D750 in a strange mode

voxmagna

Senior Member
Hi, I am away on vacation and my D750 has got into a strange mode. I normally shot aperture priority. The autofocus display is the same as in full Auto mode. I normally see all the small squares on half press then a lock and solid small square at the lock point. At the same time in Auto I see the White AF light come on.

Now in all the priority modes I see a fixed matrix of 9 small dots and one central square. At some point I got the 9 dot matrix and centre square to move from the centre position. I have checked the AF settings as best I can. The assist light is enabled but not coming on and the small squares I used to see during AF Are not happening. I checked with User profiles and the AF display is as before. I have obviously got a changed combination of settings but can't figure out what has changed. I was on location when I rotated one of the function wheels and saw different focus options in the viewfinder which I've never seen before but I cannot remember how I got there
Can anybody help?
 

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
Press the AF button on the front near the lens mount. Back wheel will rotate you through AF-S/C/A and front wheel will rotate you through number of focus points. If you cannot move the focus point then you likely have it locked - there's a lever on the control wheel that toggles between lock (L) and unlocked. If it's unlocked, press the center button on the control wheel and it will return to center.

Hopefully that does you.
 

voxmagna

Senior Member
WhYou are the best -Thanks. I have missed and not used the center button. Somehow I expected all the important presets to be on the menu pages. I shall study the manual more when I am back home. I have a few things on my beginners todo list. First I need to build a glossary/lookup of all the D750 symbols. I know they are in the manual in various places. But I want to match a symbol to what Comes up in the viewfinder or menus and quickly translate what it means. The ? Help doesn't have everything. I first stumbled on the exposure icons - spot, spot highlight, face etc.

Do you know if there is a reset to manufacturer defaults on the D750? I hope never to use it and maybe screw up things like shot file name sequence back to default, but it could come in handy if I got in a mess with settings. I assume there is no way to export user settings to a text file? What threw me here is I went off comparing my Aperture mode settings with good U1 settings I had saved a while back but the AF center button options seem to override in all the shooting modes except full Auto and the Aperture priority I had been using. As soon as I started selecting options as you suggested I got the AF assist lamp on but according to the menu settings it should have been on??

Thanks again
 

voxmagna

Senior Member
I can close this thread now I am back home and on a real PC instead of an ipad with typos! With the D750 manual and a couple of good links on Nikon Autofocus I can see I left a lot out in my learning curve.

I started with exposure, but understanding Autofocus is far more important. You can pull back exposure errors in post, but you can't do much about bad focus. It is too easy to set focus modes that are inappropriate for the shot. If I repeated my learning curve I would start using the D750 in manual modes - Focus/Exposure/ASA then decide on and introduce the automatic modes if they can make setting up the shot easier. If you get in a mess like I did with Autofocus, you are fighting the camera and photography shouldn't be like that.

Automatic ASA is another pitfall. I wondered why on some of my shots the ASA setting seemed way to high. Nikon allow the minimum and maximum ASA to be set, but in my case I hadn't defined the lowest shutter speed when I wanted the auto ASA ranging to kick in - Lesson learned.
 
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