Nikon DSLR Tutorial Gateway

Beginners' Deck: DSLR Beginners' Guide

Taking a great photo is no rocket science. Use this highly interactive beginners' guide to learn why a DSLR is a better camera, how to handle it, how to use its basic features to take better photos quickly, without burning through your user manual!
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Beginners' Deck: The "No Trouble" Shooting Guide

Bad photos are no mystery! They are easy to avoid if you know how to. Use this fun and light hearted guide to learn about common photo mistakes and how to avoid them. Then go out and have fun shooting great images.
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Amateur Creative Photography 1: Fundamental Photo Skills

Think taking photos of silky flowing water, blurred portrait backgrounds and well-lit night scenes are beyond you? Learn the Fundamental Photo Skills from our Amateur Creative Photography series!
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Amateur Creative Photography 2: Additional Photo Skills

In addition to fundamental settings of focal length, aperture, shutter speed and ISO, there are other factors that will determine your end product. We’ll show you how to control them
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Amateur Creative Photography 3: Photo Scenario Tips

Have fun learning how to shoot better photos for different conditions and subjects with Nikon’s Photo Scenario Tips! This guide offers tips covering landscapes, portraits, sports and action, night and low light, macro, to wildlife and pets; and recommends the best gear to shoot with for each!
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Amateur Creative Photography 4: On-Location How To Guide

Nothing beats learning how to photograph a location or scenario by getting "On-Location". In each of the four destination venues that you will explore here, learn what makes a good or bad photo through the step-by-step photo critique tips presented in each location's scenic photo collections. 
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HD Movie Maker

SD Card

(Secure Digital Memory Card) The most popular flash memory card for digital camera and other mobile storage. Introduced in 1999 by Panasonic, Toshiba and SanDisk, cards up to 128GB are available with huge capacities planned for the future (see SDXC below).

SD Cards use the same 32x24mm form factor as the earlier MultiMediaCard (MMC), but are slightly thicker (2.1mm vs. 1.4mm), and SD Card readers accept both formats.

Fast Storage
Although SD Cards support encryption and content protection (the "Secure" in SD), they have been mostly used for regular storage due to their small size and fast transfer rate, which started out at 10 MB/sec and has steadily increased. SD uses NAND flash technology

SD High Capacity (SDHC)
Based on the SD Card Association 2.0 specification, SDHC cards do not work in SD devices, because SD uses the FAT16 file system, and SDHC uses FAT32. However, SDHC devices support both SDHC and SD Cards. SDHC cards also come in miniSDHC and microSDHC formats.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org

Photographing People

Key Point in This Video

Candid Shots

Candid photography is best described as un-posed and unplanned, immediate and unobtrusive. This is in contrast to classic photography, which includes aspects such as carefully staged portrait photography, landscape photography or object photography. Candid photography catches moments of life from immersion in it.

Candid photography is opposed to the stalking involved in animal photography, sports photography or photographic journalistic intrusion, which all have a focus on getting distant objects photographed, e.g. by using telephoto lenses. Candid photography's setup includes a photographer who is there with the "subjects" to be photographed, close, and not hidden. People photographed on candid shots either ignore or accept the close presence of the photographer's camera without posing.

Zoom lens

Zoom lenses are often described by the ratio of their longest to shortest focal lengths. For example, a zoom lens with focal lengths ranging from 100 mm to 400 mm may be described as a 4:1 or "4×" zoom. The term superzoom or hyperzoom is used to describe photographic zoom lenses with very large focal length factors, typically more than 4× and ranging up to 15× in SLR camera lenses and 30× in amateur digital cameras. This ratio can be as high as 100× in professional television cameras.

Source(s):
www.thefreedictionary.com

Travel Fotography

Tripod

Tripod is a word generally used to refer to a three-legged object, generally one used as a platform of some sort, and comes from the Greek tripous, meaning "three feet". A tripod provides stability along the side-to-side and up-and-down Coordinate axis of motion and provides a large amount of leverage. Tripods have the disadvantage of being heavy and bulky although they can be used with large equipment.

Tripods are used for both motion and still photography to prevent camera movement and provide stability. They are necessary when slow-speed exposures are being made, or when telephoto lenses are used, as any camera movement while the shutter is open will produce a blurred image. In the same vein, they reduce camera shake, and thus are instrumental in achieving maximum sharpness. A tripod is also helpful in achieving precise framing of the image, or when more than one image is being made of the same scene, for example when bracketing the exposure. Use of a tripod may also allow for a more thoughtful approach to photography. For all of these reasons a tripod of some sort is often necessary for professional photography. In relation to Film/Video use of the Tripod offers stability within a shot as well as certain desired heights. The head of a Film Camera Tripod allows free flowing movement with which you can easily track a subject or pan left/right as well as tilt up and down. The use of a tripod within film/video is often a creative choice of the Director.

Source(s):
www.thefreedictionary.com


Macro photography

Macro photography (or photomacrography or macrography,and sometimes macrophotography) is extreme close-up photography, usually of very small subjects, in which the size of the subject in the photograph is greater than life size (though macrophotography technically refers to the art of making very large photographs). By some definitions, a macro photograph is one in which the size of the subject on the negative or image sensor is life size or greater. However in other uses it refers to a finished photograph of a subject at greater than life size.

"Macro" lenses specifically designed for close-up work, with a long barrel for close focusing and optimized for high reproduction ratios, are one of the most common tools for macro photography. (Unlike most other lens makers, Nikon designates its macro lenses as "Micro" because of their original use in making microform.) Most modern macro lenses can focus continuously to infinity as well and can provide excellent optical quality for normal photography.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org

High Dynamic Range

High-dynamic-range photographs are generally achieved by capturing multiple standard photographs, often using exposure bracketing, and then merging them into an HDR image. Digital photographs are often encoded in a camera's raw image format, because 8 bit JPEG encoding doesn't offer enough values to allow fine transitions (and introduces undesirable effects due to the lossy compression).

Any camera that allows manual over- or under-exposure of a photo can be used to create HDR images. This includes film cameras, though the images may be digitized for processing with software HDR methods.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org

Shooting Sports

Rule of thirds

The rule of thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design. The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.

The rule of thirds is applied by aligning a subject with the guide lines and their intersection points, placing the horizon on the top or bottom line, or allowing linear features in the image to flow from section to section. The main reason for observing the rule of thirds is to discourage placement of the subject at the center, or prevent a horizon from appearing to divide the picture in half.

When photographing or filming people, it is common to line the body up with a vertical line, and having the person's eyes in line with a horizontal one. If filming a moving subject, the same pattern is often followed, with the majority of the extra room being in front of the person (the way they are moving)


Motion blur


Motion blur is the apparent streaking of rapidly moving objects in a still image or a sequence of images such as a movie or animation. It results when the image being recorded changes during the recording of a single frame, either due to rapid movement or long exposure.

When a camera creates an image, that image does not always represent a single instant of time. Because of technological constraints or artistic requirements, the image may represent the scene over a period of time. As objects in a scene move, an image of that scene must represent an integration of all positions of those objects, as well as the camera's viewpoint, over the period of exposure determined by the shutter speed. In such an image, any object moving with respect to the camera will look blurred or smeared along the direction of relative motion. This smearing may occur on an object that is moving or on a static background if the camera is moving. In a film or television image, this looks natural because the human eye behaves in much the same way.

Because the effect is caused by the relative motion between the camera, and the objects and scene, motion blur may be avoided by panning the camera to track those moving objects. In this case, even with long exposure times, the objects will appear sharper, and the background more blurred.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org