Hello all,
Sorry I have been a little lax in posting the past couple days. I am right in the heart of wedding and portrait season and have been swamped with photo shoots and whatnot.
So I was with my assistant on Saturday shooting a wedding and it dawned on me that our digital SLR's have come a REAL long way! She has herself a Pentax DSLR and she was having a real tough time with it during the reception which reminded me of how spoiled my D700 has gotten me. Some might think of them as just bells and whistles but I think that many of these can be really helpful... That is IF you know how to use them! I mean heck, Program mode could be considered the best feature that camera's have since it does everything for you pretty much... Do you think DaVinci hand drew his lines or used a ruler? Know what I mean? We are given these tools so we need to utilize them to make our life easier.
Here are some features that I am particularly fond of and use often. Some are new, some are old and some have totally different names that you just need to link up with the lingo that your camera uses. My experience is with Nikon so that is what I am going to roll with.
1.) Av Mode: It really rocks. I know what my shutter speed should be, it is just that one isn't always fast enough to get to that proper setting in time to capture "the moment". I have lost some good pics by being too slow. When I do weddings and portraits, I am really only concerned with setting my aperture and ISO. I want to set it and forget it so Av mode is where it's at for me. Now Av Mode is not the say-all-be-all and that is where item #2 comes in handy.
2.) Exposure Compensation: If your shots in Av Mode, are too bright or too dark then you need to rock the Exposure Compensation to tell the camera that you want your images to be darker or lighter than what it thinks is a good exposure. Too bright, tell the EC to dial it down by -1.0 or to brighten it up by +1.0. Digital is awesome so you can do a test shot and do the proper EC based upon the histogram and image preview... Check out #3 for a better indication on if your images are over exposed. This works for all the modes except for Manual mode... Using EC in Manual mode does give you a quick way to control your speedlights TTL flash compensation however! More on that in another article though.
3.) Highlight Warning: This feature is great for a quick indication letting you know if your image is blown out and over exposed. Little "blinkies" will fade in and out in the areas that are blown out.
4.) Auto-ISO: I know I want my shots to be above 1/60" to ensure that I am showing the least camera shake and motion blur from the subject. Auto ISO gives asks for you to set a minimum shutter speed that your camera should not go under... I set mine for 1/80" to be safe. You also get to choose a lowest and highest ISO that you want to use... This works for all the modes except for Manual mode. So how it works is that as soon as your camera sees that it needs more light and has to go under your lowest shutter speed, it just kicks up the ISO for you to get the shot... Cool huh? My D700 has a minimum of ISO 200 and a maximum of ISO 6400... Why? Because those high ISO files look darned good! I do disable auto ISO when shooting with a flash however... It throws things out of whack for me and it is too much dependencies on one another for my liking.
5.) Custom Menu / Button Assignment: Nothing is worse than having a bunch of buttons that you never use. Instead, I can allocate useful features to otherwise useless buttons on my D700... I have the buttons doing cool stuff like Virtual Horizon, Access Top Item of my Custom Menu (which is set to show my Commander Mode stuff for CLS flash work) and stuff like that.
6.) 3D Matrix Metering: I don't 'use' this much but can see it being REAL helpful for sports shooters. All you really have to do is set the AF point and keep tracking in Continuous AF and you will actually see the AF point move (showing that the AF is following) with your subject as they cross your frame! You should probably enable the 51 AF points and definitely need to use the dynamic AF control.
So those are really cool features that I use and abuse. I would really just suggest cracking open your user manual and search for those little gems that may help out when you out the next time shooting.
Thanks for stopping by,
Mike
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