Nikon D40 Tips: 2012

January 27, 2012

Nikon D40 Continuous shooting mode

To enable the continuous shooting mode on the Nikon D40, go into the Custom Setting Menu (pencil icon). Scroll to item 4: Shooting mode. Choose Continuous in this menu to enable continuous shooting. With this setting, the D40 will take 1 shot if you just press the shutter once, and keep on shooting if you press and hold down the shutter. In fact, there is not much reason to use the Single shooting mode, so you can just leave this as the standard.

January 14, 2012

Nikon D40 - Highlights on or off

When you are looking at your pictures in playback mode, you can turn on the highlight function to check your exposure. What this will do is take the part of the picture that is too bright and has lost all detail and blink it on and off to highlight it. If a large portion of the image is highlighted in this way, you have overexposed the picture, or the contrast in the frame is far too high.

To turn on the highlights, press down twice in playback mode. The first press will take you to the histogram, and the second to the highlight.

To turn off the highlights in the Nikon D40, press up twice to go back to the normal playback mode.

January 13, 2012

Nikon D40 Self timer

To turn on the self timer on the Nikon D40, go to the Custom Setting Menu (pencil icon). Go to item 4: Shooting mode.

Choose Self Timer to enable the self timer mode.

The wait duration of the Self timer can be set on a separate menu, this is item 16: Self-timer. You can choose between 2, 5, 10 and 20 seconds.

2 seconds is useful when taking photos at night, you can press the shutter and take you hand off to prevent camera shake by pressing the shutter. 10 seconds is the classic time needed to press the shutter and run back to join your friends. 20 seconds is better if you have to run a long distance!

Read about the Nikon ML-L3 Remote Control to see how you can avoid all this running!

January 12, 2012

Nikon D40 - Modes

This is the "point and shoot" automatic mode. The camera will take care of all settings in this mode. While this is fine for most settings, flash is not one of them. Thus, shooting in auto mode, you may become tired quite quickly with the flash popping up automatically at the worst moment possible to ruin many shots.

This is the same as automatic mode but with flash off. So it offers basically the same convenience of auto mode but without the occasional nasty surprise of the flash popping up when it feels like it. If you think you are an absolute beginner, you can use this mode pretty much all the time.

I assume that anybody who has ever picked up a camera can decide for themselves if they need flash in a shot or not. So, if you need to use the flash, press the flash button to let it pop open, set auto mode and flash away. If you don't want to use the flash, stick to flash-off mode.

Portrait mode will set the auto-focus on the closest subject and soften or blur the background using a large aperture. It will also play with optimizing the image to produce soft skin tones. White balance and metering are also set automatically.

Landscape mode tries to give you as much of the scene in focus as possible using a small aperture. Flash and the auto-focus assist are disabled.

Child mode... no idea...

Sports mode will set a high shutter speed to allow you to freeze the action. The autofocus will work continuously as long as the shutter is held half pressed.

Macro mode allows you to take close up shots of objects. The flash will pop up as needed, and the camera will focus on the center auto focus point.

Night potrait mode tries to strike a balance between the subject and the background in low light. The flash will pop up automatically if needed. Shutter speed can be quite slow so take care about camera shake.

January 9, 2012

Nikon D40 Official camera manual from Nikon

The user's manual from Nikon is called:

The Nikon Guide to Digital Photography with the D40 Digital Camera

You can find it here.

January 8, 2012

Using the Nikon ML-L3 with the Nikon D40 DSLR

If you just bought it and are wondering why your ML-L3 doesn't work with your Nikon D40, it is because you need to enable it in the settings.

Go to the menu on the D40 and scroll down to the Custom Setting Menu (pencil icon). Go to option 4, Shooting Mode. There are 2 settings that you can use with the ML-L3:

In the Quick-response remote mode, it will take a picture as soon as you press the button on the remote control.
In the 2s Delayed remote mode, it will take a picture 2 seconds after you press the button on the remote. This is useful if you are taking picture of yourself and don't want your arm sticking out while triggering the camera, so you get 2 seconds to tuck your arm away.

Also remember that the ML-L3 works with infrared light, so it needs line of sight to the Nikon camera. See the little dark circle under the red triangle on the hand grip? That is the infrared sensor on the D40 and the ML-L3 remote control should be approximately pointed somewhere near there. Indoors, in smaller spaces you can get away with bouncing the infrared off the walls, so sometimes you can also use it without proper pointing.

The D40 will decide to switch back to the previous shooting mode after some amount of time. In the Custom Setting Menu, go to item 17 Remote on duration to set this time, how long the ML-L3 remote control should stay enabled. You can choose between 1, 5, 10 and 15 minutes.

January 4, 2012

Nikon D40 Reviews from around the web

Here is a list of Nikon D40 reviews from various sites:

Nikon D40 - How to format the memory card

Formatting the memory card on the D40 is very easy.

Go in to the menu, by pressing the button MENU (obviously). Scroll down until you get to the little spanner icon, which is the SETUP MENU.

Formatting the memory card is the second option on this menu, scroll over to it and click ok to be greeted with the warning:

Confirm to format the memory card.

And then 2 seconds later: Voila!

Empty memory card.

Nikon D40 - Histogram

In playback mode, you can display the histogram for the picture by pressing down on the thumb switch.

This will show a single histogram. To make the histogram go away, press up on the thumb switch.

You can also view a histogram for each color separately. In order to do this, press OK on the thumb switch to call up the Retouch Menu, choose Filter Effects and then choose Color Balance.

Pressing the play button takes you back to normal playback mode.

Nikon D40 - Setting Auto ISO

To adjust the Auto ISO on the Nikon D40, you need to go into the third menu, with the pencil icon. This is the Custom Setting menu.

Scroll down to item 10 and you find the ISO Auto. Press OK to go in and set ISO Auto to On.

You can also set the Max sensitivity, which means the maximum ISO that will be used in low light conditions. Keep in mind that the image quality will degrade as you increase the ISO values. At high ISO values, you will get slightly more grainy pictures Use lower values to keep image quality high and higher values to use in very low light. For the D40, I find ISO 800 to be a good compromise.

The other option is to set the Minimum shutter speed. This is the threshold that will cause the camera to start pushing ISO up. The D40 will try to strike a compromise between noise caused by high ISO settings and blur caused by camera shake caused by low shutter speeds. Obviously this will depend on the focal length, but somewhere around 1/30 should be a good start. You can set a slower shutter speed if you have a steady hand (for example 1/15) or a higher speed if you have a shaky hand (for example 1/60).