How To Set Up & Use Your Nikon Z6ii & Z7ii

[Music] well hey everybody it's hudson the new z62 and z72 are here so i'm doing this kind of complete custom setup video for you to show you how i set up my camera's controls my customizing of my controls some of the menu settings for the way that i like to shoot and i'll also show you how some of the user setting banks can be used to set up for different types of shooting modes i'll also go in and show you how to set up snapbridge so that you can connect your phone and your camera and get gps geocoding and automatic time zone updates and bring photos between your phone and your camera via bluetooth whenever you want when you're out on the road uh and and for anybody that's watching my videos if you just scroll along the timeline at the bottom i've got those chaptered so you can jump to any section that you want or re-watch any section that you want there's also a linked table of contents with time codes in there where you can just jump around and jump to whatever section that you'd like to watch if you click on the video's title or show more you can see that along with codes or links to any products that i talk about like i always get questions about this this cool little viewfinder eye shade that you can switch from vertical to horizontal left eye right eye it's a really handy cheap little accessory that i think you'll find you'll love on the camera i'll put a link to that in there i'm recording my camera via a hdmi out to a atomos ninja 5. i'll put a link to one of those too that's handy and i'll also show you how to back up all these settings to an sd card maybe you've got an old small sd card that you don't even want to use like this little 32 gigabyte one i've got laying around i'm going to back up all my settings on that so that if something happens i can always restore them again all right so let's jump in i'm not going to hit every single customization setting possible for this camera i'm just going to show you the ones that are important to me i'm taking the little eye hood off because i'm also recording sort of what i'm doing with my hands on the back of the camera and it gets in the way all right i want to show you first just some of the cool things that i have set up on this camera so and what i'm going to show you how to do i have it set up so that my user one mode is for landscapes where everything's manual and and i'm just dialed in for doing photography in the landscape on a tripod where i'm really fine crafting a static image or say still life something like that user menu 2 on the top command dial i have set up for a silent kind of stealthy mode for say you're doing some wedding photography or an event and you don't want the auto focus assist light and the sound of the shutter to be disturbing your subjects and then user setting three i'm going to switch some of the external controls around on the camera to optimize it for shooting motion sports action wildlife things where you're really caring about how you're auto focusing on your subject and working at faster shutter speeds and controlling things with shutter speed so i'll talk through how to set those three modes up i'll also show you how you know i've got my camera set up so that the function one button you know if you've got your hand on the camera that button that's right underneath your middle finger when it's on the grip does depth of field preview for apertures smaller than f 5.6 it lets me see how much of the scene is really in focus and the button that's underneath my ring finger the lower of those two front buttons does bracketing and with just a sweep of my front dial i can choose how many stops i'm bracketing by and with the back dial whether i'm just making one frame three stops underexposed and one on the meter or three stops overexposed one on the meter three stops underexposed those settings with bracketing just as simple so you don't even have to look up from your viewfinder while you're working so i'll show you how i set all that up really quickly and really easily i want to talk just a second about the touch screen on the back you've got in and the i menu functions so i'll show you how i set up and customize this i menu this is just a ability to pull up a bunch of easily accessed menu settings you can customize which ones you want available it's a really nice mode they're different for video mode than they are for still mode and also there's a little touch button right here i want to mention that you can hit the i button to bring that up by just touching the screen or you can hit this i button the physical button on the back but this little button that has a finger and an auto focus point looking thing that actually controls what happens when you touch an area on the screen so right now i have autofocus turned on if i touch the screen somewhere like on the camera where you are it will autofocus on the screen it's actually going to throw up a subject tracking box because i'm in auto area autofocus mode i can get rid of that by hitting the minus button on the back of the camera if i touch this button again it's actually set to focus and shoot on anything i take i touch the screen i don't really like that mode very much off means nothing happens when i touch on the screen just has no effect what i like is to say position autofocus point so particularly when i'm out in the landscape and i want to zoom in on a specific area of the screen i can set up you know single point autofocus and autofocus single servo mode and if i touch an area on the screen it just throws a focus point there and then when i want to go zoom into it it's automatically going to zoom in i'm in the wrong focus mode right now but let's open up the i menu and change that so i can show you what i'm talking about if i'm in auto focus single servo mode and if i went into a say pinpoint autofocus and now if i go in and i ab just touch say here and hit okay boom it zooms in to that area so it's super handy when you're out in the field just wanting to to zoom in and choose an area that you want to see you know is that in focus is that not in focus very very handy i'll show you how to set all of that up okay let's talk about those i menu options uh how i have mine set up uh well actually i'll show you when we go through and i'll show you how to customize this when we get into the to the menu options to customize but let's go do that all right so let's jump into the menus and to my mind the most important menu is the my menu my menu lets you collect a series of menu options that you want easy access to and and you can add any item in here that you want by just scrolling to the bottom in the beginning you won't have anything in there and you just say add items and it'll let you go into any one of your main menus you know say you want to go into the custom settings menu and you want to choose a shooting and display option like maximum continuous release you could just hit ok and it would add that in wherever you want in your menu you can choose where it gets put i'm going to put at the very bottom here you can rank items move them around on the list you can remove items like i don't necessarily want max continuous release if i just scroll over it push to the right to hit the check box and hit ok i'm going to delete selected item with the ok button boom so you can add a bunch of items in there and i'll show you what i have in here so that we can avoid even talking about them when we go into the other main menus i have my exposure delay mode in here i also keep that in my in my eye menu i'll talk about that in a minute how to customize that but exposure to laymo is just so important to me i often turn it on and it lets me choose whether i want the camera to wait two tenths of a second up to three seconds between when i hit the button and when it takes the image it's like having a cable release without ever setting one up or a remote control format memory card sadly these cameras don't have a two button reset um which the old slrs had so putting it up the top of my menu makes it easy for me to go in and format a card after i've downloaded images from it interval timer shooting i use that all the time for time lapse silent photography i like to use that to just go low profile and and not make noise when i'm shooting sometimes focus shift shooting that's great for doing uh focus stacking so i do use that i set that in there exposure steps for exposure control i can change from you know every time i click the wheel being a third of a stop to it being a half a stop which makes it quicker if i'm making adjustments for say long exposure noise or long exposures and i'm using neutral density filters or something i might want to not have to click the wheel three times to get a stop i just want to click it twice image review every now and then you do want to see the image after you took a picture mostly i leave that off that's if you take a shot it shows you the image that you just shot either in the viewfinder or on the back of the the camera i usually leave that off but i might want to turn it on for some reason uh shutter type there might be a reason why i absolutely want electronic front curtain shutter to be turned on or turned off but for the most part i leave it in automatic mode here it gives you a little explainer of what that means i find the camera does a great job i rarely change that but i keep it there clean image sensor that just dusts the sensor off hold it upside down activate that before you clean your camera if you find your brightness i turn viewfinder and monitor brightness i like to have those both in the my menu for if i'm working out late at night doing the milky way i want the brightness turned all the way down if i'm working in a brightly lit sunny day i want it turned all the way up so i can really easily see what i'm doing airplane mode there's occasions where i just want to save battery and i turn that on most of the time i leave it off and bluetooth connects it with my phone and updates the clock and and moves files if i want i'll show you how to do that with snapbridge self timer that lets me just change how many shots the self timer is going to take you know so you get a group set up on a mountaintop and how long the delay time is it's really easy to make those adjustments and i'll have to dive into the menu to find out where it is hdmi out i use that all the time because i shoot video and i record my screen and so those settings are important to me power off delay i use that that that just sets the camera it's kind of like your phone how long does it go before the screen times out when i'm shooting videos like this i need to adjust that you may not you just leave it at default and save batteries uh your flash shutter speed i'm not going to get too into flash settings here but i like flash control and flash shutter speed to be set here so i can control those if i am working with an external flash non-cpu lens data i use that for older lenses that don't communicate with the camera like my old manual focus 400 3.5 lens or my old uh manual focus 105 millimeter 2.5 ai lens some of those old nikon lenses you can just tell it what their maximum aperture and what their focal length are and the camera knows how to meter them all right so that's how i set up my my menu you can just add any item that you want you can customize it however you want that's how mine is set up now i'm just going to run through and show you some menu settings that i like to leave set up in here i'm in the playback menu anytime you're nikon lan you can navigate which menu you want to work in by just moving all the way to the left and then up and down that list to the left right now our playback menu is activated if i move to the right i'm in it playback display options i like to have exposure info i like red green blue histogram so i can check my exposure really really detailed i can see what my settings were i can check to see if the histogram looks right and then i like a none view no information at all just the image when i'm reviewing images so if i hit the display button while or or the up down arrow while i'm reviewing images it lets me go through those different modes it's really really easy for me to pick which one so that's the settings that i like for that i turn image review off as i said earlier i don't really want it interrupting me in between shots with the image i just took rotate tall i like to turn that off a lot of people leave it on if you if you leave that turned on when you take a portrait shot it displays it vertically when you're holding the camera horizontally and it gives you a real little vision of what that portrait oriented image looks like i'd rather have it be big in full screen and rotate it if i want it to be right side up i just want a more detailed look at it and that's that that's that for the playback menu the only things i really change i don't do a whole lot in the photo shooting menu either i do change the file naming so that my files have my initials and that's as easy as running around and choosing something on netflix on your smart tv i like to set my primary slot to the compact flash express card i think you got the idea earlier i'm a big compact flash express xqd fan they're just amazing they're much better built than any sd card they're much faster than sd cards particularly compact flash express so i like that to be my primary secondary i usually use overflow if i run out of space on my compact flash express and i have an sd card in the camera it'll start writing files to there if you're working for on some job that's just absolutely critical you're never going to get a chance to shoot it again you can choose it to back up just remember that if you're shooting in burst mode if you're doing sports or wildlife and you're shooting burst mode and you're really taxing the buffer it's going to slow down the writing because the sd card can't write as fast as the xqd or the compact flash express in the primary slot and i don't think there's much else run through here quick now all these settings i pretty much leave it stock i mostly shoot raw so it doesn't change those settings don't have a huge impact or they're easily accessible in my i menu movie shooting menu again i set up my name on the files the destination i like i like to shoot to the sd card if i have a big fast sd card in here i might as well have my movies on one source and my my stills on another although if you shoot a lot of movies onto a big sd card it'll take forever to download to your computer in comparison to a compact flash express card i mean you're talking about you know the difference between 250 or at the most 300 megabytes per second versus 1.4 or 1.6 gigabytes per second so a much faster speed if you use the xqd or cfxpress just depends on what you're doing i tend to shoot mainly stills in some videos so i put them on the sd card i don't think there's anything else that i change in here that isn't on my imenu already if we go into custom settings let's talk about the autofocus modes that i that i change i leave everything pretty much at default including you know the tracking speed where to lose a subject if it goes behind something these days i use all the autofocus points on the z62 for sure z72 i probably will too i i used to use half the autofocus points with my old z7 because there were so many and it took so long to scroll around between them all now with the dual processors it's much faster to scroll around and select different autofocus points so i don't mess with that i just i just leave it to all store points by orientation that's a big one when you're shooting vertically and you move the focus selector to say down be down in the bottom right rule of thirds position and then you flip up to horizontal and you move the focus point down to the bottom right rule of thirds position if you say store points by your orientation it will remember where you were when you were vertical it will remember where you were when you were horizontal and and keep those points where you set them until you change them that's a huge time saver if you're flipping in between vertical and horizontal i like that af activation this is a big one back button back button back button back bucket and there's a reason why just about every pro photographer in the world uses button autofocus and it's because the shutter should be for taking the picture not for taking the picture and focusing and if you use back button autofocus then it's rare that you need to flip into single servo autofocus mode because by taking your finger off the button it stops auto focusing so you choose the selection point with your back thumb you choose to focus with your thumb you let off it stops focusing you shoot when you're focused you want to focus again and hit with your thumb so i turn this to af on button only not shutter button f on and that makes it look as if it's and i leave that usually i enable that and that says af activation is off uh you can choose to limit the different autofocus area modes that are possible um i i'm still experimenting with them all i kind of like them all focus point wrap around i leave that turned off that's the setting where if you're selecting a focus point it goes off to the right side of your viewfinder it'll pop up on the left side that just bothers me not not my thing oh let's just run down not too much i would change in here nope just make sure i'm not forgetting something i usually leave that shutter type on automatic where the camera chooses between a mechanical shutter an electronic front curtain shutter extended shutter speeds this is a biggie this is super cool this is something i'm so excited about it's the first nikon cameras i've had that have this you turn this on it's set to off by default but when you turn it on it lets you choose in manual mode focus speeds much slower than 30 seconds you can go all the way to 15 minutes with the settings in camera so no more having to hook up a bluetooth device or a intervalometer that gives you really long exposure settings it's all built in here so that's a really cool thing to turn on i don't think there's too much i would change i like to have my framing grid display turned on it helps me with making sure that i'm level it also helps me when i'm shooting panoramas to have those frame lines to to notice where i am and make sure i have plenty of overlap focus peaking i like to turn that on but very very subtle i want the color to be white so it doesn't distract me like some glaring color in the frame and i want the peaking level to be one very low it just has a little shimmer tiny shimmer on the edge of high contrast edges so that i can get a visual representation that yes that is a sharp edge very very subtle i think nikon does this better than anybody with how subtle it is i really don't like a big distracting flashing video game looking focus peaking in my frame flash settings i'm not going to worry too much about one of the nice things in the custom setting is that you can literally go into these different sub menus so i'm just going to skip over bracketing while bracketing bracketing like i said is going to be set up on that function 2 button so it's easily accessed i'm not going to not going to do anything about that the order though i like that to be normal that's the stock order and what that is is it shows you the metered shot and then the under and then the over and that's nice because you get to see the the shot that was on the meter first when you're looking through images in post production all right so now let's custom let's go into the controls and again when you're in this custom setting menu it's so big and deep you can just scroll around you know you can jump into the shooting display options the d menu options or you can go down to controls like we just were and so moving out from bracketing order into controls i want to go ahead i want to customize my i menu and that's where we just talked about here's all the settings that are in my i menu from long exposure noise reduction and quality if i want to change one of those i just hit the ok button and i've got this huge list to choose from you know say i went to active d lighting now that's changed i don't though i want it to be high long exposure noise reduction once again this is my setting long exposure noise reduction white balance size and quality flash mode metering exposure delay choosing an image area fx dx square release mode i like to leave release mode on here just because it's faster than having to hit the button change a wheel and hit the button again when it's on the screen i can just tap tap it's quicker vibration reduction settings the focusing mode whether it's afs afc or manual focus and then the area mode boom boom that's also available in my video button i'll show you how i do that in just a second so i go ahead i hit done and then we go back into controls here custom controls now we're actually setting up what the external buttons on the camera do here's where we set these things differently than stock so the function one button that it's showing you in this little graphic where that is that's that button that's under your middle finger when you're holding the camera i want that to be the the depth of field preview so you touch that it's the depth of field preview and you can scroll between all these different things and change it if you want depth to field preview function 2 bracketing there's where we put that bracketing mode in scrolling along i want autofocus on to be an autofocus button i'm a back button focuser that's all i want that to do the joystick underneath the af on button i want to help me scroll around and select which focus point i'm using if i push the center of it i want to reset that focus point to the center makes me move around quicker the movie button i want to control autofocus settings with the wheels so hold down the movie buttons remove the front wheel i change which area mode move the back wheel i change which autofocus setting between manual focus afc and afs now some lenses with this new system come with function buttons that are programmable on the lens my uh nikon 14 to 24 2.8 lens the s lens has one of these function buttons right now my favorite setting for that for a single button lens these bigger heavier ones where you're holding it in the camera is to put play on there and that way i don't have to look down and reach my hand back from holding the lens and hit the play button on the back of the body on the left side and i wish nikon would consider moving the play and delete buttons over to the right hand so that you can chimp without looking up while you're holding a long lens it's something to think about changing or maybe in playback mode make other buttons active but at this point this is just a quick way to be able to access your images and see if what you're shooting looks good without even looking up from from a bigger lens some lenses like the 70 to 200 millimeter lens have a second function button and i like to set that to that active subject tracking mode say you're in an auto area autofocus mode with or without eye detect or animal eye detect you can activate a little tracking box put it over the subject that you want to track and have the camera track that subject around on the sensor having that button activate or deactivate that tracking box is really handy with a longer lens like the 70-200 and i'm sure all their big long lenses will have another function button that you can do that with this one's a little tricky this this lens control ring so if you have a lens like this 20 millimeter 1.8 that i have on here that lens control ring is just the manual focus ring and i want it to manually focus that's what m a means if i have my my 24 to 70 little f4 lens it has a zoom ring and it has a manual focus ring and that control ring is the manual focus ring i want it to manually focus if i have one of the new holy trinity 2.8 lenses like this 14 to 24 or the new 70 to 200 they have a new third ring a control ring so there's a zoom ring there's a focus ring and then there's the third ring the control ring and i like to set that if you connect this lens to the camera and you make change this setting it'll change it only for when this lens is connected to the camera so if you do want to customize one of your new top gun lenses that has that third control ring mount it on the camera come back into this menu and choose whether you want it to be manual focus aperture exposure compensation or iso sensitivity i tend to like exposure compensation but you got to keep your eye on it and make sure that it's not that it's not changing by bumping it or something you got to kind of keep your eye on exposure compensation it's really handy if you're shooting in auto modes though with one of these new lenses that has a third ring but when you have your stock lens on there that doesn't have a control extra control ring make sure you leave it to ma manual automatic focus the ok button i want that to zoom in to 100 percent when i'm focusing i showed you that earlier where you tap and wherever your focus point is i hit my ok button it zooms into 100 to check whether i'm in focus when i'm shooting uh i want to do the same thing when i'm in playback mode and you can choose how much you want to magnify i like it to go to one to one 100 so boom that's set and in shooting mode the same thing you get to choose and i want it to be one to one one hundred percent boop okay so those are set um shutter speed these are all ways to customize the command dials and um and reverse the the way that your settings work or you know i don't do any of that i just leave them in stock with your movie settings you've got another separate eye mode the minute you flip this this toggle switch around the display button from still to video you have a whole nother eye menu to work with and the way i set up my movie shooting eye menu is picture control i tend to set that to neutral when i'm shooting for the most ability to post process white balance which is really important when you're shooting video microphone sensitivity whether it's internal or an external mic coming in the quality that's whether it's 4k 1080 720 how many frames per second the image area that you're shooting on your headphone volume for monitoring your audio the metering focus peaking electronic vibration reduction that's kind of a level of vibration reduction where it crops in a little on the frame and actually will adjust the frame to do even more vibration reduction i tend to leave that off and just use regular vibration reduction which is amazing with video and then the same is still mode the focusing modes whether i'm focus mode or the auto area modes and then again in a movie i want to customize my controls i set them up a little differently for video again you know i i'm not as worried about uh depth of field preview because in video mode it always stops down to the aperture that you're working with what you see on the screen is what you're going to get it also i don't need to worry about bracketing because i'm not doing any exposure bracketing when i'm shooting video so i set things up a little differently my function one button is actually live view display info off what that means is i get a completely clean view with no information now if that's really important to you in stills mode too you can program one of your external buttons to do that i wish it was built into the display rotation whereas just one of the options as i hit the display button to see different displays on the on the back of the camera and the viewfinder it's not you have to set it to an external button it's really important in video for framing and so i set that to the function one button it just turns all the information on my display off so i can really see the frame that i'm that i'm crafting function two button i have the autofocus settings it's really easy to access what autofocus mode i'm in the af on button again is af on the sub selector center button so the little the little joystick just resets if i push the center of it it resets to the center autofocus point same as before the shutter button takes a still photo and again you've got the control ring controls which you know again i just generally leave to manually focus even more important with video that you leave it to manually focus all right so i'll hit done and once again the ok button zoom just does into one to one same thing um yeah oops and then so i don't really change any of the other stuff going on in here oh highlight display i tend to like to have a little bit of zebra striping for video to see completely blown out white sections of the frame so i turn that on and i put my threshold at 248 so the 255 so if it something's really really bright you can set your your threshold there 248 is just below completely blown out and it'll show us a zebra pattern all right that's it for the custom controls we're all the way through them um when it comes to the setup menu i'll show you how to save uh your your your settings we've already gone through put form we put most of the ones that i use in here already in the my menu like monitor brightness and some of the others the non-cpu lens data all that kind of stuff clean image sensors in here if you're cleaning your sensor it's a good i you know it but we've already got that in there so not a whole lot that we go through i don't do much in retouching in the camera at all we already covered my menu so what i'll do is i'm going to run in here and show you how to set up how to save and load your menu settings once we're done setting up our user settings on the u1 u2 u3 button all right let's talk about setting up individual user settings to the user modes on your main command dial u1 u2 u3 i'm going to set up so the u1 is for landscape and static subjects u2 is for silent kind of syrup shooting so you're in an event space you don't want to bother anyone and u3 is going to be for sports and action and wildlife and fast shooting situations all right so let's jump in here you're going to set the camera up like you want to shoot in that situation so i'm going to jump in my my display mode to the one where you can see where i'm set and we'll set up for landscape first we're already in manual mode let's change our shutter speed way down slower we're going to say a 30th of a second and maybe you want to think about shooting in one of your prime apertures like f8 and i'd rather be in a different mode for autofocus than autofocus continuous i'd rather have it be autofocus single servo where it's going to lock a perfect focus on a static subject so i'm going to put afs and then i'd like it to be a pinpoint autofocus where i'm choosing a real pin point source i want to [Music] turn exposure delay mode on i'd like a half a second shutter delay let's say uh and i would want long exposure noise reduction turned on so that's that's all the kinds of things i would do for shooting in the landscape oh i also want to just make sure we'll turn that back off that i don't have auto iso turned on i have auto iso turned on right now so i'm going to turn that off by just holding the iso button down and rolling the back the front wheel the back wheel with the iso button changes iso i want to set it at my base best iso and i don't want auto turned on that's that front wheel boom done and now i want to save that to user setting one so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to hit the menu button and here in the uh in the setup menu up near the top we've got save user settings i'm going to save these settings we just set to u1 boom done all right so now let's set it up for silent photography i'm going to go into my well first of all i want to go into let's just look at our display again here i'm going to go into aperture priority mode where i would want to be i'm going to turn that iso back onto auto for exposure i probably want my aperture kind of wide open for that kind of mode i am going to hit my my settings down here i'd rather be in a continuous autofocus where it's tracking moving subjects i probably want ion face detect in the uh in the auto area autofocus mode we'll talk about autofocus modes in just a minute but i'm going to do auto area autofocus for people that's generally when i want this kind of setting i don't want any exposure delay turned on i want to take a picture of the instant i hit the shutter button i don't need long exposure noise reduction for this i'm not taking really long images that seems pretty good to me oh yeah we need to go in i'm going to go back into the menu here and i want to go into the my menu and i'm going to scroll on down to where i have silent shutter well i probably just went right by it didn't i you're all laughing at me silent photography there it is on boom that's set locked in we're good and now i just want to jump back out go into my setup menu save user settings save to u2 save oh one more thing wait i forgot something we want to go into the custom setting menu here into autofocus and down towards the bottom of the a list is built in af assist illuminator let's turn that off so it's not flashing lights in people's faces either okay so now our settings are truly dialed in and we'll just re-save that okay now that's added cool so let's jump in and we need to turn that stuff back off again don't we i'm going to turn the autofocus illuminator back on might want that i'm going to set it up for sports in action now is what we're doing i'm going to jump back into the my menu and turn the silent photography back off all right i think those are the only main internal menu settings oh no you know what else i need i want to change my controls a little bit for shooting for shooting sports in action this way so i'm going to go down to controls and i want to customize my controls and i don't need to worry about bracketing for sports in action so this is my big change i want to change that so that it activates subject tracking in the auto area autofocus mode and remember we set that for the lens function button 2 for longer lenses i'm also setting it for that button that my ring finger rests up against when i'm shooting sports in action in my u3 mode it makes it really easy to activate or deactivate a focus tracking point when you're using the auto area autofocus to force it to select that point and track that point around on the sensor that's really important so boom that is now set that's the only thing i need to change and i'm going to jump back out to my display mode here i want to be in shutter priority mode i want to set it so that my shutter speed is really dialed in for if i suddenly wanted to photograph a burden flight you know i always think about i'm happening upon a heron on the bank i want auto iso but i want it to be set for my base iso which it is so shutter priority shutter is what matters to me with sports in action i want auto focus continuous i want that auto area auto focus mode and i'll leave it on people because a lot of times sports in action has people in it i want vibration reduction turned on as i go in here and look through these things i want exposure delay mode turned off you know sadly the release mode is not sticky i would want to go into high speed cont extended but that won't lock in with the user settings you got to go in and change that remember that that still needs to be physically changed and there we go we basically have it all set up for shooting sports in action right now so i go back into my menu i go back into my setup menu up near the top here under format card i'm going to save all these settings to u3 save settings hit the ok button and we are set so let's test it out now i'm in shutter mode right now oh you know one thing quick now i'm not in one of those u buttons i need to go in here and i need to change my control mode back this is the one big thing to do after you've got it all down in your general setup when you're just in manual or aperture or shutter or program mode i want to go back into custom controls and flip that back into bracketing i only want that bracketing setting to be there to turn off bracketing when i'm in um [Music] when i'm in the user three mode so where is that there's such a big long list here i want bracketing i probably just missed it huh bracketing settings that's funny i'll find it oh yeah it's a command dial press plus command dial that's what's going on so it's bracketing boom there you go all right so we're reset now so i've got my camera set up as i would want but if suddenly you know i found myself in a landscape situation all of a sudden i'm in manual mode 30th of a second f8 exposure delay mode's on the autofocus mode i desire is set again it didn't lock in the the release mode when high speed extended you'd want to change that to single frame going to user 2 i'm in aperture priority i'm in silent mode all my settings are dialed exposure delay is turned off if i go into user 3 i'm in shutter priority 250th of a second autofocus continuous exposure delay is turned off it's also going to have that subject tracking on my function 2 button on the front if i go back into manual or aperture or shutter i'm just in my general everyday shooting modes so that has my camera custom set up exactly the way that i want now i want to back those settings up so what i'm going to go ahead and do i'm going to flip my camera off i'm going to pull out my compact flash express card i'm going to pull out my regular high capacity fast sd card that i would keep in here if i have one and instead i'm going to drop in an old 32 gigabyte slow sd card i have lying around i'm gonna slide it into that slot turn on the camera i'm going to go into the menu and in that same setup menu down towards the very bottom scroll all the way down the list you'll find save load menu settings save menu settings boom now it's saved to that old memory card i turn my camera back off i'm gonna pop that card i'm gonna slide that little lock on the sd card so that i can't overwrite that important information i'll probably put a sticker on there you can do this to multiple cards you can keep one at home in your studio you can keep one in your camera bag and in with other sd cards but locked with sticker on it you got your settings you can always get them back if something gets screwed up and you're not sure what's going on it's like backing up your computer hard drive all right so quickly i want to talk about autofocus modes and i think this is especially important for anybody coming over from the dslr world to the to the z world for the first time things are different and i'd have you practice some of the new settings that are available with the z cameras and practice the different modes and i'll just tell you what's been working really well for me so you know some of these are super simple i'm going to use the i menu to access these again you know we have it set up so that you can switch between these area modes and autofocus modes really quickly with the video button but here in our i menu there's your choice between autofocus continuous autofocus single servo that's very similar to the dslr world is whether it locks in on a af-s is where it locks in on a static subject and just gets fine tunes autofocus perfectly or whether it's tracking autofocus continuous tracking a moving subject or whether you're manually focusing your camera and then the focus peaking is going to come up and everything else and also just switch to manual focus on your lens if your lens has an autofocus switch on it manual autofocus when i'm in single autofocus mode um hit okay here i often just the times i use single autofocus mode i generally use pinpoint autofocus and and that lets me select a focus point you know let's say again like i showed earlier like you and then if i hit the ok button we've got that set to zoom into 100 and i can just check and fine tune my focus so i got a little bit of peaking if i use manual focus and and bounce back out with the ok button you know i can set that little tiny fine pin point and i can either hit the af on button and get it locked in focusing and with the low light autofocus mode turned on like i said i've used this to focus on planets in the night sky when shooting milky way or a really bright star it's amazing or you light up your subject with a headlamp and focus on the foreground in a night scene so going back into the i menu that's the most common mode that i use in the afs when i go into afc i tend to use some different modes i'm frequently frequently using auto area autofocus mode with face and eye detect turned on and what that does is it's sort of like a close subject priority mode where it as it makes a decision based on what the sensor sees on what it is that you want to auto focus on and nine times out of ten i find it makes the perfect decision it generally prioritizes subjects that are close or that are moving in a way that it would anticipate your subject would be moving or that you're tracking it's incredible when you're doing things like birds and flight and you're tracking something that's moving quickly through the framing you're moving with it with your camera it does a great job for instance you know with me tracking skiers in the back country or kite border it identifies that subject without me ever highlighting an auto focus point at all and if there's a face or eyes in it all of a sudden it'll lock in on the face or it'll lock in on the eyes and you can use the d-pad left and right arrows to switch between faces or switch between eyes and the frame it's really super cool there's a mode for animals where it looks for animal faces there's a mode for people where it looks like people's faces and eyes there's a mob where it isn't looking for faces and eyes but it does a great job there's now and then when you want to actually lock in on a subject and the camera's not making the right decision for you well that's where that subject tracking box comes in so if i suddenly flip out and i'm go into the into our user three mode where we're in the motion detect and i hit that that function two button where we normally have bracketing set up in our camera i can activate or deactivate that box i can move it around i can tell it i want to track the subject and as long as i activate it and hold it down it'll track whatever i've declared i want tracked if a person's moving around in the frame this lets you determine which of the two penguins do you want to track that are moving around slowly in the frame and it'll follow them and keep them in focus pretty cool stuff turn it back off by hitting that function button again it's the the easiest and fastest way i've found to do that is by setting it up with that user three mode in my sports and action tracking mode and putting that on the function button or with some of my lenses like the 70-200 that has a second function button on the lens you can activate it right on the lens and deactivate it super cool super easy so going back into here if we're in here and we choose there's a new thing with the z6 and z7 where you've got kind of a wide area where you're able to select you know where where do i want my focus to be oh wait didn't i just select that hang on a second i didn't thought i did i want the wide area large i hit okay okay now i'm in wide area so it's only going to focus on things that are within that wide area so if i hit the button boom it's picking the picture now it's picking the camera that's you guys now it's going to pick the desk in the foreground all right you can also set that up now where you have that wide area that you're selecting and it's only going to look for faces within that wide area or eyes within that wide area either people or animals that's really handy if you've got a lot of people in the framing you only want to track one or a lot of animals and you only want to track one it's a really nice nice setup and then there's dynamic area this is much like we used in the dslr era where you're saying you know i want my subject to be here once i begin tracking it it'll hand that subject off between those other points around it i find it a little less useful in the mirrorless age than the auto area modes it seems like the engineering is really going into the auto area let that sensor make decisions for you and it does it really really well but there's occasions where i do want to use this dynamic area i would say play with both practice with both see which one you like better and then you know you can also of course set it up to where you're using a single point that's tracked i find that a lot it's useful i find myself here here or here wide area where i'm choosing what area to do face and eye detect or just auto area with faces and eyes popping up whenever they come into the frame or in this dynamic area and to be honest this mode right here i find is just pretty oops you do have to hit okay this mode right here the auto area autofocus people that's the one that i love to use the most it just makes great decisions 99 of the time and when it doesn't i hit that tracking box and activate the tracking box if i'm you know if i'm shooting motion and sports and action and things that's where you know i would go into that user three mode for for motion and action and the camera will make great decisions for me whoops almost forgot i need to show you how to connect your your z62 or your z72 into nikon's mobile software snap bridge it's going to be the same whether you're on ios or android phone or tablet basic process is identical you're going to fire up snapbridge on your mobile app this app has gotten better and better and better over the years by the way and when you get in here it's showing that i have my z7 connected last i'm going to go ahead hit that little wheel up at the top my settings wheel the gear icon and i want to add a camera and i'm going to choose a mirrorless camera and i want to use pairing bluetooth plus wi-fi and now it tells me to go into my cameras uh the setup menu and up you know sort of down towards the the middle lower section you're going to find connect to smart device and then we want to go into pairing and i want to start pairing boom instantly on my phone pops up the camera i tap it it's going to connect into our camera and you press the camera's okay button when it asks you to establishes a connection i don't need it to have my access to my contacts and call history so i go ahead and hit pair it's establishing that connection pairing is complete we're connected to the camera boom you've got remote photography options where you can actually do live view control change settings and fire the camera remotely you can go into the camera and download pictures you'd have to enable wi-fi to do that but you can actually go in delve in and and and check out pictures you can have it automatically download two megapixel stills if you're shooting raw plus jpeg i often just flip raw plus jpeg on and off when i want the images automatically downloaded to my camera and i'll throw my camera bag in the van and have my my tablet or my phone in the van and when i go out to dinner boom all my images are on my camera a little two megapixel versions to just look at you can tell you want to synchronize clocks right now it knows what time zone i'm in on my on my phone so this keeps if you connect all your cameras in via snap bridge right after you get someplace on a trip it'll synchronize all your clocks so they're all dialed in the same you can synchronize location data as long as it's connected now remember if you go and you photograph someplace that's sensitive someplace you don't necessarily want to send hordes of photographers that follow you on your instagram feed into turn that off so that you keep places secret and special and boom you can turn that auto link on and off anytime you want you're just sort of set and and it'll download images from your camera directly into your phone's camera roll if you're on a ios device or into whatever folder you designate if you're on an android simple easy boom it works like gangbusters i love snapbridge all right so hopefully that helps with the setup if you have questions about things if you have comments uh hit me up again you know my product links are always there you can always go find them at hudson henry.com ats links i've put links to this stuff in the video if you have something in particular you want to buy and you want to use one of my links to help me out you know feel free email me i'm easy to get to thanks everybody i know this is a long video but for those of you that are new to the system i know a lot of people really enjoyed the last one so i'm putting it out there all right thanks see you out there i hope you enjoy this new camera they're pretty darned awesome

Channel: Hudson Henry Photography

Views: 78,802

Rating: 4.9432006 out of 5

Keywords: Nikon, Z7, Z6, mirrorless, lesson, education, training, how to, gear, photography class, digital photography, depth of field, f5.6, aperture, live view, Approaching The Scene, Hudson Henry, Z6ii, Z7ii, setup, guide, autofocus, touchscreen, user settings, menus, controls, backup

Id: Do0Va7wciTs

Length: 49min 10sec (2950 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020