Nikon Z Setup Tips - Get EVERY Shot!

[Music] hi joe here from shutterspeak photography very nice to see your smiling faces again here on youtube so we all know that the nikon z is a fantastic camera system if you use it you know most people that use it absolutely love it and due to its incredible dynamic range and fantastic color reproduction it's able to grab shots in in almost any situation but there are situations that come up that even the nikon z can be challenged by so what if i could show you two settings that i use that can get you your shot in almost any situation that's what we're gonna take a look at today i'll go through the menu settings and how i use it and how it's gonna benefit you so that you can put your eye up to that viewfinder and be able to compose and change settings on the fly right through the viewfinder that will be able to get you your shot in almost any situation so hey before we get started i'd just like to say thanks again for watching if anything in this video does help you out and i hope it does please help me out by hitting the subscribe button and ring the bell for future updates feel free to leave me a comment as well i do try and answer all comments as much as i can so without any further delay let's get started okay so here on the front of your nikon z camera are two function buttons function one and function two i believe they are labeled and yes they are and with these two buttons you can use these buttons to be able to adapt to almost any shooting situation out there on the fly i'm going to show you what i have mine set to and why i use it now just to throw a little background out there i do work as a press photographer i shoot nhl hockey i've shot major concerts in new york city from you know every every named act you could imagine and using these settings can really be a huge time saver for you and like i said the last thing you want is to be in some kind of dynamic shooting situation where you need to change the setting and now you have to fumble through menu settings on the back of your camera or even using the i button is really sometimes just too much of a delay you really need to be able to resolve a lot of these situations with your eye up to the camera as you're shooting and using these two buttons we can use the function one and function two combined with the two command dials to change and adapt okay so the first thing i want to show you is how to set up the menu settings to customize the f1 and f2 button on your nikon z series camera so what you're going to do is you're going to hit the menu button scroll down to the pencil for custom settings menus and in custom settings select f for control and then f2 for custom controls and then you'll see the function 1 and function two buttons up at the top function one is probably set to white balance but you're gonna scroll through the list there and find metering and select okay and then head over to function2 and it may already be set to auto focus mode but if not scroll through your list and select that hit okay and then to confirm these settings and exit the menu just press menu again to exit out and you're done okay so we've made these menu setting changes and we got our function one and function two button program but now what can this do for us and why is it so effective a system to use in your daily photography well i'm going to tell you why first off let's say you're in a dynamic lighting situation concert something like that maybe it's your son or daughter's uh school play and they have a role and suddenly there's a spotlight on them you put that camera up to your face and you know the camera is great at resolving all sorts of different shooting situations but once you put a spotlight on somebody's face what's gonna happen is the camera's gonna try and resolve to the middle which means you're gonna end up with some dark areas you're gonna end up with some highlights that are overexposed and unfortunately more times than not those highlights end up on the face this is especially true if you're photographing a concert whether it be professionally or just a band a local band that you happen to like spotlight hits the face of somebody on stage they're going to end up typically being overexposed so one of the ways that you can compensate that is of course you can go into flash compensation mode and dial it down and experiment a little bit and see how many stops you might need to knock things down but a more effective way just get that camera up to your eye okay now you have that shooting scenario okay without even ever having to take your eye off the subject just push that top function button and start scrolling your back command dial until you hit highlight weighted metering mode and then continue shooting what's going to happen is once you put your camera into that mode the camera is going to calculate in an attempt to not over expose the most brightly exposed areas typically again on with the spotlight situation it's going to be the face and you're going to get the shots because the face is the most important part in a scenario like that now that's great but let's say you're again same scenario there's a bunch of kids on stage it's your kids um school play or maybe your kids have a band or a friend has a band and you're taking some pictures for a band there's three or four people on stage and you're in face detection mode face detection mode is picking up the wrong person and yes of course you can switch it on the back of the camera and sometimes that works but let's say you want to knock the camera quickly out of face detect mode because maybe it's bouncing back and forth and you want to focus on just the singer or just the guitarist again just put that camera up to your face and then hit that bottom command dial and you can start scrolling using the front command dial all the different focus modes so maybe i'm on face detection and i can just a couple of swipes of the finger of that front command dial move to pin or some other focus mode that is going to work better for me in that particular shooting scenario so that's one of the reasons why we're going to do this again it's going to allow us to adjust on the fly in almost any situation now let's say you're shooting a sports event and you go you only want to get one person again maybe it's your kid maybe it's a friend maybe it's a sports figure that um you know you want to get maybe you're working for the press and and you need particular shots of a certain person in sports unit your if that's your scenario face detection is not going to work for you so you're going to need some other metering mode and you might need it very quickly quite often like if we're shooting say nhl hockey nhl hockey moves at incredibly fast speeds the puck moves at over 100 miles per hour at times let's say i'm in a shooting scenario and i want to get a shot of the goaltender i may want to revert to an old-school method of creating a focus trap so how do i create a focus trap well what i do is i take the camera out of continuous focus mode so again as i'm focused on my subject i can just hit that bottom button spin my back command dial and go to auto focus single now while holding that same command dial depending on what focus mode i'm in i might want to switch to a small area focus now once i have that done i can half press my shutter put the focus point on the goaltender and now just wait and once there's a shot i can hit my shutter button completely and just hold it down and let it rapid fire and i don't need to worry about well a player skated through or there was a stick that went up and the camera grabbed focus of the stick or the ref skated by and the camera grabbed focus of the ref it's going to ignore all of those things it's going to stay on its predetermined focus point and shoot as fast as possible simple focus trap again it's old school photography and it works great especially if you're trying to get an action shot in a scenario like that so again that's just another way of how we can change on the fly now all right that shooting scenario is over but the play hasn't stopped i don't want to take this camera away from my eye so now i can just again hit that bottom command button and i can just back control dial and go right back to auto focus continuous scroll my front command dial and i can go back into whatever focus mode i want again quickly doing this on the fly without taking the camera away from my face so i'm able to resolve just about any type of shooting situation that i need to by just using these function one and function two buttons without ever having to take the camera away from my eye so that's why this scenario works so well for me when i'm doing press work so again if i'm doing a concert if i'm doing sports whatever it might be these are very dynamic situations especially concerts lighting is changing constantly so in order to be able to dynamically change the type of metering that i'm doing and dynamically change the type of focusing system that i'm using on the fly without losing track of my subject or without taking the camera away from my face enables me to get images consistently all the time without having to oh well let me hit my eye button here and and go to this setting or that setting that doesn't work because once i take my camera from here to here i'm missing shots i'm missing what's going on by able by enabling me to do this with my camera up with myself my focus on my subject i'm never going to miss a shot or well i might miss some shots but hey that's probably my fault but it's probably not the fault of the camera because i've minimized the amount of clicks it takes me to change settings now one of the defaults for this camera is for the function button is white balance white balance is something that first off auto white balance works fantastic you're rarely going to have to change white balance like for example if you were shooting in a hockey rink like for me if i shoot in the same ring all the time i know what the white balance setting is and i will custom set the white balance at the beginning of the game and i will leave it that way i'm never going to change white balance on the fly while i change metering on the fly maybe will i change focus modes on the fly 100 yes 100 yes so you know this is just something that works really well now in a concert am i going to change focus modes on the fly yeah probably will will i change metering on the fly yes i probably will and that enables me to keep shooting continuously to get the shots that i need that's why i hope you take the time out to consider trying those settings that way i think it's going to help your shooting tremendously so there you have it folks that's uh kind of uh my take on how to really effectively use the nikon z system in these various scenarios i hope this helps you and if it did well please help me out by hitting subscribe and ringing that bell so you get notified of future updates i appreciate you watching this it's nice to see your smiling faces as always here on youtube thanks for watching and i will talk to you soon bye

Channel: Joseph Nuzzo

Views: 7,703

Rating: 4.9162788 out of 5

Keywords: nikon z7, nikon z6, nikon z5, Nikon Z Tips, nikon mirrorless, z 6, z 7, nikon mirrorless camera, nikon, z6, z7, nikon z 6, nikon z series, full frame mirrorless, nikon z, nikon z6 video, tips and tricks, tips & tricks, mirrorless camera for beginners, mirrorless camera, z series, nikon z7 video, z7 setup, z6 setup, nikonmirrorless, zseries, ztips, nikon z50, autofocus, z50, nikon function button, fn button, z6ii, Z7II, nikon z6ii, z6 ii, z7 ii

Id: TW1LZrvHxW0

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021