Skip to main content

Shooting Menu

Lesson 11 from: Nikon D7100 / D7200 Fast Start

John Greengo

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

11. Shooting Menu

Next Lesson: Custom Menu

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu

Next up in the menu is interval timer shooting, and this is where the camera can be set up to shoot a picture. After a given interval, for instance, ten seconds, twenty seconds are common, and you're going to do this so that you end up with a whole bunch of pictures in a row, usually from a tripod or device that perhaps maybe we'll move and you'll end up with a really cool video. Now you do have to use a video program to assemble it, but here's our duck dodge on lake union at a speed at which I can actually see where the boats are going on dh so I took a picture here about every twenty seconds for an hour as the votes were moving around another one of my favorite time lapses was shot in india, and I shot a picture about every twelve to fifteen seconds and you'll notice the slow zoom back that was all done in post and you're shooting with such high resolution on these cameras that you have a little bit of room to do the ken burns or a zooming effect like this. And so these air all indiv...

idual images that are pretty high quality j pegs and just combined three or four hundred of them into a short ten or fifteen second bit. And what's cool about this camera is that you can do it in camera without any other accessories were not going to go into all the specifics about how program the time, but it should be fairly clear when you're in there and this is something you are obviously going to leave turn off most of the time, but when you do want to go in to do it, it's a lot of fun and there's a lot of great things that you could do, we'll do a little surfing around youtube an interval time lapse stuff and you'll see some incredible work by people out there today. All right? This one's pretty important movie settings and here is where you get to set the resolution and the frame rate that you record video at for most people they're going to want to shoot it the maximum resolution, which is full hd nineteen twenty by ten eighty and they're going to want to shoot it thirty frames a second because that's what most video is shot out now? It's a long discussion and we're not going to get into it, but hollywood shoots their movies at twenty four frames a second I know it doesn't make a lot of logical sense it is the way it is talk to anyone who likes to shoot film and they'll probably talk to you a lot about twenty four frames per second and so you can shoot with that look if you want teo there are also some options for shooting at fifty or sixty frames but you do need to be shooting at a lower resolution of twelve eighty by seven twenty some of these options may not be available to you depending on how you have your camera set up for instance with the shot on screen nineteen twenty by ten eighty at sixty I is great out because that is on ly available when your camera is in a one point three crop mode so it's shooting smaller day and it's able tto crunch that date a little bit faster so nineteen twenty by ten eighty by thirty frames a second is the standard setting well that uh finishes up the cameras and I don't know if there's any questions regarding the playback or the camera mode but the custom menus kind of the next you know one question I'd love to ask him then we can keep going okay duke stone ass how do you set your own copyright info on the camera itself? Is that even there's a there's a slide for that? All right, we'll be getting to that excellent let's keep going okay, so we're goingto get into the custom and you a little bit and so in the custom menu I guess just as a preface most of the stuff you don't need to change all right, if you completely avoided the custom and you probably okay, but there's a few things in here to really taylor the camera to the way you want it to work, we're gonna be able to make those adjustments a f c if you recall is the continuous focusing system it's the sports photography focusing on the camera in that mode, the camera is in a release priority mode, which means when you press down on the shutter release, you're going to get a picture whether it's in focus or not and that may not seem like a good thing, but sports photographers want to be able to fire the shutter whenever they want to fire the shutter, even if it's not one hundred percent perfectly in focus because maybe it's only ninety nine percent and their cameras trying to fuss around to get perfect focus that they want the shot and so that's the standard mode you could change this to focus priority, but very few people want to do that in the single focusing mowed your cameras in a different mode it's in focus priority the camera will not shoot unless it's in focus and this, by the way, and make sure my cameras and auto focus in auto focus this is one of the most common problems is people are like I'm pressing the shutter release why won't my camera take a picture it's because you're not giving it something proper to focus on and so in this case I need to focus and I can shoot a picture because I got the focus brackets on something that it could focus on and so it has to be in focus and the advantages is that I can focus lock in focus and move him off to the side so that they're not in the middle of the frame and so that's the standard system people have left up but you could change this to release priority if you wanted all right all you sports photographers out there this is pretty important and I don't know where for you to set this but you'll have to be the judge focus tracking with lock on what happens with a nikon camera is that we have all these focusing points and let's say you've chosen all fifty one focusing points and you've started right here in the center and your camera has locked on to something and it's moved over to this place here how quickly do you want the camera to jump over with it? Maybe it's a baseball that got hit do you wanted to focus on the baseball or the actual person? How quickly do you wanted to jump and look for something else to focus on and so the camera comes set to three which is the middle of the range now if you want focus tracking long like five, that means you don't want it to switch. If you are shooting team sports on a field, and you kind of have subjects that you are locked on to, you might want to try for even five if you're shooting a sport like I was doing the other days at the velodrome, bike racing, where you don't really care who it's on you wanted just on the leader, whatever is closest to you, you might change that down to two or one, and so you want to be aware how quickly is your camera changing the focusing between different points and different types of sports require different types of adjustments? If you're not sure, you could probably just leave it on three and be pretty safe, but there is a little bit of fine tuning that khun b had. Once you get into it, auto focus point illumination normally, under bright conditions, you'll see a little black square, which indicates where the focusing is, and if it's dark out, it'll turn red, so it just has a little light meter in there. When it gets dark, it turns red, which makes it nice and easy to see, so most people leave it in auto. If you don't like this, you could turn it off, so it is on ly black and or actually excuse me or only shows up in red and so most people leave in an auto so it just kind of switches back and forth. Next up we have finally gotten to the rap section this is our rap session here and so if you are all the way to the laughter all the way to the right of the focusing points you have the option of going in the direction with the multi controller that you want to go several steps or you could employ the wormhole theory as I like to call it and rather than going left to go all the way across the screen you can just go right and you wrap around to the back side and so it's like it's a continuous wrap around and so turn it on there's no harm by it you just can't go anywhere you want if you're at the very top and you go up you go straight back down to the bottom that's what the happiness sorry to disappoint all the rap fans okay number of focusing point if fifty one is just too big a number for you, you can reduce it down to eleven it's not a huge advantage, but it can be quicker to quickly go from one side to the other, but I don't know too many people that use that but it's available, okay for the private investigators who are sitting in cars and dark alleys and dark streets, and they're taking pictures and they don't want a big a beacon of light coming out of their camera. You want to turn this off? I know a lot of more serious photographers like to turn this off just because it's something that's disturbing and sometimes you don't want people noticing that your camera can't focus on dh it's very limited in how it can help you out. It's good for maybe six or eight feet, not good for very much distance for focusing, and so I tend to want to turn it off because we have a question on this or were you just getting ready for something in the near future to ask a question? I know I just had a question on basically if you were to turn that off, you know what? You were talking earlier about the flash and the red eye reduction part of camera, and then that turns on offering that you know that red eye to go away, be right if you turn that off, does that feature work? If you use it on flash, the red eye reduction no, this turns it turns off that that light all the time, so for focusing and for red eye. I think so that way the let me double check so first off I'm going to make sure my camera is in red eye reduction let's turn this on and I'm just gonna put this to manual focus and so there is the light I'll do that again just in case you didn't say so and it's not going to have much effect in here but that's the light and you can see the delay I pressed the button and it weights a second and a half and so let me dive in here and let's see what twenty we're at we're at a seven so I'm going to go into a seven back here so we could see what's going on and I'm going to turn this off turn it back forward oh it still comes on so it's just it turned it off for focusing but it's still infrared eye so that's just for the focusing assist all right thank you yeah yeah it's fun tow what nicholas and marcel go along with you in this guide and kind of they're flipping as they're going yes is really really fun okay let's let's do one more section and then we'll take our break at the end of this section here which I think is a very short one I s o sensitivity step value you can change isos in one third stops which is very convenient you can change the half stops if that's your thing not really a big change they're the same thing with exposure most cameras air using third exposures or a third of a stop steps between exposures which is very common I know the light meter that I have which is can old by now works in half stops and if I wanted to match it up I could change it over a half stops rather than third stops not a big deal easy exposure compensation remember how you had to press the button and turn the back dial well if you don't want to press the button you just want to turn the back dial you could turn this feature on but most most cases I would recommend leaving it turned off it's a safety precaution now one of the options with turning it on is you could also turn it on auto reset so what would happen for instance if you did a minus one exposure it would keep it there for a little while and then it would reset and don't ask me how long it takes to reset I forget if I think it's after the meter resets after about fifteen seconds it will constantly reset itself and so you may or may not want it on reset if you want to make those quick changes but for most people leave that off this camera has center waited metering but you can customize how big a circle the center waited meter in area works with standard is an eight millimeter circle you can make it smaller or you could make it larger. Most people don't use center waited metering anymore but if you do, you can customize it. Fine tune optimal exposure okay, so if you find that your camera is just not meet oring correctly, every everything is a little bright or a little thing little dark you could adjust with exposure compensation, but fine tune optimal exposure is going you're going to be able to do it by one sixth of a stop rather than one third of a stop so you can be very, very exact about it on it will kind of high this so that you don't see it within the bracketing and the exposure controls everything else. It's pretty rare that you would need this, but it's only there so that you don't have to send your camera back to nikon. If it's having slight exposure problems, you can just do that fix right in the camera and that brings us to the end of the meet, a ring and exposure part of the custom menu, so we'll take a look for any questions. Yes, wally asked, how do I save the settings after I make the changes and he's setting and he came settings the camera socials even after I make the change and exit out of that setting okay, so one of the awkward things about nikon cameras is that you will go here's something I would like to change and you enter it or you go to the right you go okay? Well, I'm gonna change it to this and then you exit well, you haven't saved that change what you often have to do is press the okay button sometimes depending on the menu, you'll have to go back up to the top of the list and go to the done option and click the done in this various with individual settings but to make sure that you're setting has stuck either hit okay or see if there's a checkbox for done I know I've more than once gone in and change something come back out and realized I never changed it all I never finalized you might say thank you and tim in ator ask does a file numbering reset after nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine I e d s c nine nine nine nine and then reset to dea ceo one or was this just a computer and software problem? Were they talking about the numbers resetting or the letters resetting there? I believe the number's once you show you what happens when you buy the camera the first picture is zero zero zero one and counts up to ten thousand and nine thousand then and on then it goes back down to one and so the problem is is that if you shoot twenty thousand images every image has a exact duplicate file name ok? And so what you the way to avoid that ultimately is if nikon we just put a couple extra zeros in there but that seems to be too tough for nikon so what we have to do is photographers is that when we download him to the computer we should be changing the file names that we downloaded into the computer the system that I use is a date system so it would go year month day livan underscore and then a sequential number that goes up to ten thousand so as long as I don't shoot more than ten thousand pictures in a single day I'm good which doesn't happen very maybe never and so that's the ultimate solution that serious photographers they're using but you could go in and you could manually reset the numbers if you wanted to you could have him reset every time you go into the the camera but that would be dangerous because you're ending up with a lot of pictures with zero zero zero one unless you're going in and manually changing the three letter code which would be a lot of work the simplest solution is to get light room figure out how to do the auto import where it changes the file name and you never have to do anything that's the easiest solution

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

D7200 Menu Recommendations
NikonD7100 - Outline

Ratings and Reviews

judy49
 

I'm sold. Can't wait to upgrade from my D5200 to the D7100. Thanks to John I have just been convinced of what I have been reading about this camera. And John is much more interesting than a manual. Since I now own this video, I can re-watch it when I get the camera. I have watched and purchased John Greengo's videos several times, and he never ceases to amaze me. I have been shooting for about 18 months, and really have developed a real passion for the art. At 65 years old, its not as easy as maybe it would have been years ago, but with the help with instructors like John Greengo, and others on Creative Live, I'm on my way to an exciting retirement.

user e35335
 

I think Nikon should supply this course as part of the purchase price, it's that good. John is a great ambassador for the Nikon brand and there can be no better way to get immediate confidence in your new camera. He has a calm engaging manner, is very fluent (no umm's & err's) and is a true inspiration. I owned the camera for a couple of months before I came across this course and my hit rate has dramatically improved with his instruction. I have gone on to purchase "The fundamentals of photography" and the fast start for my other camera OMD EM1, both equally excellent.

~user-458e96
 

This is my first experience with a DSLR and John's class and instruction style is excellent and easy to understand his instructions. I purchases the D7100 and am happy that I can watch this video again and again to increase my knowledge of this wonderful camera. I am so satisfied with John's style of instruction I intend to purchase "Fundamentals of Digital Photography 2014" Thank you CreativeLive. eddyhc1

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES