Does any one have any good pointers for me on the Nikon D5100?
I bought my Nikon D5100 this past saturday and I have been reading the manual. I'm a beginner, to say the least but I would like to have a few pointers or some advice on my dlsr. Like, what mode seems to work for portraits outside and inside? RAW vs JPG? Little quirks and tid bits like so is what I'm interested in. I know as I go, I will learn on my own but advice couldnt harm me. My sister in law wants me to take a few pictures this weekend for fun, but I would like to have someone's opinion on a setting to start off on.
Thanks!
Added (1). I forgot to add, that I do have another lens I bought with it, all in a bundle package. It is the 55-200mm.
I have the same dslr.
first thing to get out of the way, if you only have the standard lens they give you, the 18-55, change it with a prime lens, you will get sharper images and can shoot in lower light situations, and that's always a bonus. Just today i bought a 35 mm 1.8G and i'm loving it.lens aside, well i shoot mainly in M mode, i think you get better results, compared to auto. The D lighting feature, i would say to keep it at medium, otherwise your pictures might tend to look like pseudo hdr, and that's not always a good thing. RAW and jpg, well, if you intend to do some kind of photo editing on your pictures, you should shoot in raw, but if you don't then shoot only in jpeg, there's virtually no difference in image quality, raw is advisable only for photo editing, since it retains more information, but like i said, if you don't need it, ditch it and save card space.keep the grid on the live view, to better frame the pictures, you just have to press the info button once in live view
if you are shooting with the standard lens, optimal sharpness is around f8, so keep it around that value to get sharp images.
ISO. Now this might depend on your taste. For me, the iso is always too high, there's a setting in the menu that allows you to stop the camera from selecting the iso (usually 3200) you might want to turn it off and rely only on manual iso
and that' all i can think of right now, but feel free to get into detail if you need to.
Google the camera
also, go to kenrockwell.com
to learn many helpful hints
Why not learn from Nikon?
http://www.nikonusa.com/...index.page
1) learn how to balance the ISO, shutter speed and lens aperture using the cameras light meter
http://camerasim.com/camera-simulator/
2) lean to compose your images using the viewfinder of your camera
http://photoinf.com/General/Robert_Berdan/Composition_and_the_Elements_of_Visual_Design.htm
http://www.photographymad.com/pages/view/10-top-photography-composition-rules