Nikon Z7 II & Z6 II User's Guide & Tricks by Ken Rockwell

i'm ken rockwell let's look at some tips and tricks that i use with my nikon z7 mark ii this applies just as well to the z6 mark ii as well as to the older z7 and older z6 for the most part and if there's any features the other cameras don't have well that's just the way the cookie crumbles now this is going to show you how to operate the camera and various tricks and tips that i use to make it a little easier to work with in terms of taking great photographs that has nothing to do with your camera you can take great photographs with an iphone what you do need to do is you do need to know how to take great photographs and for that i would simply go to my website kenrockwell.com and click the link for how to and i've got a ton of articles about how to take great pictures first off we need to get this beast charged well one thing you used to do in the olden days is you would pull out the battery and charge it in an external charger and you can do that nikon still includes with some of these models an external charger but i don't bother because the battery will charge in the camera the way you do that is pop open this little door and you look for the usb connector there you pop in your usb c cable and then you can either use a cord that goes to usb a and it'll charge it about seven watts or you can charge it much more quickly and maybe at about 10 watts or so i've measured this but forget exactly i just use a little charger that came standard with my apple ipad and happens to have a usbc cable this way it all travels with me together and this is a very quick charge i think it charges about two hours or so again the specifics are all on my written review but that's how i charge the battery i don't even use the included little external charger the only reason to use the external charger is if you have two batteries and you come back at the end of the day and you want to get them both charged up while you're sleeping then you'd pull one and pop it in the external charger when you do charge it there's a tiny little invisible led that lights up you see this little tiny thing here where it says chg for charge that little dot that will light up but it also will get covered up by this or because you have to pull this flap open get covered over by the flap so good luck the little led lights in amber while it's charging and extinguishes when it is done not only can you charge from a usbc adapter you can charge from your computer you can charge from a power bank you can even charge if you've got a really large solar cell that should charge as well anything that makes usbc now if you use usb c pd power delivery it charges more quickly as i showed the little apple adapter there is usb c pd but again even if you just use a good old-fashioned usb a cord it will charge not as quickly but it doesn't matter if you're charging it overnight which is when i do it you're good to go next morning no matter what now other power sources yes you can run it from the battery that's included it'll also run off of usbc if you have enough power the gotcha is it only charges when the power is turned off if the power is turned on it's running from the usbc power you can also change that in the settings you can go to menu setup usb power delivery leave that on if you turn that off what that means is when you plug it in your usbc cord it won't run the camera but the camera will only be running off of the battery i leave that on but if for some reason you only want to run from the battery even if the cord is plugged in set that to off for power conservation you're in luck you don't have to turn this off every time you want to stop taking pictures the camera usually times out even if you're carrying it around your body's against the viewfinder or whatnot i find it works great i can just leave it turned on and it goes to sleep when you want to wake it up being mirrorless it doesn't always turn on instantly in fact if i turn it on here it takes a moment to wake up what i always do is when i want to bring the camera to my eye to take a picture i tap the shutter to wake it up and by the time i get it to my eye then it's all good for memory cards this is two card slots it has the larger slot which takes cf express type b bravo or it also takes xqd cards in the same slot so it'll take both and it also takes good old-fashioned sd cards which are my preference but you know to each their own to open the card simple just slide your thumb like that there's no latch there's no nothing it just works it never opens by accident and always stays closed and it's always easy to open when you want to open it so i love the car door the viewfinder has an automatic brightness control it may vary as you point the camera up or down so if you're playing back images and you're sort of pointing the camera down to something dark the images may look dark on playback so oftentimes on playback especially if i'm outside i'll point the camera something light like the sky then press the playback button which brightens up the viewfinder the monitor control ordinarily the way it comes to the factory is there is a sensor here that detects your face so when your face is in front of it you get the viewfinder you take it away from your face you get the lcd if that gets mucked up this button here is the monitor control button and as you press this you can get various options for viewfinder only the back monitor only you can prioritize the viewfinder or automatic display switch is the way that i would leave it there's lots of programmable buttons most of these buttons especially the fn1 and fn2 buttons are easy to program they are programmed at menu custom setting menu controls custom controls and have added you can go to all the different controls here and program what they do you'll also notice there's an adjustment to set what the lens function button does in other words if you have a lens with a button on it that's where you can set what it does personally i set my fn1 oftentimes the depth of field preview or magnify and i said fn2 to control the autofocus functions but that is your choice you also can program what the lens control ring does in other words many of these lenses have an extra control ring like this one here you control that at the same menu you'll notice there's an additional option now for that that should control what the lens ring does focus aperture you name it you got it what kind of lenses well ideally use a nikon z lens and they're marked nikon z that's pretty obvious nikon have an adapter called an ftz for f mount to z mount it doesn't work with half of the lenses that they have sold it only works properly if you have an afs lens which would be af s meaning autofocus silent wave motor these lenses work just great on the ftc they autofocus fast they're sharp they're actually quite good this is well recommended i have problems with the fact that nikon implies that all of their lenses made over the past 60 years will work properly they don't work properly they'll take a picture but they don't work properly if you have a traditional autofocus lens like this lens that came out in 1993 the autofocus lenses from the 1980s and 1990s most of them autofocus the screw so as this ring turns the screw turns and the way it focused was that there was a motor in the camera that turned that screw that turned the ring that made the lens focus that would work great the only problem is nikon got cheap there is no motor in this adapter you'll notice there is no screwdriver bit here to focus your lens so if you use this lens on this adapter or any of these lenses in the 80s and 90s and nikon still manufactures and sells these lenses today they will not auto focus on any of the z cameras they'll focus manually and you'll have full data control and exposure control and that's all good but you're back to manual focus so the question is did you really want to buy a nikon camera if these older lenses won't work if you own those older lenses and the answer is i don't think you do i have a whole video and page and explicit details about how to use older lenses manual focus lenses rangefinder camera lenses i'd refer you to that but just know that any of these things is more of an experiment when you start trying to adapt these other kinds of lenses unless you have an afs lens and nikon still makes lots of these today afs lenses they're making these since the 1990s these work just great also afp lenses from the dslr should work just great on the ftz but avoid a traditional af lens or manual focus lens the manual focus lenses work even worse because there's no coupling of any data whatsoever and if you really want to go crazy strange but true i have this adapter here and i have a separate review on this the fringe ef to nz lets me use my canon lenses on my nikon z cameras any of the canon lenses made since 1987 will focus just great on my z cameras why can't nikon's cameras do that well that's why i asked why shoot nikon but anyway here we go see it loves it it autofocus is just great on the nikon z cameras adapting lenses is usually a dopey idea it's it sounds good to begin with but it never worked as well as you're hoping it would because there's a lot more finesse involved than getting lenses to work well with a given camera so stick with the z lenses if you already own the af-s lenses stick with those or feel free to buy them i use mine and you're good to go just don't think you're going to use your older traditional af lenses on your nikon z a weird thing with the nikon autofocus system is when you're using the af-s or single focus single focus and lock mode the af boxes turn green when they're locked and that's good and red means it's not locked and stop that makes sense the problem is in the afc mode the continuous af mode the red boxes means it's in in focus and you're ready to go that makes little sense but that's the way it works so just be forewarned that when you shoot this camera that green or red don't necessarily mean what you think it does it takes a little experience to know but honestly i don't like that oddly there's also a low light af option why that should be an option i don't know but it's under the custom shooting menu in auto focus it's a 10 at least on the z7 mark ii load light af i leave that on auto focus tracking gosh it doesn't always track just by magic the way you want it to track the way to get it to track is you have to select afc for continuous autofocus mode and then you have to select the all area af which is this large box and the way i'm selecting this is i programmed my fn2 button which we covered five minutes ago so i hold in the fn2 button and i turn on the front and the back dials to change those settings once you've set that it does a pretty good job of locking on to whatever it finds and then tracking that around the finder if you want to be more specific for instance if the camera's not magically locking onto whatever you want the lock on to pardon the prepositions then you can press the center ok button and now that that little piece there is going to lock on and stay attached to whatever it is now you could move this around but you won't want to do this unless you're locked down in a tripod because it's a heck of a lot easier just to move the camera to assign an object onto which to lock focus you see in there it it's doing its best here in this little pattern this thing will pop up sometimes for no reason at all to make it go away you hit the minus button and you're back to normal some folks like to have a rear button auto focus the lens so it only focuses when you push the rear button the way to program that is quite simply go to menu custom settings a for autofocus a6 af activation program it so that only goes on when you press the af on button and you can also enable or disable it so you can make that a lock or make that so that it only focuses when you press that manual focus aids it's got a lot you can either just look through the finder and turn the ring until it's sharp if you select the focus area manually it'll turn from red to green when it's in focus but it only does with one zone at a time but you can't put that zone anywhere in the picture i program one of these function buttons so i can just magnify here you can magnify your heart's content you can move the area that is magnified around and that's what i'll do if i'm on a tripod there's also a three-way null indicator you see off in the corner here there's a little dot those little dots are telling me in what direction to turn the ring so that i get perfect focus you also see you get a little indication of the relative distances focus from infinity down to close but it won't read the actual distance it's just a rough idea you can also get focus peaking if that's your preference you get that at the custom settings d11 focus peaking and you have your choice of the usual options of colors and strengths and so forth when shooting this is personal preference i set everything to automatic except for this auto button i don't use this because when i set that to green there it locks out a lot of settings i do like to use but essentially i'll shoot in program auto exposure auto iso auto white balance and auto everything unless i have a good reason to take it off of auto in which case i'll set it manually why do i do that simple decades of experience have shown me that it's faster at doing the basic rota mechanical settings than i am and this way i can spend my time looking at my subject i don't need to change anything i'll just change it from there but i'll let the camera get there first but again that is all personal i never even set manual isos that's important i use auto iso and set it to do what i wanted to do i set it to lower shutter speed usually to vary with the focal length of the lens and i let it take it from there other words it magically does if you have the confidence to pay attention to what's going on the auto iso settings do exactly what you or i would do manually but instead of having to change the iso every time you look up look down and change it all around it just does it in real time here's another pro trick a lot of people just shoot at iso 100 they don't know why just for the basic iso well this camera the bass iso is 64. so i set everything to start at iso 64. which just gives me a little bit more sharpness and a little bit cleaner images it doesn't make that much of a difference but if you can use 64 use 64 rather than 100. for silent shooting there's an electronic shutter you get to that at the menu the photo shooting menu and then you go it's actually the bottom of the menu i tricked i cheated here i went one up what got me the very bottom menu silent photography that is the electronic shutter you can't use flash or flicker reduction or hdr while in the silent mode and the maximum iso is 25 600. there's no limit on the minimum but if you want to get the iso 51200 or any of the higher ones you have to go to the regular shutter silent mode does work at all the shutter speeds from 8 000th down to minutes there's no bracket button on here the way you get the bracketing is you go to the photo shooting menu and then it's the option called auto bracketing and then you have your usual options of all the usual things if you want an electronic first curtain shutter which i think is cool because that way instead of having a mechanical shutter open at the beginning you have an electronic shutter so you don't have to worry about things like self timers necessarily so you have a little bit more freedom from vibration that is available at custom setting d5 shutter type see that you can electronic first curtain mechanical or auto for light metering always shoot in a matrix matrix is the smartest metering mode they include other modes for old timers who do things like sensor weighted and so forth but those have all been obsolete so if it ever gets off of matrix set it back to matrix because that's the smartest mode all this other crazy stuff i never use i always shoot matrix and if it's too dark or too light i simply press the compensation button and add or remove usually no more than two-thirds of a stop and i'm good to go matrix is the smartest mode i would use that all the time but again that's art you can use what you want image crop modes i love to crop my images in camera as i shoot because i find this long three to two ratio is usually just too long but again this is art it's your preference i programmed this red button to be my crops where i can get a dx crop which is the same as a digital zoom i can get square crops to match my hasselblad or ideal format five to four crops which usually is a little bit better for most subjects depending on what you're doing especially shooting verticals but again it's all art it's what you want to do for flash honestly nikon hasn't made a great flash with these little cameras in years this is the flash that i use it's a little sb400 the reason i use it is it's plenty bright it's super smart it locks this is 100 compatible the flash turns its power on and off with the camera among other things it takes two nice fat double a batteries to give you lots of shooting life they don't make these flashes anymore you can follow my links and get a great one for about a hundred dollars used off of ebay and i find the other flashes today are just dinky pieces of garbage or they use things like aaa batteries which gives you a fraction of the flash power and recycling speed if you're using studio strobes in other words if you're shooting in a studio and the exposure is entirely by studio strobes or if you're shooting by flash say at night with a high sync speed so you're getting little to no ambient contribution you want to change how live view works because otherwise it's going to look totally dark go into your custom shooting options go to d for shooting display and d9 where it gives you the option to apply settings to live view now it's set to on so that means if you're shooting say to 250th of a second for flash sync in dim light and there's no ambient light contribution to the final image well that means there's no ambient light contribution to the image in your live view so you'll see a totally black finer so if you set that to off now the finder will always attempt to show you a decent picture it won't show the effect of color and saturation and contrast settings and so forth but it will let you see what you're doing so you can focus on your models and get your shots when you're shooting in a studio with studio strobes for auto white balance i have a whole section on this in my formal review there are now four different auto white balance settings which kind of takes the auto out of auto white balances auto zero auto one auto two and auto natural light auto i usually shoot at auto one and if it's too warm or too cool for me then i just go directly to the kelvin settings and force it to what i want it to do for long exposures the z7 mark ii now has two great ways to do that there's a time setting in the manual exposure mode so if you go to manual exposure go through here you go through your slower settings you'll notice once you pass 30 seconds right between bulb and xsync there's time exposure what time means is when you press the shutter button once it's now exposing and taking your picture and you can get back an hour later half an hour later five minutes later three hours later whenever you want and when you press the button again there you go that was your exposure however long it was set a better way to do it is i just want to make timed exposures let the camera worry about it to do timed manual exposures that are longer than 30 seconds you have to enable that you go into d6 under custom setting menus and under d6 extend the shutter speeds in manual mode set them to on and now you have beyond 30 seconds it goes from 30 straight to 60 but you know i didn't program this camera but it does go out to 15 minutes which is 900 seconds that is a cool feature for movies because especially i programmed my red button to be a different feature because i don't use this for movies what you do is you have to turn this deliver to the movies now the controls all do different things but have you programmed it in fact now the red button will take movies u1 u2 and u3 are one of my favorite features i can program about two-thirds of what the camera is set to into u1 u2 and u3 i program u1 for program auto exposure and very high saturation and sharpness for my landscape shots i'll program you two either for people shots or as the same as you won except it'll be aperture priority mode then u3 i'll either program for use on a tripod which will be fixed iso at iso 64 and use the aperture priority set to f8 or maybe i'll set that to people or maybe i'll set that for how i shoot sports i wish i had more of these but that's what i do and that way when i'm out shooting if i'm photographing landscapes boom and suddenly i want to make a people shot looking the other way i'll go back over to you too then about three quarters of the things i would set things like autofocus modes and contrasts and picture modes will change with that and again the user's guide on my website links to that in my description will have complete descriptions of how i use these modes and even has the file you can download and load into your camera of exactly how i set up my camera because last but not least you can save and load the files that represent how the camera is set when you go into the wrench or setup menu save and reset user settings that's how you program these u1 u2 and u3's so you can set up the camera however you like it then save it to you one or save it to you two and save it to you three then you recall them simply by turning this dial now you can do some things here you never have to clear them out if you want to change one well you call it up boom now have u3 called up change whatever you want in the settings and then save it back to u3 hope that makes sense and it would recall the setting change it save it that's how you edit it and if you want to get the camera configured to begin with well i set the camera how i want it and i set that into u1 and then i'll change some settings that might be relevant for a different kind of shooting and then save that into u2 and so forth and so on to download my pictures i prefer to use a card reader i find that's much handier pop this out stick it in i do not attempt to plug my camera into my computer because that's usually very slow however when the z7 came out which was awful because it only took these ridiculous xqd cards and i was too cheap to buy a proper xqd reader for a few months then or attempt to plug my camera and via usb into my mac and on my macintosh i use apple's native image capture app and that even works on my 2007 imac just fine it recognizes camera and let me download from the card and that's it that's just a few little tips and tricks i use with my nikon z7 mark ii if you really want to know how to take great pictures again check out the links in my description go to kenronkle.com click the how to and there's tons of articles there about how to see and recognize and take good pictures thanks again for watching ken rockwell kenrockwell.com and kenrockwell.tv you

Channel: Ken Rockwell

Views: 13,105

Keywords: Nikon Z7 II User Guide, Nikon Z6 II User Guide, Nikon, Z7 II, Z6 II, Ken Rockwell, KenRockwell, Tutorial, User's Guide, Tips & Tricks, Users Guide

Id: YruvaLsk1Ug

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021