Making a new bird apartment...
Photography 2
- Thread starter Floorist
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I knew a redheaded peckerwood once.
@Floorist , Rusty, those were taken with my Nikon. I'm starting to figure it out a little bit. The basic controls are the same as my OM-1, but the menus for some of the more advanced settings are quite a bit different. Trying to remember how to change things on the fly is a bit of a learning curve for sure. You'll have to come and give me some training! 
You and Daris can come for a meet up and I'll take you guys to the marsh. I walked about 10.5 miles on Sunday and about 5 on Saturday so wear your comfortable shoes!
Since my shop is close to the marsh, you guys can come over and by a bag of nails and write the trip off as a business travel expense!
Since my shop is close to the marsh, you guys can come over and by a bag of nails and write the trip off as a business travel expense!
Wish I could come up. I think my last trip anywhere was last spring to Galveston.You and Daris can come for a meet up and I'll take you guys to the marsh. I walked about 10.5 miles on Sunday and about 5 on Saturday so wear your comfortable shoes!
Since my shop is close to the marsh, you guys can come over and by a bag of nails and write the trip off as a business travel expense!
I did charge my camera batteries a couple days ago. Say do you have Kindle? I think I could trust you to read my book and give me an honest review. It is called "Tremors from my Mind". and is free on Kindle unlimited.
I have kindle unlimited. I'll check it out!
Thanks.
My wife joined the forum last night so she could see your photos and understand the raw setting.You and Daris can come for a meet up and I'll take you guys to the marsh. I walked about 10.5 miles on Sunday and about 5 on Saturday so wear your comfortable shoes!
Since my shop is close to the marsh, you guys can come over and by a bag of nails and write the trip off as a business travel expense!
Of course it's always best to get the best shot possible up front, but for those times when you don't quite nail it, with RAW files you can still save the shot and make it look better.
To set your D5100 up to shoot JPEG & RAW (You'll get two image files for each picture you take)...
Hit your "menu" button and go down to the second group which is your "Shooting Menu". Navigate down to "Image Quality" and hit ok. Then you want to set it to the "NEF (RAW) & JPEG fine" setting.
Then go back to the "Shooting Menu" and go down to the "Image Size" and set that to Large.
After you take your pictures, you'll have to load them onto your computer via a card reader or wifi connection to your camera.
The next thing you'll need is the photo editing software. If you don't want to buy something like Adobe Lightroom, or DxO Photolab, then you can use Nikon's free NX Studio program.
You can download it free here: NX Studio | Image viewing and editing software for Nikon digital camera files
You'll probably need to watch a short tutorial on youtube or look at the support for the software on Nikon's site, but it's really not too horrible. Spend a half an hour or so and you'll be able to do basic editing of your RAW files and save them as JPEG's. You'll be able to also compare what you have done to the JPEG that the camera stored and you'll see that you can correct things like exposure (image brightness), and make color corrections for the lighting, etc. You can also do simple cropping and framing so that your subject is in a spot where you want it and at the zoom level you want.
The cool part is if you don't like how it turns out, you can reset everything you did and start over and do it different until you get the result you want as the Nikon software stores the changes you made along with the original file so that it can always revert back to the original. It's a pretty handy little piece of software.
I do most of my "post" edits with a paid copy of DxO Photolab 7 as I like some of the "denoising" features it has. Since I'm often shooting at the maximum distance of my lens with a smaller aperture, my ISO (camera sensors sensitivity to light) can get a little high if I'm not paying attention and when I crop and zoom an image, you'll see little "artifacts" or spots that look like graining or pixelization and make the image look less sharp. The denoising module cleans that up without me having to do a bunch of manual editing to the image with "retouch" or "healing" brushes.
At any rate, if either of you have any questions I'll be happy to answer as best I can.
Another really good resource that I use are tutorials from John Greengo. He's probably one of the best and most thorough teachers I've found on the internet. He has decades of experience with Nikon gear and he has a whole multitude of model specific tutorials for their DSLR's.
Here's a link to the one for the D5100:
Nikon D5100/D5200/D5300/D5500: Fast Start
His videos walk you through literally every setting on the camera, what they do, and then to wrap up he'll give you a printable guide that will show you how to set up for about any shooting situation for that specific camera: Portraits, Landscape, Wildlife, Sports, etc.. The course costs $29.00 but you have perpetual access to either stream or download the videos to watch as many times as you want or need.
He's also got most of his courses on a site called CreativeLive.com. He has several for just general photography knowledge and they are extremely thorough and in depth. Some of them are free and some of them are accessible with a monthly or yearly paid subscription to creativelive. I've been watching them in the evenings and I've learned a ton from him so far.
A really good free resource are the tutorials by Simon d'Entremont on youtube. I'd put him right up there with John Greengo. He has tons of free tutorial videos on his youtube channel and he's well respected by other professionals for his knowledge and training.
P.S. I downloaded your book last night and started reading it. Very good so far! I'm not a big fiction reader but it's holding my interest very well so far. I also told my wife to give it a look because she's the big fiction reader in the house. But of course, she dropped her Kindle last night so I'm off to the Amazon store to get another one for her for Valentine's day.
To set your D5100 up to shoot JPEG & RAW (You'll get two image files for each picture you take)...
Hit your "menu" button and go down to the second group which is your "Shooting Menu". Navigate down to "Image Quality" and hit ok. Then you want to set it to the "NEF (RAW) & JPEG fine" setting.
Then go back to the "Shooting Menu" and go down to the "Image Size" and set that to Large.
After you take your pictures, you'll have to load them onto your computer via a card reader or wifi connection to your camera.
The next thing you'll need is the photo editing software. If you don't want to buy something like Adobe Lightroom, or DxO Photolab, then you can use Nikon's free NX Studio program.
You can download it free here: NX Studio | Image viewing and editing software for Nikon digital camera files
You'll probably need to watch a short tutorial on youtube or look at the support for the software on Nikon's site, but it's really not too horrible. Spend a half an hour or so and you'll be able to do basic editing of your RAW files and save them as JPEG's. You'll be able to also compare what you have done to the JPEG that the camera stored and you'll see that you can correct things like exposure (image brightness), and make color corrections for the lighting, etc. You can also do simple cropping and framing so that your subject is in a spot where you want it and at the zoom level you want.
The cool part is if you don't like how it turns out, you can reset everything you did and start over and do it different until you get the result you want as the Nikon software stores the changes you made along with the original file so that it can always revert back to the original. It's a pretty handy little piece of software.
I do most of my "post" edits with a paid copy of DxO Photolab 7 as I like some of the "denoising" features it has. Since I'm often shooting at the maximum distance of my lens with a smaller aperture, my ISO (camera sensors sensitivity to light) can get a little high if I'm not paying attention and when I crop and zoom an image, you'll see little "artifacts" or spots that look like graining or pixelization and make the image look less sharp. The denoising module cleans that up without me having to do a bunch of manual editing to the image with "retouch" or "healing" brushes.
At any rate, if either of you have any questions I'll be happy to answer as best I can.
Another really good resource that I use are tutorials from John Greengo. He's probably one of the best and most thorough teachers I've found on the internet. He has decades of experience with Nikon gear and he has a whole multitude of model specific tutorials for their DSLR's.
Here's a link to the one for the D5100:
Nikon D5100/D5200/D5300/D5500: Fast Start
His videos walk you through literally every setting on the camera, what they do, and then to wrap up he'll give you a printable guide that will show you how to set up for about any shooting situation for that specific camera: Portraits, Landscape, Wildlife, Sports, etc.. The course costs $29.00 but you have perpetual access to either stream or download the videos to watch as many times as you want or need.
He's also got most of his courses on a site called CreativeLive.com. He has several for just general photography knowledge and they are extremely thorough and in depth. Some of them are free and some of them are accessible with a monthly or yearly paid subscription to creativelive. I've been watching them in the evenings and I've learned a ton from him so far.
A really good free resource are the tutorials by Simon d'Entremont on youtube. I'd put him right up there with John Greengo. He has tons of free tutorial videos on his youtube channel and he's well respected by other professionals for his knowledge and training.
P.S. I downloaded your book last night and started reading it. Very good so far! I'm not a big fiction reader but it's holding my interest very well so far. I also told my wife to give it a look because she's the big fiction reader in the house. But of course, she dropped her Kindle last night so I'm off to the Amazon store to get another one for her for Valentine's day.
Thanks, I will see if she can figure it out.
I'd be more worried about it staying on your property.
You doing Ok?
Beautifully dry day today. Had a house measure 50 miles away and out into the boondocks......20 miles from "civilization "
A wonderful drive.
I should have stopped and taken a couple photos today. It wouldn't be worthwhile with my $200 Motorola.
That looks like a big bird head. A bird head, not Big Bird.
Cool cloud.
