Alan -
As a fellow Canon expat, I\'ll recommend looking at the following settings:
Custom Setting A8 - lets you limit AF point selection to 11 points
Custom Setting A9 - turns off the built-in AF assist lamp, which is annoying and largely useless with zoom lenses - the 24-70 included.
Custom Setting B4 - allows you to change the exposure compensation without having to actually hold down the EC button at the same time
Custom Setting E2 - controls the flash shutter speed so that it can be slower than 1/60th.
Custom Setting F2 - Configued \"Playback Mode\" to magnify. I personally find the positioning of the magnify buttons to be awkward in playback. Setting this custom setting will allow you to zoom in to a preset level and will focus on the active AF point at the time of the exposure.
Custom Setting F5 - Assign the Func. button. This allows you to assign any function you want to this button. Personally, I have this set to trigger the first item in \"My Menu\", which is to show me the Commander Mode screen so I can easily tweak my flash setting.
Custom Setting F7 - Assign the AE-L/AF-L. I usually don\'t use AE/AF lock, so I\'ve assigned this to trigger Live View. From a Canon user\'s perspective going this way gives you an experience more like a Canon - after you actually shoot, it will return to Live View mode. This is unlike actually manually selecting Live View which unintuitively shuts Live View off after you take a picture. Very confusing.
Custom Setting F9 - Setting the Custom Command Dials \"Menus and Playback\" setting to \"On\" allows you to use the back thumb dial to review images, which I find much more intuitive than using the multi-directional controller.
There\'s custom settings for reversing the dials so it\'s more \"Canon like\", but after using it for a while I found that there were too many cases where it wasn\'t consistent, so I\'ve just resigned myself to re-wiring my brain to the Nikon way.
Other things to be aware of:
The D700 doesn\'t shoot 14bit RAW out of the box - you have to configure it in the shooting menu.
The default Picture Control settings are a bit hyped imo, I prefer the Neutral setting.
Nikon\'s flash system is fundamentally different than Canon\'s in at least one critical way - EC and FEC are not completely independent values as they are with Canon. FEC controls the flash level in relation to the EC value. So you really use FEC more as a ratio than an independent value. The nice thing about this is that if you\'ve got your ratio setup, but you\'re underexposing, all you need to do is adjust EC and you\'re good to go.
Commander Mode allows you to control your remote flashes in manual mode! Worth the price of admission right there for my studio work.
I\'m sure there\'s plenty more. Still working on my \"Review of the D700 from a Canon user\'s perspective\".
Oct 29, 2008 at 09:57 AM
Previous versions of Sam Bennett's message #6325192 « drawn to the dark side by the D700 »
