly for your specific subject and also probably pick a little bit of a faster shutter and an open F stop to create that really sharp, uh, movement frozen but also create depth of field. Have a shallow depth of field so that the object looks really sharp, with a really blurry background below. That is what looks like ah, square with a little person and a star in the upper right corner. And that's for night portrait mode. Now, typically, that's gonna probably pick a little bit of a slower shutter, or it's gonna pick a shutter that syncs with your flash. Um, it's also going to try and bring up your main subject and let the background sort of have some light but fall off a little bit. This is really for more portrait's at night. It's going to try and auto select the best looking way, too. Basically, shoot people at night, though under your night portrait mode on your main dial is an effects mode and under the effects mode you can then go to your back screen and use your thumb dial to cycle through all these little effects that Nikon has created. And this will basically change your camera settings to create these effects. There's like a night chrome low. There's a pop motor of more saturation. Ah, bunch of different ones. There's a toy camera effect creating a silhouette, so basically you can get in here. Use these auto effects to create these really fun interesting looks without having to do much. Um, thinking so that's really helpful. Those effects modes when you're just trying to create specific look automatically in your camera. Now that's everything on top of your dial. Um, most of these things are very auto driven, so picking the scene and letting your camera decide what you wanna look. Um, the biggest way to get really into your settings and stuff yourself is to be in manual mode . You have full control over and everything. Everything else is just really fun to play with. And if you ever find yourself in a situation where you can't really figure out what you're doing in a manual setting, these these effects and these program modes, uh, will really help you out a lot. Um, so the big thing is to just get out there, practice using them and see what they could do for you. 11. Bulb Mode: So let's talk about bald mode. Bold mode is actually ah, shutter value where you can select how long you shutter is open and close. You can manually open it and manually close it, which would be great for doing, you know, nighttime photos of stars or super long exposures, things like that not to get there. We're gonna put the camera into manual mode. This will also work in shutter mode, and we're gonna take the shutter and basically move it all the way to the left to bulb mode . Now, when we pushed out on the shutter, it'll open. And when we let go, it will close it so you can decide how long you want the shutter to be open. If you really want to see what that looks like, we're in bold mode. We're going to open the shutter, close the shutter, open close. So again, that's really cool. Way to be able to take longer exposures or decide the timing at what you want your exposure to be. Typically, you probably want a little button that you would be able to push. So you're not really moving the camera too much? Ah, trigger so that you don't have to shake the camera when you're pushing it down and let it go 12. Focusing, Focus Modes and Autofocus Points: So let's talk about focusing with your camera to start at the base. You they're gonna be using the auto focus, or you're gonna be using the manual focus. Manual focus is pretty self explanatory. You're basically going to use this ring up front to focus manually with your hands and again that's going to determine be determined by each and different lens that you use on your can't on your Nikon cameras. Now for this camera to get to manual focus, you want to go to the I button and then go down to the focus mode. Here we have many different options for your autofocus. Well, let's start with manual. That's MF for manual focus. Push that in and now your camera isn't full manual. Focus on a lot of other in icons. There's a button down here. It's a physical button and you'll be able to switch it between M. C and s. Now the sea and the S R auto focus modes for continuous and single and the M is for manual . So let's go into auto focus. So going back to autofocus, we'll go to our info button cycle down to the focus mode and C. We have a F s autofocus single FC autofocus Continuous A F A is autofocus auto, which is basically choosing between single and continuous focus based on what you're seeing . Not a lot of Nikon cameras have this, but it can kind of detect what you're doing. So I like to use the classic auto single and auto continuous depending on what I'm doing. So f s or auto focus single means that when we focus on something, we push halfway down to get the autofocus to interact. And it's focused. Now I'm still pushed halfway down on the camera as I move it around. Just not going to change the pick. The focus until I take the picture. So again it focuses has not changed at all. It kept the focus on whatever it focused on. It's a single auto focus F s. Now if I switch it over to auto focus continuous. Ah, hold down halfway to do the autofocus and you can't hear it, but I can feel it. It's focusing continuously as I move. It's picking up whatever it's looking at, and it's focusing it as I continue to focus now. Why would you use the difference in either auto single or auto continuous. Well, if you're shooting something fast or something's coming towards you or if you're shooting a sporting event, you don't wanna have to be moving your finger up and down to get that auto focus. If you hold down, you could wait, Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It will continue to keep your focus on your subject as you're moving, when you're in auto focus, continuous and then you can take your shot so really helpful when you have a fast moving object or something moving towards you or away from you. Autofocus single is sort of the basic just snapping and shooting. Focus on something. Take the picture, Focus on something. Take the picture. Now again, if you're shooting action, continuous is great. If you're shooting something, Still life or like macro or portrait's or something, the single is probably gonna be a little bit easier for you to handle. I like using autofocus single, ah, lot mawr because I can focus on one thing and it keeps that focus and say I want to focus on something else for you to focus on something quickly. I could make sure to put that in focus and then move the camera that will hold that I can come back and shoot it. It's a really kind of a priority sort of thing on what you sort of like to do how you like to shoot. But those are the differences between the two. Auto focus is so when you're in auto focus, your camera has to decide what it should focus on. Now you can tell it what it should be, focusing on manually by going into the live. You remember our buttons up here and there's a little red dot on our screen. We can use this little little deep hat to move that red square around to decide what we want to put in focus and video mode. It does it automatically, but that Red Square really interact with our type of auto focus. Ah, mode. So let's go out of here. What I'm talking about is the auto focus area mode, which means it's gonna decide what area the auto focus it's going to focus on. So if we go into our menu and we go down cycle to F area mode, we have four options here we have single point autofocus. We have dynamic area autofocus. We have three D tracking, which is 11 points of focus, and we have auto area auto focus now. Auto area autofocus is probably the standard thing that you should be using all the time. It's going to generally select what area it thinks that you want and focus the most has a bunch of little detectors on it, and it will detect what it thinks is going to be the most in focusing that you're focusing on as far as your composition goes. If you go to three D tracking, typically, that's something that's moving across your frame or moving towards you, and this is really nicely used when you're doing continuous. Focus is it uses three or uses what it says 11 points of focus to detect what is moving in your frame. And it tracks that as faras focusing goes. If you go to dynamic area F, this is something is moving very quickly across your frame, and it will dynamically pick what it's trying to focus on. Typically, a lot of sports focusing will be used with dynamic area focus and then single point of focus is what's also used a lot in that little red square that I showed you earlier and uses to be shooting still life. And that will basically just pick one area. And it brings down the amount of detectors as far as like what it wants to focus on. The big thing about autofocus is to kind of get out there and practice using it a lot, seeing what mode you like the most. I think for now, as a beginner, you would want to probably stay in the auto area autofocus that will sort of get you used to the autofocus system until you start Teoh progress, as faras focusing goes. 13. Release Mode (Drive Mode): Okay, so let's talk about our Dr Settings are in Nikon. We call it our release modes, and that's basically when you're releasing the shutter or how your shutter is interacting when you take the photo. Typically, it's, ah, single shutter, a speedy shutter like multiple shutters or quiet shutter or a time shutter. Now, to get to that, we're gonna go back to our menu and actually in the back of our camera, on the buttons. Down here, in the bottom right is our dedicated release mode button. So here, now we can select between single continuous, quiet release and our timer now single we can select, and it's what you normally used to write. So you here, one photo taken. If we hold it down, it doesn't matter. It's just taking one photo. Now let's go back to our thing and let's pick continuous mode. Okay, Now, in continuous mode, we're gonna be taking multiple frames a second, so you can see when I hold this down, it's gonna fire off more than just one photo. Now, you would use that if you're shooting sports or shooting something very quick, I can just hold that down and just panel across and shoot has we're going again. That's going to create a lot of images and start storing up on your memory card. But it's a really quick way to get lots of fast action on the bigger, newer DSL. Ours from Nikon. You can get up to 11 12 frames per second on some of the really expensive cameras. You get even faster than that teach towards shooting really fast. Let's go back to our menu. Information on. We'll hit our dedicated button again, and now we'll go over to quiet shutter release. A quiet shutter mode is meant for you to sort of be a little bit more stealthy with your shutter. It's not actually quiet. Her necessarily. You can actually hold down when the mere is closed, not the shutter. So, Sam, in a very quiet mode when I hold this down and I, like Go, is when it will make the secondary sound of putting the mere back down. So that was them. You're going up and it took the picture digitally, my fingers still pressed on. It hasn't brought the shutter back down, but now, when I feel like it's an appropriate time for it to be quiet, and I can let it go to make more noise. I will. So that's that. That's the second part. So, really, the idea is that when you're doing a quiet shutter mode, if you're, you know, shooting someone speaking, it's a very dark, quiet moment. Or, uh, you wanted, like, kind of make yourself feel a little bit more or less out there with a loud shutter. You're in church or something like that. You can kind of pick and choose when you make that noise. That's what it means for the quite sure. Let's go back to our dedicated mode here and check out self timer now self timer. Pretty self explanatory. I put it on a 12th timer and I hit the button. It actually is a very loud noise. It's at 10 seconds, and in 10 seconds it's gonna fire off. There you go. So this is for self portrait. It's taking that family photo when no one else is around to take that photo. Um, you just select the last mode right here in shutter button and you'll be able Teoh, shoot that every time. Remember to go back to your single frame mode when you're done using the driver release mode and you're back in business as far as a normal single photo. 14. Metering Modes: so early. We talked about exposure and how your camera decides what exposure to pick now usually does that off the internal meter inside your camera. Now we can decide how we want the camera toe actually meet her what we're looking at. So let's go back to our menu. Will go ahead and hit the I information. So we get to our menu, move over to meet Oring. Hit, Okay, and now we have three different modes here. The three different modes are matrix metering, center weighted, metering and spot metering. These are all pretty much exactly what they say they are. Matrix metering is gonna take it. You're seen, and it's gonna look at the entire scene and decide what it believes is the best exposure for the entire sort of scene. It's basically pulling from every corner in every position of the shot. It will then take that and decide what the best exposure would be for that project Center weighted metering means that it's going to look at the center of the frame and decide what the best exposure is. Based on the center of the frame. It's basically disregarding the corners and picking center weight This is a good example when you're just trying to center a portrait or you're taking a single picture of one object that is center in your frame. Finally, the third metering is spot metering. Spot metering is basically an even smaller point of meat Oring that it's going to pick. And this is really good when you have a dark subject up against a really bright background or a bright background of against a dark subject. If you want us pick a specific spot, um, you can use the same little red, uh, the same little red box to pick that spot for your exact metering. Now, because you're just getting started and you're trying to find the correct exposure, I would tend to focus and keep your meat oring at matrix metering. This is really gonna be the best spot for you to get a really well rounded exposure for your photo 15. White Balance: Okay, so let's talk about white balance Now on this camera on most cameras, you'll be able to select your white balance, and that's basically what your camera knows as white. And that changes depending on the type of color temperature your light source is coming from. For example, color temperature from the sun is much different than a little tiny tungsten incandescent bulb inside your night stand next year. Bet we wanted to tell the camera what true White is depending on that color. So on the night cons. Let's go to our menu here and we hit our info button and go down to white balance. Now there lots different settings here. I typically on most of the cameras that I've ever used with Nikon. I usually stick with auto. Nikon has a pretty good auto white balance, and you don't really have to think about it. If you get yourself into trouble and you want to be more specific, you can go on. You can select a specific white balance. Incandescent is usually gonna be around 3000 or 3200 Kelvin Ah, fluorescent is gonna be a little bit higher than that. You can see that's the next election. The next one is daylight that's closer to 10,600 and 5700. The flash white balance is usually pretty good at will. Kind of. Distill your flash and make sure it's not super odd. Color cloudy skies. Another one. You can choose your starting to get a little bit higher and Calvin and then shade, which is also very similar to daylight and shady situations. The preset manual is something interesting if you really want to maintain high control of your white balance in this camera, if you select the pre, you need to go into your menu and go to the white balance under your shooting menu. And that's where you can actually measure or use a specific photo to white. Balance your camera to and other cameras. You'll be able to select manual white balance and you'll be able to use your thumb wheel to select the specific Calvet. Usually that's anywhere between 2500 and 8000 for Nikon cameras. 16. Picture Control & Styles: So let's talk about picture control. That's another option we have in our display menu, and basically, each picture control will change the sort of color on and way the it's processed in your camera. And there's lots of options in the Nikon. Let's take a look. So here we hit our I button. We're gonna go down to picture control, and you could see all these different options that we can select. So we construct between standard neutral, vivid monochrome, portrait landscape and flat, and you can see how here in this camera is. It gives you a little photo next, each one to show you exactly what it's doing now. Usually it's just really changing the way the picked, the way the pictures processed in camera. So that's whether it's making Mawr less contrast in, you know, standard versus neutral. We're adding more saturation and vivid or creating it in black and white in a monochrome mode. It's really how you can kind of process your photo internally as you're taking photos 17. File Formats - RAW vs. JPEG: So let's talk about file formats or file types. Your camera can take several different size of photos. Now, to start at the very top, we're gonna talk about raw. So for Nikon cameras, it'll take any EFS for their raw photos. And, honestly, raw is gonna be the most you can get out of your files. That means you'll have the most amount of room to do color, processing and post. They'll be the largest that your specific camera can be, and I'll be the best image possible that your camera can produce. Now, shooting Roz isn't always necessarily what everyone wants to be doing. The back side of RAWs is that they're large files. They do require editing in post because they will come across in your system. A little flat means low contrast, not a saturated, so you do need to run them through post processing to make them look good. Um, and they just take up a lot of space in general and take a lot more processing power if your computer or your phone or I or your tablet can't really handle it so you can shoot J pegs as well, and those J pegs won't be as easily process herbal, but you can bake in colors in camera and they'll look good right out of the box. Also, you can decide the size of the J pegs that you're taking in this camera and most Nikon cameras. You could do large, medium or basic, which will basically decide the size of pixels that you're taking. In the end, this is helpful. Say, if you have a smaller SD card, you're out traveling. You need to take more photos there just for fun. They're not really edible, or you're just gonna throw him into your phone and edit them quick. That might be the reason why you're taking a little bit lesser quality photos. My favorite thing with these cameras is that you can do both. You could actually have it take a raw photo and a J peg. It does eat up a lot of static on your card, so I would require I would request you getting a picture card if you're going to do that. But then you sort of have the option of doing a raw photo, but you have the J Peg Lee quickly get out on send to your friends or get to your phone quickly, quickly. So let's talk about getting into those options as far as changing that there are two ways. But let's go into our main menu in the back of our camera. We're going to our info, and we'll just go down to quality, quality raw, uh, or raw Plus J. Peg are your two raw options. The cool thing about this camera specifically in this mode is that it will tell you the size of taking one photo will be so if you were in Raw and Manu and Raw and J pig mode. When you take one photo, you'll eat up 48 megabytes of space and you can do the math. You have a 32 gig card in our camera right now, and I have taken some photos already. But if we were to shoot raw and JPEG, we would only have 653 photos left to take. Now, if we went over to raw, we would just be taking 31 megabytes size photos, which are so pretty sizably big for a small camera like this, and we'd be able to take just about 1000 and one photos on this card. Now, if we're in raw, it doesn't give us the option to select the size of photo because it's just taking the biggest and best photo it can take. Now if we move down to fine, which is basically J peg quality but the best JP quality, you can do it. It shows you hear it 17 megabytes per photo. Now that's a lot smaller than 31 megabytes per photo. So we are able to take 1.8000 photos on this 32 gigabyte cart. Now, if we select fine now, we have another option here that has opened up to us to change between large, medium and small. And basically, that's pixel size, right? So the pixel size will be less or more, as's faras space goes. And as faras imagery goes, I wouldn't recommend going down too small, really, unless you really are dedicated just putting these on your phone or keep them in your camera. You want to get the most out of your images, especially with such a nice big camera that you're using. But you can see here at large were at 17 megabytes. We go down to medium were down to 10 megabytes, and the small is at 5.3 megabytes. That's a really small file for a photo, and you can see we can take 5.9 1000 photos on a 32 megapixel. I'm sorry. 32 gig apart card with, UH, a J peg fine mode in small. Now let's stand large now. Normal is the next J. Peg mowed down, or it's a little bit more of a compressed file. You'll be able get as much information out of it later. You can see that it's 8.6 megabytes at 3.6000 photos left to take. Now again, we can select large, medium or small. And if we go down a small on the normal J peg, you can see there 2.8 mega 2.8 megabytes in size, which is tiny for this kind of thing, and you'll let us take 11,000 photos now again. Not necessarily something you want to be doing unless your situation calls for it. Maybe it's a specific science thing or something like that. So if we go all the way down to Basic were at 4.4 megabytes get really small, and this at small on basic will get us 20,000 photos on this card at 1.5 megabytes. Now, just to see if we're in that mode when we take a photo. This photo is actually 2992 pixels by 2000 pixels, which means the total. The total megapixel count for this is around four, which is pretty small and not really something you want to be doing a lot with, um, when considering when you're shooting on this camera, specifically at raw, you're at 24 megapixels. It's a much bigger photo and file size for you to deal with. So I would suggest always shooting raw if you can, Um, And if you can't using Fine J. Peg, we're gonna go back to Ron this camera cause I want the best quality I can out of our images. 18. Navigating the Back Display Menu: So for a lot of the Nikon cameras, we have two different types of menus. There's a display menu that is displayed while you're shooting on the back, and then there's the internal menus. Now, knowing how to navigate both of them is really useful, especially while you're shooting. Both of them can do kind of the same things, and both of them look very different. The shooting display menu eyes really there for you to get access to the things that you need while you're shooting while the internal menu conduce that as well, but also has some other options for you to really customized What's going on inside your camera? So let's get into both. So here we have our shooting display menu. I really like this many because it has our shudder r f stop and R I S o all right on screen , and it also has right below it the, uh, exposure meter so we can see that right away. Next to it is how many pictures we have left on the left. Here is what are auto focus is set to, and then it will also show us all our settings down here for what we're doing exact example would be what are quality is what are white. Balance is what we have as far as our flash going on our active display leading. Um, this, uh, basically our modes and everything that we have going on in the upper left corner. We have our mode for manual and you can see as I switched the top, we go into aperture priority, shutter, priority and program. It'll show us exactly what's going on. As for shooting pretty cool, So now once were in this. Let's go back to manual mode. And if we hit the I information button up here, this will give us access to all that information down below, using the deep hat we can then go through to each subject and decide what we want to choose . So starting with quality will hit, OK, and it gives us all our options as well as the space that each photo is going to be based on the quality and how many photos we're gonna have left. We're gonna go ahead and select fine J peg and you see, it opened us up next door to the size of J peg that we pick. We're gonna pick large next to that, we have white balance where we'll be able to pick our white balance we're gonna use Ah, no. Here's active delighting. And that's just general auto exposure. You can see the difference The cool thing about this night, cause it gives you a picture to show you the difference in what it's talking about. As far as auto exposure, we're gonna turn that on. We have our flash settings. We can decide Red. I know. Flash having a rear flash. This is where we would be selecting our I s o giving us all our eyes. So options, this is all our eyes, so options. But this does not allow us to select auto I s. So you have to select auto eso in the normal menu button. Next, we have our focus mode. We had originally put it on autofocus continuous. I'm gonna move it back to auto focus. Single Here is where we would select our area focus mode. Right now we have it in auto area or a single point autofocus. I'm going to go back to auto area because we want the widest area of focus. Here's where we would select Arm Eatery. We have spot metering, center, weighted metering and matrix metering. We will continue to be in matrix metering to meet her. The whole image picture profile. This is where we would select our picture profiles. We're gonna select standard for now since we're shooting Rod and we'll deal with that later . This is where we can pick our flash composition are flash compensation, which is where we would decide how powerful we want our flash to be. Next door to. That is exposure compensation, where we could select it in menu versus up top with the buttons as faras exposure compensation. If you're ever wondering in a Nikon what something means a lot and icons have a little question mark, especially on the newer, smaller models where if you hit that button, they'll explain exactly what that is, which is really helpful for beginners. You can see if we go to quality under J. Peg and we hit the info button. It will tell us what the differences between raw and J pic. It's a really great learning tool that Nikon provides where you go and just hit the information, but I'll tell you exactly what you're doing there. So that's the general display functionality 19. Navigating the Nikon Main Menu: So going into our main menu now, our internal menu we hit the menu button and this immediately takes us to our playback menu to start with and playback menu. We can pick pictures to delete by hitting the delete. Ah, we can decide and create playback folders for when we create different five folders for our photos. We want everything to go into all for now for playback. Um, this is our playback display options. We may want to change the way it looks a lot of people might pick. RGB hissed a gram. So you can kind of see that while you're looking at playback, Um, typically don't need to do that. It always it may need to go backwards. Uh, image review, whether that's on her off. If you have that on, the image will pop up right after you take a photo off. It just won't display anything. Auto image rotation. Your camera will detect if your picture is either horizontal or vertical and display as such. Um, rotate tall. If your image is ah taller than, uh, more vertical than horizontal, it'll keep it in that direction. Um, a slide show will actually create a slide show in the playback options. If you want to be looking at it that way, rating will allow you to rate your photos as you go through him so you can later look at him and then select to send a smart device. This option will let you pick the photos. You want to send either Bluetooth to your device. Now going into the next option is the shooting menu. The shooting menu allows you to pick stuff, kind of like the stuff that's in your display. Many that we went over before, but a little bit more in depth reset. The shooting menu will set everything back to default. So if you feel like you've gone too far and change too many settings, this is be a good option for you to select to get your camera back to default. Image quality is just like we had talked before. It looks a little different, but you can select raws, which are any EFS plus J Peg. You can go into just raws again. This is very similar to the display menu. You could hit menu or you can hit left on the deep head to go back image size. This allows you to select the size of RJ Pancks I S O sensitivity settings. So this is where you would be selecting several things that are very important, so you can immediately just select your eyes. So off the bat, this is where you would turn off your auto I S O sensitivity control. Now, if you want to be completely manual, you want to turn this off because now you can select your eyes so as you see fit, if you want it to be on auto, you would turn it on. Now, this is also where you can tell your camera that you want to not go over a certain I eso in auto or you want it to stay under a certain eyes. So So maxim sensitivity were going to say 6 6400 This would just be like us being like we don't want you to auto select. I s over that and it will do it the same with the minimum shutter speed. Right now it's on auto, so it will decide based on your settings what it thinks should be your minimum shutter speed. Or you can select it typically I personally like having mine at 1/60. I don't want the auto shutter to go below that because that's when my hands start getting shaky now. White balance again. Same thing that is on the back of your display. Many that we looked at before. Same options here. Set picture control again. Same options. Just looks a little different than your display menu color space. Now, this is something really interesting where you can kind of select the color space that your camera is in. And that just means it's display and what it knows as colors. And it is also something good for you to match what you're doing in post default standard is s RGB Now Adobe RGB has its own color space. This becomes a little bit more advanced when you're trying to match things in post and to modernise and stuff. I would just leave this alone if you're just starting out, leave it on s rgb for now Active delighting again just like we did The display sayings is where you can turn it off and on Noise reduction is basically your camera deciding at high i esos if you want it to reduce the amount of noise or the grain that isn't when you have a high, I s so I would leave it on. This camera's pretty good at doing that. Vignette control is something that smaller in icons have been doing with their D X lenses, where it slowly is able to brighten up the corners to keep away anything that looks like a vignette in their smaller lenses. Um, auto distortion control will also corner sort of start to mess with the corners and keep your distortion up. I would keep it off for now, depending on what lens you're you're using, you might want to take a look at that. Your focus mode is basically which focus mode you are in, depending on what you're doing in your viewfinder when you're looking through it. This goes alongside with what we picked on the display settings earlier. So it's the same F s A F C f A and then manual. Focus, um, in your live view mode, when you're using live, you can decide whether you want it to be single manual or full time servo, which is basically better for video when you're using live. You were gonna stick, Teoh. Um, the regular part of focus. So the built in F assist illuminator is that bright light at the front of the camera that turns on and allows you to focus in the dark. Typically, you want that on because you're gonna be trying to use autofocus in the dark. I have turned that off a Taconic Certs or, you know, in dark events where he don't want to be throwing a light on your subject. Ah, at all, metering is just like the other back of the camera, giving you options to change your metering mode. Um, the flash control for built in flash. This is the type of flash that you're using. A T T. L is a better way to use your flash appear. It's basically kind of like an auto flash versus picking your compensation for your flash, so I would leave it in t t l. The optical VR eyes actually a really cool mode that's in some of these Nikon cameras, where it's going to optically stabilize your shaky hands. I would leave it on for now. If you feel like you're up against a battery problem, that's something you can turn off quickly. I hope you save batteries. Movie settings. Now this is really cool we haven't talked about. This causes more movie than photography, but this is when you can really select the size and frame rate for your movie. Now, typically, 1920 by 10 80 is sort of a film. A US film sort of frame rate that you would pick 30 frames per second is ah, standard TV rate and 60 frames per second in 1920 by 10 80 is be really cool for slow motion stuff. If you're shooting back at 24 you can really pick the movie quality size. This kind of depends on compression rates and whatnot. It's hard to get deep into this on the small camera, but I would keep it normal. Your microphone. Whether you want it on auto, you can see as I talk here, or you can change the actual sensitivity of it you want, or you can just straight up turn it off. Typically, if you're gonna be taking videos, leaving it on, auto sensitivity is going to be the West. Best way to go. You can reduce the wind noise coming into your microphone by turning this win noise reduction on um, and then manual movie settings. This is if you want to be able to fully control the exposure and settings in your movie. I would only recommend this if you are really deep into doing movies and you understand exposing and lighting for a film. Ah, and that's, um that's get out of the movie settings. And that's our last thing in our shooting menu. Here is our set up. Many now set up menu is what we use to set up the actual camera itself. These cameras nowadays have airplane mode for when you're flying. It turns up all the Bluetooth and WiFi and signals coming in and out of your camera. Um, you can connect your smart device here, which is pretty simple, step by step thing. Send a smart device. This is when you decide you can set up for your camera toe automatically. Be sending stuff to your set up to your device when you're shooting like in a studio or something. I feel like that's probably the best place for that. Here's where you can turn your Bluetooth on and off. Conformity market is actually just the standards with which the camera complies with a bunch of rules. It depends on which country you're in, but this is just to prove that they're doing that. So no need to look at that. Ah, slot empty release lock. So this will basically let you open or close the shutter if I lenses attached when the camera's on or off, I would say release locked. Normally reset all settings that just resets all those things quickly. If you want a default, your camera. You've gotten a use camera from somewhere that might be a good place to start or if you're having trouble. Firmware version. Great way to find out what firmware urine reset. Set up options. This will reset this entire menu format memory card. Make sure you know where this is. This is a good place to format your car when you're first getting started. I like that. They kind of bury this deep into your menu so you don't accidentally format your card date stamp. You can turn that honor off so it comes on your photos time zone and date is just where your cameras at. Language, of course. Monitor brightness. I would leave this a zero or even turn it down. The higher your monitor is going to be, the more battery your camera will take. Info display format. This is a really cool place where you can actually decide what you want. Your display setting toe look like we have here so you can see all three variables, which I like a lot. You can change it to blue. You can change it to something more basic. Ah, a little bit more numbers and less graphics if you like. I think that's a really nice option that Nikon kind of gives you. Um And then you can also change what? The program. Ah, shutter prairie aperture Priority manual. Looks like when you're into selecting it for that specifically, Sometimes people change that toe a different color, so they know exactly when they're in a mode versus auto, which is kind of a good way to do things. Auto info display. This will turn the auto infamously on that we're talking about while you're shooting. Think for now, if you're beginning, you should leave that on. Um, this auto off times is allowing your camera to automatically turn off. I have been a long cause We're showing, um, things on this camera, but typically would be on short just to save battery self timer. Remember that self time removed? We can actually change that. Ah, when we were pushing this button to go into release mode into five seconds, two seconds or 10 seconds tens pretty standard. You can also have it take a certain amount of shots all at once. So if you wanna have it, take three shots just in case you're taking a group photo and someone close their eyes, um, walking Europe for cleaning and stuff. We've already kind of locked that down. Image Comment. This is where you can actually attach a comment in your image by typing through this camera . Not the most fun thing to do on camera, though. Copyright informations. Really cool. You can actually attach your specific photography company or your name so that when you basically bakes it into the metadata on brings it into a light room or wherever you're beeping is that'll Sound that your camera make one auto focus is or when it's about to do a , uh, timer sh timer shot Flicker reduction is actually really actually more used for video them for photo. But while you're displaying the live you you can use this to basically offset the flicker coming from fluorescent lights. It's kind of cool. Little know that you can dio so buttons. This is where you can kind of basically customize what you want your buttons to be. The a l L The auto exposure lock in the auto focus lock button will allow you to basically change it to just auto focus or just auto exposure. And it could be either a lock or you have to hold on it. This is something that you would probably do if you were a much more, um, active in as far as like what you would want specifically. It's a really great way to customize what you're looking at. It wouldn't touch it for now. Typically, we're not gonna be using that starting right out, but it does become useful down later on. When you're shooting events and stuff like that, you can also make the auto exposure lock, release the shutter or not. Um, and then you can decide if you want it to disable or enable the autofocus. So this is really customizable as faras this button up here goes when you're shooting and is really much more of Ah, scored a self self thing that you're doing. The range finder is actually something in there that allows you to kind of see the distance between what you're focusing on again. That's a personal preference on what you're shooting and how you're doing it. This allows you to turn the manual focus, ring honor off while auto focuses on, um, I enabled, because sometimes I do just like to manually focus without having to worry about autofocus . But sometimes people confined that annoy, you can turn it off completely. Final number sequencing. You can basically trying off where you can reset it if you're starting over from scratch. So you want to keep track of what the numbers are. Storage folder. You're actually gonna decide which number or what? You want to name the number of your storage folder, save the file naming. He could actually change the names of your file. Uh, and how you want it to be? A lot of times, maybe you could make your initials the file names or just keep it as D. C. You can see here we can go in and we can actually change the numbers. Letters for that file. Um HTM I This is about sending what you're going for. Video outside of the HD my port on the other side. You can really get into control and resolution and location data. This will allow you to know exactly where the photo was taken if you get in there and start changing that around and that is our set of menu. Okay, so in this menu are retouching menu. The Nikon actually allows you to take each one of these options and turn it into an editor , and you can edit your photos in the camera. I don't necessarily recommend editing like this. It is nice to kind of see on resize and trim in camera so you can see what you can dio basically the way to each to use each one of these is you'd hit, OK, and then you pick the photo that you want to edit. Let's find a good one here. We've taken a lot of photos of whites. Let's take this picture of Phil and now we're in the trim mode and basically you can now trim in any crop here using this up here. So basically, we've We've decided what we want to do. We've selected the photo and then we're messing around with the options in here. And I could move this up or down, and now I can officially crop it in camera toe, Let it be there. Ah, so it's a really quick way to basically retouch or change. Uh, what your Your photo is in camera. So again we pick it, we decide what photo we want, and then we adjust it depending on what we're doing. You could see how this one's just fisheye affecting everything, and then we can save it again. I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing this in camera. You'll have a lot more options will be easy here to find Tune in post. But sometimes it's fun to mess with these things and you can see we have a lot of options here. We can do overlays, Color outlining, photo illustration, color sketches, basically all the effects that we could dio before you can apply later. So for this camera, this has the recent settings menu. In other cameras, you'll actually be able to create a Nikon custom menu for yourself where you can decide what you want to be in your custom menu when you hit menu. Chances are you probably wanted to have quality, UM, and or white balance or effects or anything like that, that you can get too quickly for yourself and how you shoot specifically. It's much more of a personal preference in your own menu that some of the bigger night cons will allow you to do. 20. Intro to More Important Skills: Now we've gone over a lot of the basics of your camera. There's a couple of small things on your Nikon camera that we should go over a Sfar as advanced settings, things like connecting to a smart device, the dye Achter, the flash things that you can really dive into and kind of get more a little specific about . 21. Connecting Your Nikon to a Smart Device: Okay, so let's talk about connecting your camera to a smart device. Now I've downloaded Nikon Snap Bridge, which is kind of the basic connecting at for your Nikon camera. This may different between different cameras, depending on what you have. So let's go ahead and turn on our Nikon and we'll go into our menu system and we're going to go into our set up menu and click over on Connect to Smart Device. We're gonna click on that and it's gonna bring up basically information about downloading the app and bringing up your the camera name. So we're gonna go ahead and open the app and it gives us option to connect to camera. We're gonna tap that we're a digital SLR camera, so we'll select that. And now again, it's popped up and it's shown us our d 3500 underscore with the same name that's on the back of the screen. We're gonna tap that and it's connecting. All the magic is happening. We understand. Connecting to camera, please connect Camera. Wait, so we're just gonna wait for it to connect. This does usually take a second. It's just connecting through its blue to system I've had a problem in the past for the accessory part doesn't come up here. Usually if we just give it a second, pop up just like that. Tap the camera with our serial number and here we go. The cool thing about having a smartphone app that can connect your camera is that you will be able to send photos directly to your phone over the air while you're out in the field and you can start editing right away. The other cool thing that you can do is you could actually control your camera at the same time. Okay, so now that we've paired with your phone Ah, this menu should come up. And basically, it tells us exactly what camera we are in. We're in the D 30. 500 actually has our serial number down in the bottom right corner. Now, you can do a lot of things from this menu, including download pictures, which will click. It's readying the camera. Ah, and we should see our library of photos from our camera here in a few seconds. Getting info here comes Here we go. So here are all our images as it populates on our phone that we've sort of been messing around with in taking and this is really cool comes from at this point, we can basically pick a photo, and we can decide to download it. If we click the bottom button, it tells us all the information the size of the photo. Uh, and we can, uh, basically use that to go straight to your phone, and you can start editing right away. Now, another cool option that you could do while connecting to your camera is clicking in the bottom here. Remote photography. So again it's ready in camera. And from here we should be able to get control of the camera from our smartphone. So this is really cool, because you can kind of take photos of yourself. You can set it up and take photos of a group. You get into the settings. If you can't get to the camera, you can at least get to the settings from your phone. It's kind of fun. It also brings across some information. It tells you what camera it is, how many photos, your left and your battery. So right now we just have it in, Ah, a shutter mode and the reason we can't see a preview right now is because the mere is in the way. It's not gonna broadcast the signal because of our mere. But if we hit our shutter button, it will take a photo so really cool aspect of doing that. You can change your settings. You can download pictures. You can have a self timer here through the camera settings. Um, it's a really fun way to connect. Although you can't connect on and see an actual preview without turning on the life mode in some Nikon cameras, you just need to turn on live you to see it through the APP. Some Nikon cameras won't necessarily work. All right, so let's get out of the APP. You can use the auto link in which, if we turned it on, we can automatically download all the photos. When you connect to your phone, it will synchronize the clock. Basically, take the clock from your phone and send it into your camera so it's always up to date, as well as location data that will burn into your photos every time it takes photo from your phone. So it's really cool to have your phone connected to your camera. It's helpful is faras like creating metadata and then transferring photos to your phone? I think that's like the biggest thing you can dio. Um, also something you could just do at home. You could take your SD card and Logan, but, um, yeah, that's how you connect your smart device. 22. Flash Compensation - How Powerful is Your Flash?: Okay, so let's talk about using the internal flash here. This flash you can control by compensating the power that you're sending out through it. So we start and set up a picture of our bust. Here, we can take a picture and you can see how it's in focus. And it's pretty break now. If you go into our menu here by hitting the I button like we have been doing and cycle down to flash compensation, weaken, basically, select that and weaken brighten up our flash, basically making the flash more powerful so it can only go up a bell and stop. But let's just see what the most powerful mode is here. We're at plus one. Really hit, OK? And they were gonna go back to our shot that we just took fire away. And now you can see how much more powerful the compensation of the flashes. You can see how this one is a lot brighter than that one. Now let's go in the other direction by hitting are I button going back to flash compensation and going minus three. So it's crazy that we can only go plus one, but we go minus three on the night. Cons. So here we go like this. It's a little bit less, less punchy, less powerful. You can see a flash. Compensation could really change your power in your flash, depending on your shooting. And this is like a big thing that you'd be using if you're taking pictures of people if you're too close, but you still need enough light to shoot on them. It's a very quick way to basically bring down your exposure, but still being able to use the flash if you need to. I don't always recommend using your internal flash for professional looking photography. It tends to be a little aggressive and a little punchy. We're gonna go over how to use an external flash with your Nikon camera, which can really up your game and make things look a lot better. 23. Using an External Flash: So let's talk about using an external Nikon flash. Now, I have kind of an old Nikon flashier to speed light 800. Uh, it's back from when I used to shoot Nikon all the time, and I actually can still use it on other cameras and other camera systems. I think it's much better to use than your internal flash on your built in camera, but, uh, yeah, so let's let's check out and see how we do it. So basically, you have a hot Schum out. We're gonna go ahead and clip it in. We're gonna close this and we're gonna turn it on. Turn the camera on. And right now, I'm in program auto mode. So we can basically just use program auto mode. Teoh, see where we're at. As faras exposure goes, we're gonna use our trusty bust here again, and we're just going to shoot directly at our subject. Right now, I have the flash set, which is something you can do with flashes to 1 64th power. You can adjust that by moving up and down on this particular flash unit, uh, and changing the actual power of the flash. So this is a 1 64 So let's go and take a look at our bust here. I can see it is totally over exposed. An incredibly punchy. Now, instead of changing the the auto in the camera to adjust to what we're using with the flash , I'm just gonna come down in power quite a bit. So we're at 161 32nd. We're gonna come all the way down to 1 28 of power on the flashes, just like the internal flash compensation. But we're doing it in our external flash. What's going to shoot? Much less power, much less exposure, although it is still pretty bright. And that's because we're taking a very harsh, bright flash and treating it right at our subject Cool thing with an external flash is that we can take it and we can move. It pointed straight up. Now we happen to be in a room with some white ceilings, and we want to create like, a nice ambient light. We'll keep it at 11 28th and we'll shoot. And now you can see a nice even fall off. I mean, we're getting our own lights here that are lighting me, but you can see the flashes now. It dissipated and create a really nice soft look on William Shakespeare's head. Here we can create more. Let's go up to 1/16 just for fun and see what that does illuminated the room even more. And now you can see other room is full, and it looks like a beautifully exposed wonderful party shot of our bust will have Shakespeare here, and I like doing that a lot when I'm shooting events is an external flash on top, your Nikon shooting right into a ceiling. If you've got a low ceiling, it just creates a nice ambiance light. Um, and it's something that you can do to take your small Nikon camera and really pump it up and make it look really professional. Something else you can do if you feel like getting the extra money is actually getting a remain system where you can separate your camera and your flash. Ah, hot shoe remote and a hot shoe receiver will allow you to do sidelight and stuff like that . I don't have one with me right now, but it's something that you can really kind of due to design your light around your subject . If you're doing studio work or in a portrait setting 24. Photo Review Settings & the Histogram: So let's talk about advanced display options when you're reviewing your photos. Now, really cool thing about after you taking a photo and a digital photography is that you can then take a look at all the metadata, the information, the hissed, a grams to really get a really cool idea, a good idea of what you're shooting now here in the Nikon. We gotta turn that on first on the 3500 and may be different for your camera. But let's go to the menu and then in our playback menu will go to playback display options . Now I want to see definitely the RGB hissed a gram. I want to know my shooting data and sure, I want to see the highlights as well. The highlights is basically gonna tell you what's blown out or is too bright. So let's go ahead and go back. We want to save changes. Yes. Now, when we hit play, we're back at our normal image. Now, if we hit down on our d pad, we should be able to start to get information. So this is the highlights. This is showing me where we're losing information because it's too bright If we continue to go down, it's now going to show me All four hissed a grams, the bottom three being color So rgb red, green and blue and our levels hissed a gram are basically our exposure history Graham. Now, if you don't know how to read and exposure Instagram basically on the left side is all our shadows on the dark. On the right side is all our highlights. So you can really kind of see and get a level for where our exposure is looking within this photo. And if we did a good job or not exposing it correctly for later and post. Now, if we can continue to go down, we can see tons of information about our actual photo are shutter speed our location. It looks like on the next page, what are what are contrast was our clarity everything that basically the camera auto selected in program or whatever mode you're in. And this is really great because if you see settings that you like and you want to make sure that your camera doesn't change it for the next photo, you can remember them. Go and set them yourself and you're good to go 25. Video Mode: Okay, so let's talk about recording video with your Nikon camera to start off. Let's look at the settings. Since they're a little bit different than photography. We're gonna go into our main men, your internal menu. We're going to go to our shooting menu, and I believe it's all the way down at the very bottom. Is movie settings gonna click on movie settings? And it's asking us for all these different questions. So let's start with frame, size and frame rate now. Frame rate we wanted probably be shooting HD, which is the highest definition this specific camera can shoot. This will also ask you what frame rate you want. So first, the 1920 by 10 eighties, the resolution, those air the pixels that were shooting and next number is the frames per second now has a P to stand for progressive, not something you need to worry about right now, but we do need to know is 60 frames per 2nd 50 frames per 2nd 30 25 24 now, depending on what you want, you want to shoot a specific frame rate 24 frames per second is sort of the standard cinema movie Ray, and it looks more like film. It's kind of what the aesthetic has become. A Sfar As movies go on the other end, 60 frames per second is Aton. More frames rights, taking Thanh more frames per second. And actually you can take a 60 frame per second video and in editing, put it into a 24 frames per second timeline and you'll see it as slow motion. So you want to shoot in so motion. Be prepared to do some post work, but you can shoot 60 frames per second. The other frames per second kind of deal with other things like 30 fares per second is sort of standard for television. And 25 50 frames per second are standard for other parts of the world, depending on where you are. So let's go in, and I like 24 frames per 2nd 1920 by 10 80 because that's what I'm used to shooting. So then we'll go down to move equality Here. We have high quality or normal quality. Normal quality will be fine for what you're doing shooting out of here. It's basically a little bit more compressed, less compressed in the high quality video, your microphone options. This is the difference between manually setting How, um, loud, the microphones picking up on your camera and auto setting. I would typically but on auto, just for basic video stuff. Unless you're in a very extreme circumstance where you need that, really crank the microphone down, you can. You can also just turn it off. If you're not needing audio. Wind reduction in icons will allow you to basically it'll here, the wind coming in and trying to reduce that as much as it can. Internally, we're leaving it off right now. Manual movie settings. Now I'm a big fan of being able to control my own exposure in movie Sang's. And if you need to do this, you can flip it to the on section. But because we're just filming random videos here, we don't have to worry about that. We're just gonna let the camera auto expose an auto control. All are setting, so we're gonna leave that, and that's pretty much it. We're ready to record video, So what do we do next? Let's go back to our display menu, and I think for video, because it's a little bit easier to record. We're not using an actual shutter. We're gonna hit the live you. But so now that we're in live you we can basically see all our settings up here. We can have all the focus on you can see it's focusing. So now your camera is totally in auto mode for video. We didn't need to select anything else. And to start recording, we're just gonna push this red button up top boom. And now we should be recording video on our auto setting here. And basically you can see how the light changes for what we're trying to dio. So if we had in manual focus basically, depending on your lens or depending what you're trying to do, you have to manually focus your video. I would suggest doing manual focus for your videos. It'll just look a little cleaner. You have more control over. You won't see it hunting for focus, which is what we're doing right now. You can switch it toe autofocus, but let's stick with manual focus. So yeah, video on a Nikon 26. External Microphone: So if you're gonna be doing video on your DSLR, you probably want to think about having an external mike. Now. This camera, in particular 3500 does not have an external mic input, but a lot of night cons do, and it's really beneficial to actually use an external mike. It fits in the hot shoe, just like that, and if we actually had a port on this camera, we would then take this and plug it into the camera. Now there's a lot of reasons. Toe. Have an external mike one being the biggest. You won't pick up a lot of the noise from your hand. Your microphone on your DSLR is right up front here, and it picks up all your finger movement and stuff. When you're doing video, it will also be a little bit more directional, and it's just a better quality sounding microphone than the one inside your camera. It's better to use a microphone that's built to be a microphone than using a microphone that happens to be inside a camera 27. Lenses: so welcome to this new section. We're gonna talk about a bunch of different accessories that you may want to use on your Nikon camera to get started. Let's talk about my favorite thing lenses or glass, so there are many different lenses that you could actually get. Let's talk about a variety of different lenses to start off. On the wide side, a wide lens means that you can seem way more of the world. You could see nice, big wide picture. Now that corresponds to the millimeter, right? So in 18 millimeters 16 millimeter, 12 millimeter, those would be wide lenses. Now you can get a prime lens, which is just one millimetre. We can get a zoom lens, which is a range of millimeters, so a wide lens that's a prime would be a straight 16 millimeter lens. Or if you're gonna get a wide zoom, you would get something like this lens, which is a 17 very wide to 55. 55 is not that wide, but at least you have the zoom range that you can do now. This is a 2.8 D X lens, which would fit on our camera this right here is the kit lens that came with the camera that is a about the same range. It's about 18 to 55 now. You can see the difference in size. When this lenses at its widest, it can actually only hit a 3.5 F stop. Now, when it goes to its longest, which is at a 55 millimeter, it can actually only hit a 5.6. That's how fast it is. It means it will not open more than a 56 Not letting that much light in this, on the other hand, is a 17 to 55 2.8, which means it can go 2.8 from 17 to 55. The only reason they're able to do that is because of all the glass and the filaments and the structure of the actual lens, which makes it a lot bigger and heavier than our kit lens. It also makes it more expensive. You can see the difference in expense and fast and portability as far as what you can do it . These two lenses have basically the same range as faras millimeter. This one just lets in more light more consistently. Probably has a little bit nicer glass in it too. Thea. Other types of lenses would be zoom or telephoto lenses. Now, on the other end, we want to zoom in really far away and get really close. We would up the number to something like 400 millimeters 600 millimeters, 200 millimeters now kind of a standard zoom range lens would be a 72 200. And that's kind of like the normal standards you months. I don't have one of those with me, but that would allow you to zoom all the way in a 200 come back at 70. If you need Teoh, they have primes like that to where they're like 600 millimeters 1200 millimeters. Those lenses can be in the like thousands of dollars like 10 to $20,000 range. Not something you necessarily need, but they do make some really affordable zoom lenses that, like 200 millimeters 300 million, even 400 millimeters, where you can stretch now. Right in the middle is where I suggest maybe putting your money. And if you're starting off this lens right here is the range that's probably the hero range for a lot of professional photographers. It's a 24 to 72.8, which means it goes from 25 millimeters 24 millimeters to 70 millimeters at 2.8. You can see how beat up it music so much, but a lot of ah, you know, a lot of Canada. A lot of ah photography companies use and have a 24 to 72 point range that they use a ton. So that would be something that I would potentially look into investing in. If you're going to start spending money on glass so you can see there's a wide range of lenses and my favorite range, uh, and prime is actually the 85 to 50 millimeter prime lens that's really fast. It's beautiful for portrait. So if you're looking into just street walking around or taking portrait's something that's a prime, it's either a 35 of 50 or in 85 b. A really beautiful portrait lens would really work out for you for your specific Nikon and keep in mind when you're researching lenses. Remember what kind of Nikon you have. If you have a crop sensor D X lens or you have a full frame sensor, which is an FX lens. You want to make sure that you get the corresponding lens to that system in that camera. My feet favorite thing about Nikon is that they have used the same mount for all of their DSL, ours forever from beginning to end, and that includes their D X lenses and their FX lenses. The cool thing is, this is my old D 100 from forever ago, and on it is my 50 millimeter lens from when I was in high school that I used on my film cameras. Now I've carried the sons with me forever, and I can take this lens off this. Be 100 right here. It's manual. You can see there's physical aperture ring and physical focus ring, and I can take it and get this new camera that we just got. Take off the lens and stick this old 50 millimeter right on top of it, and we're good to go. It's basically the same mount that I've used. So in this regard you can find a lot of old used lenses that you can put on your newer Nikon cameras. Now this lends itself is actually, uh, a full frame lens, and it doesn't necessarily read that there's a lens on the camera. But it will work, which is really cool, and you can control the F stop from right here physically, even though you can't necessarily read it in camera. It's not digital Now. There's a lot of different things that you can do as faras lenses go, of course, the kit lens that comes with your camera. You can also get some bigger 24 to 70 mid range lenses. This is a prime old 85 1.4 lens that would fit, um, and so the options are really endless. You can see how they get bigger, depending on what you're doing or if you have a full frame. Nikon verses a DX Nikon. This is actually just so you can see what it looks like. A 105 millimeter macro Nikon lens that will allow you to get those really awesome macro shots. So again, finding the right glass that you want is a really nice investment, especially with Nikon. And if you're planning on upgrading to a bigger, nicer Nikon camera. Putting money into a lens is really great because it will carry across your bodies. Um, the new Nikon Mere Lis camera has a little bit of a different mount on it because of the distance between the sensor and the bayonet with a lens goes. But you can buy adapters to use all your old Nikon lenses they'll still all fit on. And it's a really great system to get into probably one of my favorite things about NYC. 28. Lens Cleaning Kit: so another accessory that you might want to think about getting that's relatively cheap and a super helpful is a lens cleaning kit. Now this one from Pro Optic has a lot of the basic necessities that we would need to clean your lens. And actually, there's a lot of stuff in here that you could use to clean your actual camera, too. A lot of times you may need to clean your back screen or between the dials and stuff like that. So let's see what's in it. Opened this guy up first and foremost, a little bit. A little Ah, little hand blower here. This will help clear any dust and particles without you trying to put your fingers and stuff on your lens itself. Also, Like I said, you can clean off the in between buttons if you start to get your camera a little dusty. This, of course, the micro fiber cloth, which we would use to actually wipe off the lens itself. And with that comes some solution for wiping the lens off. Now you can get this separately, get your own solution. But when you get a lens clit kid, it's kind of nice that it comes with it. Basically, we would take this off. I like to spray on the micro cloth and then wipe in a circular motion on your glass. Now let's see what else we got. This one is really cool and actually use this more for the camera itself, but you can see how you spin, and it's a nice micro fiber sort of tiny little brush. This one has a little loose ends, but basically you can get inside and really dust your camera dust between and under the spots where there's dust around the lens. And if you have a really pesky ah, you know piece of dust on your lens, you can go and get that again. This is another thing that I would use to clean around your camera and inside the nooks and crannies of your camera itself never used this on the sensor. In fact, just as a disclaimer now, I would really not clean your sense of yourself. I would maybe clean your mere glass if you like, But be very careful and try to teach yourself through YouTube or something quickly before actually trying to attempt it yourself. I would not attempt to clean your own sensor. I would take it to a professional person if you see some dust or any markings on your sensory, because you could risk ruining the sensor. Once you do that, you kind of ruined your camera. So again, don't use any of this stuff for inside your camera. Stick to just the glass on the outside of your camera or the glass on the back side of your lens. Or, like I said, the camera itself. On the outside, what else we got in here? So these are actually pro optic wipes, which are really useful. One time wipes. They're actually alcohol swabs, so when you open them, you'll be able to just wipe down your lens with them. Usually, uh, they provide a hot, more liquid and cloth than you need for one lens. So what I'll do with one of these is all, definitely use it on the lens, the front, the back, the back screen, and then if I have a little left over, I'll use it on myself, though these air great for one time use. So yeah, this is pretty much your standard lens kit. It's something really great to have in the field with you. You never know when you might hit some dust, or you might see something going on a lot of times before events. I'll take this and I'll use it to clean my camera the night before. I'm about to go out, so I know everything's good to go again. They come in very small pieces. They're very inexpensive and easy to get a hold of. So, yeah, highly recommend. 29. Lens Filters: So let's talk about lens filters. There's many different type of lens filters, but let's talk about some of the very basic filters that you may want to use with your new base camera. The first thing I would suggest is a clear UV filter. Now I try to get a clear you via filter on pretty much every lens that I get. It basically is just a protector. It's a clear, nice, flat protecting and see on this lens. It's a screw off, so we'll just screw it off right here. And you can see now the con cave of the lens itself without the filter, and the whole reason I get this filter is pretty relatively clear. It sounds a little dirty, but the whole reason I get that is to protect my lenses to protect the glass. It's not gonna bring down any light. It's not gonna stop or change the picture or really the color quality. As long as you get a decent UV filter that screws on. It's really just there to protect your investment in this lens. One little scratch this way in the glass on the front of your lens is really going to get messed up with the UV protector. It's really gonna like, you know, $2030 for UV filter. To protect your nice lands is really the best thing to do, I think as far as protection goes now as faras, another basic lens that you might want to think about getting is an ND filter. Now this is an ND filter. It's basically basically stands for neutral density filter. It basically stops like it's, ah, incomes in different levels, and it will bring down the levels at which light come into your camera. Now, why would you want to do that? You're trying to get more light in your camera, usually right, but typically when you're outdoors and it's super bright and you might want to shoot at a slow shutter with a open up F stop, and you don't want toe, sacrifice any grain or change your eyes so or you've limited down your eyes. So 100 it's super bright. This is hard of 1/4 variable that you can use to bring down the light coming into your camera, and they have all sorts of indie filters. It's also something that is very useful with video work. If you're doing a lot of video work and you still want to use an opened up F stop, you're gonna wanna look into an Andy filter. They have different levels of nd filters. Tiffin actually makes a really awesome 10 stop filter. That's 10 stops that actually has an apparatus that would go in front of your lens on your camera. And that's really for doing long exposures during the day. The filters will allow you to do a many different things, and they come in variable sizes, often for DSL, ours and for photography. They will come in a sort of circular version like this that will allow you to screw it onto your specific lens. It's measured by the millimeter of the circumference of your lens. So for this camera for this lens over here, they'll say 77 millimeters on the actual filter, and it says 77 millimeters inside the lens. So you know what to get the other type of actually drop in filters, which are usually typically squares or rectangles. But then you need an apparatus to go in front of your lands for it to sit in right up against the glass. Those are the two types of filters that you would be getting physically. As far as what the filters are. There's plenty of different things that you can play with. I suggest going out seeing what people are using and testing what you think is best for your specific style and your specific art. 30. Thank You: So that's our course on Nikon cameras. I hope that this gave you a lot of information on your Nikon camera, and it allows you to have the confidence to get out there and shoot what you need to shoot , um, and be able to find the settings that you need to find. The cool thing about these Nikon cameras is that everything is there. Everything is accessible, and as soon as you start to get out there and shoot, you'll learn and learn and practice. Um, and the best way to get good at knowing all these settings is to really just get out there with your camera, put yourself in these situations and shoot. So thanks for watching. And I hope to see you on the next 18 Phil back here. And I really hope that you've enjoyed this class with Will. I know he was super excited to walk through using a Nikon camera and teach all those lessons to you is always when we launch. Of course, we try to make it as best as can be, but we know it might not be perfect for everyone. So if there was something missing or if you still have questions about something with your camera. Let us know will be happy to update this course or respond to you directly with more information. You haven't done so yet. Please leave a review for this class. Your reviews not only help us know what you like about the courses, but it also helps other students know whether this is the right course for them. Lastly, please check out our profile to see all of our other courses on a range of topics, from photography and video to design and business and more. Thanks so much. Have a beautiful day and we hope to see you in another course.