Carmine Loc: Westport, CT

My favorite quote to my students: "When all else fails, read the manual". Nikon manuals have been pretty complete over the years, layered often in a "how much do you really want to know?" fashion. My recently purchased Sony A6500 came with very little and an offer of something on line which I downloaded and promptly forgot where I stored it. It's of little use when you're traveling with a backpack.

lautenk2

One of them is for still subjects (the green cartoon), the other for moving subjects (the gold cartoon with the star if I remember right). The manual is not entirely clear.

lautenk2

The manual for the 1973 Honda CB350 gave gap settings for the "sparkprugs." Honda manuals have improved since then.

lautenk2

Sorry, I have to disagree. I know a lot of smart engineers who are horrible writers, and who don't appreciate that writing is hard. I imagine it's the same at camera companies, and that their good tech writing is not done by design engineers or program managers. Third party camera manuals seem to be written by good writers who know a lot about the cameras. Steve Perry is a good example, I just read his Nikon autofocus book. Klosterman, Busch, Freidman are good as well (apologies for misspelling some names).

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

An example of where 'just the facts' type of manual can be illustrated by White Balance. The manual will gl on and on about the settings, while the problem in the field is 'WB quality' of the available light and 'how best to compensate.'

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

John, manuals are for instruction on what the different settings are and some of what they will do. They are not intended to make you a great photographer. For example, Nikon's site has educational videos showing the various settings and recommending which to use. Similarly, the manual will indicate how to remove and attach a lens. It won't indicate which lens one should use for a particular scene.

To address your statement, I manually WB every one of my photos. Something to which I didn't pay much attention, due to mostly using black and white film. Once I started shooting digital, color became a necessity. Every photograph I made early on needed WB. There was always some color hue that overwhelmed the scene. Shoot in the forest and it's green. Shoot a desert landscape and it's going to be bluish or reddish, depending on how much sky is in the scene.

Being the inveterate lab rat, I've photographed the same scene using various camera WB settings, without going to the customized settings menu. None of them showed a 'flat' response. All had varying degrees of bias. Since 2015, my camera setting requires that I do a WB in both ACR and at the start of my processing in PS. But then, I've been doing the WB in PS on every image anyway. Additionally, WB is very necessary when doing a digital conversion to black and white.

So, the manual, itself, is quite sufficient in indicating what the settings are and providing guidance on when to use them. However, the more diligent photographers should take it upon themselves to explore the results of each setting and the overall results on the final image.
--Bob

BebuLamar

I bought the Klosterman book for the Df. It's about the only third party book on the Df. I bought it because I have some free credit for the Ebook. I read a little bit but got bored and never finished it. I read the Nikon manual in its entirely several time.

Pegasus Loc: Texas Gulf Coast

That'd be Klostermann, with two Ns.

I bought his book on the D7500 and it's been very helpful. I have the two pdfs from Nikon and the ebook from DK on my Note 8 and my tablet. The Nikon publications are encyclopedic in nature, whereas the DK book is more of an how-to book. Both styles have value.

I read the two Nikon pdfs even before ordering the D7500. I just read them "in diagonal" to see what the features were. I don't pretend to memorize everything on the first (or even second or third) read, but I quickly get an appreciation for what the features are. Then I can go back and read about a feature in more detail because I know it's there. I do that for everything that comes with a manual.

alx Loc: NJ

Maybe they aren't related?

CamB Loc: Juneau, Alaska

I look at my manuals to solve a problem. When I get a new camera I put the battery in, load a card and start shooting. By the end of the day i'll have a few questions and look them up in the manual.Thats about it.

alx Loc: NJ

But did anyone actually pay attention to the part that said to "Obey all posted Speed Limits"?

Tikva Loc: Waukesha, WI

And I wish that boyfriends came with the same sort of documentation, although at this stage of my life, I'm not looking for one any longer.

lautenk2

We're talking about motorcycles here, I think you missed that. I'm always aware of the speed limit (or should it be speed rimit).

lautenk2

That is a great idea, thanks. With Google translate, anybody could do it.

PeterBergh

BEWARE: Google Translate is, at times, very far from accurate, based on my experience of looking at translations from the Scandinavian tongues -- my native language is Swedish -- to US English.