Nikon D3500 Full Tutorial Users Guide

everybody my name is Michael Andrew and today I want to give you a free tutorial on the nikon d 3500 wonderful little camera i love it's cost obviously the size and the weight and it has an excellent 24 megapixel sensor in it many of you are pure beginners to photography so i want to emphasize that knowing how to operate the camera isn't gonna be enough to go out and take great images if this is you I would definitely recommend checking out my brand new course Universal photography concepts I'll put that link in the description it'll teach you how to think in terms of the physics of photography very proud of it I'm also giving away a free camera Sony a7 3 it's a $2,000 camera amazing it's one of my favorite cameras right now I'll put that link in the description as well very easy and free to enter to win so many of you are probably wondering how do you find all the different chapters for this tutorial we've made a table of contents and if you use the search feature of your browser type it in it'll highlight it and you can click to that link and it'll take you right there so in any event we have a ton of information to cover let's get started before I take you on a full overview of all the buttons and controls I wanted to point out a few quick notes that you'll notice that on your lens you're gonna have a little white dot on the lenses it's right there and there's also a white dot on your camera body these two are meant to line up and then rotate the lens on one important tip that I can give you is that you turn the camera body upside down so this should be facing the ground when you change your lenses if it's not you're increasing the chances of something falling into your camera body and creating some sensor dust and you'll notice this as a like a Grace back on on all of your images it's going to be in the exact same place if this has happened and you can reduce that again by changing your lenses upside down try not to change them in windy conditions things of that nature when you turn your camera on so here's the power switch you're getting ready to shoot especially few have a kit lens it's going to ask you to unlock the lens so this was not available on earlier models of Lenz has a little L indicator and there's a lock button right here that you're going to push and rotate to open the lens to 18 to 55 millimeters let's talk about some of the buttons and controls real quick again here's your power button pretty important we have an auto focus lamp here sometimes this will turn on automatically depending on what mode you're in and I'll make some recommendations on that the shutter button obviously is right here very important to note that this is a two phase button there is a halfway position and then there's a full position that takes the picture so when you push this halfway down you can kind of hear it a little bit that engages the cameras focusing systems so it's gonna focus on your subject push it down all the way to take the picture we'll be talking more about this when we discuss the optical focusing systems which is through the viewfinder this button here the mode dial very important it's going to tell the camera what conditions to change the exposure settings manual mode is obviously you're going to do everything and then we have a PS and a modes I'll be making recommendations on those this button right here with the plus minus sign we have a picture of some aperture blades very important when you're shooting an aperture priority mode if you want to change your brightness it's called the exposure compensation button fancy way of saying changing image brightness and then we have our command wheel right here you're going to be using your shutter button the mode dial button the command will and your exposure compensation button quite a bit this is the live view lever this is going to kick the camera into Live View which is going to shift what you're seeing on the back display it's like a little TV monitor and I'll demonstrate all that of course shifting it back will go to your information screen lens release button right here hot shoe mount right here is the pop-up flash it's a little tiny flash that will pop up and give you some fill light one button I comically left out was the video record button has a little red dot on it it's right next to the shutter button when you push that that's going to start or stop video recording on the back of the camera we have our flash engage button this is going to pop up the flash certain modes here popping up next just above it you're going to see the flash exposure compensation and what this means is that when the flash is up if you push and hold that down it's going to allow you to adjust the flash power this little dial right here just to the right of the viewfinder that's your diopter adjustment what that means is if you use corrective eyewear glasses contacts this is going to help you adjust the focus through the viewfinder we have our information button autofocus lock auto exposure lock button there's a way to customize this which I'll demonstrate in the focusing lesson we have our playback button deep menu button we have our I button which is different than the info button I'll demonstrate that we have our directional pad the okay which is like a set or return button on a computer just to the bottom in the right of it we have our drive modes button this is going to tell the camera what to do after we push your shutter button down all the way we have our delete button garbage can icon we have our zoom in zoom out for playback this question mark sometimes will give us menu information little definition of what it is we're doing or changing on the camera and then we have our back LCD monitor very important very critical you're gonna be changing a lot of information you're going to be viewing images and things of that nature on the back monitor obviously we have on the right side our card slot for a single SD card slot and then we have an HDMI out and USB terminal on the left side of the camera let's talk about the information that you're going to see on your back monitor very important to make some distinctions here the info button is going to allow you to toggle this screen on or off so if you're a certain situation you want to turn that off boom so if it disappears try that and there's also a distinction between the info button and the eye button and I'll point that out in a second in the top left hand corner you're going to have your shooting mode this little N icon basically means the camera is going to try to clean up vini edding in the corners it's a darkening in the corners that you're going to see in wide-angle lenses image stabilization this s refers to single shot that's where a drive mode indicator will appear beep indicator battery indicator these three big circles are very important we have our shutter speed aperture in ISO and something that's cool about the aperture is it shows the aperture blades and so it's it's sort of like a little preview of what's happening to your aperture blade as you rotate your command I'll changing them we'll talk about all that in just a second but shutter speed aperture ISO you'd be looking here more than anywhere else focusing mode then we have our number of shots remaining you're gonna see this bracket in little K here K means thousand I have seven thousand images available on the memory card this is going to change depending on the format you're shooting in whether it's raw or JPEG the size of the files things of that nature now below all this we have these twelve different options down here and you're going to notice that you can't really highlight them right but if you push the I button it's going to allow us to access and change all of these very handy ok so just get used toggling that on and off we'll go through each of these real quick image quality refers to raw and JPEG see look at the predicted number changing raw only fine is the highest quality JPEG compression for normal essentially means the camera is going to tell adjacent pixels that are similar enough that they're now the same it's very difficult to see the difference between fine and normal to the naked eye but if you look at the number of shots remaining in the file size it can save twice the space ok so normal is about half the size of fine basic is about half the size of normal probably gonna start seeing some degradation at basic but you know if you're shooting through the web or you don't need really high quality images and you're running out of space I typically shoot on fine or raw depending on what I'm doing if it's important I'm shooting raw or raw in JPEG if it's more casual you know kids playing around things of that nature I'll probably be shooting on JPEG I button to go out image size is the number of megapixels when you come in here you can shoot full-size which is 24 megapixels megabytes is an estimation of how big the file is in terms of memory and then we have smaller images with medium and small typically I'm always shooting on large because you can take a large image in downsize can't really take a small image and up size without losing quality white balance we're talking about this in depth this is where we select the color temperature that we're shooting in active d-lighting think of this as an automatic contrast control and for JPEGs I leave it on on most the time you can turn it off you're going to notice a slight shift in some of the dynamic range this is more of a processing thing that happens as the camera is recording to the memory card some people love it some people hate it if I'm shooting JPEGs yeah it's typically enough flash control the flash mode that we're shooting in we'll briefly talk about all these ISO control if you haven't heard I don't know this is the sensitivity of the sensor lower numbers mean that the camera is going to capture images cleanly with less noise it's going to be better image quality if we're in a low light shooting situation in we have really slow shutter speeds we can come in here and turn this up the problem with this is is that as we make the sensor more and more sensitive to light we increase the amount of grain it's an artifact that you're going to see in very high ISO images and 12,800 you're probably going to see it pretty easily for sure twenty-five thousand six hundred you'll see it in flesh tones kind of smoothes out the camera tries to reduce some of the grain sometimes and so just keep that in mind yeah you can shoot in low-light conditions but once you get into these higher numbers it's usually not that great the focusing modes have to do when the camera is focusing the focusing area has to do with the where the camera is focusing in the clusters can come in here and change the clusters which I talked about that in depth as well metering mode is how the camera is measuring light that's entering through the lens picture control I like to think of these guys as recipes for JPEGs it's basically how the image is being baked were processed by the camera cameras are going to capture initially raw data and convert it into a JPEG throwing away a lot of information just keeping the most important parts of the image if you're shooting raw you're capturing the complete raw original file so picture controls apply to JPEGs only flash exposure compensation fancy way of saying flash brightness control and then we have normal exposure compensation so that's an overview of the back monitor as well as the eye button let's talk about the mode dial located on the top of the camera there is so many icons and letters and numbers on top of this what I want you to notice is that as you rotate this mode dial you're going to notice the letter changing in the top left hand corner the most important modes that you need to be focusing on are P program mode s shutter priority mode a which is aperture priority mode in M which is the manual mode and if you're my best friend and you came over here and you're like Michael what am i doing I put a lot of pressure on you to try to learn aperture priority mode first between aperture priority mode in manual mode this covers probably 95% of the modes that I'm shooting in and instead of spending all this extra time on on modes that you may or may not use focus on aperture priority when you start getting a good feel for the camera worst case scenario focus on program mode program is like an automatic mode what I definitely do not recommend is shooting on this mode here Auto mode this is really bad Auto mode is going to do everything for you it puts everything into automatic you can't change your ISO you can change your focusing you know it's just basically the camera is going to be running the show the reason why you bought this camera is for the sensor size in the controls of the exposure and the focusing in so worst case program mode program it mode has its time in place for begin I've heard of some pros that shoot in program mode when they're using flash just depends on what they're doing now there are some other modes on the dial that you're going to notice one of them is effects effects is kind of fun it's sort of gimmicky you know but I don't really use it if you want it to change which effect you're using rotate the command dial and you'll see you this little photo illustration toy camera miniature effect probably easier to see this in live view so I'm going to toggle the live view lever and this is going to give you a preview of the effect that you're doing handout here let's see if we could see some of these guys photo illustration right it's almost like a comic book sort of thing toy camera not a huge fan of them why because you can do all these things in post if you really want it to go that route as you continue to rotate the mode dial we come into these preset automatic modes you're going to notice a little picture icon and some of the informations going to change as well so low light you're going to notice this little icon of an individual with a little star or light behind them you're going to notice that the flash mode changed to slow sync this is going to allow for a slow shutter speed with the fill flash macro mode or close-up mode then we have sports mode person running no flash then we have portrait mode so woman with a hat and we have our no flash mode if you're at Elvis's house that say they say no flash again all of these modes these automatic preset modes I don't recommend messing around with them you would still benefit from getting images with the full-size sensor but the camera is going to be making most of the decisions so we're going to be focusing on aperture priority mode so something I want you to become very comfortable with is toggling into Live View mode so this is what we see through the viewfinder toggle that lever lever again we backed her information screen let's go through some of this information real quick so ever shooting mode flash mode our drive mode now set to single frame our focusing mode auto focus single focusing cluster active d-lighting we have a picture control a white balance setting we have right here our image size compression type image stabilization in the lens battery indicator beep metering shutter speed aperture ISO those three are very important you're also going to see them in the viewfinder where you see a fraction the first two shutter speed F refers to the opening of lens aperture and ISO you notice this ISO a is flashing so definitely hope you have your camera in hands we're gonna start talking about exposure control and something I want you to do very critical is we're going to turn off automatic ISO automatic ISO means that the camera is going to be making changes to the sensor sensitivity without your permission and I believe that Nikon set the sub default to help people get started and make it easier to take pictures the problem with it is is that if you're in a low light shooting situation it's going to boost your ISO okay and some of the images can look really terrible and there's ways around that you know using a tripod with longer shutter speeds so we're gonna turn this off for the sake of exposure discussion so we're going to come into the deep menu green cap ISO sensitivity settings and to navigate in the menu you are where the yellow highlight is and I'm using my directional pad up and down you'll notice there's five tabs and those tabs all have their own color there's a little color frame around each of those tabs blue is for playback Green is for shooting orange is your setup we have a retouch menu which is purple and then we have our custom menu or my menu be going through most of these here in the one I want you to look at is green tab and so we're going to push right to highlight so we remember you are where the yellow is something that's very subtle on the far right is that we have this slider bar so what that means is there are different pages within each tab so even though you have one tab you may have three or four pages I know there's three pages here from the size of the bar so as I continue to scroll down to move to the middle continue to scroll down to the bottom but keep on going it resets it stays within that tab you have to move over to go to the next tab and then down before pages there so that's how you navigate through the deep menu so we're going to come back to ISO sensitivity settings in the auto ISO sensitivity control is what we're going to turn off the only time I turn that on is when I am shooting low-light sports and I have to have a certain shutter speed in a certain aperture I'll turn auto ISO on because if there's changes in lighting I don't want to have to make adjustments the cameras the only time I use it and other pros will tell you otherwise it's just one man's opinion so now that this is turned off let's talk about exposure control so the aperture priority mode is the one I want to focus on because you're going to get the most out of this aperture priority mode means that when we change our aperture the camera is going to make adjustments automatically to the shutter speed see that so the aperture is changing and the shutter speed is also changing but this is something that the camera is controlling in shutter priority mode we designate the shutter speed in the camera changes the aperture talk about this in a second in program mode you're going to notice that the camera change is both and then in manual mode we change shutter speed look how the aperture stays the same there's a way that we dial in the aperture as well so something I want to point out is that it's very important to sneak a peek at the shutter speed when you're using aperture priority mode because you if you're shooting people you want to have a shutter speed of at least one sixtieth of a second is the short answer is people move too if you're trying to shoot people up one thirtieth of a second you can probably expect a lot of your images to be blurry so right now I cannot open my aperture wider it's not letting me open it shutter speeds one thirtieth of a second if I take if I were to take a picture of my blinds I'm on a tripod it's kind of dark so we have a number of problems here if you get into a situation like this where your shutter speeds are low can't open your your aperture blades more look at your ISO very low ISO and we have some room to play with right 100 is the lowest setting so what I'm going to do is come in strife 400 look what happen to the shutter speed bumped up so now we could shoot at 1/100 of a second ISO 400 and if we were shooting portraits that would that would be in most cases fast enough depending on what kind of lens you have there's something called the reciprocal rule where you want to use a shutter speed that is the reciprocal of your focal length so if you're shooting at 200 millimetres ideally this would be one two hundredth of a second if you had a 100 millimeter lens 1/100 of a second get it 60 or 70 millimeter lens you want to be 60 or 70 or 80 but you can't dial in the shutter speeds use 60 or 80 that's just a rule of thumb my experience has been is if you're steady you can get away with quite a bit sometimes but if you're beginner keep that in mind so I want to show you something that's pretty cool here take your hand and point your camera at something and something bright and I want you to move your hand in front of the camera and watch what happens the shutter speed is changing so the camera is making changes to the shutter speed depending on how much light is entering the lens that's very important okay so it's gonna do a lot of work for you professionally when I shot weddings I would shoot aperture priority mode why because we'd be in a dark church and as the bride and groom are leaving now we're in a kind of a medium lit Lobby and in two seconds we're outside and so we might have three different lighting conditions change in a matter of seconds and I don't want to be fumbling with my exposure settings same thing with sport shooting I'm on aperture priority mode why because sometimes clouds come over the Sun and during the action I don't want to fumble with my settings and fumble back and so what I try to do is dial in my aperture and keep an eye on my shutter speed what my shutter speeds doing something that you'll need to do and get in the habit of is taking a picture and inspecting it it's a good habit to start to make sure you're getting your focus your exposure everything's right so let's talk about changing your image brightness you'll notice that as we change your aperture the exposure stays the same why because the camera is doing exactly what we're asking it to do it's changing and making adjustments to the shutter speed in order to compensate for aperture changes so the question you probably have is Michael how do we make images brighter I can even see here this is a little too dark for my taste this is where exposure compensation comes in it's that button on the top of the camera it's a diagonal plus minus sign actor blades what we're going to do is push and hold that button down and we get this yellow box on the bottom of our camera zero we start rotating this see it getting brighter 0.3 0.7 1 see how much brighter that is let's keep going let's go to 2 I'm gonna take a picture it's probably a little bit too bright but look at the difference in brightness between this image and the image I took beforehand try to scroll the difference between those two see how much brighter that is let's say it's way too bright and we want to go and make it darker we'd go in the opposite direction so you'll notice that little square the top left one is positive in the bottom right one is negative so when you see that that means we're getting darker darker darker you can see the shutter speed is changing to be faster you take a picture so you're going to get a tremendous amount of mileage out of using exposure compensation in the aperture priority mode it's going to give you a lot of firepower again just keep on checking your shutter speed try to keep it you know one sixtieth one one hundreds if you're shooting people if it's Sports one 500 maybe one one thousand something I want to point out for the sake of discussion kind of love these little philosophy side tracks is I want to demonstrate something very interesting so we're at an even exposure 1/100 of a second what do you think these numbers refer to let's go to one stop one stop refers to twice the amount of light look at the shutter speed one fiftieth of a second let's go back to an even exposure so 1/100 of a second is twice as fast as one fiftieth of a second okay so we're using a longer shutter speed much longer shutter speed why because if we were to take 1/100 of a second and add it to one 102 ii that would be two one hundredths of a second an easier way of saying that is one fiftieth of a second if you're good with fractions that's what's happening we are letting in twice the amount of light which is one stop and so what that's what all this means is stops of light is how many times more light we're letting in so quiz time I'm going to ask you if we continue going up to two stops what do you think the shutter speed will be what is twice as long as one fiftieth so if we were to go one fiftieth plus one fiftieth we would get 125th of a second two stops take it a step further what about three stops or you can have that fraction right 12.5 it rounds to 13 or 15 let's go in the opposite direction just to demonstrate this so what would be twice as fast as 1/100 of a second this is a little easier one two hundredth of a second what's twice as fast as one two hundredth of a second one four hundredths of a second what's twice as fast as one four hundredths one eight hundredths of a second three stops and so that's how exposure compensation works and even once you dial it in again if you take your hand let's get a I usually shoot it like a third or big two third stops if you take your hand and you move it in front the camera the camera is still adjusting the shutter speed according to our camera setting so that is how aperture priority mode works it's how it would change our aperture or shutter speed in that mode the brightness let's talk about shutter priority mode it's a little different now and you're going to notice that the aperture is flashing when you see the aperture flashing the camera is not happy you'll notice that the question mark icon is flashing that means that if you push this button right here it's going to give you some additional information saying the subjects too dark can't adjust exposure choose a slower shutter speeds nikon's trying to help us understand what's going on with her camera right long story short if you see your aperture flashing what it means is you can't open your aperture wide enough the camera can't to let enough light in to make this shutter speed work so we're dialing in the shutter speed you have to use a slower shutter speed longer shutter speed and we get to a point that it stops flashing and the cameras happy again so watch what happens I take my hand put in front of the camera watch what happens to aperture the aperture starts changing right so this is where the problem happens you're indoors shooting your kids soccer game the Lighting's bad and you need one five hundredth of a second is the motion blur if you got you slow shutter speeds with motion you're gonna get a lot of blur we need one 500 to the second app sure is not happy how are we gonna get around this think about it for a second how can we make this work if you said adjust your ISO you're absolutely correct press the I button come into I so we're gonna turn it up to 3200 which is pretty good it's decent you're not gonna start seeing terrible stuff until you get a little bit higher 3200 tap the shutter button and the blinking has stopped so what we've done is we've increased the sensitivity of the sensor to become more sensitive to light which means we're going to get a good exposure at 1 5 hundredth of a second I think most problems that beginning photographers run into is like indoor sports shooting if you're outdoors you got plenty of lights a lot easier let's talk about the program mode program mode is great when you're first getting started it's going to allow you to change things such as your ISO white balance focusing modes it's gonna go and give you some control it's like taking the training wheels off a little bit when you rotate your command wheel you're going to notice that both the shutter speed and aperture are changing in the camera because we're in 3200 is essentially trying to maintain this even exposure okay we can still control our exposure compensation it works the same way the camera just makes the adjustments to right and it's nice when you're first getting started I don't really use it okay so something to keep in mind both are changing at some point you're not going to be able to go further notice that kind of stopped so that is your program mode let's talk about manual mode the rule of thumb for me on manual mode is if I have enough time if I'm in a rush usually shooting on aperture priority mode but if I have enough time and I really want to dial it in if I am doing studio strobe work I'm on manual mode almost always when I am shooting video I am on manual mode I don't want any camera changes when I'm shooting video I don't want any exposure changes when I'm when I'm shooting video so manual mode essentially means that we dial in the shutter speed and the aperture the default is that when we rotate the command wheel we're changing our shutter speed we also get this bracket popping up right if we wanted to change the aperture we're going to push the exposure compensation button which has a picture of the aperture blades next to it that's what it means is this is how you change your aperture there it is so this is going to take some muscle memory to bounce back and forth between shutter speed control in aperture control something very curious that you probably noticed was this little bracket popping up in the bottom right hand corner that little bracket traditionally is the exposure compensation bar but I want you to think of it as how bright or how dark the image is going to be and so in manual mode this is giving us an exposure prediction okay and those each of those little ticks there stand for one third of a stop the bigger tick is one stop so something you're going to notice is that when the tick mark is at zero it's nice and evenly exposed there it is right if we were to say for example open up aperture a little bit take another picture it's at one big tick which is one stop this should be twice as bright is the previous picture look there it is a bit brighter if we were to continue to to two stops so bright that is yep so that little bar is going to be your friend when you are shooting in manual mode it's going to tell you how bright or help dark the images it's basically a light meter so we've talked about each of the modes we've talked about changing the exposure controls in each of them as well as ISO let's talk about our white balance very important because what's going to happen is you're going to be shooting in the sea you'll take a picture of a friend and the picture is gonna look like a little yellow or a little bit bluish if you're a pure beginner my recommendation is to shoot with auto white balance but you're going to notice that when you come into this menu is that we have these icons of different light sources and the short answer on this is that our eyes are very good at adjusting to different light sources temperatures talked about the theory in just a second the short answer is is that your images are going to look better they're going to look more accurate color wise when your white balance is set correctly so auto white balance means that we're going to give permission to the camera to change accordingly but we have these other ones incandescent light so that's a tungsten light bulb we have florescent light see how blue it became we have fluorescent light direct sunlight flash we have cloud cover shade and then we have something called preset manual go through each of these all together so the short answer is if you see something funky change it to the icon of the light source that you are currently shooting in okay that's the short answer the long answer in the discussion that I get into that upsets a lot of people just talk specifically about the color of these lights and we don't again we don't notice it that these different light sources have color wavelengths attached to them and the way these colors are measured is something called the Kelvin scale it ranges anywhere from a thousand Kelvin to ten thousand Kelvin and Kelvin is an actual temperature so the lower temperature is 1000 or 2000 Kelvin those are very yellow or orange appearing light think of a candle and the higher temperature one's like nine or ten thousand are very blue think of a blue blowtorch that's what I like to tell people because it's obviously hotter than a candle so the low end is yellow the high end is blue the way the camera works is the camera does the opposite in order to compensate for that so if you're shooting in a very let's say yellow lighting condition and you come to your incandescent setting it's going to add a lot of blue and that's why this is blue right now it's adding all this extra blue and appears blue it's not that that light is blue and people get the scale mixed up okay it's that the camera is going to compensate with the opposite of whatever light you're shooting it so if you're shooting in a very blue light and you take a picture you know you'll pull that picture in a Photoshop and you'll add yellow on your white balance slider to correct it especially if you're shooting in with RAW files now the confusion comes in is when people start referring to the colors as warm or cool because kelvin is an actual temperature and the hotter you get the more blue it is but if I were to take a picture of this it would be completely appropriate okay so that's even you come in and we select incandescent what happens is among photographers is people would say that is a very cool looking image so when the image has a blue appearance sometimes refer to as cool if it has a yellow cue to it sometimes refer to that is hot but that is the opposite of what the kelvin settings are for that light temperature so that's where it's confusing is just to be a little distinct in terms of what you're talking about okay so the appearance can be referred to as hot and cool and the light temperature itself can also be referred to as hot and cool okay those are two different things that's where people get upset with me so if you want to talk about the theory of how white balance is measured it's a theoretical blackbody that scientists use and they heat it up to these Kelvin temperatures and they measure the amount of color coming off of this blackbody and that is how color temperatures are calibrated it's a very cool thing I think something else I want to point out is that if you come into the white balance menu is you'll notice that we have this little triangle here pointing to the right that is going to allow us to access many different types of fluorescent light and we can tweak it further by pushing to the right and we get the color temperature shift so we have red blue green magenta so those letters stand for and so if you're in a shooting situation where it's just a little off and you want to tweak it this is where you could come in and do it I typically don't mess with that a whole lot but this is where it's done in the case of the D 3500 what we need to use in mixed lighting conditions is the preset manual what this does it allows us to take a picture of something and tell the camera that this is white see it's not letting us do it from here we can use a photo but we just took a picture we're gonna say we're gonna select this image and so now we're on preset manual if you hadn't taken a picture you would take a picture of this there it is that's white those are white blinds and then you would come in and you would use that picture or you can select other images come in here here they all are it was just this one I just took that image and so now the white balance is set correctly so that is an overview of setting your white balance the easiest way to learn your camera's focusing systems is to think of it in terms of how when and where the camera is focusing if you can break it down into those three simple concepts this is going to be easy now when you get your camera out of the box the default setting for focusing once it's turned on is that when you push the shutter button halfway down it engages the camera's focusing systems so that's how you focus if you push it down all the way it's going to take the picture do it real quick pretty straightforward when the camera is focusing has to do with how often the cameras focusing systems are engaged is it a single moment or is it over and over and over again the way we access our auto focus modes which has to do with when is we're going to push our eye button and you're going to see it in the bottom left hand corner when you come into this menu you should see four different options in the truth of the matter is there's really only two a F S stands for autofocus single servo and what this means is that when we push the shutter button halfway down and hold it down eventually we get something called focus lock and if you look in the bottom left-hand corner of your camera when this is engaged you should see a little green circle that means the camera has focusing lock now as long as I hold the shutter button halfway down and I moved the camera around the focus will not change this is a very important and powerful tool if you are interested in taking pictures of people because as a portrait photographer we want to get focus lock on their eyes and so what I do is I get a focus lock hold the shutter button halfway down and I recompose that means I move the camera to position the subject in a more aesthetically pleasing position in the frame if you're a sports photographer and maybe you shoot wildlife or race cars or kids moving around you're probably going to want to test out AF C which stands for autofocus continuous so when we select AF C you should be doing following along with your camera if you're not and we look through the viewfinder you're going to notice something very interesting when you move the camera around that Green Dot starts to blink and what this means is the camera is continually focusing over and over and over again we do not achieve focus lock with AF continuous because the camera is trying to make a prediction of a moving subject what we're going to do is put our focusing square over the moving subject and we're going to hold our shutter button halfway down track the subject and push the shutter button down all the way when we're ready to take the picture very useful for moving subjects now the good news is if you are a pure beginner what I recommend is to go with AF a which stands for autofocus automatic in this mode we're giving the camera permission to switch between AFS and AF see when I shot weddings I all exclusively left my camera on AFA because the bride would be standing outside the church now she's walking down the aisle now she's standing at the altar and now she's dancing and now she's cutting cake and so there was lots of this moving and stopping and moving and stopping and the camera does a pretty good job of determining whether or not you're dealing with us still or a moving subject and it's one less setting you have to worry about now the fourth option we have in this menu is M this stands for manual the truth of the matter is I never use it simply because our cameras most of the lenses come with an AF to manual switch so when I want to do manual focusing I flip the switch to manual and I focus with the ring but there are some lenses out there that don't have this switch and if you have one you would manually focus by going into your menu and turning it to M so the when the camera is focusing has to do with the autofocus modes and whether it's a single focus lock or a continual refocusing where has to do with our focusing points the way we select this menu again we're going to push our eye button we're going to go into the second from the bottom left-hand menu it says AF area mode and you're going to see four different selections in here I'm going to make a very strong recommendation to use your single point selection in nothing else the reason is the other three modes give permission to the camera to change how the focusing in which focusing squares are being used with single point selection you have complete control and you know where the camera is looking and where it's focusing and what does this mean you should have your camera look through the viewfinder and tap your shutter button and you should see one of those focusing squares light up now wherever the camera is lighting up terms of those points that is where it is focusing if you want to change your focusing square you are going to push on your directional pad in the direction that you want the next square to be selected so we push on the pad and we can change our focusing points this is very useful and it's one of the more important skills you need to become you know like secondhand nature is changing your squares as you look through the viewfinder so for example if you wanted to get a moving subject on the edge of the frame you would use one of the edge focusing points again pretty straightforward now a cool little tip about this is that if you push the OK button it'll jump back to the center square a lot of people don't know that the center square is hyper sensitive on almost all DSLR cameras and that's the same for our Nikon is that it is more sensitive in more accurate so if you're having a very hard time you know getting a precise focus lock keep that in mind the center focus square is cross-type the other ten are not very important to remember for the sake of being thorough let's talk about the other autofocus area modes or though other where's the dynamic AAF focusing cluster has to do with allowing the camera to get information from the surrounding squares it sort of like takes a little sneak peek and it makes a judgment on where the subjects going to be 3d focusing is meant for moving subjects and it's supposed to allow the camera to actually change which focus Square is being used in how it is focusing on the subject it the concept of it is spectacular and when it works it's awesome but it's not always perfect the AF or the autofocus automatic mode essentially gives permission to the camera to focus on the closest subject to you I never use it it has another side note I should tell you that if you are not shooting on pas or M which you should be the camera is going to make a lot of the focusing decisions for you and you're not going to be able to switch around in these different modes I tell all beginners focus no pun intended on the pas and M modes the creative modes where you have complete control now as you advance as a photographer with your skillsets there may come a time when you want to use different customized controls such as back button focusing back button focusing essentially is a customization that removes the halfway shutter depression of focusing and it moves it to this back thumb button AFL AEL so the way this would work is you engage focusing by pushing on the thumb button and you take the picture by pushing the shutter button down all the way the shutter button or is responsible for nothing else but taking the picture now the reason I don't teach back button focusing to pure beginners is it simply a little bit easier to learn the half-way depression and then taking it all the way but a lot of my professional friends shoot exclusively on back button focus and when you get more advanced I would definitely recommend checking it out so in summary how does the camera focus you push your shutter button halfway down second when does the camera focus that depends if you are on a single mode or a continuous predictive mode single mode gets focus lock the continuous predictive mode tries to guesstimate where your subject is going to be for focusing clusters I definitely recommend you go with a single square simply because it's going to give you the most control let's talk about focusing in live view meaning using the back monitor instead of looking through the viewfinder focusing through the viewfinder is far better in terms of the speed the performance the accuracy if you're shooting sports definitely shoot through the viewfinder however there are times that you want to see what you're doing for video shooting for example definitely using the back monitor obviously and there are other times as well and there are some tricks and some tips I can show you using the live view monitor so we have this red box that's our focusing square in live view and again the how we focus is we push a shutter button halfway down we get a beep that tells us that we're in focus lock green square push it down all the way to take the picture that's the same as it would be through the viewfinder different part here is that this box can move to a greater area of the viewfinder and so I have a little target here that have moved to the front here so we can focus on that shutter button halfway down there it goes you can see that my picture is a little blurry and some model back there and so that is the basic way of how we do is removing the square to different parts of the viewfinder and we are engaging the focusing systems if we look into the eye button there is our focusing mode auto focus s single one time focus right come in here we have auto focus full time which is the Live View version of auto focus continuous so what this means is that if you have if you're in auto focus F camera is going to be continually to servo focus and then we have manual focus which is exactly what it sounds like you're dialing it in manually so if we select AF F what's going to happen is that you're gonna see this little breathing every once in a while there it goes see there it's improved dramatically over the years on Nikon cameras however if you are shooting video this is something I'm going to try to tell you to not use in video some cameras can pull it off but the breathing of this shifting can be very distracting if you're shooting video come to manual focus and there's a number of little tricks and ways to get around this for example if you are worried about not getting it just right you'd come into autofocus single get the focus lock and then hit your video record button remember auto focus single is only engaged when you push your shutter button down halfway right so this is locked it's not going to change very important tip for shooting video it's going to be much faster this way how do we change the size of the box and the type of the box right here area mode which is the cluster there's only four of them in here we have wide area and we have a normal area which is a smaller box see how small it is again we would have to push an old to move this guy around feels a little tedious sometimes but if you're shooting people you have this thing right here our face priority face priority scans the the preview finds a person's face push halfway down to eat your focus lock all the way to take the picture when you're shooting at aperture is around 3.5 4.0 and smaller apertures it's probably gonna be the fastest way to get focused lock on a person's face if you're shooting it very wide apertures let's say you have a 1.8 50 millimeter lens it may not get tack sharp focus simply because the depth of field is very shallow so keep that in mind but for most general types of shooting yeah face detection for people is awesome and there is an additional mode in here as well called subject tracking also improved over the years it's it's gotten better so on the tracking mode you're going to notice that his new I log boxes okay when you push it in yellow that means it's supposed to be tracking push it in again it's white and it resets the idea of tracking mode is that the camera will automatically follow a subject that you say hey follow this thing over here nice to put on my face and okay it's gonna turn yellow yellow is a warning so let's move the camera around and it does a pretty good job tracking on a clean background okay the problem is it's not focusing remember we're in autofocus single mode so we would have to push your shutter button down halfway and now it's saying yeah this looks like it's in focus we get the green box so in a perfect world we'd have on aff and as we moving around the camera is re-engaging focus even as the subject changes the problem with this is is that when I test this outside there's so much focus breathing in and when you get in a contrasting background it doesn't work the way you want it to okay so you might have some frustrations but if you have a give like a really clean background and they're not moving around too fast you can make it work okay I just don't personally use it myself so those are the focusing modes in live view those are also the focusing clusters for video shooting again I recommend autofocus single single square I think that is going to be the easiest you can just tell the camera hey focus here move it over focus here the record button in that way you don't have the focusing changing real quickly I also wanted to point it out that the focusing square can be reset to Center by pressing the okay button just something I thought you guys would want to know let's talk about back button focusing which is removing focusing engaging from the half shutter button depression to a back button such as the autofocus lock button the reason why we want to do this is especially as sports shooters there are times that you want to specifically control when the camera is focusing and by lifting your thumb up you're essentially jumping into manual focus so it stops focusing very useful when players are stopping and you want to recompose quickly so if you have to get a shot of somebody who's just stop for a second or two and you want to recompose it you would engage the focusing systems get the lock lift it up you could recompose take the picture and you're focusing wouldn't change there's some other reasons to do it too coming into the menu we have on the orange tab buttons third page so the important thing here is that when we are shooting with the shutter button we have it's basically saying do you want it to focus yes or no if this is on halfway shutter button depressions going to focus if it's disabled it will not so we come back out I'm pushing the shutter button way down it's not focusing if you forget to do that sometimes it's really scary now we're going to come back to assigning this button gonna turn it to autofocus on we have some other options in here but this is really the one you want so now I am engaging focus with the autofocus lock button and I can shoot away whenever I want to take a picture that is how you set it back button focusing if you want to switch it back you could leave that on or you can go with auto exposure lock just come back in here turn that to enable this middle item essentially is asking do you want the exposure to lock as well with a halfway shutter button depression default is have it turned off let's talk about a technique that I refer to as manual zoom focusing very powerful very easy to overlook this is something that I talk about a lot of my advanced courses on other cameras is these kinds of techniques we have a manual focusing ring on the front of our lens even the 18 to 55 almost all lenses have annual focusing rings and if we turn our auto focusing off come in here and turn this off we can now focus with this ring because we have a live view monitor and we have these magnifying glasses we can really take this step further it's gonna be great for things like macro or very shallow depth of field maybe video work where you have to dial in a very precise focus you're going to push the magnification icon what's going to happen is the camera is going to zoom over the area you have selected once you're zoomed in now you can start dialing in focus and get that precise crisp sharp image that you want something like this looking at the edges of my target at this point you can zoom back out or you can even shoot from that position take the shot that is a very good technique to have in your quiver it's gonna come in very handy for all kinds of manual focusing problems let's talk about our cameras metering modes bottom left-hand corner we have our metering mode indicator or in the matrix metering mode the short answer on this is this is how the camera measures light okay we're telling it what area to look at to measure the amount of light coming in the camera you'll notice that you have this headlight on and as I move around it changes a little bit nothing too dramatic or crazy right it's because we're on the matrix metering mode which which is sampling from the entire frame it also measures things such as color and things of that nature but if we were to come in to our metering modes here you're going to see that we have three options we have our matrix metering mode which is a general-purpose metering good for most uses center-weighted metering and then we have our spot metering mode so the easiest way for me to explain this is to talk about it in the spot metering mode when we are in the spot metering mode and in this case the focusing square we're telling the camera to look within this box to measure light specifically within this box and I'll demonstrate how this works see when we move it over the bright light remember aperture priority mode makes adjustments to the shutter speed based on the light entering the camera one four hundredth of a second it's much brighter here right so when we move it off to the side it's using a longer shutter speed because this is where we're measuring the light from if we were to take a picture here and look at it and then we were to come over here and take a picture again run after sure priority mode use the different shutter speed so when we're playing these back there is a change in the exposure because the camera measured light in two different places here versus here so that is what the metering modes do and I'm going to turn the light off and do an extreme example here in a second the MTG remotes are helping the camera determine how much flights coming in center-weighted metering mode it essentially gives emphasis to the middle of the frame more than the corners i when I'm using anything and see either matrix or spot in the time that you you might want to think about using spot is that if you're shooting a portrait for example with somebody backlit so they're standing here and you have bright sun coming around them we want to ignore the bright light and we want the metering to happen on the person that's a great time to use the spot metering mode so let me turn the light off real quick we're right over the light let's take a picture why not and now I'm going to move my square over the blinds we a much more dramatic shift but again we're in aperture priority mode is trying to make it work see how much brighter that light is between here to here and that's how metering modes are working so one question I get a lot on these entry-level cameras is how do I do focusing for video if I can't use autofocus full time or face tracking what do you recommend for shooting myself if I was you know doing the vlog the trick is that you set up a tripod or have another person's sit in your place tripod I use tripods all the time in essentially you're going to focus on the area where your face is going to be engage the focusing system so you know we're in live use af-s focusing won't change at that point so once you get that you would come in and you would move the tripod out of the way and you would come and sit in that place that's how you set up for sing for vlogging and then when you're ready to record you hit the record button definitely helps to have a slightly higher aperture f4 f5 to get the depth of field that you need you might be moving around in here and so you want to keep the focal plane you know where you're going to be talking couple other quick notes on video shooting just real quick if you are shooting at 30 frames per second just go ahead and do this let's go to video mode shoot it on manual if you're shooting 30 frames per second you're gonna want your shutter speed to be twice your frames per second so in this case it would be 60 see how bright exposure control is over here we would want to turn down our ISO it's too bright so I'm just showing you basically how I would set it up turn my ISO down aperture size at 5 6 3 7.1 see how dark it's gotten we have to come back in and bump up our ISO so close to our arm and so that is how I would set up for video recording start recording it may be a little bit overexposed and we could adjust our iso or adjust the aperture a little bit so let's talk about our movie settings real quick we're gonna be going through the menu briefly here in a second but this is pretty important is that if you come in here you select this get all these different options frame size and frame rate the movie quality the microphone wind noise reduction manual movie settings so what we just did there in the menu this manual movie settings it's very important because it is going to give us an exposure preview of what we're shooting it it's telling us how bright or how dark this we're even though we're in the manual mode now we can see that this is kind of blown out and this is good because it is telling us exactly the exposure that we're shooting it so that this is more of an even exposure right the problem with this is watch what happens I can change my shutter speed still alright and it's saying hey you want to maintain 60 frames per second you can't use a longer shutter speed than one sixtieth of a second that's what that means oh and hey I'm using LED lights you can barely see it you can see these gradients coming in if you see that that's a miss sync between your camera and your LED lights there goes away the problem with this is when you're shooting in this mode is that you cannot change your aperture it's a bummer so I don't really shoot with that on this camera I kind of keep an eye on my exposure preview you can always record take a look at it when it's done on playback just to make sure everything's fine okay to play it I'm talking buddy so we have these these different playback controls here can pause it this directional pad there's rewind there's forward there stop there's play this is talking about this style we can jump ten seconds in either direction using the rear control wheel press the I button we can even edit the movie I don't do it in camera there it's there if you want it this is how you play video back so if you're doing something important make sure you preview your work before doing everything just to make sure everything's all dialed in let's take a look at these other movie settings in here real quick the most important one is the frame size and frame rate so when we come in here we see all these confusing numbers these numbers here in the middle 1920 by 1080 those are the most important ones that you should see those are pixel dimensions 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels tall the number on the very very end is the number of frames per second so shooting at 1080 60 P is actually a very high quality video in terms of the rate and the resolution it's not 4k but the truth of the matter is 1080 is plenty you could you could shoot a movie on 1080 okay and publish it no problem especially on the Internet okay you can get away with that framerate means that it's gonna be sampling at 30 frames a second P is a progressive scan it means every line of the frame is going to be scanned in the past there was something called interlaced where the where the images was were interlocking together we just don't use that that much anymore but if you look over here on the far left all this is summarized in these little icons and as we move down we get 50 P 30 P 25 P which is pal the powell standard parts of europe 24 p which is the standard for film and we've got 720 if we continue to go down and so those are the movie settings i'm usually almost always shooting at 30 p or 60 p for youtube it just depends on what your preference is the 60 p looks a little bit crisper some of these other settings in here the movie quality if you want a higher quality you can turn this on it's a microphone we have a microphone built into the camera the automatic setting means that the cameras going to make adjustments to the sensitivity depending on how much how much noise coming in and so this red thing here we this is bad okay that means the audio signal is being cliff clipped out I am NOT a fan of Auto sensitivity I typically use manual sensitivity in a perfect world this would have a microphone jack and we would plug an external microphone into it to record high quality audio in the case of the D 3500 unfortunately we do not if you are doing serious video work I would recommend something like an h4n zoom an external recorder or a shotgun microphone or a lav microphone that you can record to a digital audio recorder like the h4nh fourth friend is a workhorse it's been her hump for years I still use mine I mean I've had it for over over 10 years easy maybe yeah maybe even longer than that it seems like so if you're going to do high-end quality video keep in mind the importance of good audio you have to record it to a separate audio source if you wanted to turn off the microphone all together to do that here but I like manual sensitivity because it allows us to adjust the gain of the signal coming in and anything red is bad so we would want to stay kind of in that yellow zone without that's good that's something that I would adjust to and so we can actually control the gain of the microphone I hit okay wind noise reduction essentially is supposed to help clean up the sound of wind it doesn't really work we got again our manual movie settings which I don't recommend using because then you're going to lose your aperture control so those are your movie settings so let me take you through an overview of the deep menu system talk a little bit about navigation again yellow is where you are in these different tabs you can scroll through then we want to go to a specific item push to the left or right to select press okay so the lead icon essentially allows us to delete selected images we can select by date anytime you see a black triangle on a menu item that means if you continue to press to the right you're going to get more items so the idea here is that you can select different images and selectively delete them I typically do not do that unless I'm running out of space on my memory card get the best memory card you can you don't need really need to have a super high end performance one but you know if you go into Walmart and buying anything less than a class 10 card are gonna run into some problems with your video recording I like the U 3 cards because you can upgrade when you get a 4k camera they're not that expensive so typically I recommend get the best card you can afford in terms of speed and size coming back out we also have the ability to delete by a date pushing to the right you can pick it is the 3rd of October go back out can also delete everything I don't recommend doing that I recommend formatting the card and that's later on in the menu when we play our images back do you want to play back from all the folders or just one so there's the ability to have multiple folders all playback display options this is pretty cool is that when you play the image back do you want additional information such as an RGB histogram overview let's just hit OK we're gonna play if we push up we're given access to the histogram shooting information this is super helpful I think you'll notice that it also recorded the focal length so you know the exact focal length that you were shooting on the date time oh good good stuff there image review simply means that after you take a picture do you want the camera to automatically show what you just took auto image rotation essentially means is that when you shoot in the portrait orange so we're in landscape now if we were to rotate the camera and shooting portrait if you have these two turned on the camera is automatically going to rotate the image during playback so it's standing tall you won't see that immediately after the camera takes the picture but when you play it back you should slideshow remember we have an HDMI port on the side of the camera so we could plug this into a TV we did this back in the day when I shot weddings is we would shoot ceremony and then at the reception we would play back some of the images on a TV and so yeah you can connect an HDMI cable from the camera into a monitor or TV essentially this allows you to determine whether or not you want stills in video clips how long do you want the frames to show for maybe five seconds and when you're ready to start you would hit okay and it would start animating the playback for a slideshow rating allows us to assign a star to each of the images that we take so pushing up or down on the directional pad you can say hey this is five this is a five star image it's amazing and then when we import it into Lightroom or Photoshop that rating would be respected and so if you are out shooting and you take an amazing picture and you're so excited but you have thousands of them you might want to come in and mark which one it is it'll help you find it easier when you are going through everything see that how I was on a tab and I tried to go down a page so we've got to make sure we're here we're gonna talk about this when we talk about Wi-Fi essentially it allows you to send images to your smartphone very nice something you'll notice missing our video clips can't do the video clips will talk about the Wi-Fi app setup in just a minute so get through this green tab this is your shooting cab you're gonna be changing a lot of the settings in here and sometimes you're gonna change something and may not know exactly what you did and something's acting weird you can come in here and reshoot the setting menu image quality this is the amount of compression for JPEGs it also allows us to select raw or raw in JPEG raw files have a lot more information in them it's essentially the raw data captured by this sensor larger file sizes definitely but it's going to allow you to edit them correct white balance more accurate you're going to get greater dynamic range better colors in RAW files JPEGs can be as small as 20% of the raw file and less if you're choosing more compression so quality not is great but for most general shooting purposes if you're if you're nailing the exposure and it's not like a page shoot a lot of JPEGs are gonna be just fine and a lot of sports shooters a lot of wedding photographers they shoot exclusively on JPEG many of them image size has to do with the pixel dimensions of the image 24 megapixels is large 6 megapixels is small so basically the camera to be throwing pixels away I recommend staying on large why because you can downsize if you need to ISO sensitivity settings this allows us to change here's our basic ISO just like we can do from the camera auto ISO sensitivity control which again I'm not a huge fan of that once you turn it off you're going to notice that you lose your maximum sensitivity and your minimum shutter speed so when this is on you can designate the top ISO that you want so you want to keep it under 6400 and you can also designate at what shutter speed do you not want it to go slower than that's the easiest way to say that if shooting sports it may be one five hundredth of a second if you're shooting people it may be one sixtieth or one 125th of a second again I'm not a huge fan of auto ISO on it leave it turned off white balance settings this is where we can come in and select our white balance we can also tweak some of the shift we can designate our preset manual picture controls there's a lot of information in here the short answer is these are the recipes for cooking JPEGs it can be cooking different ways vivid you're gonna have more pop in your blues and greens portraits you might have better flesh tones landscape flat profile which is something that is different between the D 3500 and D 30 400 a lot of video shooters prefer the flat profile for grading purposes on these cameras the short answer I say try to get it writing camera if you want to adjust the pictures to controls you can come in here look at all the different ways we can tweak tweak these ingredients we can change the sharpening how sharp the image is at the clarity the contrast the brightness the hue the saturation so we can come down here and adjust this up or down my recommendation is if you are brand-new to photography do not worry about these profiles do not mess with these too much if you do a lot of high-end shooting you might have a reason to to make some adjustments but for the most part no don't mess with it so you've got some Auto settings for saturation really great come in here and change whatever you want pretty much color space the short answer is srgb for shooting for a magazine and you have a specific reason to choose Adobe RGB you would do that active d-lighting is an automatic change and adjustment to some of the contrast a little bit of the dynamic range you might see in images for JPEGs yeah it makes sense if if you want to see what it does without it turn it off take some side-by-sides noise reduction I typically leave this on it means the camera is going to clean up high ISO noise vignette in control is that when you're using very wide angle lenses this is going to clean up some of the corners in terms of the darkening Auto distortion control is also for wide-angle lenses most of the time where we get a bowing or a bending when you're using very very wide focal length lenses so 18 millimeters 15 millimetres sometimes you get this bowing the focusing modes we've talked about in the focusing lessons here they are Auto servo single autofocus continuous in manual it's easier to select them on the back of the camera they were focusing clusters so our auto focus area mode allows us to designate what focusing cluster we're using for the viewfinder single point dynamic 3d 11 points auto you can also determine that for Live View they're all in there built-in auto focus assist illuminator this is the little lamp in the front of the camera and it won't kick in unless it's kind of dark but if you wanted to turn it off altogether sometimes that happens you're at an event and sometimes it's dark and it can be super distracting you come in here and turn that off the metering modes we've talked about there they are flash control for built-in flash and I'll break this down for you as fast as I can right here TTL stands for through the lens metering when you have this selected for your flash two flashes are fired the first is a pre flash that measures the amount of light that bounces off to your subject in comes back in through the lens that's what TTL stands for this allows the camera to make a super-fast calculation in fire the main flash for the exposure this all happens so fast we can't see it click it looks like one single flash pretty incredible very powerful for general types of shooting if you're out and about and you're taking a picture of your loved one it's back light through the lens metering you know hopefully it's gonna do the job for you but manual control is exactly what it sounds like is that you are going to control how much power the flash is putting out manual control means that you select a fraction of the power from full power to 1/32 power so it's not metering it's not measuring anything so let me activate the flash and show you something super confusing flash is up you can't see it just know that it's popped up we're going to take a picture here so that all happened really quick there's our image and there are a couple cool controls we can do now if we push the flash button in we can change the flash mode typically the main flash happens at the beginning of the exposure that's the default to push this in with the yellow highlight this flash with the eye means that it's redeye reduction that means we get an additional flash it's going to help dilate the pupils before the main flash exposure fires and then we have something called rear curtain flash which is really great for longer exposures so if you're doing a slow exposure and you're really soaking the sensor and maybe have person moving in it this is going to give you ghosting effect it's creative thing you can do essentially we're telling the camera to fire the flash at the end of the exposure so I leave it on default like this so typically the question is is how do you change flash power when you're shooting in this way you're going to push two buttons down this main button and then the exposure compensation button now we have something on the bottom here called flash exposure compensation it's very similar and how how the information is displayed in terms of stops so if we add one stop of flash power the flash is going to be twice as bright as it was before and we can go in the opposite direction as well it's easier to go to just you know less powerful flash that it is to increase so we're limited it to one full stop the flash power which is twice the brightness or we could go into the to the menu and dial in the manual powers here so that's a quick overview on the flash optical vibration reduction most of the kits that you buy the d30 500 with they're going to come with the kit lens that is a vibration reduction lens if you want to turn it off you come in here off movie settings we've talked about this allows us to designate our resolution or frames per second the quality some microphone settings the movie settings if you want an exposure prediction lots of great in the orange tab here come up so if you set a bunch of these settings in here and you forget what you've done you can reset it formatting a memory card this is a really really good one to have on your custom tab if you come in here it's gonna ask you if you wanted to wipe the memory card clean you would select yes and it would format the memory card it would erase everything including protected images anytime you put a new memory card in here probably something you're gonna want to do is to reformat it just make sure you have two copies of every image somewhere on different hard drives or in different places maybe one on the cloud one on a hard drive date stamp do you want the date stamped on the image you can basically try that out if you want it has a date warning on there there it is in the bottom left hand corner cut off don't like it time zone in date this is where you could when you when you turn the camera first on it asks you you know what time zone Ian what time do you want if you wanted to change it you could do that in the Hawaii time zone you could pretty straightforward pretty intuitive if you wanted to change the format daylight savings time we don't have it here in Hawaii language hopefully you are an English speaker if you're watching this but we have Spanish French and Portuguese monitor brightness we can control this menu item by pushing up and down info display format allows us to select different layouts of our LCD info screen whether it's for auto scenes or effects this is really the one you look at and you can actually see the differences in colors some of these are kind of cool blue black and white different versions very nice Auto info display is something I do recommend you leave on it essentially means is that when you push your shutter button halfway down do you get this information on the back of your monitor if you didn't want that appearing you would come in and turn this off auto off timers I have it set to custom now because I'm teaching but if I didn't want the camera shutting off every minute this is where I could come and adjust it typically the camera you know as a battery saving feature maybe every 20 seconds every minute just depends on your preference we also have playback menus after how many minutes do you want this to turn off let's just go to 20 seconds image review live view things of that nature all timer battery saving stuff self timer allows us to determine how many seconds our timer works on our drive modes ok lockup mirror for cleaning allows us to tell the the mirror inside the camera to flip up and give us access to the sensor so if you were gonna clean your sensor you would start press the shutter button mirror lifts floor the mirror turn the camera off so at this point the mirror is raised and you could actually get in there and clean your sensor and then when you're ready to close it you turn the camera off again so the reason I talk about this is some of you are going to be comfortable cleaning your sensor others or not I would say read the reviews of any product that you were buying to clean your sensor because some of them are not good I personally prefer something called dust aid it's a very mild adhesive that cleans off a rubber pad that pulls particles off I'm not a huge fan of the wet solutions anymore because I've had a bad experience somebody had a wet solution they want to ask me to clean the camera it wasn't the best and there was a little bit of residue there just made me nervous if you're terrified of cleaning your camera take it to a camera store most camera stores will do it I typically clean with dry solutions you know air bulb you know the the dust aid solution that I use in things of that nature if you're not comfortable with it have somebody who knows what they're doing do it dust off reference photo I think is kind of a waste of time basically it's a reference photo where you could tell the camera where you have a desk spot and come in you pick it you know take a picture of something bright ten centimeter and it's gonna find these little specks to designate where to clean up I think this is a waste of time if the way to do it is to keep your sensor clean you can you know you can clean up dust in Photoshop if you had to image comment means that we can put a comment into the metadata this is where we could type it in obviously same thing with copyright information if you wanted to put your copyright information in here do that as well beep for focusing things of that nature selecting things this is where we would turn it off flicker reduction has to do with the camera deciding in measuring how to reduce changing lighting conditions that we cannot see with the naked eye most lights are not constant a lot of modern lights are not constant is that they are pulsating so quickly that we can't tell the difference camera has the ability to recognize this in the auto setting means we're giving permission to the camera to figure this out and to minimize the effects of this flickering light if you go and you do a lot of high-speed photography under certain sodium lamp lamps you'll see it for fluorescent lights LED lights there's these variations that happen and you can see it sometimes is banding or color shifts short answer for stills Auto is great if you're shooting video and you see heavy banding in your video it looks like these little black lines coming up and down on your video settings what I'd recommend is shooting with a shutter speed of about one sixtieth of a second to see if that reduces it sometimes one fiftieth of a second it depends on the frequency of the lights that are in the shooting environment biggest common mistake is like fast shutter speeds and there's a mismatch of the frequency and you'll see that banding but one sixtieth of a second seems to resolve a lot of it but in some cases you might have to use a different light source you know if you're doing serious shooting just a side note for you all button customization we talked about with back button focusing this is how you can assign this button to be autofocus on and remove autofocus activation from the shutter button rangefinder is a tool that is used for manual focus I am NOT a huge fan of it the range finder will show these little tick marks and I think to the left is in the front and to the right is to the back and as you rotate the manual focus ring it'll help you dial in what is in focus manual focus ring and autofocus mode means that you can use auto focus and then find tweak with the manual focusing ring to enter that off you do so there file number sequence when you change your memory cards do you want it to remember the next number or you want it to reset or you want to reset it right now but basically we are changing your memory cards do you want the number to continue on the next card storage folder allows us to designate a folder by number so we can create new folders by coming in here and pushing up for example pressing ok and now we're in storage storage folder 103 we can also come back and select from a list so if you have a shoot in the morning and it shoot in the afternoon you might want to create a secondary folder just like I showed you change the number or you can bounce around between those folders and how you save it the file naming individual individual file naming there's three letter designation DSC you can change that here HDMI information the output is typically auto but if you know that you want it feed the HDMI cable out at 1080p do that here airplane mode allows us to turn the camera into a safe mode I never use it connect to a smart device we'll be talking about in the Wi-Fi lesson all that stuff slot empty release lock if you do not have a memory card in the camera do you want the camera to be able to take a picture so if it's locked nothing's going to happen if you enable release it will open the shutter and close it but nothing's going to be recorded there was a couple a couple a couple years ago emailed me and they're like okay you know we went on vacation and we could hear the camera working but you know how do you get to the internal memory and I'm like there's no internal memory on the camera they had they had enabled the shutter without a memory card and didn't take any pictures on their vacation we can reset all the camera settings we wanted to firmware version this is how we can change the software of the cameras is telling us the current versions that we have so this is the first camera software that came with the camera and if something happened in Turkey there was a bug Nikon can issue an update and they say hey we've got to update 1.01 and you would know that you use time to update I believe these other two have to do with the lens in terms of the lens performance or and or some of the clean up for things like distortion and Vinnie adding and things of that nature it done so let's go to the purple tab the retouch menu I have mixed feelings about it for the most part I never use it it's essentially going to give you some editing options in camera if you don't have a computer or Photoshop if you've taken some RAW images you can process them again here are the blinds and we can come in and change some things like white balance the exposure compensation noise reduction color space and Yeti control so just some basic light changes we can trim the image so if you wanted to let's say crop it down or change the aspect ratio we can do that so we're taking this wheel we can push on our thumb wheels in and out back we can resize the image typically this is means down sizing pick the one you want and then you would pick the new size there's there's not a lot of reasons to do this in a camera you want I mean you want to do out on a monitor we can see everything but we have things like D lighting control retouch eye correction can straighten the image distortion control perspective control fisheye control filter effects black-and-white image overlay it would allow you to choose multiple images and stack them on top of each other color outline photo illustration some of these are cool to play with you know but I just don't personally see them as serious editing tools and then we have the ability to edit a movie if you wanted to trim it down in camera again all these things I do want a computer makes more sense to see it on a big monitor as you're doing it so this final tab recent settings essentially the camera remembers the last settings that you you found in the menu so the idea is that if you're using the same menu items over and over again is that you're going to see most of them on this first page instead of needing to come in here and hunt you know for something specific so that is an overview of the deep menu system of the nikon d 3500 let's talk about our cameras drive modes which is what the camera does after we push the shutter button down all the way to a cursor drive modes we're going to push right here drive mode button it's going to pull up the options we have first we have single frame push your shutter button down once takes one image then we have a continuous drive which is better for sport shooting listen five frames per second if we come over to the quiet shutter release listen if it's quiet a little bit more and then we have our self timer we can designate how many seconds this beep obviously it's annoying and if we if we wanted to adjust that we could come in up here self timer and we could change that from two to five to twenty seconds so those are the drive modes single frame multiple frame quiet self timer so let's talk about connecting remotely from our smart phone or device to the camera very important that I make the distinction that this is through bluetooth not through Wi-Fi our camera does not have Wi-Fi it's going to prevent some confusion because the app is going to going to show some Wi-Fi options this is for other cameras so snap bridge download it from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store open it up asking to connect to a camera we're going to come into our menu and we have a Bluetooth on we're gonna go connect to smart device once that starts up we're going to hit connect camera wow look how fast it found it in the past understand this starting to connect snap bridge hasn't always been very good in fact when the D 500 came out it was terrible it was unusable I couldn't I couldn't make the lesson see it recognizes the Bluetooth signal coming from the camera right hit pair and when we hit pair it wants us to hit okay over here to connect so it's going through this it's pairing up Wi-Fi connection is usually better it's better signal you can do some things through Bluetooth such as remote shooting I'm talking about a remote control not necessarily changing our exposure settings we're getting a preview we can download some of the images it's pretty limited it's asking if I want to download location data this is that GPS setting so if you want to download info we can if we hit yes do you want to sync the clock yeah sure why not but remember all this is happening in the upload is happening through bluetooth so right okay here's our camera here's the remote photography don't get too excited about this because on other cameras we can change our white balance we can see the preview we can do all kinds of stuff and you're gonna be a little underwhelmed so here it is that's it that's the remote shutter it's taking a big picture it's automatically downloading a two megabyte file to our phone so there it is there the blinds and that's how the remote works there's some information that we can take a look at see how big the file is but at least we get a preview to the phone if you wanted to post it on to social media or something of that nature 2 megabytes the more shots remaining battery life here are the settings you can download 2 megapixels automatic download or not you're going to notice that the original size is grayed out we have the ability to add a self-timer so if we wanted to add a timer 3 5 or 10 seconds there it is we have an auto link feature that will help us pair up we open the app you can sync location clocks power saving mode download images if you want to get into the camera and download them individually so the good news is that the app is working the bad news is no it's not Wi-Fi and what you can do in here is very limited there's a cloud service if you guys are interested in that unlimited auto upload and this is where things can start getting confusing is that you add a camera you'll have a d8 50 other Nikon cameras that come out you can add them here and you'll be given some options in terms of DSLRs they have a new mirrorless camera is ready to go in here I like this because it doesn't require download multiple apps and we can we can have all of our cameras in here some other things I just want to point out is that we can forget camera telling it to forget the pairing authentication if you do this just make sure you delete the Bluetooth profile in your camera settings otherwise you will not be able to reconnect in this part here the Wi-Fi mode is confusing it's highlighted there's no Wi-Fi mode on the deef 3500 as far as I know without a Wi-Fi feature on the camera so that's a quick overview of connecting with snap bridge so you're probably wondering what are the next lenses you should get after the kit lens the 18 to 55 is really not a bad starter lens the problem with it is the aperture doesn't open that much you can see it's very small there is also a 70 to 300 kit lens that you can get and those for the most part are great when you're shooting outdoors okay if you want to get a wider aperture lens I personally like the Nikon 50 millimeter 1.8 the problem with it is it's over $200 there is a knockoff brand of that land lens called yong-go no I have not personally used it but the reviews are pretty good and the price is incredible it's it's also a 1.8 it's gonna open up to be a wide aperture on the high-end we have the Trinity of Nikon lenses the 14 to 24 2.8 it's 24 to 72 2.8 the 70 to 200 2.8 all very expensive and if you go that route you're probably looking at upgrading your camera body make a huge difference that's what I recommend is if you get serious about those lenses and camera bodies are going to be investing more money probably what I would advise is if you're under a budget is take a look at a good tripod Boggan Manfrotto has the be free tripod it's a little compact travel tripod I think that's a better investment than something you'd pick up at Walmart I know Walmart has these you know really rinky-dinky tripod that can be anywhere from 40 to 50 bucks things complete waste of money granted it's better than nothing but you're gonna beat those up pretty quick invest a little bit more money into your tripod with a locking ball head it's gonna last you for years I think if you're on a budget and you're looking for a great way to get into macro photography is to invest in a set of extension tubes I'll put that link in the description extension tubes essentially allow us to move our lens away from our camera body and increase the ratio in terms of the projection onto the sensor makes them larger and essentially allows you to get close up and there's also some budget flashes that I would recommend in any event I want to say thank you guys so much for joining me on this tutorial of the nikon d 3500 if you're struggling with the concepts of photography check out universal photography concepts it's the best course that I could put together for anyone in the world struggling to learn photography very fast very efficient that links in the description as well keep in mind I also have a contest going on right now for a brand new a7 3 that link is in the description as well thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you next time if you found this video helpful you might be interested in one of my many camera or photography specialty courses they're available by DVD and download come with a 100% money back guarantee they can be ordered from the following link [Music]

Channel: Michael The Maven

Views: 798,813

Keywords: Nikon D3500, Tutorial, D3500, Nikon D 3500 Tutorial Training, Nikon D3500 Manual, PDF, Help, Lessons, Troubleshooting, Guide

Id: CmO1JAGi9Ek

Length: 104min 15sec (6255 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018