Your Nikon D3300 camera keeps track of the picture-taking settings and allows you to view them as you shoot. Your camera gives you the following ways to monitor the most important picture-taking settings:
Information screen (viewfinder photography): The left screen in the figure gives you a look at the Information screen available for viewfinder photography. The screen appears when you first turn on the camera and then disappears after a few seconds. To redisplay it, take any of these steps:
Press the Info button. Press once to display the screen; press again to turn off the monitor.
Press the shutter button halfway and release it. Pressing and holding the button halfway down turns off the screen and fires up the autofocusing and exposure metering systems. Because those two systems use battery power, avoid this technique when the battery is running low.
This is the display as it works by default. But you can modify its behavior via the Setup menu.
Live View display: When you press the LV button to switch to Live View mode, the shooting data appears atop the live preview. (Refer to the right side of the figure.) You can vary the type of data displayed by pressing the Info button; the figure shows the default display style.
Viewfinder: You also can view some settings at the bottom of the viewfinder, as shown in the figure. The information that appears depends on the exposure mode.
If what you see in the figures looks like a confusing mess, don’t worry. Many settings relate to options that won’t mean anything to you until you explore the advanced exposure modes (P, S, A, and M). But make note of the following bits of data that are helpful in any exposure mode:
Battery status indicator: A full-battery icon shows that the battery is fully charged; if the icon appears empty, look for your battery charger.
Just for good measure, the camera also displays a low-battery symbol in the viewfinder, as shown in the figure. If the symbol blinks, the camera won’t take more pictures until you charge the battery.
Shots remaining: Labeled in the figures, this value indicates how many more pictures you can store on the memory card. If the number exceeds 999, the initial K appears, indicating that the value is in the thousands.
For example, 1.0K means that you can store 1,000 more pictures. (K is a universally accepted symbol indicating 1,000 units.) The number is rounded down to the nearest hundred. So if the card has room for, say, 1,230 more pictures, the value reads 1.2K.
Buffer capacity: When you press and hold the shutter button halfway down, the shots remaining value is replaced by the letter r plus a number that indicates how many frames will fit in the camera’s memory buffer. For example, the value r24 indicates that 24 pictures can fit in the buffer.
So what’s the buffer? It’s a temporary storage tank where the camera stores picture data until it has time to fully record that data onto the camera memory card.
This system exists so that you can take a continuous series of pictures without waiting between shots until each image is fully written to the memory card. When the buffer is full, the camera automatically disables the shutter button until it catches up on its recording work.