Nikon® D300s: Digital Field Guide

Chapter 1. Exploring the Nikon D300s

The Nikon D300s is one of Nikon's professional camera models and has many more buttons, dials, and knobs than most of the consumer and midlevel cameras. The reason for this is to make it faster and easier to access many of the controls that professional photographers need to change the most. To access most of these functions in consumer cameras, you need to enter a virtual maze of menu functions, which can cost precious time when you are in the midst of shooting. With the D300s, you can simply press one button and rotate a dial.

The many buttons and dials on the D300s can be daunting to look at. This chapter familiarizes you with each button and dial, as well as the displays on the LCD control panel and viewfinder.

Getting to know all of the buttons and dials on your camera will help you to change your settings quickly so you won't lose any shots.

Key Components of the D300s

In this section, you look at the camera from all sides and break down the layout so that you know what everything on the surface of the camera does.

This section doesn't cover the menus, only the exterior controls. Although there are many features you can access with just the push of a button, oftentimes you can change the same setting inside of a menu option. The great thing about the buttons, however, are that they give you speedy access to important settings — settings you will ...