Nikon^® D7100™ Digital Field Guide

Nikon^® D7100™ Digital Field Guide

Published by
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-1-118-50937-1

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Credits

Acquisitions Editor

Courtney Allen

Project Editor

Cricket Krengel

Technical Editor

Mike Hagen

Copy Editor

Kim Heusel

Editorial Director

Robyn Siesky

Business Manager

Amy Knies

Senior Marketing Manager

Sandy Smith

Vice President and Executive Group Publisher

Richard Swadley

Vice President and Executive Publisher

Barry Pruett

Project Coordinator

Sheree Montgomery

Graphics and Production Specialists

Jennifer Goldsmith
Andrea Hornberger
Jennifer Mayberry

Quality Control Technician

Dwight Ramsey

Proofreading and Indexing

Evelyn Wellborn
BIM Indexing & Proofreading Services

About the Author

J. Dennis Thomas is an Austin, Texas-based photographer and the author of 20 Nikon Digital Field Guides by Wiley, as well as the author of Concert and Live Music Photography: Pro Tips from the Pit and Urban and Rural Decay Photography: Finding the Beauty in the Blight, published by Focal Press. He is also a frequent author of articles on photographic theory and technique for Digital Photo Magazine, MasteringPhoto.com, F-Stoppers.com, and his own website, the Nikon Digital Field Guide Online (http://Nikondfg.com).

He is represented by Corbis Images and does freelance photography for Rolling Stone, SPIN, and Veri.Live magazines. His photographs have been featured in many notable publications including Rolling Stone, SPIN, People, Us Weekly, Elle, W magazine, Thrasher, Ebony, New York Post, Veri.Live, and many more.

When not out photographing or in front of his computer writing about photography, he can be found gracing the stages of the Live Music Capital of the World and popping up randomly in films and television shows.

Acknowledgments

These books wouldn’t be possible without the great team at Wiley working behind the scenes to put out a great product. My name is on the cover, but there are so many folks that contribute to these books that I’d like to thank: Courtney Allen for keeping me on the projects, Cricket Krengel for pretty much being the best project editor ever, Kathleen Jeffers, Robyn Siesky, Barry Pruett, and Vera Weaver. And a special shout-out to the elusive Tom Heine because if he hadn’t found me, I wouldn’t be doing this.

I’d also like to thank the folks at Precision Camera and Video in Austin, Texas, Jack and Monica Puryear at Puryear Photography, and Sigma USA for making great lenses.

As always, to my girls Henrietta and Maddie…

Introduction

With the ultra-high resolution of the D800 and the D800E, the incredible and affordable full-frame camera in a small package the D600, and then the brand-new magnificently performing 24MP sensor of the D5200, Nikon has been turning the camera world upside down and giving everything a good shaking up.

With all of these great new cameras with impressive features, people weren’t expecting a major upgrade to the D7000. Sure, it was expected that the resolution would be increased to at least 24MP, but what more could Nikon do?

Nikon dropped another bomb on the photo world and surprised everyone once again. Nikon took the best aspects from the newest and best high-end cameras, put these great features in the familiar compact body style and produced the D7100 — another game-changing DX camera. Nikon added more magnesium to the camera frame to make it even stronger and also increased the weather sealing making it on par with the D300s/D700 camera bodies. Nikon also put in the Multi-CAM 3500DX from the D300/s and updated it with features from the D4. This is now the top-of-the-line DX AF-system with 51-points (15 cross-type) and 3D-focus tracking. The D7100 also inherits the top-of-the-line Expeed 3 image processor and the 2016-pixel Color Matrix Metering II metering system. The D7100 also is the first Nikon camera to sport an OLED readout in the viewfinder, and the brand-new high-speed 1.3X crop mode. Further establishing itself as being as close to a professional camera as you can get at this price level, the D7100 has the same 24MP sensor first seen in the D5200, but with a big twist — the D7100 has no Optical Low-Pass Filter. This is something that D800E owners had to pay $300 extra for. This means even sharper images than even the 24MP D3X can give you.

The D7100 has everything advanced and even professional photographers need, but there’s more: Nikon hasn’t forgotten about newer photographers, either. The D7100 offers lots of scene and effect modes to allow you to open up your creativity and capture great images in any shooting situation, no matter how much photography experience you have. The D7100 also allows in-camera editing so you don’t necessarily need to be computer savvy to add great effects to your images. It even allows you to edit RAW files.

The D7100 should appeal to videographers as well. It matches the D800 in almost every way in terms of video capabilities, including the ability to record uncompressed video through the HDMI port. The other features that should appeal to the videographer — besides the lower price point — are the stereo microphone input; the stereo headphone output; the ability to control ISO, shutter speed, and aperture; and the plethora of fast lenses that Nikon offers to achieve the shallow depth of field that is the hallmark of high-quality video production.

In the end, Nikon created an amazing, full-featured, full-frame camera that isn’t out of reach of regular folks.

About the Digital Field Guide

The Nikon Digital Field Guide book series is intended to act as an adjunct to the manual that comes with your camera. While the manual gives you a great overview of the camera, a photographer didn’t write it. The Nikon D7100 Digital Field Guide gives you all the information you need about the camera from a working photographer’s perspective.

The goal of this guide is to help photographers, from novices to advanced amateurs, to get a grasp on all the features of this great new camera. It includes tips learned from working with the camera in the field, as well as some basic information to help newer photographers get up to speed quickly.

This full-color guide walks you through setting up your camera and offers insights into which settings to use, as well as why each setting is useful in a particular situation. It includes full-color images that demonstrate different photography concepts, and shows you some of the things that the D7100 is able to accomplish under different circumstances.

In the end, the Nikon D7100 Digital Field Guide is designed to help you quickly learn to navigate and handle your camera better, as well as help you to reach your goals and achieve your photographic visions more easily.