D300s

[kirif1]

Hey guys!

Well i recently upgraded from my trust D50 to a amaazing D300s....

..yay!

Well i have just returned from a long (and cold) day of shooting a lovely couple's wedding. A few worries:

I shot a few in A as my P mode wouldn't let me change the f number but instead went to P*

When in M my shutter speed would not go above 250

With both memory cards, i checked the amount of pics when the cards were empy and it said 356 in RAW, i didnt change the quality but ended up with 580

I kept to the basics and ploughed through and am about to see the results.

Anyone familiar with this camera or perhaps Nikon traits that i'm unaware of? I sincerely doubt there is anything wrong with it but I was extremely upset with myself for not knowing my own camera that well...

any advice would be fantastical!

 

[Kaouthia]

Yeah, "P" mode doesn't mean "Professional" mode. It means auto-everything, so altering the aperture and shutter speed aren't going to do a thing.

If your shutter will not go above 1/250th, that means you have a flash on your hotshoe (or the popup flash is... popped up). 1/250th is the flash sync speed. To go beyond that you need a Nikon SB-600/SB-800/SB-900 flash, and you need to adjust the menu option to automatically go into Auto FP high speed sync mode beyond 1/250th shutter speeds (but you'll immediately lose about 2 stops of power from your flash).

356 is an estimation based on the maximum size it thinks a raw file might be. In reality, you're often not shooting images with the complexity the camera may be expecting, so it's able to compress (lossless compression, so you're not losing any detail) them a lot more and fit more onto the memory card.

 

[kirif1]

That was very helpful...thank you!

I think my mind went partly blank! (half way through i thought A was for Auto and i've been doing this for two years????)

I have a SB600 but i am not as clued up on the menu of it past the basics as i obviously should be. I didnt need a much faster shutter speed, i just couldnt figure out why it wasnt letting me do so. Why would i loose two stops?

Phew to the number of shots!

 

[Wheels]

Im getting 1 on Tuesday and I have looked at every youtube video I can find on various topics on the operation of the camera.

 

[Kaouthia]

To make the camera go into FP sync mode with the flash attached, it's a menu option in the camera itself. The flash just does what the camera tells it to.

It's menu option e1 "Flash Sync Speed". You'll want to change it to "1/250 s (Auto FP)". Then you'll be able to whack your shutter all the way up to 1/8000th and still get flash.

The reason you lose a couple of stops is because of the way the high speed flash sync works.

Normally when you take a regular shot with flash, at say 1/100th of a second...

There's other stuff happening as well (aperture being stopped down, curtains going back to their original positions, etc) but this is the basic process of what happens with flash when you take a shot.

1) Your mirror flips up
2) The first curtain goes opens and your scene starts to expose
3) Your flash goes off, with a duration of anywhere between 1/1000th and 1/80,000th of a second depending on power output)
4) The second curtain comes across and the exposure ends.
5) The mirror flips back down

At a speed of 1/250th of a second or slower, the first curtain is completely open before the second curtain starts to close, which means the whole of the sensor is exposed to light at the same time, thus your flash, for all intents and purposes, will light the whole scene your camera is seeing.

Beyond 1/250th of a second, the second curtain starts to close before the first curtain has completely opened, which means that at any point during the exposure, only part of the sensor is actually seeing any kind of light. If your flash were to just go off, you might only see half of your image exposed, and the other half of it simply be a black stripe running across the top or bottom of your image.

In order to facilitate flash for such fash shutter speeds, the way Nikon's high speed sync works is that it sends out pulses of light for the entire duration of the exposure. Obviously it can't do this at full power, if it tried to sustain full power output to all parts of the image it would probably explode.

So, each of these pulses is a couple of stops below maximum power so that it can continually fire them out for the duration of the exposure to ensure even flash output across the whole of your image.