11
The Playback and Shooting Menus
My job is to be your guide on a wild trip down the rabbit hole, where Menuland rivals Wonderland in its possibility to confuse and confound you. Under that thicket of choices is the kind of versatility that makes the Nikon D800 one of the most customizable, tweakable, and fine-tunable cameras Nikon has ever offered. If your camera doesn’t behave in exactly the way you’d like, chances are you can make a small change in the Playback, Shooting, Custom Settings, and Setup menus that will tailor the D800 to your needs.
However, just telling you what your options are and what they do doesn’t really give you the information you need to use your camera to its fullest. What you really want to know is why you would want to choose a particular option, and how making a particular change will help improve your photographs in a given situation. That’s a big job, and I’m going to devote three entire chapters to demystifying the D800 menu choices for you.
This chapter will help you sort out the settings for the Playback and Shooting menus, which determine how the D800 displays images on review, and how it uses many of its shooting features to take a photo. The following chapters will focus on the Custom Settings menu (Chapter 12), and Setup, Retouch, and My Menu options (Chapter 13).
As I’ve mentioned before, this book isn’t intended to replace the manual you received with your D800, nor have I any interest in rehashing its contents. You’ll still find the original manual useful as a standby reference that lists every possible option in exhaustive (if mind-numbing) detail—without really telling you how to use those options to take better pictures. There is, however, some unavoidable duplication between the Nikon manual and the next three chapters, because, like the Nikon book, I’m going to explain all the key menu choices and the options you may have in using them. You should find, though, that I will give you the information you really require in a much more helpful format, with plenty of detail on why you should make some settings that are particularly cryptic.
I’m not going to waste a lot of space on some of the more obvious menu choices in these chapters. For example, you can probably figure out that the Beep option in Custom Setting d1 deals with the solid-state beeper in your camera that sounds off during various activities (such as the self-timer countdown). You can certainly decipher the import of the two options available for the Beep entry (Volume and Pitch). In this chapter, I’ll devote no more than a sentence or two to the blatantly obvious settings and concentrate on the more confusing aspects of the D800 setup, such as automatic exposure bracketing. I’ll start with an overview of using the D800’s menus themselves.
Anatomy of the Nikon D800’s Menus
If you used any Nikon digital SLR before you purchased your Nikon D800, you’re probably already familiar with the basic menu system. Indeed, if you own (or owned) the original Nikon D3, you’ll find that its menus are virtually identical to those of the two latest cameras in the D3-series. The menus consist of a series of screens with entries, as shown in the illustration of the Playback menu (discussed next) in Figure 11.1. Navigating among the various menus is easy and follows a consistent set of rules:
View menu. Press the MENU button on the left side of the back of the camera to display the main menu screens.
Navigate main menu headings. Use the multi selector’s left/right/up/down buttons to navigate among the menu entries to highlight your choice. Moving the highlighting to the left column lets you scroll up and down among the six top-level menus. From the top in Figure 11.1, they are Playback, Shooting, Custom Settings, Setup, Retouch, and My Menu, with Help access represented by a question mark at the bottom of the column.
Choose a top-level menu. A highlighted top-level menu’s icon will change from black-and-white to yellow highlighting. Use the multi selector’s right button to move into the column containing that menu’s choices. The selected top-level menu’s icon will change from yellow to a color associated with that menu (blue for Playback, green for Shooting, red for Custom Settings, orange for Setup, purple for Retouch, and gray for My Menu).
Figure 11.1 The multi selector’s navigational buttons are used to move among the various menu entries.
Select a menu entry. Use the up/down buttons to scroll among the entries. If more than one screen full of choices is available, a scroll bar appears at the far right of the screen, with a position slider showing the relative position of the currently highlighted entry.
Choose options. To work with a highlighted menu entry, press the OK button at lower left on the back of the D800 or, more conveniently, just press the right button on the multi selector. Any additional screens of choices will appear. You can move among them using the same multi selector movements.
Confirm your choice. You can activate a selection by pressing the OK button or, frequently, by pressing the right button on the multi selector once again. Some functions require scrolling to a Done menu choice, or include an instruction to Set a choice using some other button.
Exit menus. Pressing the multi selector left button usually backs you out of the current screen, and pressing the MENU button again usually does the same thing. You can exit the menu system at any time by tapping the shutter release button.
Returning to an entry. The Nikon D800 “remembers” the top-level menu and specific menu entry you were using (but not any submenus) the last time the menu system was accessed, so pressing the MENU button brings you back to where you left off. So, if you were working with an entry in the Custom Settings menu’s Metering/Exposure section, then decided to take a photo, the next time you press the MENU button the Custom Settings menu and the Metering/Exposure entry will be highlighted, but not the specific submenu (b1 through b6) that you might have selected.
Accessing a frequently used entry. If you use the same menu items over and over, you can create a My Menu listing of those entries. Or, if you’d rather have a rotating listing of the last 20 menu items you accessed, you can convert My Menu to a Recent Settings menu instead. I’ll show you exactly how to do that in Chapter 13.
As I noted, the top-level menus are color-coded with accents within the menu itself, most notably a half-frame that underlines the menu title and runs down the left side of the menu entries. The colors are: Playback menu (blue); Shooting menu (green); Custom Settings menu (red); Setup menu (orange); Retouch menu (purple); and My Menu (gray). The Custom Settings menu has seven submenus that are themselves color-coded to help you keep track of where you are located in the menu system. You’ll learn about the Custom Settings, Setup, Retouch, and My Menu options in Chapters 12 and 13.
Playback Menu Options
The blue-coded Playback menu, shown previously in Figure 11.1, has ten entries where you select options related to the display, review, transfer, and printing of the photos you’ve taken. The choices you’ll find include the following entries (the last two, Slide Show and Print Set [DPOF] are not pictured in Figure 11.1, and don’t appear until you scroll the listing on the screen to the bottom):
Delete
Playback Folder
Hide Image
Playback Display Options
Copy Image(s)
Image Review
After Delete
Rotate Tall
Slide Show
DPOF Pprint Order
Delete
Choose this menu entry and you’ll be given two choices: Selected and All. If you choose All, then all the pictures in the folder currently selected for playback (as described next) will be removed. When two memory cards are in the camera and have photos, you can choose which card to use to select images for removal. To delete only some pictures from a folder, choose Selected, you’ll see an image selection screen like the one shown in Figure 11.2. Then, follow these instructions:
1. Select image. Use the multi selector cursor keys to scroll among the available images.
2. Evaluate image. When you highlight an image you think you might like to delete, press the Zoom In button to temporarily enlarge that image so you can evaluate it further. When you release the button, the selection screen returns.
3. Mark images. To mark an image for deletion, press the multi selector center button (not the Trash button). A trash can icon will appear overlaid on that image’s thumbnail. To unmark an image, press the multi selector center button again.
4. Delete images. When you’ve finished marking images to delete, press OK. A final screen will appear asking you to confirm the removal of the image(s). Choose Yes to delete the image(s) or No to cancel deletion, and then press OK. If you selected Yes, then you’ll return to the Playback menu; if you chose No, you’ll be taken back to the selection screen to mark/unmark images.
5. Exit Delete menu. To back out of the selection screen, press the MENU button.
Figure 11.2 Select images to delete.
Using this menu to delete images will have no effect on images that have been marked as protected with the Protect key. Keep in mind that deleting images in this way is slower than just wiping out the whole card with the Format command, so using Format is generally much faster than choosing Delete: All, and also is a safer way of returning your memory card to a fresh, blank state.
Playback Folder
Your Nikon D800 will create folders on your memory card to store the images that it creates. It assigns the first folder a number, like 100ND800, and when that folder fills with 999 images, the camera automatically creates a new folder numbered one higher, such as 101ND800. If you use the same memory card in another camera, that camera will also create its own folder. Thus you can end up with several folders on the same memory card, until you eventually reformat the card and folder creation starts anew.
This menu item allows you to choose which folders are accessed when displaying images using the D800’s Playback facility. Your choices are as follows:
ND800. The camera will use only the folders on your memory card created by the D800 and ignore those created by other cameras. Images in all the D800’s folders will be displayed. This is the default setting.
All. All folders containing images that the D800 can read will be accessed, regardless of which camera created them. You might want to use this setting if you swap memory cards among several cameras and want to be able to review all the photos (especially when considering reformatting the memory card). You will be able to view images even if they were created by a non-Nikon camera if those images conform to the Design Rule for Camera File system (DCF) specifications.
Current. The D800 will display only images in the current folder. For example, if you have been shooting heavily at an event and have already accumulated more than 999 shots in one folder and the D800 has created a new folder for the overflow, you’d use this setting to view only the most recent photos, which reside in the current folder. You can change the current folder to any other folder on your memory card using the Active Folder option in the Shooting menu, described later in this chapter.
Hide Image
Use this menu option to protect and hide images. When you choose Hide Image, you’ll be given a choice to select/set images (using a selection screen almost identical to the one used to delete images, as shown earlier in Figure 11.2) or the option of deselecting all hidden images.
Unlike the Protect option, which just marks images to keep them from accidental deletion, this selection also hides them from view using the regular Playback functions. Pictures that have been hidden can only be viewed from the selection screen. I use this facility in two different ways:
Hide non-relevant images. Sometimes I have a memory card filled with images and I want to show some of the images, perhaps as a slideshow, or sometimes just by handing the camera to someone and asking them to browse through the photos. I can hide the non-relevant images so only the relevant pictures appear.
Bury your mistakes. Hiding images is a good way to make your real stinkers invisible from the eyes of those who otherwise respect your work, if you haven’t quite made up your mind to delete them. Tuck them out of view until you move them to your computer, or get up the courage to nuke them forever.
Remember that if you “unhide” an image you are also removing the Protect attribute. If you want the photo to be visible, but still protected, press the Protect button (it has a key icon as a label) while viewing the image on the LCD monitor. The key icon will be superimposed on the image, showing you that it is now protected from accidental erasure. Reformatting the card removes the Hidden and Protected attributes, of course—because it removes those images as well!
Playback Display Options
You’ll recall from Chapter 2 that a great deal of information, available on multiple screens, can be displayed when reviewing images. This menu item helps you reduce/increase the clutter by specifying which information and screens will be available. To activate or deactivate an info option, scroll to that option and press the right multi selector button to add a check mark to the box next to that item. Press the right button to unmark an item that has previously been checked. Important: when you’re finished, you must scroll up to Done and press OK or the right multi selector button to confirm your choices. Exiting the Display mode menu any other way will cause any changes you may have made to be ignored. Your info options include:
Focus point. Activate this option to display the active focus point(s) with red highlighting, as shown in Figure 11.3.
None. A screen with the image only and no photo information will be displayed.
Highlights. When enabled, overexposed highlight areas in your image will blink with a black border during picture review. That’s your cue to consider using exposure compensation to reduce exposure, unless a minus-EV setting will cause loss of shadow detail that you want to preserve. You can read more about correcting exposure in Chapter 6.
Figure 11.3 Use the Display Mode menu entry to activate data display, like the focus point shown in this reviewed image.
RGB histogram. Displays both luminance (brightness) and RGB histograms on a screen that can be displayed using the up/down multi selector buttons, as shown in Chapter 2. If you’re viewing this histogram with the Highlights display enabled, you can change the Highlights focus from the luminance histogram to any of the three RGB channels by holding down the Thumbnail button and pressing the multi selector right button until the channel you want is selected. I’ll explain the use of this feature in more detail in Chapter 4.
Data. Activates the pages of shooting data shown in Chapter 2.
Overview. Activates the overview screen shown in Chapter 2.
Copy Image(s)
The ability to work with two memory cards simultaneously ranked as my absolutely favorite new feature when the first Nikons to offer dual slots were introduced in 2007. One of the best uses for two cards is to make back-up images while traveling, or at any other time that your computer isn’t easily accessible. Here are some examples of what I do:
Shoot to two cards simultaneously. This gives you an instant backup in case pictures on your primary card become corrupt or are erased. Ideally, your two cards should be equal in size.
Make a copy. Use this Copy Image(s) facility to make a copy of images you shot on one card to your second card. Instead of shooting on two cards at once (which does slow down the D800 a bit), use only one card when you take photos, then make a backup onto a second card at the end of the day. You can copy all or only some of the photos you’ve shot.
Make copies to distribute. I bought a bunch of 8GB memory cards for $5.98 each, and find it’s quick and easy to make multiple copies of photos, not for backup, but for distribution either on the spot, say, to provide models I’ve hired with some raw (not RAW) images or to send by snail mail to colleagues, friends, or family that I want to share photos with. No computer required!
Leave your PSD at home. Since I’ve begun using Nikon cameras with dual memory card slots, I leave my hard disk/personal storage device with its built-in reader or my laptop at home more often. If I am going to be gone for only a day or two, it’s easier to just make copies in the camera, and not bother with another external device.
To copy images from one card to another, just follow these steps (which are available only when two memory cards are present in the camera):
1. Access copy menus. Choose Copy Image(s) from the Playback menu. There are four choices that may be available to you: Select Source; Select Image(s); Select Destination Folder; and Copy Image(s)?.
If you have images on only one card, all other choices will be grayed out, and the card containing images will be selected. In the Copy Image(s) menu, Select Image(s) will be pre-selected for you.
If there are images on both cards already, you can choose Select Source to specify either the SD or CF card slots as the source to copy from or you can Select Image(s) if the source displayed is satisfactory. (See Figure 11.4, left.)
If you have already marked some images previously, then all four choices will be available.
2. Select Source or copy. Press the right button on the multi selector to perform the task of your choice:
Choose Select Source, then highlight SD or CF and press OK.
Choose Select Image(s) and continue to Step 3.
Choose Select Destination Folder and continue to Step 3.
If you’ve chosen source, destination, and images, choose Copy Image(s)? and skip to Step 4.
3. Select destination folder or images. Perform one or both of these tasks.
If you are choosing a destination folder, you can select by folder number (either a current folder number or one you create by specifying a number for the new folder), or choose from a list of existing folders. Press OK when finished to return to the Copy Image(s) menu.
If you are selecting images (as shown in Figure 11.4, right), you can Deselect All images to cancel previous selections (and then proceed to mark individual images with the Thumbnail/Zoom Out button); Select All Images to view a screen similar to the one shown previously in Figure 11.2, where you can mark and unmark specific thumbnails (Hidden images cannot be copied); or Select Protected Images to choose from among images you’ve previously marked with the Protect key (located just under the MENU button). Press OK when finished to return to the Copy Image(s) menu.
4. Start copying. When you choose Copy Image(s)? you’ll see a confirmation screen. Highlight Yes, press OK, and a progress screen with a green progress bar appears while the copying is underway. You’ll see a Copy Complete message when the task is finished. Press OK, and then the MENU button twice to back out of the menus; or just tap the shutter release button.
Tip
The Copy command will ask for confirmation before overwriting images on the destination card that have the same name as the source images. You can choose Replace Existing Image, Replace All, Skip, or Cancel the rest of the copying operation.
Figure 11.4 Choose a source slot for the images to be copied (left), or select images (right).
Image Review
There are certain shooting situations in which it’s useful to have the picture you’ve just shot pop up on the monitor automatically for review. Perhaps you’re fine-tuning exposure or autofocus and want to be able to see whether your most recent image is acceptable. Or, maybe you’re the nervous type and just want confirmation that you actually took a picture. Instant review has saved my bacon a few times; for example, when I was shooting with studio flash in Manual mode and didn’t notice that the shutter speed had been set to a (non-syncing) 1/500 second by mistake.
A lot of the time, however, it’s a better idea to not automatically review your shots in order to conserve battery power (the LCD monitor is one of the major juice drains in the camera) or to speed up or simplify operations. For example, if you’ve just fired off a burst of eight shots during a football game, do you really need to have each and every frame display as the camera clears its buffer and stores the photos on your memory card? This menu operation allows you to choose which mode to use:
On. Image review is automatic after every shot is taken.
Off. Images are displayed only when you press the Playback button. Nikon, in its wisdom, has made this the default setting.
After Delete
When you’ve deleted an image, you probably will want to do one of three things: have the D800 display the next picture (in the order shot); show the previous picture; or show either the next or previous picture, depending on which way you were scrolling during picture review. Your D800 lets you select which action to take:
Show next. It’s likely that you’ll want to look at the picture taken after the one you just deleted, so Nikon makes this the default action.
Show previous. I use this setting a lot when shooting sports with a continuous shooting setting. After the sequence is taken, I press the Playback button to see the last picture in the series and sometimes discover that the whole sequence missed the boat. I sometimes go ahead and press the Trash button twice to delete the offending image, then continue moving backward to delete the five or six or eleven other pictures in the wasted sequence. You’ll often find yourself with time on your hands at football games, and the urge to delete some stinker series to save your time reviewing back at the computer, while freeing up a little space on your card.
Continue as before. This setting actually makes a lot of sense: if you were scrolling backward or forward and deleting photos as you go, you might want to continue in the same direction weeding out bad shots. Use this setting to set your Nikon D800 to behave that way.
Rotate Tall
When you rotate the D800 to photograph vertical subjects in portrait (tall), rather than landscape (wide) orientation, you probably don’t want to view them tilted onto their sides later on, either on the camera monitor or within your image viewing/editing application on your computer. The D800 is way ahead of you. It has a directional sensor built in that can detect whether the camera was rotated when the photo was taken and hide this information in the image file itself. (This is the same sensor used to determine camera tilt in Virtual Horizon mode.)
The orientation data is applied in two different ways. It can be used by the D800 to automatically rotate images when they are displayed on the camera’s monitor, or you can ignore the data and let the images display in non-rotated fashion (so you have to rotate the camera to view them in their proper orientation). Your image-editing application, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, can also use the embedded file data to automatically rotate images on your computer screen.
Rotation works only if you’ve set Auto Image Rotation to On in the Setup menu (I’ll show you how to do that later in this chapter). Once you’ve done that, the D800 will embed information about orientation in the image file, and your image editor (such as Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements) will rotate the images for you as the files are loaded.
This menu choice deals only with whether the image should be rotated when displayed on the camera LCD monitor. (If you de-activate this option, your image-editing software can still read the embedded rotation data and properly display your images.) When Rotate Tall is turned off, the Nikon D800 does not rotate pictures taken in vertical orientation, displaying them as shown in Figure 11.5. The image is large on your LCD screen, but you must rotate the camera to view it upright.
When Rotate Tall is turned on, the D800 rotates pictures taken in vertical orientation on the monitor screen so you don’t have to turn the camera to view them comfortably. However, this orientation also means that the longest dimension of the image is shown using the shortest dimension of the monitor, so the picture is reduced in size, as you can see in Figure 11.6.
So, turn this feature On (as well as Auto Image Rotation in the Setup menu) if you’d rather not turn your camera to view vertical shots in their natural orientation, and don’t mind the smaller image. Turn the feature Off if, as I do, you’d rather see a larger image and are willing to rotate the camera to do so.
Slide Show
The D800’s Slide Show feature is a convenient way to review images in the current playback folder one after another, without the need to manually switch between them. If you’ve recorded voice memos for some or all of the images you display in your slide show, you can opt to have them played back as narration. Re-direct the output of your camera’s video to an HDTV television, and you’ve got an instant camera-based large-screen audiovisual extravaganza. Your options include:
Figure 11.5 With Rotate Tall turned off, vertical images appear large on the monitor, but you must turn the camera to view them upright.
Figure 11.6 With Rotate Tall turned on, vertical images are shown in a smaller size, but oriented for viewing without turning the camera.
Start. To activate a slide show, just choose Start from this entry in the Playback menu. During playback, you can press the OK button to pause the “slide show.” When the show is paused, a menu pops up, as shown in Figure 11.7, with choices to restart the show (by pressing the OK button again); change the interval between frames; or to exit the show entirely.
Image Type. You can choose to display both still images and movies, still images only, or movies only.
Frame interval. If you like, you can choose Frame Interval before commencing the show in order to select an interval of either 2, 3, 5, or 10 seconds between “slides.”
As the images are displayed, press the up/down multi selector buttons to change the amount of information presented on the screen with each image. For example, you might want to review a set of images and the settings used to shoot them. At any time during the show, press the up/down buttons until the informational screen you want is overlaid on the images.
Figure 11.7 Press the OK button to pause the slide show, change the interval between slides, or to exit the presentation.
As the slide show progresses, you can press the left/right multi selector buttons to move back to a previous frame or jump ahead to the next one. The slide show will then proceed as before. Press the MENU button to exit the slide show and return to the menu, or press the Playback button to exit the menu system totally. As always, while reviewing images you can tap the MENU button to exit the show and return to the menus, or tap the shutter release button if you want to remove everything from the screen and return to shooting mode.
At the end of the slide show, as when you’ve paused it, you’ll be offered the choice of restarting the sequence, changing the frame interval, or exiting the Slide Show feature completely.
DPOF Print Order
The Nikon D800 supports the DPOF (Digital Print Order Format) that is now almost universally used by digital cameras to specify which images on your memory card should be printed, and the number of prints desired of each image. This information is recorded on the memory card and can be interpreted by a compatible printer when the camera is linked to the printer using the USB cable (using the Direct Print facility, discussed in the next section), or when the memory card is inserted into a card reader slot on the printer itself. Photo labs are also equipped to read this data and make prints when you supply your memory card to them.
When you choose this menu item, you’re presented with a set of screens that look very much like the Delete photos screens described earlier, only you’re selecting pictures for printing rather than deleting them. The button sequences are slightly different, however:
1. Select/Set or Deselect All. The first screen allows you to quickly deselect any images that may have already been marked for printing, or to proceed directly to the Select/Set screen.
2. Review images. Use the multi selector cursor keys to scroll among the available images. Note: press the Zoom Out/Thumbnail button if you want to change to a different memory card or folder.
3. Evaluate image. When you highlight an image you might want to print, press the Zoom In button to temporarily enlarge that image so you can evaluate it further. When you release the button, the selection screen returns.
4. Mark for printing. To mark an image for printing, press the Protect button and hold it down while pressing the multi selector up and down buttons to choose the number of prints you want, up to 99 per image. A printer icon and the number specified will appear overlaid on that image’s thumbnail. (See Figure 11.8.)
Figure 11.8 Select images for printing.
5. Unmark unwanted images. To unmark an image for printing, highlight and hold down the Protect button while pressing the down button until the number of prints reaches zero. The printer icon will vanish.
6. Exit image selection. When you’ve finished marking images to print, press OK.
7. Choose imprint options. A final screen will appear in which you can request a data imprint (shutter speed and aperture) or imprint date (the date the photos were taken). Use the up/down buttons to select one or both of these options, if desired, and press the left/right buttons to mark or unmark the check boxes. When a box is marked, the imprint information for that option will be included on all prints in the print order.
8. Complete print order. Scroll up to Done when finished, and press OK or the right cursor button.
Direct Printing
Direct printing from your D800 to a PictBridge-compatible printer is not one of the Playback menu options; the PictBridge menu appears when the camera is connected to a PictBridge printer using the USB cable. In that mode, you can print any images you’ve selected using the Print Set (DPOF) menu entry in the Playback menu, or you can print directly.
Just follow these steps to print a single image:
1. Connect the camera to the PictBridge printer using the USB cable; do not connect through a USB hub.
2. Turn the camera back on. The PictBridge display will appear.
3. Use the left/right directional buttons on the multi selector to browse among available images. You can press the Zoom In button and rotate the main command dial to zoom in and out of a frame being viewed. (Press the Playback button to return to full frame view.)
4. Press the multi selector center button to view up to six thumbnails at once. Press the button a second time to view a highlighted picture in full frame mode.
5. When you’ve highlighted a picture you want to print, press OK to view the PictBridge printing options.
6. Use the up/down directional buttons to highlight an option, and the right directional button to select it. Your choices are:
Page size. Choose from your printer’s default page size, 3.5 × 5 in., 5 × 7 in., or A4 sizes.
No. of copies. Choose from 1 to 99 copies, and press OK.
Border. Select from Printer Default (the border setting already stored in your printer), Print With Border, or No Border. Press OK to return to the menu.
Time stamp. Select from Printer Default (the time stamp setting already stored in your printer), Print Time Stamp, or No Time Stamp. Press OK to return to the menu.
Cropping. A dialog box will appear, and you can rotate the main command dial to zoom cropping in or out, and the multi selector directional buttons to position the cropping frame.
7. When ready to print, select Start Printing. Once printing has begun, press OK to cancel before all the copies have been output. Press OK to return to the menu.
To print multiple images, follow these steps:
1. Press the MENU button in the PictBridge playback display.
2. Select one of the following:
Choose Print Select to choose the images now that you want to print.
Choose Print (DPOF) to print the images that you have previously marked using the Playback menu’s Print Set (DPOF) menu.
Choose Index Print to create an index print of all the JPEG images on the memory card.
3. If you’ve chosen Print Select, choose the images to be printed, using the left/right directional buttons, the Protect button to mark them, and the up/down buttons to select the number of prints from 1 to 99 copies.
4. Press the OK button to display PictBridge printing options, as in Step 8 above, except that only Page Size, Border, and Time Stamp may be specified.
5. When ready to print, select Start Printing. Once printing has begun, press OK to cancel before all the copies have been output. Press OK to return to the menu.
Shooting Menu Options
The various direct setting buttons and dials on the D800, for image quality, autofocus mode, white balance, release mode, ISO sensitivity, metering mode, and flash, along with exposure compensation (EV) adjustments, are likely to be the most common settings changes you make, with changes during a particular session fairly common. You’ll find some of these duplicated in the Shooting menu (see Figure 11.9), along with options that you access second-most frequently when you’re using your Nikon D800, such as specifying noise reduction for long exposures or high ISO settings. You might make such adjustments as you begin a shooting session, or when you move from one type of subject to another. Nikon makes accessing these changes very easy.
This section explains the options of the Shooting menu and how to use them. The options you’ll find in these green-coded menus include:
Shooting Menu Bank
Extended Menu Banks
Storage Folder
File Naming
Primary Slot Selection
Secondary Slot Function
Image Quality
Image Size
Image Area
JPEG Compression
NEF (RAW) Recording
White Balance
Set Picture Control
Manage Picture Control
Color Space
Active D-Lighting
HDR (High Dynamic Range)
Vignette Control
Auto Distortion Control
Long Exposure NR
High ISO NR
ISO Sensitivity Settings
Multiple Exposure
Live View (mode D800)
Multiple Exposure
Interval Timer Shooting
Time-Lapse Photography
Movie Settings
Figure 11.9 Common shooting settings can be changed in this menu.
Shooting Menu Bank
The Nikon D800’s Shooting menu banks are four groups named, initially, A, B, C, and D that store specific collections of Shooting menu settings that you can recall at any time by switching to the bank containing the preferences you want to use. These banks are one of the primary reasons why the D800 is more versatile than Nikon’s entry-level dSLRs, which lack the ability to change shooting specifications en masse using a simple menu command. The Shooting menu banks A, B, C, and D should not be confused with the four similarly named Custom Settings menu banks A, B, C, and D, which provide similar, but separate storage of your CSM settings. You can use your Shooting menu banks and Custom Settings menu banks in any combination. That is, you can be using Shooting menu bank A, and Custom Settings menu bank C at the same time.
In addition to the standard menu banks, the D800 has the ability to store additional information in what Nikon calls Extended menu banks. They aren’t really different banks; when you activate extended banks, the A, B, C, and D banks simply include exposure mode and exposure settings information in those banks, as I’ll explain in the section that follows this one.
The D800 uses bank A by default. To switch to another bank:
Navigate to the Shooting menu. Press MENU and select the Shooting menu.
Choose the menu bank option. Scroll to Shooting Menu Bank and press the multi selector right button.
Select the bank to activate. Scroll to the bank you want to use with the multi selector up/down buttons, and either press OK or press the multi selector right button to confirm your choice.
Exit menus. The Shooting menu appears again. Press the MENU button to back out of the menu, or simply tap the shutter release.
Any changes you make to one menu bank do not affect the other banks, except for the following exceptions: changes made to Interval Timer Shooting, Multiple Exposure, Time-Lapse Photography, and Extended Menu Banks settings, along with any changes you make to customize Picture Controls carry across all four menu banks. All other Shooting menu changes you make are confined only to the bank that is active when you make those adjustments. For example, if you change Image Quality to RAW in bank A, then the Image Quality setting in bank B will not be modified.
Because the settings for each bank are more or less independent of the others, you can set each one up with the settings you like to use in particular situations. For example, you could use bank A for sports, bank B for landscapes, bank C for portraits, and bank D for general shooting. Or, if you’re a specialist, one bank could be dedicated to indoor sports (with high ISO settings and tungsten or fluorescent light balance) and another for outdoor sports (normal ISO and daylight white balance), with both specifying JPEG FINE capture only, because RAW or RAW+JPEG can slow down continuous shooting. You could even tailor a D800’s operation using parameters other than typical shooting sessions. For example, a wedding photography studio that shares a pool of Nikon D800 cameras among several photographers could have one bank named Peter, another named Paul, and a third dedicated to shooter Mary. The currently selected bank is indicated in the monochrome control panel, and in the shooting information display.
Entering Text on the Nikon D800
Customized names of up to 20 characters each can be used to replace the generic A, B, C, and D designations. Highlight the bank you want to label in the Shooting Menu Bank screen, and select Rename by pressing the right directional button. You can then use the standard Nikon text entry screen to specify the name you want to use. Now is a good time to master text entry, because you can use it to enter comments, rename folders, and perform other functions.
The Nikon D800 uses a fairly standardized text entry screen to name files, Picture Controls, create new folder names, enter image comments, and other text. You’ll be using text entry with other functions that I’ll describe later in this book. The screen looks like the one shown in Figure 11.10, with some variations (for example, some functions have a less diverse character set, or offer more or fewer spaces for your entries). To name a menu bank, just use the multi selector navigational buttons to scroll around within the array of alphanumerics. Then, enter your text:
Highlight a character. Use the multi selector keys to scroll around within the array of characters.
Insert highlighted character. Press the multi selector center button to insert the highlighted character. The cursor will move one place to the right to accept the next character.
Non-destructively backspace. Hold down the Thumbnail/Zoom Out button and use the left/right buttons to move the cursor within the line of characters you’ve entered. This allows you to backspace and replace a character without disturbing the others you’ve entered.
Erase a highlighted character. To remove a character you’ve already input, move the cursor to highlight that character, and then press the Trash button.
Confirm your entry. When you’re finished entering text, press the OK button to confirm your entry, then press the left button twice to return to the Shooting menu, or just tap the shutter release to exit the menu system entirely.
Figure 11.10 Use this D800 screen to enter text.
As you work with menu banks, keep in mind that while changes you make to a particular bank don’t affect the other banks, they are “sticky” within that bank once you’ve made them. That is, if you’ve set up a “sports” menu bank to use a high ISO sensitivity setting, and then during a session change the value to ISO 200, that’s what you’ll get the next time you access that menu bank (unless you remember to change it back to your preferred value at the end of the session). So, at best, your customized banks are preset for you only to the extent that you don’t change those settings while you use them.
In Chapter 3, I provided a list of recommended Shooting menu bank settings for typical photo environments, from sports and landscapes to portraits and macros.
Reset Shooting Menu
Earlier Nikon cameras had a separate entry for reverting the settings of the current menu bank to the factory default settings. However, by placing this option at the top level of the Shooting menu, it was easy to overlook the fact that this reset applied only to the currently active bank, and not to all banks. To reset the A, B, C, and D banks to their factory defaults, you must reset each bank individually. Nikon has moved the option into the Shooting Menu Bank entry, where it is a choice (along with Rename) for whichever menu bank is highlighted.
Don’t feel bad over being confused about what this menu item does. The Nikon D800 has, in effect, three different kinds of resets. This is one of them.
Shooting menu reset. Use this option to reset the values of the currently selected Shooting menu bank except for image quality, image size, white balance, and ISO sensitivity to their default values. When you select this option by pressing the Trash button in the Shooting Menu Bank screen, your choices are Yes and No. As I said earlier, kindly note that the defaults are restored only for the menu bank that is active, and not any of the other three Shooting menu banks, except for multiple exposure and interval timer shooting settings, which are reset for all four banks. A reset has no effect on the four settings noted above.
Custom Settings menu reset. This option, which I’ll describe in Chapter 12, is used to reset any of the four Custom Settings menu banks. It has no effect on camera settings or Shooting menu banks.
Two-button reset. The Nikon D800’s two-button reset (holding down the QUAL and Exposure Compensation buttons [on the top of the camera at the left and right sides, respectively] simultaneously for more than two seconds) will not reset your Shooting menu banks or Custom Settings menu banks. This particular reset is for basic settings, such as focus point, exposure mode, flexible program, exposure/flash compensation, autoexposure hold, bracketing, flash mode, flash value lock, and multiple exposure settings.
Table 11.1 shows the default values set using the Reset Shooting menu option. If you don’t know what some of these settings are, I’ll explain them later in this section.
Table 11.1 Default Shooting Menu Values
Extended Menu Banks
The Nikon D800 has the ability to include several additional parameters—exposure mode, shutter speed, and aperture—to the values stored in a particular Shooting menu bank. So, if you have a Sports mode especially for action photography and always begin a sports session using Shutter-priority and a shutter speed of 1/1,000th second, you can include that information in each of your shooting menu banks. Or, perhaps you have a bank set up for portraits, and you like to use Aperture-priority with an f/stop of f/5.6 to reduce depth-of-field. The extended menu banks can keep that information on file, too.
When would you not want to use extended menu banks? You’d probably want to switch this feature off if you change exposure modes frequently and don’t care (or don’t want) a particular shutter speed or aperture to be preset for you when you change to a particular menu bank. (Keep in mind that, once a bank has been loaded, you can always change to a different mode or setting, and that your new setting will become the default for that bank when you reload it in the future.)
With this option set to Off (the default), the D800 will not store exposure mode, f/stop, or shutter speed in a menu bank. If you select On, then exposure mode will be stored. If the exposure mode that is stored is Shutter-priority or Manual, then the shutter speed will be remembered as well. If the exposure mode is Aperture-priority or Manual, the aperture will be remembered.
Storage Folder
If you want to store images in a folder other than the one created and selected by the Nikon D800, you can switch among available folders on your memory card, or create your own folder. Remember that any folders you create will be deleted when you reformat your memory card.
Why create your own folders? Perhaps you’re traveling and have a high-capacity memory card and want to store the images for each day (or for each city that you visit) in a separate folder. Maybe you’d like to separate those wedding photos you snapped at the ceremony from those taken at the reception. As I mentioned earlier, the Nikon D800 automatically creates a folder on a newly formatted memory card with a name like 100ND800, and when it fills with 999 images, it will automatically create a new folder with a number incremented by one (such as 101ND800). To create your own folder or select an existing folder:
1. Access active folder entry. Choose Storage Folder in the Shooting menu, and press the right multi selector button.
2. Choose selection method. Highlight either Select Folder by Number or Select Folder from List (to choose a folder that you know already exists). Press the right directional button to confirm your choice. One of two screens appears, with the card in the currently active slot highlighted. Perform the tasks in either Step 3 or Step 4.
3. Select Folder by Number/New Folder Number. If you’ve chosen this option, a screen appears with three digits representing the possible folder numbers from 100-999, as shown in Figure 11.11. Use the left/right buttons to move between the digits, and the up/down buttons to increase or decrease the value of the digit. If a folder already exists with the number you dial in, an icon appears showing folder is empty, partially full, or has 999 or a picture numbered 9999 and can contain no more images. Press OK to create the new folder and make it the active folder. You’d want to use this option to create a new folder or when you don’t know whether a folder by a particular number already exists. If a folder with that number already resides on the memory card, you can use it (if it is not full); if it doesn’t exist, you can create it.
4. Select Folder from List/Select Folder. From among the available folders shown, scroll to the one that you want to become active for image storage and playback. This feature is handy when you want to display a slide show located in a particular folder. Use this option if you know that the folder you want to use already resides on the memory card. Press OK to confirm your choice and make the folder active.
5. Exit menus. Press the MENU button or tap the shutter release to exit.
Figure 11.11 Create a new folder or select an existing folder number.
File Naming
The D800, like other cameras in the Nikon product line, automatically applies a name like _DSC0001.jpg or DSC_0001.nef to your image files as they are created. You can use this menu option to change the names applied to your photos and associated voice memos—but only within certain strict limitations. In practice, you can change only three of the eight characters, the DSC portion of the filename. The other five are mandated either by the Design Rule for Camera File System (DCF) specification that all digital camera makers adhere to or to industry conventions.
DCF limits filenames created by conforming digital cameras to a maximum of eight characters, plus a three-character extension (such as .jpg, .tif, .nef, or .way in the case of audio files) that represents the format of the file. The eight-plus-three (usually called 8.3) length limitation dates back to an evil and frustrating computer operating system that we older photographers would like to forget (its initials are D.O.S), but which, unhappily, lives on as the wraith of a filenaming convention.
Of the eight available characters, four are used to represent, in a general sense, the type of camera used to create the image. By convention, one of those characters is an underline, placed in the first position (as in _DSCxxxx.xxx) when the image uses the Adobe RGB color space (more on color spaces later), and in the fourth position (as in DSC_xxxx.xxx) for sRGB and RAW (NEF) files. That leaves just three characters for the manufacturer (and you) to use. Nikon, Sony, and some other vendors use DSC (which may or may not stand for Digital Still Camera, depending on who you ask), while Canon prefers IMG. The remaining four characters are used for numbers from 0000 to 9999, which is why your D800 “rolls over” to DSC_0000 again when the 9999 number limitation is reached.
When you select File Naming in the Shooting menu, you’ll be shown the current settings for both sRGB (and RAW) and Adobe RGB. Press the right multi selector button, and you’ll be taken to the (mostly) standard Nikon text entry screen (go back to Figure 11.10 if you’ve forgotten what it looks like) and allowed to change the DSC value to something else. In this version of the text entry screen, however, only the numbers from 0 to 9 and characters A-Z are available; the filename cannot contain other characters. As always, press the OK button to confirm your new setting.
Because the default DSC characters don’t tell you much, don’t hesitate to change them to something else. I use 800 for my D800 and ND4 for my Nikon D4. If you don’t need to differentiate between different camera models, you can change the three characters to anything else that suits your purposes, including your initials (DDB_ or JFK_ for example) or even customize for particular shooting sessions (EUR_, GER_, FRA_, and JAP_ when taking vacation trips). You can also use the filename flexibility to partially overcome the 9999 numbering limitation. You could, for example, use the template 801_ to represent the first 10,000 pictures you take with your D800, and then 802_ for the next 10,000, and 803_ for the 10,000 after that.
That’s assuming that you don’t rename your image files in your computer. In a way, filenaming verges on a moot consideration, because, they apply only to the images as they exist in your camera. After (or during) transfer to your computer you can change the names to anything you want, completely disregarding the 8.3 limitations (although it’s a good idea to retain the default extensions). If you shot an image file named DSC_4832.jpg in your camera, you could change it to Paris_EiffelTower_32.jpg later on. Indeed, virtually all photo transfer programs, including Nikon Transfer and Photoshop Elements Transfer, allow you to specify a template and rename your photos as they are moved or copied to your computer from your camera or memory card.
I usually don’t go to that bother (I generally don’t use transfer software; I just drag and drop images from my memory card to folders I have set up), but renaming can be useful for those willing to take the time to do it.
Primary Slot Selection
This menu entry allows you to specify which of the two slots in your D800 is the primary slot. Nikon’s default is the SD slot (perhaps they are trying to tell us something), but you can, as I do, choose the CF card slot instead. There are many reasons why I prefer to use my CF card as my primary storage. Although I use 64GB cards in both slots (almost a must with a 36-megapixel camera), my preferred CF card is a 600X with a read/write speed of 90 megabits/second, while my Class 10 SDXC card is in practice a tad slower. (It’s difficult to compare read/write speeds of CF and SD-class cards directly, because the way in which those speeds are reported is different. CF card ratings give a maximum speed under ideal conditions, while SDXC speed ratings are the minimum you can expect.)
Secondary Slot Function
This menu entry allows you to specify the function of the second memory card slot in the Nikon D800, choosing to use the secondary slot to accept overflow images when the primary card fills up; create a backup of all the files stored on the primary card; or to split your RAW+JPEG files between primary and secondary slots. The D800’s Movie Settings functions (explained later in this chapter) offer a fourth option: you can select which slot is used to store your movie clips (and can therefore choose the largest memory card or fastest memory card for your movies).
As I’ve mentioned before, the second memory card slot, introduced to the Nikon world with the original D3 (Canon has had this feature on its high-end dSLRs for some time) is one of my favorite features. I’ll explain your choices for secondary slot functions—and the importance of each of them—in the next sections.
Overflow
In this case when the memory card in the primary slot fills up, the D800 automatically switches over to the card in the secondary slot. The changeover happens quickly, and you’re not even likely to notice, unless you have your eye on the “slot” indicators on the top control panel or the monitor’s shooting information display. There are dozens of ways to use this capability:
“Limitless” Capacity. My standard operating procedure is to put one 64GB memory card in each slot. As a practical matter, that means I can shoot all day without changing memory cards, even if I am shooting landscapes and bracketing everything with three- or five-shot sets (either to optimize exposure, or, when the camera is mounted on a tripod, to capture files for later HDR processing). Or, I might be shooting sports/photojournalism, where the practice is to change memory cards when your media is 80 percent full to eliminate the possibility of missing anything important due to a card change at an inopportune time.
Small/fast—with backup. For some sports, if you are shooting continuously, you may want your fastest memory card in the primary slot to maximize write speed out of the camera’s buffer, but the real speed demons in the memory card world can be expensive. So, instead of an affordable 64GB medium-speed card, you may put a (per gigabyte) more expensive 8GB or 16GB high speed card in the primary slot, and back it up with a slightly slower (and cheaper) 16GB or 32GB card. You can capture images with the fastest card you’ve got, yet not have to worry about missing shots, because you have a backup card installed in the secondary slot.
Put smaller cards to use. If you don’t think you’ll need the overflow capacity, but still want to have it just in case, put a smaller card that you don’t use much anymore in the secondary slot. If your large card that you didn’t think would fill does come up short, you won’t lose any shots. They’ll be directed to that old 8GB card you put in the secondary slot for insurance. I sometimes do this when I am using several cameras and have a limited number of large cards at my disposal. I’ll save the big cards for primary use, knowing that any overflow shots will be stored on the small backup cards if necessary. I own two 64GB CF and SD cards, five 32GB CF cards, two 32GB SD cards, and a gazillion 16GB SD cards, so I am able to use the smallest and slowest cards as my overflow storage as I keep feeding the largest/fastest cards into my primary slot.
Stretch your budget. Your D800 produces files that are at least two or three times as large as your old 16 or 12 megapixel model, but after spending an arm and a leg for a 36-megapixel camera, you’d like to avoid replacing your old fast but limited-capacity 8GB memory cards for a little while. (Perhaps you’re waiting for those new 128GB cards to come down in price.) With one 8GB card in each slot, you can double your shooting before it’s time to swap cards.
Backup
In this case, each photograph you take is recorded on the memory cards in both the primary slot and secondary slot. The write process takes slightly longer (so it may not be your best option when shooting sports), but it’s otherwise a seamless way to create a backup copy of each and every image you take. If you’re shooting RAW+JPEG, both files associated with each image are recorded on both slots. I absolutely love this feature, as I’ve mentioned before in this book. Here are some of my favorite applications:
Critical shots backed up instantly. When I was a photojournalist, a lot of the images I took, particularly of spot news events, were literally once-in-a-lifetime shots that couldn’t be duplicated under any circumstances. I also shot weddings, and while it was sometimes possible to restage a particular setup or pose, that was never a satisfactory option, even if done on the day of the nuptials. So, there was always a degree of trepidation until the film was processed or digital files backed up. With dual-slot backup capabilities, backup files can be made instantly, as you shoot. What a relief!
Great when there’s No-Fi. Many pros (and more than a few amateurs) rely on in-camera Wi-Fi connectivity (using Nikon’s WT-4 accessory) to beam backups to a nearby laptop computer for safe-keeping, or, at events, so that an assistant can be processing some images while photography continues. But, sometimes that’s not possible, or, perhaps, you don’t own the necessary equipment. Making a backup in your camera is a great alternative when wireless capabilities are unavailable or impractical. You can even shuttle that secondary slot card to an assistant at intervals while retaining the “main” copy of your images in the camera.
Leave your PSD at home. When I travel overseas, I like to pack light, with only a carry-on bag that holds my camera gear and some of my clothing, with the rest of my apparel relegated to the second tote that qualifies as a “personal” item. But I’ve always carried two card reader/personal storage devices so I can make backup copies of my images while I travel. I’ve found that my dual-card Nikon cameras can easily replace the PSD. I can back up each image as it’s shot automatically, or shoot on one card (to allow faster capture) and make a duplicate with a card-to-card copy back in my hotel room in the evening. Or I can use the D800’s Copy Image(s) feature to make an extra copy of only the images I want.
Instant copy to share. Want to give a traveling companion copies of all the images you shoot? Create a backup as you take the photos and hand over the copy on the spot. (Again, if you want to share only some of your pictures, you can use the Copy Image(s) feature instead.)
RAW, the Primary Slot—JPEG, the Secondary Slot
In this mode, when you’re shooting RAW+JPEG, the NEF (RAW) files are saved to the card in the primary slot, and the JPEG files are saved to the card in the secondary slot. When you’re using any other Quality setting (any JPEG option, or TIFF), the images are stored in the primary slot, until that card fills; then the photos overflow to the secondary slot. (This is effectively the same as the Backup option.) You’ll find this mode useful under the following conditions:
Separate RAW and JPEG. Perhaps you like to store your RAW and JPEG files in separate locations. This mode makes it easy to do that. Copy the card containing the RAW files to one destination on your computer, and the JPEG files from the other card to a second destination. The only complication is that the memory card in the primary slot is likely to fill up more quickly than the card with the smaller JPEG files in the secondary slot, so if you shoot to the capacity of the card in the primary slot, you’ll need to replace it more often than you will the card with the JPEG files. Or, if you want the two cards to be mirror images of each other (but in different formats), you can swap them both out at the same time, with the secondary slot card only partially full.
Faster backup of RAW+JPEG. If you shoot RAW+JPEG, using the Backup option (described earlier) means that you’re saving four files each time you press the shutter release. That can slow you down in some situations if you’re rapid-firing a sequence of images. Storing RAW files on one card, and JPEG files on the other is a faster way of capturing a backup, because only two files are saved per click. If you have a problem with one of your JPEG files, you can easily produce a new JPEG from the RAW file. (Nikon Capture NX 2 has a batch mode that simplifies creating JPEGs from NEFs en masse, in fact.) The reverse is not true, however. If your NEF file gets munged, your RAW information is lost forever, even though you still have the JPEG version. Note: with this option, if you shoot RAW files (only), then the RAW file will be stored on the Primary card. If you shoot JPEG (only), then JPEG versions will be stored on each card!
Image Quality
As I noted in Chapter 2, you can choose the image quality settings used by the D800 to store its files. The quickest way to do that is to hold down the QUAL button embedded on the release mode dial at left on the camera’s top panel, and spin the main command dial until the quality setting you want is shown. You can also use this menu option to make the quality settings using the bigger, brighter 3.2-inch color monitor. You have three choices to make:
JPEG compression. To reduce the size of your image files and allow more photos to be stored on a given memory card, the D800 uses JPEG compression to squeeze the images down to a smaller size. This compacting reduces the image quality a little, so you’re offered your choice of Fine (a 1:4 reduction), Normal (1:8 reduction), and Basic (1:16) compression. You can see an exaggerated version of the effects of JPEG compression in Figure 11.12. There is a further tweak you can make, specifying whether JPEG compression should be optimized for the smallest possible image size at a given compression level, or whether you’d prefer to sacrifice some compression for optimal quality. You won’t find those options in this menu entry; instead, use the JPEG Compression menu item, described later in this section.
JPEG, RAW, or both. You can elect to store only JPEG versions of the images you shoot, or you can save your photos as RAW files, which consume more than twice as much space on your memory card. Or, you can store both at once as you shoot (and store them to different memory cards, if you like, using the secondary slot function described previously). Many photographers elect to save both JPEG and a RAW, so they’ll have a JPEG version that might be usable as-is, as well as the original “digital negative” RAW file in case they want to do some processing of the image later. You’ll end up with two different versions of the same file: one with a .jpg extension, and one with the .nef extension that signifies a Nikon RAW file.
TIFF. The TIFF format is a lossless uncompressed 8-bit format (at least, in its Nikon incarnation) that is preferred for some applications, such as stock photography. TIFFs are several times larger than RAW files, however, and it takes a long time to store a TIFF file on a memory card (a second or two, at least), so most photographers don’t create TIFFs in the camera. It’s usually a better idea to produce a TIFF file from a RAW file, which, because it can contain up to 14 bits of information (instead of the Nikon TIFF format’s 8 bits), has potentially a wider range of colors captured.
Figure 11.12 At low levels of JPEG compression, the image looks sharp even when you enlarge it enough to see the actual pixels (top); when using extreme JPEG compression (bottom) an image obviously loses quality.
The D800 always saves a full-resolution 7360 × 4912 pixel RAW image even if you choose a smaller image size (resolution) for the JPEG version (such as Medium (M) or Small (S)).
To choose the combination you want, access the Shooting menu, scroll to Image Quality, and select it. A screen similar to the one shown in Figure 11.13 will appear. Scroll to highlight the setting you want, and either press OK or push the multi selector right button to confirm your selection.
Figure 11.13 You can choose RAW, JPEG, RAW+JPEG, or TIFF formats here.
In practice, you’ll probably use the JPEG Fine and RAW+JPEG Fine selections most often. Why so many choices, then? There are some limited advantages to using the JPEG Normal and JPEG Basic settings, either at full resolution (Large) or when using the Medium and Small resolution settings. Settings that are less than max allow stretching the capacity of your memory card so you can shoehorn quite a few more pictures onto a single memory card. That can come in useful when on vacation and you’re running out of storage, or when you’re shooting non-critical work that doesn’t require 36 megapixels of resolution (such as photos taken for real estate listings, web page display, photo ID cards, or similar applications). Some photographers like to record RAW+JPEG Basic so they’ll have a moderate quality JPEG file for review only and no intention of using for editing purposes, while retaining access to the original full-resolution/uncompressed RAW file for serious editing.
For most work, using lower resolution and extra compression is false economy. You never know when you might actually need that extra bit of picture detail. Your best bet is to have enough memory cards to handle all the shooting you want to do until you have the chance to transfer your photos to your computer or a personal storage device.
However, reduced image quality can sometimes be beneficial if you’re shooting sequences of photos rapidly, as the D800 is able to hold more of them in its internal memory buffer before transferring to the memory card. Still, for most sports and other applications, you’d probably rather have better, sharper pictures than longer periods of continuous shooting. Do you really need 20 or 30 shots of a pass reception in a football game, or a dozen or two slightly different versions of your local basketball star driving in for a lay-up?
JPEG vs. RAW
You’ll sometimes be told that RAW files are the “unprocessed” image information your camera produces, before it’s been modified. That’s nonsense. RAW files are no more unprocessed than your camera film is after it’s been through the chemicals to produce a negative or transparency. A lot can happen in the developer that can affect the quality of a film image—positively and negatively—and, similarly, your digital image undergoes a significant amount of processing before it is saved as a RAW file. Nikon even applies a name (EXPEED) to the digital image processing (DIP) chip used to perform this magic.
A RAW file is more similar to a film camera’s processed negative. It contains all the information, captured in 12-bit or 14-bit channels per color (and stored in a 16-bit space), with no sharpening and no application of any special filters or other settings you might have specified when you took the picture. Those settings are stored with the RAW file so they can be applied when the image is converted to a form compatible with your favorite image editor. However, using RAW conversion software such as Adobe Camera Raw or Nikon Capture NX, you can override those settings and apply settings of your own. You can select essentially the same changes there that you might have specified in your camera’s picture-taking options.
RAW exists because sometimes we want to have access to all the information captured by the camera, before the camera’s internal logic has processed it and converted the image to a standard file format. Even Compressed RAW doesn’t save as much space as JPEG. What it does do is preserve all the information captured by your camera after it’s been converted from analog to digital form.
So, why don’t we always use RAW? Some photographers avoid using Nikon’s RAW NEF files on the misguided conviction that they don’t want to spend time in post-processing, forgetting that, if the camera settings you would have used for JPEG are correct, each RAW image’s default attributes will use those settings and the RAW image will not need much manipulation. Post-processing in such cases is optional, and overwhelmingly helpful when an image needs to be fine-tuned.
Although some photographers do save only in RAW format, it’s more common (and frequently more convenient) to use RAW plus one of the JPEG options, or, if you’re confident about your settings, just shoot JPEG and eschew RAW altogether. In some situations, working with a RAW file can slow you down a little. RAW images take longer to store on the memory card, and must be converted from RAW to a format your image editor can handle, whether you elect to go with the default settings in force when the picture was taken, or make minor adjustments to the settings you specified in the camera.
As a result, those who depend on speedy access to images or who shoot large numbers of photos at once may prefer JPEG over RAW. Wedding photographers, for example, might expose several thousand photos during a bridal affair and offer hundreds to clients as electronic proofs for inclusion in an album. Wedding shooters take the time to make sure that their in-camera settings are correct, minimizing the need to post-process photos after the event. Given that their JPEGs are so good, there is little need to get bogged down shooting RAW.
Sports photographers also avoid RAW files. I visited a local Division III college one sunny September afternoon. I covered the first half of a football game, trotted down a hill to shoot a women’s soccer match later that afternoon, and ended up in the adjacent field house shooting a volleyball invitational tournament an hour later. I managed to shoot 1,920 photos, most of them using continuous shooting, in about four hours. I certainly didn’t have any plans to do post-processing on very many of those shots, and firing the camera at its maximum frame rate didn’t allow RAW shooting, so carefully exposed and precisely focused JPEG images were my file format of choice that day.
JPEG was invented as a more compact file format that can store most of the information in a digital image, but in a much smaller size. JPEG predates most digital SLRs and was initially used to squeeze down files for transmission over slow dial-up connections. Even if you were using an early dSLR with 1.3 megapixel files for news photography, you didn’t want to send them back to the office over a modem at 1,200 bps.
But, as I noted, JPEG provides smaller files by compressing the information in a way that loses some image data. JPEG remains a viable alternative because it offers several different quality levels. At the highest quality Fine level, you might not be able to tell the difference between the original RAW file and the JPEG version.
In my case, I shoot virtually everything at RAW+JPEG Fine. Most of the time, I’m not concerned about filling up my memory cards, even when shooting in dual-slot Backup mode, as I usually have my 64GB CF and SDXC cards, and a minimum of five 32GB memory cards with me. I also use a MacBook Air with an external 1TB hard drive, and (as I mentioned earlier) for short trips, rely on my D800’s capability of copying directly from one memory card to the other in the camera. When shooting sports I’ll shift to JPEG Fine (with no RAW file) to squeeze a little extra speed out of my camera’s continuous shooting mode, and to reduce the need to wade through eight-photo bursts taken in RAW format.
You may notice that I am not going into the TIFF option in any detail. To oversimplify things, for most of us, TIFF provides the worst of both worlds: it has heftier storage space requirements than the “worst” case RAW file. Those who don’t mind waiting up to four or five seconds for a single image to be stored to the memory card, and who have prodigious skills at getting their in-camera settings correct the first time, can use TIFF if necessary. The main reason to use TIFF is because of its ability to include an embedded ICC color profile. The format itself doesn’t provide much in the way of perceptible quality improvement, and if the image requires extensive editing, it may actually limit the quality of the photo.
HIDDEN JPEGS
You may not be aware that your RAW file contains an embedded JPEG file, hidden inside in the JPEG Basic format. It’s used to provide thumbnail previews of JPEG files, which is why you may notice an interesting phenomenon when loading a RAW image into a program like Nikon Capture NX 2 or Adobe Lightroom. When the software first starts interpreting the RAW image, it may immediately display this hidden JPEG view which has, as you might expect, all the settings applied that you dialed into the camera. Then, as it finishes loading the RAW file, the application (Lightroom in particular) uses its own intelligence to fine-tune the image and display what it thinks is a decent version of the image, replacing the embedded JPEG. That’s why you may see complaints that Lightroom or another program is behaving oddly: the initial embedded JPEG may look better than the final version, so it looks as if the application is degrading the image quality as the file loads. Of course, in all cases, once the RAW file is available, you can make your own changes to optimize it to your taste.
There is a second use for these hidden JPEG files. If you shoot RAW without creating JPEG files and later decide you want a JPEG version, there are dozens of utility programs that will extract the embedded JPEG and save it as a separate file. (Google “JPEG extractor” to locate a freeware program that will perform this step for your Mac, PC, or other computer.)
Image Size
The next menu command in the Shooting menu lets you select the resolution, or number of pixels captured as you shoot with your Nikon D800. Your choices range from Large (L), Medium (M), and Small (S). On the D800, those resolutions correspond to 7360 × 4912 pixels/36 megapixels (L); 5520 × 3680/20 megapixels (M); and 3680 × 2456/9 megapixels (S) sizes. These figures are all for the full-frame FX image area, which Nikon calls (36 × 24) 1.0x in the Image Area entry of the Shooting menu. Resolutions and megapixels depart from those values when using DX format (24 × 16) 1.5x, 5:4 format (30 × 24), and (on the D800) 1.2x, which is called (30 × 20) 1.2x.
Select image sizes by holding down the QUAL button on top of the Release mode dial, while rotating the sub-command dial to change resolution among Large (L), Medium (M), or Small (S). Or, you can use this menu to perform the task (usually because you find the color monitor easier to view under the particular circumstances). There are no additional options available from the Image Size menu screen.
Image Area
This is the first entry on the second page of the Shooting menu (see Figure 11.14). You have two options, Auto DX Crop and Choose Image Area:
Auto DX Crop. You can switch this feature On or Off. When activated, the D800 will detect when a Nikon-brand DX lens is mounted and automatically crop the image to produce a frame filled with the DX coverage area, reducing the resolution of the photo to 16 megapixels (with the D800). The camera may not detect DX-format lenses from other vendors, in which case you’ll need to use the manual image area option described next. Turn Auto DX Crop off, and the camera always captures the full frame. You’d want to use that option if you don’t mind the vignetting that a DX lens can produce in full-frame mode, or if you’re using a lens that you know will cover the full frame acceptably at the focal length you plan to use.
Choose Image Area. You can manually specify the image area to be used, which the D800 will apply regardless of what type of lens is mounted on the camera. Use this option to force the image area issue (as when you’re using a DX-format lens that the D800 can’t detect automatically), or to use a particular image area for all your shots in a session. Your choices include:
FX format (36 × 24). This is the full FX image format area, roughly 36mm × 24mm.
DX format (24 × 16). This fills the image frame with the image in the center 24mm × 16mm of the sensor, creating a 1.5X crop factor. (See Chapter 7 for more about the crop factor and lenses.)
Figure 11.14 Image Area is the first choice on the second “page” of the Shooting menu of the D800.
5:4 (30 × 24). Images are captured using a 5:4 aspect ratio, the same as a 4 × 5 or 8 × 10-inch print.
1.2X (30 × 20). This image area produces an image that fills the frame with a 3:2 aspect ratio (the same proportions as the full-frame image area), but with a 1.2X crop factor. I like to use this setting with some DX-format lenses that don’t quite cover the full 36mm × 24mm frame, but which do fill up the entire 30mm × 20mm image area. For example, I have a 10-17mm fisheye zoom lens that I like to use on my full-frame cameras, and I can get an acceptable 16-megapixel image with my D800 in DX mode. However, when I switch to the 1.2X crop mode, I lose a little bit of the fisheye effect, but get corner-to-corner coverage in an even more usable 25-megapixel image file.
JPEG Compression
This menu entry is a simple one, offering you the choice of specifying either Size Priority (variable compression) or Optimal Quality (minimal compression) when the D800 creates JPEG files. I’ll explain image compression in more detail in the next section.
Size priority. When this option is selected, the D800 will create files that are fairly uniformly sized at roughly 16.3MB for a JPEG Fine image. Because some photos have content that is more easily compressible (for example, plain areas of sky can be squeezed down more than areas filled with detail), to maintain the standard file size the camera must apply more compression to some images, and less to others. As a result, there may be a barely noticeable loss of detail in the more heavily compressed images. The uniform file size also means that the D800’s buffer will hold the maximum number of shots during continuous shooting, allowing you to shoot longer sequences without the need to pause and wait for some images to be written to the memory card.
Optimal quality. Choose this option if you want to maintain the best image quality possible at a particular JPEG setting (Fine, Normal, or Basic) and don’t care if the file size varies. Because the D800 will use only the minimum amount of compression required at each JPEG setting, file size will vary depending on scene content, and your buffer may hold fewer images during continuous shooting.
NEF (RAW) Recording
Here you can choose the type (amount) of compression applied to NEF (RAW) files as they are stored on your memory card, and whether the images are stored using 12-bit or 14-bit depth. The default values for type (Lossless compressed) and color depth (12-bit) work best for most situations, but there are times when you might want to use one of the other choices.
Compression is a mathematical technique for reducing the size of a collection of information (such as an image; but other types of data or even programs can be compressed, too) in order to reduce the storage requirements and/or time required to transmit or transfer the information. Some compression algorithms arrange strings of bits that are most frequently used in a table, so that a binary number like, say, 1001011011100111 (16 digits long) doesn’t have to be stored as two 8-bit bytes every time it appears in the image file. Instead, a smaller number that points to that position in the table can be used. The more times the pointer is used rather than the full number, the more space is saved in the file. Such a compression scheme can be used to reproduce exactly the original string of numbers, and so is called lossless compression.
Other types of compression are more aggressive and actually discard some of the information deemed to be redundant from a visual standpoint, so that, theoretically, you won’t notice that details are missing, and the file can be made even more compact. The Nikon D800’s RAW storage routines can use this kind of size reduction, which is called lossy compression, to reduce file size by up to about half with very little effect on image quality. JPEG compression can be even more enthusiastic, resulting in images that are 15X smaller (or more) and which display noticeable loss of image quality.
Under Type in the NEF (RAW) Recording menu, you can select from:
Lossless compressed. This is the default setting, and uses what you might think of as reversible algorithms that discard no image information, so that the image can be compressed from 20-40 percent for a significantly smaller file size. The squeezed file can always be restored to its original size precisely, with no effect on image quality.
Compressed. Use this setting if you want to store more images on your memory card and are willing to accept a tiny potential loss in image quality in the highlights, after significant editing (I’ve never been able to detect any effect at all). The D800 can achieve from 40-55 percent compression with this option. It uses a two-step process, first grouping some very similar tonal values in the mid-tone and lighter areas of the image together, and then storing each group as a single value, followed by a lossless compression scheme that is applied to the dark tones, further reducing the file size. The process does a good job of preserving tones in shadow areas of an image, with only small losses in the midtone and lighter areas. The differences may show up only if you perform certain types of extensive post-processing on an image, such as image sharpening or some tonal corrections.
Uncompressed. At this setting, RAW images are not compressed at all, increasing the time needed to transfer these slightly larger files to your memory card. The files are identical to those produced by the lossless compressed option. The only real difference is that some software can handle uncompressed NEF files more readily than lossless compressed files. If you use an up-to-date RAW converter, there’s no real reason to use this format.
The Bit Depth setting is another option that looks good on paper but, in the real world, is less useful than you might think. For most applications, the default value that produces 12-bit image files is probably your best choice, unless you’re exposing images that will be combined using HDR (high dynamic range) software later on. In that case, you can definitely gain some extra exposure “headroom” using 14-bit processing.
As you may know, bit depth is a way of measuring the amount of color data that an image file can contain. What we call “24-bit color” actually consists of three channels of information—red, green, and blue—with one 8-bit bit assigned to each channel, so a 24-bit image contains three 8-bit channels (each with 256 different shades of red, green, or blue). A 24-bit color image can contain up to 16.8 million different colors (256 × 256 × 256; you do the math). Because each of the red, green, and blue channels always is stored using the same number of bits, it’s become the custom to refer only to the channel bit depth to describe the amount of color information that can be collected.
So, when we’re talking about 12-bit color, what we really mean are three 12-bit RGB channels, each capable of recording colors from 000000000000 to 111111111111 hues in a particular channel (in binary), or 4,096 colors per channel (decimal) and a total of 68,719,476,736 (68.7 billion) different hues. By comparison, 14-bit color offers 16,384 colors per channel and a total of 4,398,046,511,104 (4.4 trillion) colors.
The advantage of having such a humongous number of colors for an image that will, in the end, be boiled down to 16.8 million hues in Photoshop or another image editor is that, to simplify things a little, there is a better chance that the mere millions of colors you end up with have a better chance of being the right colors to accurately represent the image. For example, if there are subtle differences in the colors of a certain range of tones that represent only, say, 10 percent of a channel’s colors, there would be only 26 colors to choose from in an 8-bit channel, but 410 colors in a 12-bit channel, and a whopping 1,638 colors in a 14-bit channel. The larger number of colors improves the odds of ending up with accurate hues.
It’s not quite that simple, of course, because bit depth also improves the chances of having the right number of colors to choose from after the inevitable loss of some information due to noise and other factors. But in the real world, the difference between 26 colors and 410 colors is significant (which is why digital cameras always capture at least 12 bits per channel), and the difference between 12 bits and 14 bits (410 and 1,638 colors, respectively in our example) is less significant. Because there is a penalty in terms of file size and the amount of time needed to process the image as it is recorded to your memory card, 14 bits per channel is not always your best option. Your two choices look like this:
12 bit. Images are recorded at 12 bits per channel in the RAW file, and end up with 12 bits of information per channel that is translated during conversion for your image editor either into 12 bits within a 16-bits-per-channel space or interpreted down to 8 bits per channel.
14 bit. This is the default bit depth for the Nikon D800. At this setting, the D800 grabs 16,384 colors per channel instead of 4,096, ending up as 14 bits in a 16-channel space or reduced to 256 colors by the RAW conversion software that translates the image for your image editor. You’ll find that such 14-bit files end up almost one-third larger than 12-bit files. 14-bit images are great for HDR photography.
White Balance
This menu entry allows you to choose one of the white balance values from among Auto, Incandescent, seven varieties of Fluorescent illumination, Direct Sunlight, Flash, Cloudy, Shade, a specific color temperature of your choice, or a preset value taken from an existing photograph, or a measurement you make. Some of the settings you make here can be duplicated using the WB button on top of the camera’s release mode dial and main and sub-command dials, but the menus offer even more choices, as you’ll see. Your white balance settings can have a significant impact on the color rendition of your images, as you can see in Figure 11.15.
Figure 11.15 Adjusting color temperature can provide different results of the same subject at settings of 3,400K (left), 5,000K (middle), and 2,800K (right).
When you select the White Balance entry on the Shooting menu, you’ll see an array of choices like those shown in Figure 11.16. (Two additional choices, Choose Color Temp. and PRE Preset Manual are not visible until you scroll down to them.) If you choose Fluorescent, you’ll be taken to another screen that presents seven different types of lamps, from sodium-vapor through warm-white fluorescent down to high temperature mercury-vapor. If you know the exact type of non-incandescent lighting being used, you can select it, or settle on a likely compromise.
The Choose Color Temp. selection allows you to select from an array of color temperatures in degrees Kelvin (more on this in Chapter 8) from 2,500K to 10,000K, and then further fine-tune the color bias using the fine-tuning feature described below. Select Preset Manual to record or recall custom white balance settings suitable for environments with unusual lighting or mixed lighting, as described later in this section.
For all other settings (Auto, Incandescent, Direct Sunlight, Flash, Cloudy, or Shade), highlight the white balance option you want, then press the multi selector right button (or press OK) to view the fine-tuning screen shown in Figure 11.17 (and which uses the incandescent setting as an example). The screen shows a grid with two axes, a blue/amber axis extending left/right, and a green/magenta axis extending up and down the grid. By default, the grid’s cursor is positioned in the middle, and a readout to the right of the grid shows the cursor’s coordinates on the A-B axis (yes, I know the display has the end points reversed) and G-M axis at 0,0.
Figure 11.16 The White Balance menu has predefined values, plus the option of setting color temperature and presets you measure yourself.
Figure 11.17 Specific white balance settings can be fine-tuned by changing their bias in the amber/blue, magenta/green directions—or along both axes simultaneously.
You can use the multi selector’s up/down and right/left buttons to move the cursor to any coordinate in the grid, thereby biasing the white balance in the direction(s) you choose. The amber-blue axis makes the image warmer or colder (but not actually yellow or blue). Similarly, the green-magenta axis preserves all the colors in the original image, but gives them a tinge biased toward green or magenta. Each increment equals about five mired units, but you should know that mired values aren’t linear; five mireds at 2,500K produces a much stronger effect than five mireds at 6,000K. If you really want to fine-tune your color balance, you’re better off experimenting and evaluating the results of a particular change.
When you’ve fine-tuned white balance, either using the Shooting menu options or the WB button, left/right triangles appear in the white balance section of the control panel at lower right to remind you that this tweaking has taken place.
Using Preset Manual White Balance
If automatic white balance or one of the predefined settings available aren’t suitable, you can set a custom white balance using the Preset Manual menu option. You can apply the white balance from a scene, either by shooting a new picture on the spot and using the resulting white balance (Direct Measurement) or using an image you have already shot (Copy from Existing Photograph). To perform direct measurement from your current scene using a reference object (preferably a neutral gray or white object), follow these steps:
1. Use gray or white reference. Place the neutral reference, such as a white piece of paper, or a gray card, under the lighting you want to measure. You can also use one of those white balance caps that fit on the front of your lens like a lens cap.
2. Choose Preset Manual. Hold down the WB button on the release mode dial and rotate the main command dial until PRE is displayed in the lower-right corner of the monochrome LCD control panel. The number of the “slot” (from d-1 through d-4) where the white balance setting will appear is displayed at the top of the control panel and in the viewfinder.
3. Select your “slot.” Press the WB button again and rotate the sub-command dial to choose d-1 through d-4. (See Figure 11.18.) Note that you can “protect” a given slot from being overwritten with a new value, in which case Prt will appear on the control panel and in the viewfinder.
4. Start measurement. Release the WB button for a moment, then press and hold it again until the PRE icon on the monochrome LCD and in the viewfinder begins a flashing cycle of about six seconds.
5. Capture white balance. While the PRE icon is flashing, take a picture of the reference object. No photo is actually taken, so the preset slot appears to be blank.
Figure 11.18 When you capture a scene’s white balance, it will be stored in the selected slot.
6. Confirm capture. If the camera successfully measured white balance, Good will flash on the control panel for about six seconds, and Gd will appear in the bottom line of the viewfinder. Otherwise, you’ll see no Gd on the LCD and viewfinder. White balance measurement can fail when the reference object is too brightly or poorly illuminated. In that case, repeat steps 2-5 until the measurement is successful.
The preset value you’ve captured will remain in the slot until you replace that white balance with a new captured value. It can be summoned at any time (press the WB button on the top left of the camera and dial it in by rotating the sub-command dial until the desired white balance slot is displayed on the control panel). You can also choose an existing image or protect a captured white balance from being over-written:
1. Choose Preset Manual from the White Balance menu.
2. A screen of thumbnails appears, showing the four “slots” numbered d-1 to d-4. Use the multi selector buttons to highlight one of the four thumbnail slots, and press the multi selector center button.
3. The next screen that appears (see Figure 11.19) has four options: Fine-tune, Edit Comment, Select Image, and Protect.
Choose Fine-tune to fine-tune the amber/blue/magenta/green white balance of an image already stored in one of the four user slots.
Choose Edit Comment to add or change the comment applied to d-1 to d-4. The comment can be used as a label to better identify the white balance information in the slot, with terms like Gymnasium Daytime or Rumpus Room. (The standard D800 Edit Comment screen, as in Figure 11.10, appears.)
Choose Select Image to view the D800’s standard image selection screen (see Figure 11.8 again) and highlight and choose the existing image you want to use. Press the multi selector center button to confirm your choice and copy the white balance of the selected image to the slot you selected in Step 2.
Choose Protect to lock the white balance setting currently stored in the selected slot. Use this to preserve a captured white balance setting.
4. Press OK to confirm your white balance setting.
Figure 11.19 The Preset Manual screen lets you fine-tune preset white balance settings, label them with a comment, select an image to use as a white balance reference, and protect captured settings.
Consider dedicating a low-capacity memory card to stow a selection of images taken under a variety of lighting conditions. If you want to “recycle” one of the color temperatures you’ve stored, insert the card and load one of those images into your choice of preset slots d-1 to d-4, as described above.
Set Picture Control
Nikon’s Picture Control styles allow you to choose your own sharpness, contrast, color saturation, and hue settings applied to your images. There are only six predefined styles offered, which Nikon calls Original Picture Controls: Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Monochrome, Portrait, and Landscape. However, you can edit the settings of any of those styles so they better suit your taste.
But that’s only the beginning; the D800 also offers nine (count ‘em) user-definable Picture Control styles, which follow the six predefined styles in the listing after you create them. You can edit these styles to your heart’s content, assign descriptive names, and deploy at the press of a few buttons. Even better, you can copy these styles to a memory card, edit them on your computer, and reload them into your camera at any time. So, effectively, you can have a lot more than nine custom Picture Control styles available: the nine in your camera, as well as a virtually unlimited library of user-defined styles that you have stored on memory cards or create using Capture NX 2 or View NX 2.
Moreover, Nikon insists that these styles have been standardized to the extent that if you re-use a style created for one camera (say, your D800) and load it into a different compatible camera (such as a Nikon D4), you’ll get substantially the same rendition. In a way, Picture Control styles are a bit like using a particular film. Do you want the look of Kodak Ektachrome or Fujifilm Velvia? (Even if you’ve never used these films, but have seen the results they produced.) Load the appropriate style created by you—or anyone else.
Using and managing Picture Control styles is accomplished using two different menu entries, Set Picture Control, which allows you to choose an existing style and to edit the predefined styles that Nikon provides, and Manage Picture Control, discussed in the next section, which gives you the capability of creating and editing user-defined styles.
Choosing a Picture Control Style
To choose from one of the predefined styles (Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Monochrome, Portrait, or Landscape) or select a user-defined style (numbered C-1 to C-9), follow these steps:
1. Choose Set Picture Control from the Shooting menu. The screen shown in Figure 11.20 appears. Note that Picture Controls that have been modified from their standard settings have an asterisk next to their name.
2. Scroll down to the Picture Control you’d like to use.
3. Press OK to activate the highlighted style. (Although you can usually select a menu item by pressing the multi selector right button; in this case, that button activates editing instead.)
4. Press the MENU button or tap the shutter release to exit the menu system.
Figure 11.20 You can choose from the six predefined Picture Controls shown here.
Editing a Picture Control Style
You can change the parameters of any of Nikon’s predefined Picture Controls, or any of the nine user-defined styles you create. You are given the choice of using the quick adjust/fine-tune facility to modify a Picture Control with a few sliders, or to view the relationship of your Picture Controls on a grid. To make quick adjustments to any Picture Control except the Monochrome style, follow these steps:
1. Choose Set Picture Control from the Shooting menu.
2. Scroll down to the Picture Control you’d like to edit.
3. Press the multi selector right button to produce the adjustment screen shown in Figure 11.21.
4. Use the Quick Adjust slider to exaggerate the attributes of the Standard or Vivid styles (Quick Adjustments are not available with other styles).
5. Scroll down to the Sharpening, Contrast, Brightness, Saturation, and Hue sliders with the multi selector up/down buttons, then use the left/right buttons to decrease or increase the effects. A line will appear under the original setting in the slider whenever you’ve made a change from the defaults. Note: You can’t adjust contrast and brightness when Active D-Lighting (discussed later in this chapter) is active. A helpful icon at upper right in the dialog box will alert you when ADL is enabled. Turn it off to make those Picture Control adjustments.
Figure 11.21 Sliders can be used to make quick adjustments to your Picture Control styles.
6. Instead of making changes with the slider’s scale, you can move the cursor to the far left and choose A (for auto) instead when working with the Sharpening, Contrast, and Saturation sliders. The D800 will adjust these parameters automatically, depending on the type of scene it detects.
7. Press the Trash button to reset the values to their defaults.
8. Press the Thumbnail/Zoom Out button to view an adjustment grid (discussed next).
9. Press OK when you’re finished making adjustments.
Editing the Monochrome style is similar, except that the parameters differ slightly. Sharpening, Contrast, and Brightness are available, but, instead of Saturation and Hue, you can choose a filter effect (Yellow, Orange, Red, Green, or none) and a toning effect (black-and-white, plus seven levels of Sepia, Cyanotype, Red, Yellow, Green, Blue Green, Blue, Purple Blue, and Red Purple). (Keep in mind that once you’ve taken a JPEG photo using a Monochrome style, you can’t convert the image back to full color.)
Figure 11.22 This grid shows the relationship of the Picture Controls being used.
Although some of the color choices seem to overlap, you’ll get very different looks when choosing between Filter Effects and Toning. Filter Effects add no color to the monochrome image. Instead, they reproduce the look of black-and-white film that has been shot through a color filter. That is, Yellow will make the sky darker and the clouds will stand out more, while Orange makes the sky even darker and sunsets more full of detail. The Red filter produces the darkest sky of all and darkens green objects, such as leaves. Human skin may appear lighter than normal. The Green filter has the opposite effect on leaves, making them appear lighter in tone. Figure 11.23 at left shows the same scene shot with no filter, then Yellow, Green, and Red filters.
The Sepia, Blue, Green, and other toning effects, on the other hand, all add a color cast to your monochrome image. Use these when you want an old-time look or a special effect, without bothering to recolor your shots in an image editor. Toning is shown at right in Figure 11.23.
Figure 11.23 Color filter effects at left: No filter (upper left); yellow filter (upper right); green filter (lower left); and red filter (lower right). Toning effects at right: Sepia (upper left); Purple Blue (upper right); Red Purple (lower left); and Green (lower right).
When you press the Thumbnail/Zoom Out button, a grid display, like the one shown in Figure 11.22, appears, showing the relative contrast and saturation of each of the predefined Picture Controls. If you’ve created your own custom Picture Controls, they will appear on this grid, too, represented by the numbers 1-9. Because the values for autocontrast and autosaturation may vary, the icons for any Picture Control that uses the Auto feature will be shown on the grid in green, with lines extending up and down from the icon to tip you off that the position within the coordinates may vary from the one shown.
Manage Picture Control
The Manage Picture Control menu entry can be used to create new styles, edit existing styles, rename or delete them, and store/retrieve them from the memory card. Here are the basic functions of this menu item, which can be found on the Shooting menu directly below the Set Picture Control entry:
Make a copy. Choose Save/Edit, select from the list of available Picture Controls, and press OK to store that style in one of the user-defined slots C-1 to C-9 (with slots C1 to C7 shown in Figure 11.24).
Save an edited copy. Choose Save/Edit, select from the list of available Picture Controls, and then press the multi selector right button to edit the style, as described in the previous section. Press OK when finished editing, and then save the modified style in one of the user-defined slots C-1 to C-9.
Figure 11.24 Picture Controls that you define can be stored in your D800’s settings.
Rename a style. Choose Rename, select from the list of user-defined Picture Controls (you cannot rename the default styles), and then enter the text used as the new label for the style, using the standard D800 text entry screen shown earlier in Figure 11.10. You may use up to 19 characters for the name.
Remove a style. Select Delete, choose from the list of user-defined Picture Controls (you can’t remove one of the default styles), press the multi selector right button, then highlight Yes in the screen that follows, and press OK to remove that Picture Control.
Store/retrieve style on card. Choose Load/Save, then select Copy to Camera to locate a Picture Control on your memory card and copy it to the D800; Delete from Card to select a Picture Control on your memory card and remove it; or Copy to Card to duplicate a style currently in your camera onto the memory card. This last option allows you to create and save Picture Controls in excess of the nine that can be loaded into the camera at one time. Once you’ve copied a style to your memory card, you can modify the version in the camera, give it a new name, and, in effect, create a whole new Picture Control.
Color Space
The Nikon D800’s Color Space option gives you two different color spaces (also called color gamuts), named Adobe RGB (because it was developed by Adobe Systems in 1998), and sRGB (supposedly because it is the standard RGB color space). These two color gamuts define a specific set of colors that can be applied to the images your D800 captures.
You’re probably surprised that the Nikon D800 doesn’t automatically capture all the colors we see. Unfortunately, that’s impossible because of the limitations of the sensor and the filters used to capture the fundamental red, green, and blue colors, as well as that of the phosphors used to display those colors on your camera and computer monitors. Nor is it possible to print every color our eyes detect, because the inks or pigments used don’t absorb and reflect colors perfectly.
On the other hand, the D800 does capture quite a few more colors than we need. A basic 12-bit RAW image contains a possible 4.3 billion different hues (4,096 colors per red, green, or blue channel), which are condensed down to a mere 16.8 million possible colors when converted to a 24-bit (eight bits per channel) image. While 16.8 million colors may seem like a lot, it’s a small subset of 4.3 billion captured, and an even smaller subset of all the possible colors we can see. A 14-bit RAW image has even more possible colors—16,384 per color channel, or 281 trillion hues.
The set of colors, or gamut, that can be reproduced or captured by a given device (scanner, digital camera, monitor, printer, or some other piece of equipment) is represented as a color space that exists within the larger full range of colors. That full range is represented by the odd-shaped splotch of color shown in Figure 11.25, as defined by scientists at an international organization back in 1931. The colors possible with Adobe RGB are represented by the larger, black triangle in the figure, while the sRGB gamut is represented by the smaller white triangle.
Regardless of which triangle—or color space—is used by the D800, you end up with some combination of 16.8 million different colors that can be used in your photograph. (No one image will contain all 16.8 million! To require that many, only about two pixels of any one color could be the same in a 36-megapixel image!) But, as you can see from the figure, the colors available will be different.
Adobe RGB is an expanded color space useful for commercial and professional printing, and it can reproduce a wider range of colors. It can also come in useful if an image is going to be extensively retouched, especially within an advanced image editor, like Adobe Photoshop, which has sophisticated color management capabilities that can be tailored to specific color spaces. As an advanced user, you don’t need to automatically “upgrade” your D800 to Adobe RGB, because images tend to look less saturated on your monitor and, it is likely, significantly different from what you will get if you output the photo to your personal inkjet. (You can profile your monitor for the Adobe RGB color space to improve your on-screen rendition.)
Figure 11.25 The outer figure shows all the colors we can see; the two inner outlines show the boundaries of Adobe RGB (black triangle) and sRGB (white triangle).
While both Adobe RGB and sRGB can reproduce the exact same 16.8 million absolute colors, Adobe RGB spreads those colors over a larger portion of the visible spectrum, as you can see in the figure. Think of a box of crayons (the jumbo 16.8 million crayon variety). Some of the basic crayons from the original sRGB set have been removed and replaced with new hues not contained in the original box. Your “new” box contains colors that can’t be reproduced by your computer monitor, but which work just fine with a commercial printing press. For example, Adobe RGB has more “crayons” available in the cyan-green portion of the box, compared to sRGB, which is unlikely to be an advantage unless your image’s final destination are the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks of a printing press.
The other color space, sRGB, is recommended for images that will be output locally on the user’s own printer, as this color space matches that of the typical inkjet printer fairly closely. You might prefer sRGB, which is the default for the Nikon D800 and most other cameras, as it is well suited for the range of colors that can be displayed on a computer screen and viewed over the Internet. If you plan to take your image file to a retailer’s kiosk for printing, sRGB is your best choice, because those automated output devices are calibrated for the sRGB color space that consumers use.
BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
If you plan to use RAW+JPEG for most of your photos, go ahead and set sRGB as your color space. You’ll end up with JPEGs suitable for output on your own printer, but you can still extract an Adobe RGB version from the RAW file at any time. It’s like shooting two different color spaces at once—sRGB and Adobe RGB—and getting the best of both worlds.
Of course, choosing the right color space doesn’t solve the problems that result from having each device in the image chain manipulating or producing a slightly different set of colors. To that end, you’ll need to investigate the wonderful world of color management, which uses hardware and software tools to match or calibrate all your devices, as closely as possible, so that what you see more closely resembles what you capture, what you see on your computer display, and what ends up on a printed hardcopy. Entire books have been devoted to color management, and most of what you need to know doesn’t directly involve your Nikon D800, so I won’t detail the nuts and bolts here.
To manage your color, you’ll need, at the bare minimum, some sort of calibration system for your computer display, so that your monitor can be adjusted to show a standardized set of colors that is repeatable over time. (What you see on the screen can vary as the monitor ages, or even when the room light changes.) I use Pantone’s Huey monitor color correction system for my computer’s main 26-inch wide-screen LCD display, as well as for the matching 26-inch wide-screen secondary display that flanks it. The Huey checks room light levels every five minutes, and reminds me to recalibrate every week or two, using the small sensor device shown in Figure 11.26, which attaches temporarily to the front of my screen with tiny suction cups, and interprets test patches that the Huey software displays during calibration. The rest of the time, the Huey sensor sits in the stand shown, measuring the room illumination and adjusting my monitors for higher or lower ambient light levels.
The Huey (www.pantone.com) is an inexpensive (under $100) system that does a good job of calibrating a single monitor. You can upgrade it, as I did, for use with multiple monitors using a $40 software download. If you want more advanced capabilities for adjustments for accurate color and making prints, you might want a more advanced system (up to $500) like the various Spyder products from Datacolor (www.datacolor.com), or Colormunki from X-Rite (www.colormunki.com).
Figure 11.26 Pantone’s Huey monitor color correction system is an inexpensive device for calibrating your display.
Active D-Lighting
Active D-Lighting is a feature that improves the rendition of detail in highlights and shadows when you’re photographing high contrast scenes. It’s been available as an internal retouching option in Nikon’s lower-end cameras (by that I mean the CoolPix point-and-shoot line) for some time, and gradually worked its way up through the company’s dSLR products, eventually reaching “pro” cameras like the D800. You’ll find the “non-active” D-Lighting feature in the Retouch menu, which I’ll describe in Chapter 13.
Active D-Lighting, unlike the Retouch menu post-processing feature, applies its tonal improvements while you are actually taking the photo. That’s good news and bad news. It means that, if you’re taking photos in a contrasty environment, Active D-Lighting can automatically improve the apparent dynamic range of your image as you shoot, without additional effort on your part. However, you’ll need to disable the feature once you leave the high contrast lighting behind, and the process does take some time. You wouldn’t want to use Active D-Lighting for continuous shooting of sports subjects, for example. There are many situations in which the selective application of D-Lighting using the Retouch menu is a better choice.
You have six choices: Auto, Extra High, High, Normal, Low, and Off. You may need to experiment with the feature a little to discover how much D-Lighting you can apply to a high contrast image before the shadows start to darken objectionably. Note that when this feature is activated, brightness and contrast Picture Control settings cannot be changed. Figure 11.27 shows some examples of Active D-Lighting applied. By the time the sample images shown have been half-toned and rendered to the printed page, the differences may be fairly subtle. For that reason, I’m not illustrating the effects of the Auto setting (which varies, of course, depending on the scene) or the Extra High setting. Look at the amount of detail in the overhanging rock in the upper-right area of each version.
For best results, use your D800’s Matrix metering mode, so the Active D-Lighting feature can work with a full range of exposure information from multiple points in the image. Active D-Lighting works its magic by subtly underexposing your image so that details in the highlights (which would normally be overexposed and become featureless white pixels) are not lost. At the same time, it adjusts the values of pixels located in midtone and shadow areas so they don’t become too dark because of the underexposure. Highlight tones will be preserved, while shadows will eventually be allowed to go dark more readily. Bright beach or snow scenes, especially those with few shadows (think high noon, when the shadows are smaller) can benefit from using Active D-Lighting.
It’s important to always keep in mind that Active D-Lighting not only adjusts the contrast automatically of your image (that’s why you can’t adjust the brightness/contrast of a Picture Control when Active D-Lighting is turned on), it modifies exposure for both existing light and flash as well, as I’ve noted. Exposure for both is reduced from about 1/3 stop (at the Low setting) to as much as 1 full stop less at the Extra High setting.
Tip
In Manual exposure mode, Active D-Lighting does not adjust the exposure of your image; it simply shifts the center (zero) point of the analog exposure indicator in the viewfinder/control panel.
Figure 11.27 No D-Lighting (upper left); low (upper right); normal (lower left); and high (lower right).
Nikon gives you a lot of flexibility in using Active D-Lighting. You can choose the setting yourself, or let the camera vary the amount of tweaking by using Active D-Lighting Bracketing. You’ll find this is a useful feature, if used with caution.
HDR (High Dynamic Range)
This is the first entry in the third page of the Shooting menu (see Figure 11.28). I was surprised at how good the D800’s in-camera HDR worked, because there are two stumbling blocks that, at least theoretically, should lead to less-than-awesome results. First, when your camera can perform HDR for you on the fly, there is the tendency to put the feature to work under non-optimal conditions; specifically, impromptu hand-held situations. If you’ve done any traditional HDR, you know that the technique works best when the camera is mounted on a tripod, so that the bracketed exposures are virtually identical except for the exposure itself. Although all HDR software can correct for slight camera movement and align images that are slightly out of register, the results I’ve gotten have not been great. I expected hand-held HDR with the D800’s auto HDR feature to be comparable.
Figure 11.28 HDR is the first entry on the third page of the D800 Shooting menu.
The second theoretical weakness of the D800’s HDR feature is the limitation of combining just two shots to arrive at the final image. The best traditional HDR photos I’ve produced have involved at least three shots, and more frequently five or more, each separated by a stop of exposure. The D800 takes two shots, total, and combines them. Despite these speedbumps, I’ve been pleased with my results.
I was prowling around a decommissioned railroad roundhouse, exploring some rolling stock that was being repaired and preserved by a group of enthusiasts who’d taken over the railyard. The engine shown in Figure 11.29 was cloaked in near-darkness, except for a large spot of light from a hanging bulb seen at left. I decided to try out the D800’s HDR. With the camera set to ISO 3200 and a base exposure of 1/125th second at f/2.8 and an exposure differential of 3EV, and a fisheye lens mounted, the camera conjured up the image you see. Not bad for a grab shot.
Figure 11.29 The D800’s built-in HDR feature can produce good results even when the camera is hand-held.
I’m continuing to play with this feature to see what it can do, and suggest you do the same. The steps, originally outlined in Chapter 4, are easy enough to follow.
1. Turn off conflicting features. Disable bracketing if active, and choose JPEG as your image format.
2. Access the HDR entry. Navigate to the Shooting menu and select HDR (high dynamic range).
3. Turn on HDR. Choose HDR Mode, press right, and select either On (series) if you want to shoot multiple HDR photos consecutively or On (single photo) to take a single HDR image and then shut the feature off. Press OK to confirm.
4. Choose an increment. Choose Exposure Differential, press the right button, and select Auto (the D800 chooses the differential based on how contrasty it deems your scene to be), or 1EV, 2EV, or 3EV. Auto is a good choice for your initial experiments. Or, select a higher EV value for higher contrast subjects, and a lower value for lower contrast subjects. Press OK to confirm.
5. Select smoothing. The edges of the areas in your image may have a high contrast, poster-edge like effect in some circumstances. If you don’t like the effect, you can use smoothing to adjust the shading between these edges. Press OK to confirm.
6. Take your shot. As with all HDR photography, you’ll want to use Aperture-priority so the depth-of-field and focus won’t change between the two shots. As I noted, you’ll get the best results with the D800 mounted on a tripod, and with subjects that don’t display a lot of motion, but hand-held shots are possible.
7. Wait for the results. After you make the exposure, the D800 will merge your two shots. The message Job will appear on the control panel, and Job Hdr will be shown at the bottom of the viewfinder.
Vignette Control
Some lenses may not be up to the challenge of covering the full FX frame evenly, producing darkening in the corners of your images at certain focal lengths. That was the chief beef many FX users had with the otherwise superb original version of the Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR zoom. (It’s since been replaced with a new VR II version that does a better job of avoiding vignetting effects.)
If you consistently encounter vignetting, this option may help. It reduces darkening at the periphery of images when using non-DX/non-perspective control lenses of the G and D type. (I explained the nomenclature of Nikon’s lens alphabet soup in Chapter 7.) You can choose from High, Normal, Low, and Off. It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much corner-brightening each setting provides. Your best bet is to shoot some blank walls of a single color with lenses that seem to have this problem, and try a few at each of the settings. Then select the value that best seems to counter vignetting with your particular lenses.
Auto Distortion Control
As I explained in Chapter 7, wide-angle lenses are prone to barrel distortion, in which straight lines appear to bow outward, especially near the edges of the frame. Telephoto lenses often have the opposite problem: lines may bend inward, producing pincushion distortion. Both these types of distortion can be easily corrected in your image editor, but your D800’s digital image processing chip has similar algorithms built in and can do the job for you. Your choices are easy: just select On or Off to enable or disable this feature.
For the process to work, the lenses have to be of a type that are able to communicate electronically with the camera to let the D800 know what type lens it is working with, so that means you should be using a G or D type optic. The camera will warp the photo before saving it to your memory card, cropping a bit if necessary to exclude some areas of the image. If you’re working with DX lenses, either choose Auto DX Crop: On or manually select DX (24 × 16) 1.5x (if you’re using a DX-type lens that might not be recognized as such by the D800) to avoid distortion outside the intended DX image area.
Long Exp. NR
Visual noise is that awful graininess caused by long exposures and high ISO settings, and which shows up as multicolored specks in images. This setting helps you manage the kind of noise caused by lengthy exposure times. In some ways, noise is like the excessive grain found in some high-speed photographic films. However, while photographic grain is sometimes used as a special effect, it’s rarely desirable in a digital photograph. There are easier ways to add texture to your photos.
Some noise is created when you’re using shutter speeds longer than eight seconds to create a longer exposure. Extended exposure times allow more photons to reach the sensor, but increase the likelihood that some photosites will react randomly even though not struck by a particle of light. Moreover, as the sensor remains switched on for the longer exposure, it heats, and this heat can be mistakenly recorded as if it were a barrage of photons. This menu setting can be used to activate the D800’s long exposure noise-canceling operation performed by the EXPEED digital signal processor.
Off. This default setting disables long exposure noise reduction. Use it when you want the maximum amount of detail present in your photograph, even though higher noise levels will result. This setting also eliminates the extra time needed to take a picture caused by the noise reduction process. If you plan to use only lower ISO settings (thereby reducing the noise caused by ISO amplification), the noise levels produced by longer exposures may be acceptable. For example, you might be shooting a waterfall at ISO 50 or ISO 100 with the camera mounted on a tripod, using a neutral-density filter and a long exposure to cause the water to blur. (Try exposures of 2 to 16 seconds, depending on the intensity of the light and how much blur you want.) (See Figure 11.30.) To maximize detail in the non-moving portions of your photos for the exposures that are eight seconds or longer, you can switch off long exposure noise reduction.
On. When exposures are eight seconds or longer, the Nikon D800 takes a second, blank exposure to compare that to the first image. (While the second image is taken, the warning Job nr appears on the monochrome control panel and in the viewfinder.) Noise (pixels that are bright in a frame that should be completely black) in the “dark frame” image is subtracted from your original picture, and only the noise-corrected image is saved to your memory card. Because the noise-reduction process effectively doubles the time required to take a picture, you won’t want to use this setting when you’re rushed. Some noise can be removed later on, using tools like the noise reduction features built into Nikon Capture NX 2.
Figure 11.30 A long exposure with the camera mounted on a tripod produces this traditional moving water photo.
High ISO NR
Noise can also be caused by higher ISO sensitivity settings, and the Nikon D800, which offers direct settings up to ISO 6400 and extended settings that go even higher, including Hi 1 (ISO 12800 equivalent) and Hi 2 (ISO 25600 equivalent). Although it costs you some detail, High ISO noise reduction, which can be set with this menu option, may be a good option in many cases. You can choose Off when you want to preserve detail at the cost of some noise graininess, and the D800 will apply high ISO NR only at the “boosted” settings of Hi 0.3, Hi 0.5, Hi 0.7, Hi 1.0, and Hi 2.0. Or, you can select Low, Normal, and High noise reduction, which is applied when ISO sensitivity has been set to ISO 800 or higher.
The effects of high ISO noise are something like listening to a CD in your car, and then rolling down all the windows. You’re adding sonic noise to the audio signal, and while increasing the CD player’s volume may help a bit, you’re still contending with an unfavorable signal to noise ratio that probably mutes tones (especially higher treble notes) that you really want to hear.
The same thing happens when the analog image signal is amplified: You’re increasing the image information in the signal, but boosting the background fuzziness at the same time. Tune in a very faint or distant AM radio station on your car stereo. Then turn up the volume. After a certain point, turning up the volume further no longer helps you hear better. There’s a similar point of diminishing returns for digital sensor ISO increases and signal amplification as well.
As the captured information is amplified to produce higher ISO sensitivities, some random noise in the signal is amplified along with the photon information. Increasing the ISO setting of your camera raises the threshold of sensitivity so that fewer and fewer photons are needed to register as an exposed pixel. Yet, that also increases the chances of one of those phantom photons being counted among the real-life light particles, too.
Fortunately, the Nikon D800’s CMOS sensor and its EXPEED digital processing chip are optimized to produce the low noise levels, so ratings as high as ISO 12800 can be used routinely (although there will be some noise, of course), and even ISO 6400 can generate good results. I regularly shoot concerts at ISO 3200, and indoor sports at ISO 6400 with my D800. Some kinds of subjects may not require this kind of noise cancellation, particularly with images that have a texture of their own that tends to hide or mask the noise.
ISO Sensitivity Settings
This menu entry has two parts, ISO Sensitivity and ISO Sensitivity Auto Control. The former is simply a screen that allows you to specify the ISO setting, just as you would by spinning the main command dial while holding down the ISO button on the top-left panel of the D800. The available settings range from LO 1 (ISO 50/100 equivalent) through ISO 1600/12800 to Hi 1 (ISO 3200/25600 equivalent). The available settings are determined by the size of the increment you’ve specified in Custom Setting b1: 1/3, 1/2, or 1 step values. Use the ISO Sensitivity menu when you find it more convenient to set ISO using the three-inch color LCD.
The ISO Sensitivity Auto Control menu entry lets you specify how and when the D800 will adjust the ISO value for you automatically under certain conditions. This capability can be potentially useful, although experienced photographers tend to shy away from any feature that allows the camera to change basic settings like ISO that have been carefully selected. Fortunately, you can set some boundaries so the D800 will use this adjustment in a fairly intelligent way.
When Auto ISO is activated, the camera can bump up the ISO sensitivity, if necessary, whenever an optimal exposure cannot be achieved at the current ISO setting. Of course, it can be disconcerting to think you’re shooting at ISO 400 and then see a grainier ISO 1600 shot during LCD review. While the D800 provides a flashing ISO-Auto alert in the viewfinder and control panel, the warning is easy to miss. Here are the important considerations to keep in mind when using the options available for this feature:
Off. Set ISO Sensitivity Auto Control to Off, and the ISO setting will not budge from whatever value you have specified. Use this setting when you don’t want any ISO surprises, or when ISO increases are not needed to counter slow shutter speeds. For example, if the D800 is mounted on a tripod, you can safely use slower shutter speeds at a relatively low ISO setting, so there is no need for a speed bump. On the other hand, if you’re hand-holding the camera and the D800 set for Program (P) or Aperture-priority (A) mode wants to use a shutter speed slower than, say, 1/30 second, it’s probably a good idea to increase the ISO to avoid the effects of camera shake. If you’re using a longer lens, a shutter speed of 1/125 second or higher might be the point where an ISO bump would be a good idea. In that case, you can turn the ISO sensitivity auto control on, or remember to boost the ISO setting yourself.
Maximum sensitivity. Use this parameter to indicate the highest ISO setting you’re comfortable having the D800 set on its own. You can choose the max ISO setting the camera will use from ISO 200, 400, 800, 1600, and H 1 and H 2 (ISO 3200 and ISO 6400 equivalent). (Note that the increments are fixed at those listed, regardless of how the exposure increments in Custom Setting b1 is set.) Use a low number if you’d rather not take any photos at a high ISO without manually setting that value yourself. Dial in a higher ISO number if getting the photo at any sensitivity setting is more important than worrying about noise.
Minimum shutter speed. This setting allows you to tell the D800 how slow the shutter speed must be before the ISO boost kicks in, within the range 1 second to 1/250 second. The default value is 1/30 second, because for most shooters in most situations, any shutter speed longer than 1/30 is to be avoided, unless you’re using a tripod, monopod, or looking for a special effect. If you have steady hands, or the camera is partially braced against movement (say, you’re using that monopod), a slower shutter speed, down to 1 full second, can be specified. Similarly, if you’re working with a telephoto lens and find even a relatively brief shutter speed “dangerous,” you can set a minimum shutter speed threshold of 1/250 second. When the shutter speed is faster than the minimum you enter, Auto ISO will not take effect.
Multiple Exposure
This option lets you combine two exposures into one image without the need for an image editor like Photoshop and can be an entertaining way to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when complex photos were created in the camera itself. In truth, prior to the digital age, multiple exposures were a cool, groovy, far-out, hep/hip, phat, sick, fabulous way of producing composite images. Today, it’s more common to take the lazy way out, snap two or more pictures, and then assemble them in an image editor like Photoshop.
However, if you’re willing to spend the time planning a multiple exposure (or are open to some happy accidents), there is a lot to recommend the multiple exposure capability that Nikon has bestowed on the D800. For one thing, the camera is able to combine two or more images using the RAW data from the sensor, producing photos that are blended together more smoothly than is likely for anyone who’s not a Photoshop guru. In addition, Nikon has eliminated one annoying aspect of the feature in some previous incarnations—it’s no longer necessary to return to the menu to activate multiple exposure for each and every set. If you want to take a series of pictures, you can set it once, and forget it. (But don’t forget to turn it off when you’re done!)
To take your own multiple exposures, just follow these steps (although it’s probably a good idea to do a little planning and maybe even some sketching on paper first):
1. Activate the feature. Choose Multiple Exposure from the Shooting menu.
2. Choose exposures per frame. Select Number of Shots, choose a value from 2 to 10 with the multi selector up/down buttons, and press OK.
3. Specify ratio of exposure between frames. Choose Auto Gain and specify either On (the default) or Off. When On is selected, the D800 will divide the total exposure of the image by the number of shots specified; for example, applying 1/4 of the exposure time to each shot in a four-image series. Choose Off, and the full exposure is applied to each picture. You’d want to use Off when using a dark background that would allow successive exposures to add details, and On to avoid the risk of overlapping images washing each other out.
4. Confirm gain setting. Press OK to set the gain.
5. Choose Multiple Exposure mode. Select Multiple Exposure Mode. A submenu appears with three choices:
On (series). The Multiple Exposure feature remains active even after you’ve taken a complete set of exposures for the number of shots you specified. Use this if you want to shoot several multiple exposures in a row. Remember to turn it off when you’re done.
On (single photo). Once you’ve taken a single set of multiple exposures, the feature turns itself off.
Off. Use this option to cancel multiple exposures.
6. Shoot your multiple exposure set. Take the photo by pressing the shutter release button multiple times until all the exposures in the series have been taken. (In continuous shooting mode, the entire series will be shot in a single burst.) The blinking multiple exposure icon vanishes when the series is finished. Reminder: you’ll need to reactivate the Multiple Exposure feature once you’ve finished taking a set, unless the D800 is set to On (single photo); it shuts off automatically.
Keep in mind if you wait longer than 30 seconds between any two photos in the series, the sequence will terminate and combine the images taken so far. If you want a longer elapsed time between exposures, go to the Playback menu and make sure On has been specified for Image Review, and then extend the monitor display time using Custom Setting c2 (Auto meter-off delay) to an appropriate maximum interval. The camera will grant you an additional 30 seconds beyond that. The Multiple Exposure feature will then use the monitor-off delay as its maximum interval between shots. Figure 11.31 shows an odd multiple exposure created at a bluegrass concert.
Figure 11.31 The D800’s Multiple Exposure capability allows combining images without an image editor.
Interval Timer Shooting
Nikon D800’s built-in time-lapse photography feature allows you to take pictures for up to 999 intervals in bursts of as many as nine shots, with a delay of up to 23 hours and 59 minutes between shots/bursts, and an initial start-up time of as long as 23 hours and 59 minutes from the time you activate the feature. That means that if you want to photograph a rosebud opening and would like to photograph the flower once every two minutes over the next 16 hours, you can do that easily. If you like, you can delay the first photo taken by a couple hours so you don’t have to stand there by the D800 waiting for the right moment.
Or, you might want to photograph a particular scene every hour for 24 hours to capture, say, a landscape from sunrise to sunset to the following day’s sunrise again. The D800 can do that, too, and, in fact, offers most of the features of the expensive ($130) Nikon MC-36 Multi-Function Remote control. Nikon has done us all a huge favor by including this functionality essentially for free! I will offer two practical tips right now, in case you want to run out and try interval timer shooting immediately: use a tripod, and for best results over longer time periods, plan on connecting your D800 to an external power source!
The Interval Timer Shooting screen (see Figure 11.32) is confusingly designed, in my opinion. It’s needlessly complex; the display changes in a quirky way depending on what information you’re entering, and some portions of the screen aren’t accessible until you’ve performed a prerequisite function. I would have set up this menu with nothing more than five entries, each with their own screen of options: On/Off, start time, interval delay, total number of shots to expose, and the number of shots in the burst per interval (if more than one image per interval is desired).
To set up interval timer shooting, just follow these steps.
Before you start:
1. Check your time. The D800 uses its internal clock to activate, so make sure the time has been set accurately in the Setup menu before you begin.
2. Choose release mode. If you want to shoot bursts of images each time an interval elapses, set the release mode dial to CL (low speed continuous; pictures will be taken at the rate specified in Custom Setting d5) or CH (high speed continuous). If you prefer to take one picture per interval, set the release mode dial to S. However, you can still specify multiple shots per interval when using S; the D800 will use the frame rate specified in Custom Setting d2 just as if you had set the release mode to CL. You can’t use the Self-timer or Mup release mode with interval timing.
3. Set up optional bracketing. If you’d like to bracket exposures during interval shooting, set up bracketing prior to beginning. (You learned how to bracket in Chapter 4.)
Figure 11.32 The Interval Timer Shooting main screen.
4. Position camera. Mount the camera on a tripod or other secure support.
5. Fully charge the battery. You might want to connect the D800 to the Nikon AC Adapter EH-5b and EP-5b power connector if you plan to shoot long sequences. Although the camera more or less goes to sleep between intervals, some power is drawn, and long sequences with bursts of shots can drain power even when you’re not using the interval timer feature.
6. Make sure the camera is protected from the elements, accidents, and theft, and that the viewfinder is covered (use the eyepiece shutter if necessary) if you need to keep strong ambient light from entering the viewfinder and affecting exposure.
When you’re ready to go, set up the D800 for interval shooting:
1. Access feature. Choose Interval Timer Shooting from the Shooting menu.
2. Specify a starting time. You must choose a start time before the D800 will let you set other parameters. Highlight either Now or Start Time and press the multi selector right button. If you choose Now, the interval shooting will begin approximately three seconds after you’ve finished setting the parameters beginning with Step 5. If you select Start Time, you’ll be able to enter a specific time, as described in Steps 3 and 4.
3. Select initial delay. When the Start Time sub-screen appears, use the multi selector left/right buttons to highlight the hours or minutes, and the up/down buttons to increase or decrease the hours/minutes entry. The 24-hour clock is used, so you can specify a time from 00:00 (midnight) to 23:59 (one minute to midnight). When both hours and minutes have been set, press the multi selector right button to move the highlighting to the Interval section of the sub-screen.
4. Set the interval between exposures. You can use the left/right buttons to move among hours, minutes, and seconds, and use the up/down buttons to choose an interval from one second to 24 hours. Press the right button when finished to move down to the number of intervals/shots per interval sub-screen.
Tip
For Interval Timer and Time-Lapse Photography, the interval cannot set one second as the interval if the images will be taken at two seconds or longer.
5. Set number of intervals and shots per interval. Use the left/right buttons to highlight the number of intervals, the number of shots taken after each interval has elapsed, and the total number of shots to be exposed overall. You can highlight each number column separately, so that to enter, say, 250 intervals you can set the 100s, 10s, and 1s columns individually (rather than press the up button 250 times!). You can select up to 999 intervals, and 9 shots per interval for a maximum of 8991 exposures with one interval shooting cycle.
6. Activate shooting. When all the parameters have been entered, press the multi selector right button once more, and the Start subscreen appears, with the choices On or Off. Choose either one and press OK. If you activate interval shooting, a message is displayed on the monitor one minute before each series of shots begins.
PAUSE OR CANCEL INTERVAL SHOOTING
Press the MENU button between intervals (but not when images are still being recorded to the memory card), choose the Interval Timer Shooting menu entry, and select Pause. Interval shooting can also be paused by turning the camera on or off, or by rotating the release mode dial to Live View, Self-timer, or Mup positions. To resume the Interval Timer Shooting menu again, press the multi selector left button, and choose Restart. You may also select Off to stop the shooting entirely.
Time-Lapse Photography
This menu entry is basically the same as interval shooting with a similar setup menu and options, except that the frames captured will be assembled into a time-lapse motion picture rather than saved as a series of still shots. The feature uses the settings specified in the Movie Settings entry (described next). One difference between time-lapse and interval shooting is that the maximum movie capture time is 7 hours and 59 minutes. To shoot a time-lapse movie, just follow these steps:
1. Access feature. Choose Time-Lapse Photography from the Shooting menu.
2. Choose an interval. The Time-Lapse Photography screen will open with Off highlighted. Press the right directional button to select an interval between shots. The default value is 5 seconds. As with interval timer shooting, the interval must be longer than the slowest shutter speed you can expect. That is, if you will be shooting a time-lapse photo at night with a shutter speed of 5 seconds, the interval must be longer than 5 seconds.
3. Select a shooting time. Use the right directional button to move down one line and choose the shooting time. The maximum length is 7 hours and 59 minutes.
4. Start shooting. Press the right directional button again to move the highlighting to the top of the screen, where you can select On, and press OK to begin capture. Actual capture begins three seconds after you select On.
Time-lapse movies cannot be captured when using live view, bracketing, HDR, multiple exposure, or interval timer photography, nor when Bulb is selected as the shutter speed. The self-timer is disabled during capture.
While capturing, INTVL is displayed as a blinking icon and the time-lapse recording indicator is shown on the monochrome control panel. The time remaining in hours and minutes is shown just before each frame is recorded; if you want to know at other times, press the shutter release halfway.
Movie Settings
This menu entry allows you to choose four movie-making parameters for the D800, which I’ll discuss in much more detail in Chapter 14. The three are:
Frame size/Frame rate. Choose from 1920 × 1080 at 30, 25, or 24 fps; 1280 × 720 at 60, 50, 30, or 25 fps. I’ll show you how to select the best settings in Chapter 14.
Movie Quality. Choose High Quality or Normal Quality.
Microphone. Select from Auto Sensitivity and Manual Sensitivity settings with levels from 1-20.
Destination. Choose the slot containing the memory card you want to store your movies on; generally, use the slot containing the fastest memory card.