Nikon® D5000 Digital Field Guide

Chapter 2. Nikon D5000 Essentials

In This Chapter

• Exposure modes

• Metering modes

• Autofocus modes

• AF area modes

• ISO sensitivity

• White balance

• Picture Controls

• Understanding JPEG Compression

• NEF or RAW Flexibility

• Live View

After reading Chapter 1, you should be pretty familiar with the basic layout of the D5000 and all of the various dials, switches, and buttons; you should also find it much easier to navigate to and adjust the settings that allow you to control and fine-tune the way the camera captures images. This chapter covers some of the most commonly changed settings of the camera, such as the exposure modes, metering, AF settings, white balance, and ISO. All of these combined settings are used to create your image and can be tweaked and adjusted to reflect your artistic vision or simply to be sure that your pictures come out exactly as you want, even in difficult lighting situations.

Exposure settings include the exposure modes that decide how the camera chooses the aperture and shutter speed and the metering modes that decide how the camera gathers the lighting information so that the camera can choose the appropriate settings based on the exposure mode.

You learn more about ISO, which also plays into exposure, and exposure compensation is also covered. Exposure compensation allows you to fine-tune the exposure to suit your needs or to achieve the proper exposure in situations where your light meter may be fooled.

This chapter also explains the Autofocus modes, which decide which areas ...