Nikon D7200 Best Settings

[Azucena Jewels]

Lookingfor best settings for D7200 for indoor kids basketball game. I will be shooting from the bleachers. Want to make sure the lighting is right and that the action is clear. I usually shoot shutter priority outside photos..

Well it would be nice to know what lens will you be using, more specifically whats the maximum aperature? And we cant possibly give you the exact settings since we dont know the lightning conditions in the sports hall...

Since the lightning is fixed and even through the whole court I'd suggest having camera on manual mode with fixed shutterspeed so you dont get any blurry shots... I shoot indor basketball at 1/1000s at F2.8 ISO 3200... But this can vary from the lightning of the sports hall... start with some fixed setting and during warmup take some shots and adjust settings acordingly

When shooting real estate interiors and exterior, set the following camera settings and leave them. This will guarantee your HDR brackets will be perfect every time when submitting them to BoxBrownie.com for final editing. If the settings are correct your Nikon camera should shoot five HDR bracket shots, at the push of a button.

The following settings are all you need to shoot your property using HDR bracketing. It is important to review your brackets to ensure there is enough photo information available before moving onto your next shot:

Only use a 10mm zoom if you want the area to look larger or you need to shoot a tight space. The end goal is to show off as much of the room as you can in the one frame, without making the room look bigger then it is.

Always leave a little extra area on the side of your images for vertical straightening. This happens in the editing process when BoxBrownie.com amend the distortion to vertical walls from wide angle lenses, minor cropping will occur. All professional photos have straight walls, keep this in mind on-site and stand further back when taking the photo.

Always review your bracketed shots before moving onto the next room. Sometimes when shooting high contrast areas, you may require more than five brackets, taking more brackets is always better than not enough.

Single shot settings should only be used for moving subjects and lifestyle photos with moving surroundings (eg. People and cars). Lifestyle photos are popular in real estate, the easiest way to capture these is to switch to the automatic single shot photo function. The HDR bracketing function should never be used for moving objects, as they will appear blurry in the final editing process.

It is a great add-on to include photos of local attractions close to a listing, it helps buyers visualize living in the area. The following are settings to use only when taking single shots, where there are potentially moving subjects in the scene.

Being able to use your camera flash effectively will help to achieve the best real estate photos, especially for internal shots. The following are flash setting that you should be using for all interior photos:

The only time you should not be using a flash is in highly reflective places, such as bathrooms and kitchens, this is to reduce reflections. It is always best to use your discretion and maybe shoot some photos with a flash and without.

Capturing a stunning shot of the northern lights (or southern lights) dancing across the sky surely must be on the bucket list of many photographers out there. On a recent trip into the Arctic Circle, I was lucky enough to see the aurora borealis on several nights. What follows are some tips and recommendations on how to photograph the northern lights and come back with some stunning pictures.

My trip took me to Yllas in Lapland, a large national park in the north west of Finland near the border with Sweden. We stayed in a small log cabin in the village of Akaslompolo, which has a permanent population of about 350. The small size of the village means that light pollution levels are quite low, and this is helped by the lights on the cross country ski trails being turned off at 10:30pm each night. As a side note, I can thoroughly recommend visiting Lapland, as even during the day it presents amazing photo opportunities, such as these reindeer crossing the road.

Next, I would suggest trying to book a tour or activity which takes you into the wilderness. This means that light pollution will be very low, plus your guide will likely know the best spots for seeing the lights. We opted for snowmobiling and drove about 15km from the village into the dark sky region of the national park. Although we saw the aurora from the driveway of our cabin on other nights, the lack of light pollution here meant that the snowmobiling was definitely worth it.

A side note on clothing: while I was in Lapland, the daytime temperatures hovered around -25 Celsius with night temperatures dropping to below -30. As such, it is vital to have the correct clothing; no photograph is worth frostbite. There are many websites which will advise on general clothing, but seeing as this is a photography guide I will suggest some hand wear. Changing camera settings in the field can be very tricky with thick gloves, so I would recommend wearing a thin pair of silk liner gloves under heavy mittens. The mittens will keep your hands warm, but when you need to use your camera you can quickly take them off and still have the protection of your liner gloves.

Now, the important part: camera settings. The first piece of advice is to set up your camera as much as possible before heading out. This will limit the amount of time you spend fumbling in the cold and dark trying to get your settings correct. As far as cameras/lenses go, you can take aurora photos with any camera or even phone capable of taking long exposures. Just make sure you have a tripod or some other method of keeping your camera steady. As for DSLRs, I would recommend:

The aurora borealis moves fast and varies speed quite significantly depending on the conditions. So, the settings above are only meant to be a starting point. Once you arrive at the location, take a test shot and adjust your settings as appropriate. For example, if the northern lights are moving quickly, you may want a shutter speed faster than 15 seconds to capture as much detail as possible, which might require a higher ISO. If possible, do not use a shutter speed over 15 seconds, as this will cause the auroras to become a blurry mess.

As a side note, remember not to touch metal camera or tripod parts with your bare hands. I say thus after accidentally picking up my tripod on a -30 Celsius night, with results that were rather unpleasant.

Excellent article, tips and advice: specially for me, who will land in Reykavik in the very beginning of November for a Photography Expedition up there. Every advice and comment are mostly welcome. And once I am a Nikonian, this article was just made for me. Tks a lot! Best regards, Ney

Guess time to write longer and more ellaborative article on my own for this site. Not that its bad info here, its just that i feel here is not enough info in this article in my opinion, especially about moon, what can happen during stronger solar storm, weather conditions etc. Good info for novice aurora shooter but not good enough for advanced aurora photographer. Ylls is good place but i would recomment Kilpisjrvi much more. Statistically there are more aurora during season than in any other europiean lapland parts (dont know about Russian lapland). And its just 10km north or west you can get to Norway and Sweden respectively. Enjoy your trip and anyone must visit colder polar regions during cold season at least once in a life time, its much much more wonderful and amazing than lying on a beach in some warmer areas.

Another point, appropo filters (as mentioned in a comment above) is that the reason to remove filters in long low light exposures is the potential for amplifying reflections between front lens element and filter causing artifacts. These ruined a few of my ice cave photos until I discovered the artifacts, seen later on computer screen though not on camera LCD when shooting.

In terms of editing, I mainly use Lightroom but the principles should be roughly the same. The main thing I would recommend is using selection masks to target specific parts of the image. The high contrast between the night sky and the NL means that you often want to brighten and saturate the lights while keeping the night sky dark. The dehaze slider in LR is certainly helpful. White balance is another area which is tricky. This is a bit down to personal preference how yellow or green you want the image but it is easy to go too far in one direction. In the snowmobile shot I had to desaturated the bottom of the image quite a lot to keep the snow white and the NL green.

I spent a week in Inari recently, not far from where you were, amazing place. The aurora was something else. Got plenty of great photos too and as you say look up and watch, forget the camera and let the minds eye record the beauty.

As is typical when receiving astronomical gear, cloudy nights and a nearly full moon greeted my receipt of my new camera. But I was able to photograph the Total Lunar Eclipse, 4 April 2015, using the new camera. This full-frame photograph of the pre-eclipsed Full Moon shows the field-of-view of the 18mm-140mm zoom lens set at f/5.6, 1/250sec, ISO 100, FL 140mm:

I used the ML-L3 wireless remote and the Nikon Wireless Mobile Utility (WMU) iPhone app to take photos during the eclipse. Both worked fine. It was very convenient to use the WMU app and Wi-Fi on the D7200 to download images to the iPhone 5s and then post them almost immediately on Twitter using the phone. You can see more of the D7200 DSLR eclipse photos on my "Total Lunar Eclipse" report.

Since the D7200 Raw converter had not yet been released for Mac OS X as I was preparing this review, the D7200 was set to save photos as JPEG Fine Large (6000x4000 pixels). I also set my older D7000 DSLR to use JPEG Fine Large (4928 3264 pixels; the maximum) for its comparison images. On 8 April 2015 I imaged the Leo Triplet (galaxies M65, NGC3628, and M66) at 8" LX200-ACF prime focus + f/6.3 focal reducer using the indicated exposure settings below. Post-processing editing of the comparison images was limited to just image size reduction for posting here. The D7000 image is on the left and the D7200 image is on the right when comparing the same ISO exposures. I used the Vello ShutterBoss remote for all these images.

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