Nikon Z6ii And Z7ii Menu Setup (Wildlife Photography)

[Music] hey everyone steve from backcountry gallery here and in this video we're going to set up the menu on my new z7 mark ii the z6 mark ii setup is exactly the same this setup is with the original firmware and was actually done back in december i just now got around to putting the video together before we begin i do want to be clear we're only going to cover the menu options that i change along with a very brief explanation of why i changed them in several places i mentioned other related videos that do go into far more detail and those are linked in the description area for this video on youtube and under the blog post for this video at my site also keep in mind i'm primarily a wildlife photographer so these are settings that work well for that pursuit and finally remember that just because i set up my camera a certain way doesn't mean you have to choose those exact same settings we all shoot a little differently and what works for me may be a bad fit for you this is a long one so let's get started right now okay so here we are looking at the back of the z7 it's telling me no lens is attached which it's not so so far so good it knows what's going on at least so i'm gonna hit the menu button and we're going to go into the setup menu here and i do confess i was in the menu just a moment ago because i wanted to extend the delay for the timeout on the menu so it doesn't like flip off when we're trying to talk about it here so other than that though this is untouched normally when you come in here you would just see the setup menu and it would be set to language if the language is fine then you don't have to worry about that so the next one down here is time zone and date we're going to set that real quick time zone i'm in eastern new york will work hit okay date and time i am doing this on december 13th so 2020 and time is 12 50. close enough there we go i don't care about the format daylight savings time is off so that's good we're all set there next let's go down here and again i'm only going to show you the stuff here that i would actually adjust i'm not going to go through every single setting let's go down to when i sometimes i'll use afi tuning usually on the z cameras it's not necessary but if i do happen to have a lens that looks like it's back focusing or front focusing a little bit i would revisit this section but that doesn't usually happen on the z cameras so i'm not too worried about that one save focus position now this is a new one for the z6 and the z7 mark ii and this is really handy what this does why it's not on by default i don't know but what this does is normally with the old cameras when you shut the camera off it would kind of park the autofocus with a native lens that would park it around infinity which was really annoying so if you were out maybe waiting on a sunset you have everything pre-focused ready to go and you're just sitting there kind of waiting for the light to get good and then you shut the camera off to conserve batteries what would happen is when you turn the camera back on focus would change and you'd have to refocus and get everything set just at the moment that you really wanted to take the photo so i recommend coming in and turning this on and what that'll do is when you're out shooting and you turn the camera off it will remember where the lens is supposed to be focused and it won't bring it back up to infinity or whatever it was doing there before so definitely turn that on see here copyright information we should probably do that artist i'm going to fast forward through this stuff for you so i have to watch me do it and then copyright okay so i have all my information there i have the artist information editor which is just my name and then copyright i put copyright 2020 steve perry all rights reserved i think that's the best way to do your copywriting there i'm going to check this little attach copyright information box as well i'm going to hit ok and i'm all done so let's scroll through here there's not much left here i'm going to check the beep options make sure they're off which they are i do not like the camera to beep but if you do this is where you would turn it on touch controls are on not worried about any of that airplane mode i'm going to turn airplane mode on because i don't use any of the wi-fi or bluetooth features of the camera at this time so i'm just going to turn that on so those aren't trying to run in the background i don't think they take much energy but still might as well keep the airplane mode on there and disable those and go on down here and that does it that's all we have here that's again i don't change a whole heck of a lot especially in the setup menu here so let's move on to the let's go back up to the top towards the playback menu let's go to the first one this is the main one i change in here which is playback display options give that a click the first one is focus point i'm going to go ahead and check that you can either tap that with your finger or you can use the right hand side of the little multi-selector button there that has the ok button in the center of it if you do that it'll check and uncheck those for you like so now by the way the ad info is for just adding info to the existing screen so on the main screen that shows you your photo the default one it's also going to put the focus point on there it's not going to add another screen that you can select that will have that now these next ones here will add another screen that you can look at when you're reviewing your images so when you hit the play button you go left and right on that little multi-selector button to go from image to image but if you go up and down it'll page through these different screens so i like the exposure info on i like highlights especially that's probably my most used one i use highlights all the time blinkies we also call my whole video out there about that if you want to learn how those work i will put the rgb histogram in there i'm not going to put shooting data in there though because it's like three pages to scroll through worth of data that i probably already know since i set all those exposure points myself on the camera anyway the overview is a nice one to have and my favorite one of my favorites anyway is none believe it or not this just shows you the image on the back of the camera i find this incredibly handy when i just want to evaluate a composition a lot of times when i'm taking pictures in the field i want to just look at the image i've captured i don't really need all the extra information i just need to see that photo and see if i like the composition or not and this allows me to do that so once you have all these selected now i selected a bunch of them here obviously you don't have to do that whatever works for you but i'm gonna hit okay the rest of these i pretty much leave at the default there rotate tall i do turn that off and this is kind of some people go one way some people go another basically what this does is when you take a photo in the vertical orientation and you're looking at the camera in a horizontal orientation it'll show you the vertical photo on the back of the camera however i don't like it doing that because if i'm taking a photo in a vertical orientation there's a good chance i'm on a tripod anyway and even if i'm not i want to see the vertical photo in a vertical format on the back of the camera if the camera's being held vertical i want to see the vertical version of the photo so i turned this off but there is one little catch here if you turn this off a lot of raw processing programs when you import your photos you're going to have to actually manually rotate them so you know you could go one way or the other there but i do like to turn that one off and that's pretty much it for the playback menu i say not much for that particular menu there next let's go to the photo shooting menu and there's a few in here that i like the first one is file naming the default is dsc so i'm going to jump in here and change that to something else and you can see there's actually two different versions of file naming there if you're shooting srgb you have a underscore between the dsc and the number and for adobe rgb it's in front of it there now i shoot srgb for this because honestly it doesn't matter i'm shooting raw it's going to be pro photo once it gets into lightroom anyhow this is just what the embedded jpegs inside the raw file are going to be and srgb is probably a little bit better for the back monitor here and we'll talk about that when we get to that portion of this menu here but for right now let's just go to file naming it got a little distracted there now as you can see it's dsc but instead of the default what i like to do is put the camera name there so i'm going to put z 7 and then a number 2 so i know this is my z72 so that's how i'm going to do that hit ok and if we go back to the file name menu you can see that where it says srgb and adobe rgb instead of dsc we now have z72 so now if i'm looking at my images and i have a variety of cameras i shot that day and maybe something's wrong with one of them i can just glance at the file name real quick and i'll know exactly which camera was responsible for that image so that's kind of handy to have or which camera i shot it with you know if i just want to know for my own reference primary slot selection i'm going to use a cf express card just double checking that one secondary slot selection is overflow that's how i usually do it i shoot wildlife some landscapes some macros and the interesting thing about doing those types of photos is that i don't really have to worry about a backup because i've never once had a deer sue me because his portrait session didn't turn out so i leave that on overflow image area is going to be fx but there are a variety of other options here for the most part i just leave this on full frame image quality is jpeg normal which i don't want i'm going to shoot just straight raw so that's nef raw i'm not going to bring jpegs along for the ride i can make jpegs later if i want to out of those raw images image size let's see here i don't care about the jpeg but i am interested in the neff and i want to make sure that is large which it is by default so that's not a big deal but i do like to go in here and double check you don't want a surprise when you're out in the field and then you come back and you think you have these great images and something wasn't set right so i just like to look raw recording and in this case we have raw compression we have lossless compressed that's the only one you should really use on an icon for the other options we have compressed which is a lossy compression so it's going to throw data out so unless you're super desperate for card space i would not do that then we have uncompressed which again there's not really any good reason to use this because lossless compressed is the exact same data just smaller so there's no reason to use uncompressed either so my recommendation stick with lossless compressed next we have iso sensitivity settings and we'll give that a click head in there and before we get too far here though if the bottom four options are grayed out you're probably still in the green auto mode on the top on your little exposure dial there switch to something like manual or aperture priority or something and you'll have access to the rest of the stuff i'm about to show you so iso sensitivity is going to be 100 for now this is just our regular iso sensitivity and i do have auto iso on because i shoot with manual and auto iso all the time so this is usually turned on unless i go to full manual mode then i shut it off obviously but for right now this is turned on maximum sensitivity on this camera i like twelve thousand eight hundred actually no this is a z7 on this camera like 6400 on the z6 i like 12800 so that's where i'm gonna cap everything out and that's pretty much all i'm gonna do right here right now so i'm gonna hit okay all right back out rather all right white balance is auto auto works pretty well i actually do like the natural light auto a little tiny bit better though so i think i think i'm gonna switch to that one picture control automatic is fine with that color space this is where you can select srgb or adobe rgb and again i do want to emphasize that this is for raw shooters this is just going to be the color profile that's embedded in that jpeg inside the raw file and since i'm shooting raw i'm just going to use srgb if you're using jpeg or something srgb is really probably still the best bet that's the one that most screens and displays are going to use so most of the time i do recommend srgb it's not as wide a color space as adobe rgb but for jpegs or embedded jpegs it works really well plus i'm pretty sure that the monitor on the back of the camera is probably not a full adobe rgb gamut i think it's probably closer to srgb so it's going to give you a little more accurate color i believe on the back of your screen here i can't prove that but that's kind of my feeling about it let's see here what else do we need next we have long exposure noise reduction you can turn this on or off depending on what your needs are i like to kind of just put it on by default basically what it's going to do is shoot what's called a black slide if i'm shooting a longer exposure i believe it's like over two seconds might be over one second i don't remember for sure but what this does is it takes a black slide so basically you take your image and then the camera takes another image with the shutter closed and then it can map that noise and compare that to the noise that you have in your other image and it can reduce the exposure a little bit even on raw file so i do like using that the disadvantage is you don't want to use it with stuff like star trails or things like that where you need one right after the other you don't want that pause because however long your exposure was the black frame exposure is going to take equally long it has to otherwise the noise reduction technique would not work so but this can help reduce noise on your longer exposure images and again we're talking i think over two seconds long next we have high iso noise reduction i just leave this on normal this is a this is not really a raw setting this is for jpegs and for tiffs and things like that this is not going to affect your raw files unless you're using capture nxd and then whatever you have set in here nikon will by default set in capture nxd but if you're using like lightroom or something else this setting is ignored anyway so i just leave this at normal so i can have kind of a realistic idea when i'm looking at my jpeg previews on the back of the camera after i shoot something how noisy it is so i would recommend just leaving that on normal i'm not worried about that one or that one diffraction compensation uh doesn't really hurt anything especially for raw file so i tend to leave it on see metering matrix flash mode is fine now right now we have some focus mode options i'm not worried about those at the moment i'm going to change this to afc eventually but we'll do that later auto bracket and just go down here and finally we have silent photography so i'm going to turn that one on that's kind of my default for that i like using style and photography when i can you do have to worry about rolling shutter a little bit with faster action subjects but for the most part it's not a problem and you avoid any kind of shutter shock issues as well this is basically using the full electronic shutter the mechanical shutter does not get involved so i tend to leave that on most of the time i don't do anything in movies so i'm going to move down to the regular custom setting menu okay so let's start with auto focus give that a click and before we get too deep into this though i do want to point out that i have a different video that covers the nikon autofocus system it was made before the z6 and z7 mark ii but pretty much everything in that video is still going to apply to the new cameras and that video goes over the functions and customizations in this autofocus menu in much much greater detail than what we're going to do here this video is simply designed that we're that you're watching now to show you my basic menu setup so if you want a lot more information and a lot more detail make sure you check it out i'll put it in the card above so our first options are the a182 these are the afc and afs priority selections there's very little reason to change those so i leave afc in release and afs in focus so i'm not going to touch those those are just fine as they are next we have focus tracking with lock on again that other video i do explain this in much greater detail and i go into a lot of detail in my book as well for this one but just the really quick version of this is that blocked af shot response is how your camera is going to respond if there's a drastic change in distance under the current autofocus point like when a tree gets between you and maybe a flying bird that you're photographing so the idea here is that if that bird is flying behind a tree we want our camera to not focus on the tree but wait a second until the bird shows up on the other side of it so we use this function to tell the camera how long it should wait if there's that drastic change in focus now the other thing that this is used for is if you're in a situation where you're tracking a bird and you find that you seem to lose focus quite a bit you might have it set too quick and delayed would work better on the other hand if you're tracking the bird maybe you accidentally focus on the background or camera accidentally focuses on the background you put it back on the burden you're pressing the af on button and nothing's happening it seems like forever until it refocuses then you need to go more towards the quick side so that it latches on faster for most people a setting of three is a good place to start but if you find that the autofocus is too sticky go down towards the quick end of it here and if the autofocus is letting go too easily go more towards the delayed side of the little bar right here but again for more info make sure you check out the other video it goes into much greater detail about this for now i'm just going to leave it at three and that is not to set it and forget it by the way i will jump in and out of there as needed but for right now i'm just going to leave it at the default next we have focus points used and i always kind of go back and forth on this one this is one that i jump around with a little bit we have two options all or every other point now the first thing i want to point out is that this is not the autofocus points the camera is using these are the autofocus points that you're allowed to select inside the viewfinder so basically the camera can still use every single autofocus point so you're not like crippling it by going every other point but what this will allow is for you to get that auto focus point to travel across the viewfinder much much faster since you're going every other point up and down so if you're in a situation where you don't need super super precise af placement but you do need to be able to move that autofocus point around that one half option is really really good for the most part i kind of anymore have been leaving this on all points unless i run into that situation but if i am in a situation where i need to move the af points around a lot i don't hesitate to jump back in here real quick and go to every other point but i think for right now i'm just going to leave it on all points next we have store points by orientation i really like this feature i'm going to give this a click this is just a yes or no i'm going to turn this on and what this is going to do is it's going to remember the af point position for horizontal shots and then for vertical shots so for example maybe i'm shooting a bird and it's flying horizontally and i focus on that bird and then that bird flies by and while i'm waiting for another bird i spot you know maybe a nice great blue heron and i focus on him but in this case i want it vertical i want that focus point on his eye so i move that up to the eye but when the next bird comes flying by i don't want to have to recenter it so when i turn the camera horizontal what this will do is it'll go back to that center af point position for me and then when i'm done with him it'll go back to the vertical point position for the other one if i want to keep photographing that bird so it's kind of a handy feature you do have to be careful with this because if you forget you turn it on you might be like how come every time i turn my camera vertical the af point moves it gets a little confusing and by the way to set it as far as where your af point position is in the viewfinder simply move the af point to where you want it when the camera is vertical or horizontal and then it'll remember you don't have to really do any kind of you don't have to really do any kind of setup or button presses or anything like that it just kind of does it automatically next we have af activation this is how we turn on and off back button focus basically so i'm going to give this a click and i'm going to go af on only and what that's going to do is it's going to take autofocus off of my shutter release and it'll just be on the back af on button and that's how i want it for right now next we have limit af area mode selection now in the previous z cameras there wasn't a lot in here so i never really went in here and unchecked anything but basically what this is going to do is if you have your auto focus area like set to a button or something and you want to press it and turn and cycle through your auto focus areas this will take those extra areas out of the equation so it makes a little faster to cycle from like pinpoint to dynamic to wide without running into af areas that you don't use so in this case i'm going to leave pinpoint on and i'm going to use dynamic white area small that's actually one of my favorites i'm going to leave wide area large but when i get to wide area af for people that's when i'm going to uncheck because i don't take people pictures at all so i'm just going to uncheck that and to uncheck that just again use the side of the multi-select button wide area for animals i'm going to leave that one on for now at least keep in mind that animals are you know pets in this case it doesn't really work well for wildlife at this point hopefully a firmware update will correct that but for right now as of the recording date of this video just use it for dogs and cats so we have auto af area i very seldom use that normally but i do use the tracking mode sometimes so i'm going to leave that on auto af area for people again i'm not don't do a lot of people photography so uncheck that and i'll leave the one on for animals and i'll just hit ok now when i cycle through my auto focus areas i won't get the option for the people wide area there or the one for auto area af with people neither one of those will show up so it'll let me get through these a little bit faster when i'm cycling through next we have focus point wrap around this is probably what you think it is if you have an auto focus point you're wiggling it towards the right or left side of the frame once it gets to that edge should it stop or should it go to the other side i leave this off because i'm not coordinated enough to know what to do and it you know jumps to the other side so focus point options i leave those on the default the low light af though i do like to turn that on that's actually really good on these cameras and there's not really a huge downside that i've found by leaving that on if the light's so low that the camera's not able to focus it'll just automatically flip over to this so i think that's pretty good next we have the built-in af assist illuminator i'm going to shut this off i don't really want the camera shooting out a bright green beam at my animals if i happen to be in low light so i'm going to shut that off so moving on here we have now our metering and exposure options and for the most part i leave this alone there's nothing in here that i'm gonna bother with here so i'm gonna move on down to the timers and ae lock options here shutter release button ae lock i'm not going to use that i don't like that at all self timer i'm not worried about and we have the power off delay and if you look the see his little asterisk as i mentioned at the beginning of this video i did modify this so that i could actually do this video with you but i'm going to go in here i am going to make a change so playback 10 seconds i like to have my playback go a little bit longer there's nothing more frustrating than examining an image on the back of the camera and having it shut off well maybe there is something a little more frustrating but anyhow i'm gonna go to 20 seconds on that menus are set for five minutes i probably will come back in here and reduce that time to one minute later on after i'm done shooting the video image review four seconds that's if you have the image review set if you take a picture it'll show you on the back of the camera for four seconds i'm not worried about it because i don't have image review set standby timer set for 30 seconds i'm gonna increase that to one minute now i had this much higher with the first version of the z cameras because i was running into problems where it would power off the camera going to standby mode rather and i needed the camera to be active instantly and the camera was really really slow to start up these cameras start up much faster so i'm going just with one minute on this because even if it does go into standby it's not the i don't know photographic death sentence that it was before so i'm gonna leave it at one minute i can't promise that down the road i won't change this to five minutes but this is how i have the z62 set i've been using that for i don't know almost a month now i guess and it's been fine so that's that i'm not worried about my continuous low speed shooting mode extended shutter speeds i do like this you can have the camera go up to like 900 seconds i think that's 15 minutes or so so i do like to have that on i don't use that feature very often but and if i do it's probably not for a 15 minute exposure it'd be more like hey i want to go one minute instead of 30 seconds but i do like to have that on next we have limit selectable image area i'm just going to show you this one real quick you can go into different crop modes and this works just like the limit the af area mode option did you saw a little bit ago if you happen to have one of your buttons set for image area and you don't want to have to go through all of these you can shut any of the ones you see right here off if you want for the most part i just leave this on but i did want to make you aware of it because that's something that sometimes i've messed with before so i thought i'd mention it here the next one i want to talk about is apply settings to live view this is one change that i've made from my z6 and z7 the original the mark 1 cameras this one i usually leave on believe it or not with the old cameras when i was shooting action i would turn this off and i got a little better performance for autofocus doing that however this camera doesn't seem to have that same issue so i leave this on all the time now and so far i've not found any real benefit in turning this off even when doing birds in flight it seems like focus has been really good so right now my recommendation is to leave this on again you know these cameras haven't been out for a terribly long time i may change my mind on this down the road but for right now i'm leaving it on next framing grid display that's a heck yeah we're going to give that a click turn that on that'll put a grid overlay in your viewfinder focus peaking i'm not worried about that right now i'll assign that to something else later i'm not worried about that not worried about that all right nothing there i am going to go down to the customize i menu i'm going to show you how i set up my eye menu for my cameras here so let's do that next so we'll give this a click and the way this works is you just select the little slot here that you want to modify the little box here if you will so i'm going to show you how i typically set up the i menu and i'll start with this little box right here give that a click and this allows me to choose anything that i want now one really cool option we now have with the z cameras let me see if i can find it here is that we can put focus shift shooting right on the eye menu and that's something i use all the time so i'm going to do that and what then i'll do is when i click that it'll bring up the focus shift shooting menu so i don't have to menu dive for it i can just hit my i menu click this and the focus shift shooting menu will pop right up so that's really handy now over here i'm going to put iso so i can adjust my iso sensitivity settings from here if i want to and i think over here i'm going to put silent shutter mode i like to have fast access to that most of the time i do have it in silent photography mode but sometimes i want to turn that off and it's nice to have it on the i menu so again i don't have to go to the photo shooting menu in order to do that next for this box i'm going to give that a click and for this one let's put choose image area i like that one if i want to quickly go from full frame to dx or someplace in the middle i can do that not everybody wants to change that in the field some people want to just do that back on the computer it's the exact same thing so no worries there however the reason i like to maybe sometimes do it in the field is because it'll give you a little bit more room in the buffer and it doesn't take up as much room on the memory card so sometimes there's occasions where i will if i know i'm going to have to crop it any way back at the computer i'll go ahead and just come in here and make that crop right out there in the field so that's an option let's give this one a click i don't generally use flash i don't need to worry about flash mode too much so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to go up this way and i guess it's the other direction looking for focus peaking there we go i like to put focus peaking right on the back of the camera because i do a lot of live view work and a lot of times i need to change those focus peaking settings and it's annoying to go all the way the custom function menu to do that on the custom setting menu rather and do that so i like metering where that is and let's go here we can replace wi-fi connection with something because again i don't really use wi-fi with this so i'm going to go down here and i'm going to use exposure delay mode on this one sometimes i like to use exposure delay and finally we have the last slot that i'm going to worry about right here give that a click and that one is going to go to all the way down here custom controls that will give me quick one button access to the custom setting menu and there's a lot of times because of what i do i'm constantly bopping in and out of there for the educational stuff for the books and stuff so it's handy to have that on the eye menu so that's about it that is my finalized customized eye menu i'm gonna leave the other four alone vibration reduction i want on there keep in mind if your lens has a vr switch that's what's in control the menu does nothing but if you have a lens on there that does not have vr then it's controlled through the menu so sometimes it's handy to have that then we have the release mode continuous high or single or whatever we have the af area mode i think that should be on there and then we have the focus mode like afs afc i don't have a lens on here so we just have af slash mf right now but that's that's it so i'm going to hit done and that is all there is to the customizing the i menu that's how i do it now one more quick note before we go just because the customizations you see here work well for me that doesn't follow that they're all gonna work well for you this works pretty well for me i found that this is a nice combination of settings here but you know i'm still adapting i'm still modifying these sometimes depending on what my shooting needs are and you should do the same don't just copy what i have here and say this is the ultimate way of doing it it's definitely not everybody should have a different eye menu when they're all done because everybody has different priorities okay next we're going to go to custom controls give that a click and again i've set nothing here but before we get into this one though i do want to mention i do have a dedicated video all about this i think it's 10 or 15 minutes it goes into really deep detail about why i do the stuff that i do in here and how i customize it and stuff this is just going to be a very brief overview but if you would like more information definitely check out that video once again i'll put a card above so you can go do that when you get a chance so let's go ahead and jump in and i'll show you these so the first one is the fn one button and it's conveniently highlighted there on the camera as you can see that one i set for spot metering i took the long way around there sorry about that then i'm going to go over here and i'm going to set this one to ae lock hold i'm going to go back up towards the top here there we go i like ae lock hold because what that's going to do in conjunction with a spot meter is that i can spot meter first and then i can press that second button and that's going to lock in that exposure then i can release the button and because it's ae lock hold it will retain that exposure until i either shut the camera off or the camera goes into standby mode or i press the button again so this is really handy if you need to spot meter off of something and then recompose or if the thing's moving around and you don't want the exposure to change and that's usually how i spot meter if i'm spot metering i probably want to lock down that exposure so i'm going to spot meter and then we'll lock it in and then i can just shoot away at that exposure until i decide that it's not working anymore so that is a nice combination and again in that other video i go over that a little bit more then we have af on for our af on button and i'm going to definitely leave that one alone so next let's go down to the joystick the sub selectors nikon likes to call it give that a click and i want that one to reset that's what i'm looking for so that's this top one right here reset and that is going to center the auto focus point for me and i know the ok button does that but in a moment i'm going to assign the ok button for something else you'll see in a second here in a little bit so that's reset now the lens function button here is the one that i like to use for tracking so i'm going to go find that one subject tracking there it is so if i'm in one of the auto af areas and i have a lens with a function button which i almost always do i can press that button and that will initiate subject tracking for me most of my lenses do not have a secondary lens function button at least none of them that i own now so i'm not going to set anything there but i am going to go to the movie record button because this is one of my favorite customizations and sorry for kind of going around the block on you there and what i'm going to do there is i'm going to go down to the pressing command dials area and i'm looking for the focus mode af area mode option and i'm going to give that a click and what will happen is if i press that little highlighted button you see there the movie record button and i turn my command dials the back one is going to change the af area and the front one is going to change the af mode like af-s afc so that's a really handy feature to have now i know a lot of you are like well why not just put an af area mode on something like the fn1 button like we do with the d500 and the d850 and the d5 and the d6 etc right well unfortunately these cameras at this time do not support that functionality you can't do it there's no option to put an af area mode on a function button so because of that and that would be my preferred way to do it but because of that i ended up doing this metering thing with them instead so that's why i have that on the movie record button so even though it's not going to instantly jump to a particular af area mode i can at least you know scroll through it very rapidly without taking my eye away from the viewfinder so that's pretty fast i don't mind that one at all okay so you may have noticed that the screen changed a little bit there now we have another option down here on the bottom that's because i didn't have a lens attached to the camera and without a lens attached you don't get this now this is the lens control ring and right now it's set for aperture so if you happen to have a native lens a z mount lens that has one of these aperture control rings you can actually turn it and adjust the aperture to me that's kind of useless i don't like that at all i can reset the aperture the way i've been doing it with the dials you know last time i set an aperture like that was way way way back when when they were on the lenses so i'm not real worried about that but there is a cool function here that we didn't have in the past and that is exposure compensation and that's the one i like so now when i turn that dial it will set my exposure compensation and that is the best fastest way i've ever seen to set exposure compensation and i just can't wait for nikon to come out with some longer native glass so i can take advantage of that with my wildlife photography and not just with my landscapes and that that i do with the 2470 so that's a really really cool customization so anyhow that's again as i said before if you need more info definitely check out that other video and once again i do want to emphasize that just because this works for me doesn't mean this is a good combination for you i'm just trying to get you started here if this works for you great if not you know feel free to customize the way you want that's why we have so many options all right next let's go to the ok button give that a click and this is where i'm going to make some modifications now in shooting mode right now it's set for reset but if you recall i changed the joystick press to reset so i'm going to give that a click and i'm going to turn this one into zoom on and off and i'm just going to make sure it's at 100 it is and that's what i want i want to go zoom on and off and the reason for that is simple that way if i am using my camera i can just click the ok button at any time and i can zoom in to wherever the autofocus point is and examine very closely what i'm looking at that is a huge benefit and it's just right there on the okay button i love having that next we have playback mode and that is set for zoom and that's fine it should be at 100 by default it is and that's all there is that's all we want to do on the ok button but yeah that's a really cool customization there next we have customize command dials i'm going to give that a click and the one i want here is menus and playback the rest of this stuff i don't really adjust but menus and playback actually has a neat feature if we turn this on and you can do with image review excluded i just turn it just on what happens is when we hit the play button on the back of the camera we can use our command dials front and back to go through our images so if i use the back dial it's going to be one image at a time if i use the front command dial it's going to be 10 images at a time this is super handy when you're trying to review a bunch of images on the back of your camera and you don't want to go one by one or flip through them with your finger you know on the touch screen one by one these are really really fast controls to use i highly recommend that one so moving on down and the one last option here is the assign mbn 11 buttons option that is for the grip and i definitely have a grip so i want to assign those so the fn button is the first one that's the one directly behind the shutter release on the grip and i like to set that one for exposure compensation because there's nothing more frustrating let's go here exposure compensation there's nothing more frustrating than needing to use exposure compensation when you're in a vertical orientation and not being able to reach it so i'm going to click that one but obviously there's a lot of options there the af on button is correct and the multi-selector looks like it equals does the same thing as the multi-selector on the camera and all of that is exactly what i want that's perfect everything else is good it's just that function button is far more useful to me for exposure compensation but you can use it for iso or other things too so that is that and let's go back this is the movie stuff here i'm not gonna adjust any of that i don't really use the camera for movies at all okay so finally i am going to wrap this up by going down to the my menu area here and showing you what i do with my menu now you have two options here the first one is the obvious one you can add items and you can add pretty much any menu item to this for quick access if you want to do that and well that's handy i tend to use different menu items all the time so what i do instead is i go down to choose tab and i'm just going to start by saying before we get into this that what i do doesn't necessarily mean something you should do for me this works well for other people it may not so i'm going to hit choose tab and instead of using my own custom settings i'm just going to use recent settings and what this is going to do is anytime i use a menu setting it's going to put it under the my menu area and the reason i do that is a lot of times when i use a menu setting i do need to come back to the my menu area and reset that setting if i'm testing a camera if i'm doing something a lot of times i want quick access to that menu setting and maybe it's not necessarily something i put under the my menu area but let me show you how this works so i'm going to go to autofocus and i'm just going to change this to 3 from where it was there one and then i'm going to go back to my menu and you can see that the last thing i messed with was focus tracking with lock on and i can go ahead and click that and it'll take me directly to that menu and to me that's really handy especially for something like this this is a setting i tweak frequently so that's something to consider there so for me the bottom line is the reason i like this is if i'm in a menu there's a good chance i'm gonna need to go back to that menu if i'm tweaking things either with focus track with lock on or maybe i'm using exposure delay and i can have fast access to that right here through the my menu option so that's the one i use but again your mileage may vary there you go my complete menu setup for the z6 and z7 mark ii cameras again make sure you check out the description area for this video on youtube or on the blog post at my site for the related videos that do go much deeper into detail on some of these topics by the way if you enjoyed this video i think you really like my ebook secrets to the nikon autofocus system the mirrorless edition the af system in these cameras is tricky and without really knowing the best practices you aren't going to get the maximum keeper rate if you want to learn how to get the most out of your z series mirrorless camera make sure you check it out finally make sure you sign up for my free email newsletter so you never miss a video a live stream a workshop an article a new book you name it also if you have a photography question or just want a fun place to show off your photos make sure you check out the bcg forums in fact can't wait to see you there finally make sure you like subscribe and get notified thanks so much for watching have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 34,086

Rating: 4.9723864 out of 5

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, Nikon z7ii setup, Nikon z6ii setup, Nikon z7ii menu setup, Nikon z6ii menu setup, nikon z7 menu setup, nikon z6 menu setup, nikon z setup, nikon z7ii settings, nikon z6ii settings, nikon z7 settings, nikon z6 settings, nikon menu settings, Nikon z6ii menu settings, nikon z7ii menu settings, nikon z6 menu settings, nikon z7 menu settings, wildlife photography, nikon z62 menu setup, nikon z72 menu setup

Id: jYrkzlbAGOI

Length: 42min 6sec (2526 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021