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Photography Books
Julie Adair King
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Published:
August 14, 2012

Nikon D3200 For Dummies

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Overview

A full-color guide to Nikon's exciting new entry-level dSLR

With its large 24.2 megapixel sensor, full HD video recording capability, and wireless options, the Nikon D3200 is very appealing! This full-color guide assumes no prior digital photography or dSLR knowledge and helps you start taking great pictures with your new Nikon right from the beginning. Popular author and photography instructor Julie Adair King shows you how to use all the settings, manage playback options, take control with manual modes, work with video, and edit and share your images. It's like a personal course in beginning dSLR photography.

  • New dSLR users will quickly gain skills and confidence with the step-by-step, colorfully illustrated instructions in this beginner's guide to the Nikon D3200 camera
  • Explains how to use all the new features of the Nikon D3200, including a 24-megapixel sensor, 11 autofocus points, 4 frame-per-second shooting, full HD video capabilities, and a WiFi feature that lets you control the camera remotely or preview images on your smartphone
  • Covers auto and manual modes, playback options, working with exposure and focus, shooting video, editing and sharing photos, troubleshooting, and photography tips
  • Popular author has written more than 15 For Dummies books on Nikon and Canon cameras

Nikon D3200 For Dummies is the easy, full-color, and fun way to start making the most of your new camera right away.

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About The Author

Julie Adair King has been writing about digital cameras and photography since 1997. Her current bestsellers include guides on various Nikon and Canon cameras as well as seven editions of Digital Photography For Dummies. When not writing, Julie teaches master workshops and image editing at such locations as the Palm Beach Photographic Centre.

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nikon d3200 for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

With the D3200, Nikon proves once again that you don't have to give an arm and a leg — or strain your back and neck — to enjoy dSLR photography. This addition to the Nikon family of dSLRs doesn't skimp on power or performance, offering a great set of features to help you take your photography to the next level.
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For people new to digital SLR cameras, the Nikon D3200 offers the following automatic settings that enable point-and-shoot photography. In Guide mode, on-screen explanations walk you through the process of shooting different types of subjects.
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To really take creative control with your Nikon D3200, step up to one of these four exposure modes, which enable you to adjust aperture (f-stop) to manipulate depth of field (the zone of sharp focus) and to adjust shutter speed to determine whether moving objects appear sharply focused or blurry. You also gain access to some features not available in the fully automatic modes.
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By default, your Nikon D3200 camera captures images using the sRGB color mode, which simply refers to an industry-standard spectrum of colors. (The s is for standard, and the RGB is for red, green, blue, which are the primary colors in the digital color world.) The sRGB color mode was created to help ensure color consistency as an image moves from camera (or scanner) to monitor and printer; the idea was to create a spectrum of colors that all these devices can reproduce.
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When you take a picture, your Nikon D3200 can record the image orientation — whether you held the camera normally, creating a horizontally oriented image, or turned the camera on its side to shoot a vertically oriented photo. During playback, the camera can then read the orientation data and automatically rotate the image so that it appears in the upright position, as shown on the left in the following figure.
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Here’s a quick reference guide to the buttons, dials, and other external controls on your D3200. Note that the lens shown is the Nikkor 18–55mm AF-S VR (Vibration Reduction) model sold with the D3200 kit; other lenses may not have the same controls.
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Your Nikon D3200, like any dSLR camera, allows you to change lenses. Any many serious photographers want to own multiple lenses. This way, for example, you can mount a 50mm lens when you're taking portraits at close range and want a blurred background, or you can switch to a telephoto lens to shoot your child's baseball game from far away.
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When you want to shoot a movie with your Nikon D3200, you have to remember two camera settings that affect the quality of your video: Frame Size/Frame Rate and Movie Quality. You access both through the Shooting menu; look for the Movie Settings option, shown on the left in the following figure, and press OK to display the options shown on the right.
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Applying the D-Lighting option on your Nikon D3200 allows your camera to capture the image in a way that brightens the darkest parts of the image, bringing shadow detail into the light but leaving highlight details intact. For example, take a look at the photos in the following figure, where strong backlighting left the balloon underexposed in the original image (on the left).
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Your Nikon D3200 offers six automatic Scene modes, which select settings designed to capture specific scenes in ways that are traditionally considered best from a creative standpoint (Portrait, Landscape, Child, Close Up, Sports, Night Portrait). But if you want more, the Advanced Operation option available in Guide mode makes it easy to play around with depth of field and motion blur to a greater extent than the Scene modes allow.
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The built-in flash on your Nikon D3200, shown in its raised position on the left in the following figure, offers an easy, convenient way to add light to a scene. For even more lighting power, you can attach an external flash head to the camera via the hot shoe, shown on the right in the figure. (The hot shoe's contacts are covered by a little black insert when you receive the camera; leave the cover in place until you're ready to attach a flash.
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The Miniature Effect filter on the Retouch menu of your Nikon D3200 attempts to create a photographic equivalent of architectural small-scale models by applying a strong blur to all but one portion of a landscape, as shown in the following figure. The left photo is the original; the right shows the result of applying the filter.
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The Retouch menu on the Nikon D3200 offers the Selective Color filter which enables you to desaturate (remove color from) parts of a photo while leaving specific colors intact. For example, in the following figure, everything is desaturated except the yellows and peaches in the rose. The result lends additional drama to your subject because the eye goes first to the areas of color, and distracting background colors are eliminated.
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You actually can buy special lenses for your Nikon D3200 that produce the soft focus effect, but a cheaper alternative is to apply a focus-softening digital filter like the one found on the Retouch menu. You can see the results in the following figure. When applied to nature subjects like the one in the figure, the filter creates a look that's similar to the watercolor-effect filter you find in many photo editing programs.
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On the Nikon D3200 you can swap out the viewfinder's exposure meter with a rangefinder, which uses a similar, meter-like display, as shown in the following figure, to indicate whether focus is set on the object in the selected focus point. If bars appear to the left of the 0, as shown in the left example in the figure, focus is set in front of the subject; if the bars are to the right, as in the middle example, focus is slightly behind the subject.
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With the D3200, Nikon proves once again that you don't have to give an arm and a leg — or strain your back and neck — to enjoy dSLR photography. This addition to the Nikon family of dSLRs doesn't skimp on power or performance, offering a great set of features to help you take your photography to the next level.
Read More
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The advantage of capturing Raw files, or NEF files on Nikon cameras, is that you make the decisions about how to translate the original picture data into an actual photograph. You can specify attributes such as color intensity, image sharpening, contrast, and so on — which are all handled automatically by the camera if you use its other file format, JPEG.
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You can quickly reset all the options on the Shooting menu on your Nikon D3200 by selecting Reset Shooting Options, as shown on the left in the following figure. Likewise, the Setup menu also has a Reset Setup Options item to restore all settings on that menu, as shown on the right. Choose the Reset option to return to the default settings for the respective menu.
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Your Nikon D3200 offers four special sync modes within the Fill Flash and Red-Eye Reduction Flash modes on your camera, where the flash and shutter are synchronized so that the flash fires at the exact moment the shutter opens. Technical types refer to this flash arrangement as front-curtain sync, which refers to how the flash is synchronized with the opening of the shutter.
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Some Nikon lenses, including the 18-55mm lens sold in a kit with the D3200 camera body, offer Vibration Reduction. On Nikon lenses, this feature is indicated by the initials VR in the lens name. Vibration Reduction tries to compensate for slight amounts of camera shake that is common when photographers hold their cameras by hand and use a slow shutter speed, a lens with a long focal length, or both.
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Want to give your photo a little extra sparkle? Experiment with the Cross Screen filter on your Nikon D3200. This filter adds a starburst-like effect to the brightest areas of your image, as illustrated in the following figure. Traditional photographers create this effect by placing a special filter over the camera lens; the filter is sometimes known as a Star filter instead of a Cross Screen filter.
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The Buttons option on the Setup menu offers a third button tweak called Shutter-release Button AE-L, as shown in the following figure. This option determines whether pressing the shutter button halfway locks focus only or locks both focus and exposure. (AE-L stands for autoexposure lock.) If you turn this option on, pressing the shutter button halfway locks exposure and focus.
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