Nikon D600 For Dummies

Setting Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO

The next sections detail how to view and adjust these critical exposure settings. For a review of how each setting affects your pictures, check out the first part of this chapter.

Adjusting aperture and shutter speed

You can view the current aperture (f-stop) and shutter speed in the Control panel, viewfinder, and Information display, as shown in Figure 7-11. If you don't see the values, the exposure meter isn't awake; press the shutter button halfway to bring it out of its slumber.

Figure 7-11: You can view the f-stop and shutter speed setting in all three displays.

Before I explain how to select the f-stop and shutter speed, I need to share a few notes about the latter setting:

• Shutter speeds are presented as whole numbers, even if the shutter speed is set to a fraction of a second. For example, the number 125 indicates a shutter speed of 1/125 second. When the shutter speed slows to 1 second or longer, quote marks appear after the number — 1″ indicates a shutter speed of 1 second, 4″ means 4 seconds, and so on.
• In M (manual) exposure mode, you can access two shutter speed options not available in other modes:
  • Bulb: At this setting, which you access by going one step past the slowest shutter speed (30 seconds), the shutter remains open ...