Setting Up My Nikon Z6 II With The Best Settings

welcome to the nikon z62 today is the official release day so hopefully if you've pre-ordered your product you got a ship notification or even better you're picking it up from your local camera store uh always always support your local camera store so they can stick around so you have a place to to buy things um i tell my wife that i'm going to pick up a box and it's usually usually has a camera in it i'm going to walk you through my z62 setup we've spent hours and hours and hours and shot hundreds of thousands of photos with the original z6 so this is all based on that and iterating from that what works as well as kind of a bunch of crowdsourced uh comments and suggestions for how to set up your camera the best so i'm gonna hopefully bring you kind of uh an overall general setup guideline if you are an events and portrait shooter or a wedding shooter like i am or even a landscape shooter these settings should be good kind of for anything in there if you're into something a little bit more advanced with really fast moving wildlife i might not be the person to talk to you about it but regardless of what style of photography you're in i do feel like this will give you a base to build off and customize out yourself everything i'm going to show you is what i personally do and how i run my cameras at weddings and events and shoots and out doing landscape photography or travel photography or street photography you can obviously season to taste pick what works for you and and figure it out and actually honestly post it in the comments below if you have any suggestions for other settings to change or modify or things that have helped you out in in the past zed series products so getting to the camera i will actually unbox one of the new z62s here for you i don't know which one it is i feel like it's the one that was on the top this one weighs more inside your camera you get some attachments as well some cable management attachments and a usb c cord because you can charge your camera just with a regular usb c charged into here you don't need any special adapters or anything which is really really nice and then also the update with the z62 the z5 as well that now not only does accept usb charging but you can charge while you're actually using the camera so you can have the camera on you can be doing a time lapse and also charging the battery which is pretty cool um original z62 the camera has to be in the off position in order to charge by usbc at least at the current firmware i don't know if that's a thing that they could possibly update with firmware to to unlock that capability if you put a new battery in it but for now you can do it on the z62 and you probably have purchased one and that's why you're watching this video here's the camera very exciting and the the most exciting part is obviously the you get to peel that off it's very nice i don't personally use a screen protector or anything i've never had any issues the pre-production z62 that i had had a few scuffs in it so i don't know maybe they're just running that camera too hard but in real life uh doing hundreds of thousands of photos with all of my nikon products in the past i don't think i've had any camera that i haven't shot into that high volume with my d700 is actually over a million shutter clicks on the original shutter and i have not scratched the back screen or anything so i don't think that you personally need that if it makes you feel more comfortable by all means but it's not something that i have used in my career as a photographer i'm going to plug this into an atomos it's a ninja 5 recorder basically what this is going to do it's just going to record the screen that you're seeing in front of me here i would recommend especially if you're getting more into the video side of things or you have a desire to get into the video side of things to get some sort of external recorder with the screen such as the ninja 5 it makes your life as a video producer just a lot easier when you're actually just kind of in the field you're able to really see what you're doing as well as you have lots of different options of ways to to actually see the image and you can do things like you can put you can have a lut that's loaded into this recorder and you can be watching your footage back recording end log which is just kind of standard flat profile and you can have your lut preview on here so it's actually showing you something that looks more close to the final image that you'll be processing but still recording the actual just kind of end log style video that's a flat profile so you're able to make any adjustments in post um the way that i'm going to show you setting up this camera is how i do it and i would say 99 of the time when we're out in the field unless we're shooting a very specific project what i'm doing to save myself time and effort in post-production is i'm actually setting the camera as close as i possibly can to my final image which means i'm in the we'll go through this but i'm in the actual uh setup and the the picture menus making my image look pretty much like the final edit rather than doing any color this might be bad advice for you if you want to get into the cinema industry but for myself as a youtube creator as well as just a general i guess commercial film creator around town here and also a wedding videographer from time to time that is how i've discovered just works the best for me and also even though you are creating kind of that final burned-in image look on video with this i do have a lot of leverage that i maybe not as much as if i was shooting in end log or some sort other flat profile but i really do have a lot of abilities to brighten up footage or change white balances a little bit and i've never really had the footage break apart too much for your actual photography files you'll notice that you're able to push them really beyond what you should ever expect and you'll always get great results and it's the files hold together really well so be proud that you purchased one of these cameras before i turn the camera on i'm going to hold down this button and rotate the front lens cap take that off one thing that i do hope is maybe fixed in a future nikon z series model is that the the sensor just isn't exposed all the time so if you are changing lenses make sure you're changing them in a more controlled environment if you're outside at the beach and it's windy don't don't change your lenses just whatever you got like make sure you you know what you're going to shoot when you go in put that lens on if you're in the comfort of your own home by all means make sure the camera's off 100 but uh you can change lenses in here it's no big deal at all um but i would say to make sure you get a few uh sensor swabs so that if you ever do notice that you're out in the field and that you're maybe at f6 or maybe that's not a real f stop maybe 6.3 maybe f8 and you're starting to see little pieces of sensor dust that if you can just quickly go in and just do an on-site sensor cleaning yourself and it's it's usually going to be good enough that you're able to do yourself in most cases and the frequency i would say after a month or so it's uh it becomes needed to clean your sensor i also change lenses a lot so maybe if you don't change lenses this isn't a big deal all right loading into the camera when you first turn the camera on uh one it loads into auto mode so just the the green camera mode up here i usually shoot in manual or in aperture priority so i'm just going to move it to manual so that when i'm customizing the settings that i know that i'm customizing it for the manual menu option if you are in the green auto you will notice that maybe not everything that you want to be able to control is available so if you're into automatic modes maybe head to p mode where you're actually able to control a little bit more overall the first thing you can see the little clock flashing up in the top corner there first thing go in and set your time time zone is under the setup menu time zone and date today is what day is today november i'm in toronto time and date eleven two right now i will go into my other camera bodies and i will make sure that this is the same date and time that i'm seeing on all of them uh specifically maybe as a wedding shooter that it is important to have my cameras to be properly timed you can fix it in post but it's way easier if you just kind of do this and don't change it through the middle of your shoot if you realize that you forgot but to just set everything up in the beginning um i personally depending on circumstances i will usually not adjust if you're in a place that has daylight savings time i usually don't adjust for that i just leave it an hour wrong all year and i guess typically i would say that my cameras are usually set for the summer months because i'm out there the most taking photos all right moving back this is also a touch screen so if you just want to if you want to touch it you can you can do that moving up here there are a lot of settings that default come really great i don't have a card in here i have a card in here i'm going to put a met i'm going to put a card in here and i'm going to talk to you about one of my favorite nikon features so putting an xtqd card in here um just two card slots one's xqd one is sd as i'm sure you're aware uh one of my favorite nikon features is actually how easy it is to increment by one your storage folder you can come in here and you can go storage folder and all i do so if i'm doing maybe three family sessions back to back i'm out there in the park i after each individual family session will come over here select folder by number go to the right and it automatically increments by one and then i hit ok and now i'm shooting in a different folder on my on my card which i personally find to be very helpful just for organization the other really really cool thing with nikon specifically is that when you do that when you create another folder it doesn't actually reset all of your files to zero which means that they won't all just be like zero zero one dot um nef and just like all the way down nef's a raw file for nikon so it's not gonna name them all the same things and when you start a new folder name them all the same things in there because it gets confusing it'll just leave off if you shot a thousand images at your last shoot and you go into the next folder it'll be image a thousand and one and it'll start to count down from there which i really really like and it's so easy to do this it's just training your brain to actually remember doing that dsc stands for uh digital still camera which i didn't know until i looked it up like 10 minutes ago i'm like what what is this why why i'm going to call this i think what most people do whatever your initials are and then a number um touch screen again makes it nice and easy uh tj4 will be this camera i will likely set this camera to be tj5 so that i know what i'm shooting you can also name them like z61 z62 whatever you want to whatever you want to call it primary slot i'm going to leave it on the xqd because i find that as a wedding shooter specifically it's super super helpful for me to get home at the end of the day and have a super fast card that i can just put in the card reader and just download everything really really fast secondary slot function depending on what you're shooting i would say um to pretty much like shoot one-to-one backups this is photography only so if you're shooting video files unfortunately it won't be backed up to the second card so shoot video files we'll talk about that in a moment but definitely to the execute card um i'm going to set backup so it's just doing one-to-one um anything that i shoot on the xqd it is immediately copying to or i guess at the same time just writing to the sd card as well and then when i come home from an event usually what i'll do is i'll pop the xpd card out i'll download everything from that and then i'll put the sd card in and just verify that the same image numbers exist or do a quick little drag and if it pops up that i just have to skip every file because it all exists that's fine by me as well what i used to do actually was i would shoot raw primary and jpeg onto my second card i also shoot we'll talk about that in like 20 seconds here but i also shoot raw plus jpeg all of the time choose image area is a cool thing for nikon so um basically as a shooter of video as well as photography in an event style environment that i'm able to go from full frame into dx mode very very quickly i don't use these two others too often but from full frame to dx to get that 1.5 crop is very very helpful if you're in say a wedding ceremony in a big church and you just want to get that close up but you don't want to stand in front of the parents in between their their son or daughter getting married you can get a little bit of extra reach out of your lens what that does is it'll actually give you less megapixels overall but i would personally say like as long as the majority of your files are shot at the 24 that are in this camera that i don't mind giving a few frames that are maybe 16 or 12 or whatever the actual i should i should know this since i'm doing a tutorial you get less megapixels i don't know how many less i'm going to call it 12 and i'm going to correct it right here if i screw that up you can also set that to a custom button i in the past always on my nikon digital slrs had it set to one of the front buttons but i set my front buttons on this camera a little bit differently choose quality so you might come here and you're like why can't i select raw and it's because it's hiding up here i always go up here i'm fine with raw plus jpeg normal the reason that i shoot jpeg normal as well as raw is because again coming home from a wedding day or even anything that you'd want to back up i find it way easier to just quickly back up the jpegs i will also say that the jpeg quality that comes off of this camera is really really phenomenal all nikon cameras really really amazing jpeg files and for the most part i find myself editing the raw file um when you load it into lightroom it basically shows you the jpeg preview and then that melts away and you get the more flat raw photo there's ways to automatically make it do some things but basically you're getting the raw file and i usually find myself editing that raw file back to actually look like the jpeg so i'm in a lot of cases if i'm in a controlled environment and say it's a family shoot i shot everything under a tree during golden hour um it's very easy for me to just go from all the jpegs and just do a quick little contrast and color edit based on that and then send that off to the client and honestly the nikon jpegs are phenomenal and i'm super happy with that image size you want large and large as well raw nef recording i shoot 14 bit you can shoot 12 if you want but you might as well shoot 14 and i also run lossless compressed i haven't really noticed any real life differences from shooting an actual uncompressed file versus this i would suspect maybe it's more taxing on the battery in the camera which is fantastic by the way and way above the specs that nikon says on the website i think they they rate it at like 350 photos or something but you get way way more than that iso settings you can set max iso so if you have a max comfortable iso you can set it here if you ever are running automatic iso i personally for the most part i'm running iso specifically set to one thing there are a few times that i will run auto iso but i think for the most part to manually control that i think is nice but if you want to set that maximum sensitivity you can and then minimum shutter speed as well this is something that i will change so basically if i am running on automatic iso i don't want the camera to go below 160th of a second or maybe we even call it one slash 100th of a second so basically what's happening if the you're outside you walk inside the shutter speed comes down to let more light in it'll stop at 100 and then at that point it'll start incrementing the iso up to make sure that that shutter speed is a minimum of 100. coming over here into white balance and uh looking through here so some of them have secret second settings so if you're here and you come to the right you hit the right arrow in auto you actually have three options here which i think is very interesting as a wedding photographer i'm usually keeping the warm lighting colors and i think that that's maybe something that not a lot of people know so i would say make sure you're aware of these two settings and then also when you get into light lighting modes if there's a number beside it like there is here in fluorescent there's a number of different fluorescent lighting options that you have and they are wildly different like you'll walk into a space you're like wow this isn't fluorescent at all if you just set it to default fluorescent but when you start going through them you might find one that's kind of bang on if you ever can't find exactly the temperature that you want you can come in here you can also set a button to do it and you can actually just set your manual kelvin white balance so that everything is exactly as you want it as well as the greens and magentas my picture control i usually just set it to standard and i leave it there if i'm doing anything really specific this is for photography and also i'm shooting raw so i'm shooting raw and these aren't actually affecting my raw photo so they're affecting the jpeg file only you can set it so that it automatically applies everything if you want but i find that by just setting it on standard it's good enough for most situations color space srgb is totally fine active d lighting is maybe something that i do that not a lot of other people do i think on the internet you're not supposed to touch this and you're supposed to leave this off i like to set it to high i like to set it to high on both my photography my photo settings as well as my video settings and i do that simply kind of what it does is it enhances and bumps up the shadows a little bit so you get to see a little bit more detail and then it also kind of brings down and saves a little bit of your highlights it doesn't theoretically add dynamic range but it kind of effectively adds dynamic range which is pretty cool long exposure noise reduction off i will just do that in post-production if i ever do need to do it um and then everything else i leave it standard we'll be doing a lot more talk uh on a lot more videos about the af area modes as well as on here as well vibration reduction as well if you're somebody that's shooting sports uh also important to know if you're on normal and you're trying to do like panning shots the vr is gonna react a little bit differently than you would want it to if you're on sport it will track and it will pan a little bit better as somebody that just shoots weddings and events uh normal is totally fine all right another important thing for wedding and events shooters that you can just do silent photography now which is really really nice coming down here file naming i'm going to change this as well i'm actually going to call it something different than my we'll call it tjm just so that these files when i'm looking at my card that the video files will be incremented down below so they'll all stick together rather than being inter-spliced within the other the photo files that are up there so destination 100 you want to be sending this to the the most secure card which in this case is the xqd card for sure um image area again you can flip between those modes if you want to get into that extra crop the cool thing with video is that if you're shooting in hd frame you can go into dx mode and it's you're not losing megapixels it's not shooting at a 720 frame because you're in dx you're actually shooting a full hd frame but then just getting that additional reach from being in dx movie quality hi absolutely don't never put that in normal it looks weird it starts to look very potato movie file type i am quite fine with mlb depending on what your computer responds best to i would say that the movie file type for me mostly comes down to what my computer can interpret and work with the easiest and in my case i've had no issues with the mov file so i'm going to leave it at that you can turn your auto iso off here as well i should have mentioned that in the photo section or if your iso button that the one that's up top here you can hold that down and hit the front wheel left or right and it'll turn you to from auto iso to off that's usually how i control that white balance you can set this if you're a hybrid shooter and you're doing both photography and video coverage you can set this to be the same as your photo setting so everything carries over and i am personally going to leave it as that if you're ever shooting in an environment that really any environment if if people are in good light if they're in shade always white balance for the actual skin tone so if somebody's face is in the shade make sure your white balance is set to shade especially if you're shooting videos so that you're actually getting that like good proper file actually so you don't have to do anything with it in post-production active d lighting again maybe maybe something that the internet will hate but i'm setting that to high everything else down here is just set to what it comes defaulted as microphone sensitivity i will do manual um simply because i use an external microphone quite often and i have controls on the back for my microphone so i set this to nine and i feel like that's a good kind of happy medium that i'm not getting any static if you were to crank this all the way up to something like 20 you're going to be getting a lot of just kind of background hiss but as you get closer to something that it's not really kind of maxing with the preamp which around nine or even less you can technically if you have a good microphone you could go as low as you can possibly go um but i just like being around nine so that if i don't have the shotgun microphone plugged in i'll still be recording a little bit of that audio through the actual built-in microphones and then coming down here frequency response you can definitely set it to vocal if you're interested but i find the wide range just works very well and time code if you really want to get into into film all right coming over here into autofocus modes there is a lot to go through you can get really in-depth into everything and everything for the most part you can kind of figure out what it does just by hitting the right button over here and loading into the menu so basically what this is that priority goes to either the release so when you hit the button or when it achieves focus so based on your settings i'm usually leaving that on release i'm usually leaving this on focus um everything else i'm leaving as it is i'll talk you through what i set my front buttons to be uh because they control most of my autofocus settings coming down here um i also turn my built-in af assist illuminator off as well um just for the that's a bright light so i don't need that coming on by accident when i'm in an environment i'll turn it on if i absolutely need it everything else out of the box looking good um you can also customize your continuous low shooting speed so there's a button on the back that just is the what the the graphic is here on the side on the left and you can hold that button down and you can scroll through from cl to see high to see high extended or single shot i think three frames a second is good i'm gonna say for me as a wedding shooter i never need to go over four frames a second so i will typically either be in single shot or cl at four moving down here not a whole lot to change as i get to flash sync speed i do pretty much all of my off camera flash is high sync speed so i want to go to auto fp within that so that i'm able to just like set my shutter speed to whatever i want it to be so going back to controls as i mentioned this is kind of an important one so customizing my controls i actually set this f1 button thanks to everybody's pressure to to start doing this on on one of my videos i actually set this to subject tracking so subject tracking becomes my f1 button so basically what this does is it puts up on the screen a little box you whatever you select on that box so if you pick somebody's face or you pick an object and you either half press the shutter button or you hold the af on button on the back it'll actually just track around with you so it will actually just track that subject so that is very important to have and then the bottom button here uh af mode so basically this just scrolls through all the different af modes possible and i'm going to show you how to minimize a few of those so basically it comes pre-loaded i can demonstrate so as you can see at the top there it's uh highlighted in yellow and af-s to afc so that's nice and all so you can quickly switch with the back wheel for that but this front wheel you're now switching through all of these different autofocus area types and you can come over here into a7 limit af mode selection and you can get rid of any of the ones that you don't want to have just hit the right arrow which means if you're now going through all these settings at the top you can see that the animal autofocus no longer pops up in between any of them so you can limit what you want if you find that you're just using two or three it's definitely something that is 100 worth doing i personally find myself using the wide area mode with the the face and eye as well as the wide mode with face and eye within that as well as single point and dynamic nine point as well and outside of that i honestly don't use on a day-to-day basis everything so i'm fine to leave that off of that dial just so i can quickly get in between those based on the situation as i mentioned a few other things so auto iso if you're holding down the iso button on the top here and you move the front wheel you go from auto iso to out of auto iso so that's easiest way to switch that you don't have to go through the menus to to do that and then by holding iso button down and moving the back wheel you're just moving the iso up and down if you hit the i button on the back of the camera it'll launch you into a few more options of things that you can change and you can also customize this menu so if you want to add something like from dx to full frame mode on this back menu here you can do that you can also quickly switch between your vibration reductions it's really just kind of a highlights list of the menu items that you actually use on a day-to-day basis so whatever makes the most sense for you to to put there by all means go ahead and do that i don't change anything else with the exception of the time zone and date within here firmware version make sure you update your firmware these become entirely new cameras anytime there is a firmware update available so i'm personally excited the z6 original i feel like they capped out with how much they could improve the firmware based on just the hardware of the camera now there are two processors in this so i am very interested to see how this grows over time and that we just kind of keep getting upgrades to our camera which is kind of really cool everything else i leave as normal if you're somebody that uses the the app anything like that i'm sure there's dedicated videos online i don't use anything in here or in here i don't really set up a my menu my menu is basically the i button on the back of the camera one last thing that you can do depending on how you're feeling you can do image review and monitor only so if you're taking photos the the image review is only popping up on the back of the monitor which means that if you're if you're in the evf and you're taking photos you don't want that image review to be up on the evf so monitor only kind of works as a digital slr would you take a photo you look down at the back of the screen it's going to be there but that said when you're shooting a mirrorless camera you're seeing the end image you're exposing exactly for that um but personally i do like to see on the back monitor every now and then just to make sure that i'm in the ballpark of what i'm trying to be doing if my shutter speed gets accidentally too slow i like to have that feedback sooner rather than later when i get home and i have to go through my photos so that is it that is how i set my camera specifically up that's how i set this camera up and this camera up and my nikon z6 original and my z5 as well everything regardless of what camera you have hopefully this was kind of cross-platform enough and i feel like it even bridges into the nikon digital slrs which is kind of where i learned most of these settings from but that's really all i do to set up a new camera um you can get pretty quick at that i know this was a longer video but you can really do that in just a couple of minutes um if you ever do need to set up a new camera so yeah enjoy the nikon z62 i hope that you enjoyed my yellow jacket and the uh the light here the yellow light cause yellow is nikon that's why that's why it's yellow i hope that i hope that you got that that is all for today if you're interested uh all of my full-length courses and all the presets that i use in my photos and everything there's a link to that in the description below the member site if you are interested specifically in wedding and or portrait and or family photography is a very incredible resource and there are i'm going to say thousands of hours of content up on there now um and it's all tuned to running a business so not so much just like hey like let's go and shoot things it's more so the actual business skills required to get you up and running as fast as possible learn from my mistakes the stuff that i did that i wish i could go back and change just get out there and start your business today that sounds like a weird advertisement there's also a lot of content on the channel so maybe have a click over there and see what else interests you and don't forget to subscribe and please like this video if you if you did like this video if you found it helpful i would appreciate that personally quite a lot thanks for watching i'll see you again next time

Channel: Taylor Jackson

Views: 111,299

Rating: 4.8629093 out of 5

Keywords: photography, wedding photography, wedding photographer, photography tutorial, photographer, taylor jackson, photography tips, photography tricks, learn photography, become professional photographer, learn wedding photography, become a wedding photographer, wedding photography tips, nikon, nikon z6ii, nikon z 6ii, nikon z6, nikon z series, nikon z6 ii user guide, user guide for nikon z6 ii, best settings for nikon z6ii, z 6ii

Id: C06ISGI8UT4

Length: 26min 33sec (1593 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020