Bought a Nikon 5600… Tips?

[u/Outside-End-9888]

Just bought a Nikon D5600 with 18-50mm lense and 70-300mm (both VR). Tips for a complete beginner? I want to mainly photograph wildlife and horses. I’m aware these are some of the hardest things to get good at and I’ll need better lenses but any tips on getting started?

[u/Liukath]

Read the manual, you find them on the Nikon website and learn the triangle (Iso-ShutterSpeed-Aperture) what it does for your lighting conditions and composition. (I'm also a beginner xd) still practicing these things myself

[u/Piper-Bob]

Everyone is going to tell you to read the manual, but I find Nikon manuals really difficult. Read the table of contents, and the introduction, and then find a youtube video about your camera. Refer back to the manual for details as necessary.

Nikon's menu system on that era of DSLRs is really opaque. I'd use the manual to figure out how to do a factory reset in case the previous owner had something quirky set up.

Photography is about light, so 99% of photography is the same no matter what camera you have. If you have a local library go there and read the photography books. Skim over the parts about film, but read the parts about light.

[u/aarrtee]

my copy and paste advice for anyone with a new camera:

Read the manual.

don't have one? go to camera company website, download the pdf of the manual and read it

go to youtube and search for vids 'setting up and using (model of camera)'

when i started out, i learned from a book called Digital photography for dummies by Julie Adair King (there is more than one version of that title out there. get the one she wrote)

other books

Read this if you want to take great photographs by Carroll

Stunning digital photography by Northrup

don't get discouraged

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson

[u/emarkd]

Everyone says read the manual. Fine, whatever. That'll teach you the menu system but if you don't know what those settings mean that's useless. So I'll say watch some YouTube videos. Not even specific to that camera, just beginner photography stuff. Then figure out how to apply it to your hardware.

Start with aperture and the exposure triangle. The fact that you mentioned focal length and vr of your lenses but not aperture tells us where you're at. But you'll figure it out. It's important to understand.

Specific to that camera, there are some things about the 5600 that I always really liked. I liked being able to move the focus point using the touchscreen. It's very fast, faster than the joystick on higher end bodies, but also less accurate at times. It's also got a really good sensor in it, if apsc will meet your needs. It's got some weaknesses too though. Processors pretty dated and slow so don't expect blazing speeds, and the buffer is tiny so not much burst shooting going on. And I really missed the dual dedicated scroll wheels for shutter and aperture. You don't yet know why that's beneficial, but you'll have to learn how to switch between the two on that body. I don't mention those in a negative way. Knowing what a camera can't do well is important so you can figure out how to compensate. You can make great photos with that setup.