Nikon® D300s: Digital Field Guide

Chapter 2. Nikon D300s Essentials

After you familiarize yourself with the basic layout of the D300s and all the various dials, switches, and buttons, you can navigate to and adjust the settings that allow you to control and fine-tune the way you capture images with your camera. In this chapter, I cover some of the most commonly changed settings of the camera, such as exposure modes, metering, autofocus (AF) settings, white balance, and ISO. All these settings combined create your image and you can tweak and adjust them to reflect your artistic vision or to simply be sure that you create the best possible images in complex scenes.

Knowing which modes and features to use in any given situation will allow you to get a good exposure no matter what.

Exposure Modes

Exposure modes decide how the camera chooses the aperture and shutter speed as well as the metering modes that decide how the camera gathers the lighting information. This allows the camera to choose the appropriate settings based on the exposure mode. Unlike some of Nikon's entry-level digital single lens reflex (dSLR) cameras, such as the D5000, the D300s has no Scene modes. Scene modes are settings that are tailored for specific shooting scenarios like sports, landscapes, or portraits. With a camera of this level, you are expected to know a little more about exposure settings for different types of photography rather than relying ...