While personally no fan of HDR and such (even worse the clouds with sharp edges), I guess most have a tendency to present / prefer pictures to be remembered as ‘a nice day’ → postcard like.
Hmm, all the more reason for setting both D750 cameras back to factory settings.
I thought both cameras were set the same.
Camera #2 may have issues, from the repair.
Question - is there a way to save ALL the camera settings as a file on the memory card, which I can then put in the other camera, and tell it to set the camera as per those stored settings?
The repaired D750 has another issue - if I put the camera in VIEW mode, to view my exposures, I’m supposed to be able to move the joystick UP or DOWN to see different data screens. On the repaired camera, nothing happens - but in other menus, the up/down buttons behave as they should. I will be calling Nikon about this on Monday, to see it if is software. If they can’t help, I will restore #2 to factory settings. If the problem is still there, I’m taking it back to the repair shop.
[quote=“Wolfgang, post:147, topic:24619”]
[ To ‘synchronize’ the cams (except this individual cam-lens-adjustment !) I use → My Menu → save settings, insert the card in the other cam and load the settings from the card. ]
[/quote]Gosh, you just saved me a huge amount of time. I wasn’t aware of that, but I never had a reason to even look for it before. Thank you.
they’ll probably propose to reset the camera and check for firmware updates. Read about this in the Manuals.
I remember setting it to f/10 before going out on the balcony to take the photo. I thought I had it in aperture priority, probably should have just used Manual.
Ignore anything I wrote about how my focus was set. I watched this video:
Nikon D750 Focusing
So much that I’ve forgotten over the years - I set up my camera originally like this:
Nikon D750 Recommended Settings
This was around four or five years ago, and I seem to have forgotten almost everything. Now that I have watched the first video, I found my original D750 was no longer set the way I thought it was. Worse yet, when I copied all the menu settings to the second D750, a you have all pointed out, that camera was set in some screwy configuration I didn’t understand.
So, now that when I press the focus knob on the left side of the camera, I can turn the front and rear control wheels, and now both cameras are set reasonably. Now I need to watch the second video, and verify the pressing the rear AE-L/AF-L button focuses the camera once, and stops - and if I continue to hold that button down, the camera will continually focus. That was my goal years ago, and that’s what I want it to do now.
I apologize - I’ve been totally wrong about this. I want both cameras to be set identically.
(It shouldn’t matter in my photos, as they were all being focused on the buildings, which I suspect was at “infinity”.)
Since what this camera is doing should be impossible, I think they’ll tell me to bring it in for service. The shop that replaced the whole front of the camera (picture King Kong twisting the lens literally off the camera) will likely know what to do, or tell me it’s not fixable. Everything else seems to work.
Earlier today, I noticed two guys were working on the Margaritaville, so I grabbed my D750-II. This is from before I corrected the settings that were messed up. My best guess is they were doing some gardening. The image was captured at 300mm.
Viewed in PL5, everything seemed perfect. Viewed at 100% flat out amazed me! I suspect this new 300 is far more capable than my old 80-200. Everything that should be sharp is, and I can see the last bit of detail in the guy’s tattoos.
@Wolfgang - SO happy you suggested this, and @Joanna, gee, would you really want me to use this huge lens instead of a dedicated wide angle?
MM2_0178 | 2022-02-06.nef (28.9 MB)
MM2_0178 | 2022-02-06.nef.dop (13.2 KB)
I suspect this thread is unfair. I am (slowly) learning SO much here, but I don’t have much to contribute, other than my results from all your good advice.
Heck, I hardly did anything in PhotoLab !! Everything was right to begin with. Every bit of detail on the boat shows up, including the dirty glass and what’s inside the cabin,
You need to go to the playback menu and the playback display options item and tick all of them, then they will be available on the joystick.
Yet another reason not to reset your #1 camera - just update the #2 to match.
That looks like an interesting video that might apply to my D850 as well, especially since I have grown accustomed to BBF yet.
What huge lens? The one I recommended was the 28-300mm, which is even smaller than your shiny new 70-300mm.
Now that’s the sign of a good photographer 
Yikes!!! I never knew there even was a “playback menu”, but it sounds obvious thinking back on things. At one point in time, I thought I understood my D750. Obviously I was deluded. Considering how many ignorant/stupid/dumb mistakes I’ve been making, maybe I should fall on my sword, er, tripod. Nikon has far, far, far, far too many menus and sub-menus and sub-sub menus, is what I’d like to think, but that is silly - Nikon just gives us full control of our cameras.
Yep, you’re right - resetting either camera would be stupid.
As of now, 8:13pm Sunday, I think my #2 D750 is set the same as #1 D750, but every time I’ve thought that before, I’ve been proven wrong.
My thoughts - any lens that won’t fit in my pocket is “too big”. Leica lenses usually would fit in my shirt pocket.
Maybe, but inside, I feel more “lucky” than “good”, although the more I follow the advice in this forum, the luckier I get. 
I must have been pathetically incompetent a year or two ago. It’s a lovely feeling when I open up an image, and there’s so little to do…
Four or five years ago, I blindly followed all the ideas in that video but for the “movie” changes. Every single one of them was worth doing. Unless you’ve already done it, check out the change to the “OK” button. Another lovely idea.
One change I made was to configure my custom button to bring up the level tool, rather than set it as yet another focus button.
I’ve got a fairly simple question, and I’m curious if there are better ways to deal with it than what I’ve been doing. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been processing images with a lot of “white” in them, most often the tops of sailboats. According to PL5, the highlights are not blown out, but I made the whites just a tiny bit darker so they wouldn’t appear to be blown out. Now it happened again, in an image I took late this afternoon. I saw this small boat coming down a narrow waterway, and took the photo pretty quickly. It was slightly overexposed, but I fixed that in PL5 until it looked good.
Here’s my question - if I know for a fact that the white area in an image is NOT blown out, do I leave it as-is, as in the image below, or do I again make it just a hair darker, so people won’t feel it’s blown out?
I had my 35mm lens on my Leica, and for this photo 50mm would have been better, so I just cropped.
My thoughts are that since I know the whites are not blown out (according to PL5) I should leave them as-is.
As to the cropping, and the arrangement and composition, it sort of looks “goofy”, but according to my eye everything is “balanced”, with the copyright at the lower left to fill in the “hole”. You’re all free to play with it, and reposition anything you like.
(With my Nikon, I’d probably have taken several photos to choose from, but with my Leica, I usually take just a single image.)
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L1004220 | 2022-02-06.dng.dop (13.5 KB)
You are absolutely right. When I got my D850, I ended up sitting down with the downloaded menu guide PDF that they provide and spending a happy(?) hour or so going through everything, one item at a time.
For someone who really wants to know how their camera is going to behave, unfortunately, there really is no other choice - either that or end up with half the automatisms and preferences of some Nikon engineer to influence how you had thought the camera should work.
The idea of buying a camera, putting a roll of film in it and starting shooting is long gone. Apparently we are now expected to have degrees in computer science before we can press the shutter, unless all we want is distinctly average snapshots.
And the “easier” the camera is sold as being, the more menus you have to search through to wrestle back control.
Which reminds me @mikemyers have you deactivated Active D Lighting and High ISO and Long Exposure Noise reduction on your #2 D750? Or even on your #1 D750? The first alters what you thought you set as a good exposure and the other two make you wait for the reduction shot to be made and applied after each shot before you can take another shot, just when that second shot was important
Hey, I might seem incredibly competent now but it has been a long learning process over many years, ever since I got my first digital camera (the D100) in around 2004. And just when I thought I had it nailed you come along and say to me, “hey what about back button focusing?” So it’s back learning something new with even more menus to get lost in 
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Here’s the DOP including my adjustments…
MM2_0178 | 2022-02-06.nef.dop (25,4 Ko)
It’s not worth posting an export, the differences are too subtle at small size.
On the subject of sharpness, you might like to look at how I’ve used the fine contrast sliders.
But with the Nikon, I would have only taken one shot, with a longer lens - a portrait of the guy, looking wistful, in his boat…
My personal opinion is that when you have to keep on cropping to this extent, even for your wider crop, you are using the wrong lens and, possibly, the wrong camera 
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Here I like @mikemyers version better as he adds some context (guy not driving through the Pacific and rethinking the Easter Islands). If I’d work in Wetzlar advertisment department I’d probably add “one of the moments you can ONLY grab with a Leica…”.The image also leaves the question unanswered if that dude really came from the bridge in the background? Unanswered questions in pictures prevent the viewers from passing by, saying, “dude in a boat, got it” and rushing to the next Leica exhibition. With all these unanswered questions… like “where has all this gray-sky been going to?”
Original plan was to walk out my front door, turn right, and walk down Lincoln Road to my East, which on a sunny Sunday afternoon might have been perfect for my 35mm lens. When I walked out the door though, for various reasons, on a whim, I went North, following Biscayne Bay on the way to my favorite food store, to buy dinner. Wrong lens for this shot, but it’s sharp enough for me to crop down to the fellow in the boat, a small part of the image. With the Nikon, I’d have aimed at the guy in the boat, and the camera would focus. With the Leica, I did focus, but then decided to wait, and wait, and I’m sure my ability to focus track is nothing like the Nikon’s. At any rate, I waited until the boat was where I wanted it to be, and took my one photo. Obviously I was using the least appropriate lens, and this photo would have been effortless with the Nikon, which would have had my 24-85 zoom on it, which is my favorite “walkabout” lens.
When I cross my bridge, I always check for boats coming towards me, and when I first noticed this fellow, he was on the other side of the bridge in the background. It took me a few seconds to confirm that he was coming at me, and a few more seconds until I was ready to take the photo, and I waited a few more seconds until he reached a spot where my fingers pressed the shutter release, on their own. I felt like an observer, waiting until all the bits fell into place.
Most times, boats coming at me like this leave an obvious “wake” behind them, so it’s clear what path the boat had taken, but not so this time.
I’m feeling confused - I love the detail @Joanna 's photo shows, but the context of the image is gone. The reason I kept cropping more and more was to show the fellow in the boat better, but if I loved the way the lines converged as they do into the bridge in the background.
I suspect that had I been using my Nikon, with a longer lens, I’d have shot the boat further away from me, cropping in camera, but the perspective with the 35mm allows the boat to look “larger” compared to the stuff in the background. For this photo, my 50mm would have been all I needed.
Hmm, I’ll need to check. At one point after our discussion, I turned off Active D Lighting on D750 #1, but this was long ago. I’ll check both cameras a little later today. First I’ll need to figure out how to even find them in my infinitely long menu system…
I thought, Active D-Lighting only affects JPGs?
That’s what I used to think, until I found out all it does is alter the base exposure to giver a bit more headroom for highlights.
So, this is an addendum to “highlight protective spot metering”? “Active D-lighting” means the same lilke setting the exposure correction to - x?
And this is where artistic vision comes into play. Here are some thoughts…
- From what you have said, you were looking for boats to photograph
- This tells me that you wanted to make a boat the subject of the image
- You said, with the Nikon, you would have aimed at the guy in the boat
- This tells me your intended subject wasn’t even the boat but the guy in the boat
- You further said that the reason you kept cropping was to show the fellow in the boat better
- My brain then says - you’re looking to take a portrait of the guy in the context of his boat
When I look at the image, I don’t see converging lines as much as I see a leading line from the left side, leading my eye away from the boat, towards the bridge with the car and pedestrian and then my eye is led by the other bank, away from the boat to the right side of the image. I would even say that this is an image of two parts because, if I crop the bottom with the boat off, I get an image of the bridge with leading lines from the corners. Whereas, if I crop the banks and bridge off and bring in the sides, I get the portrait of the guy in the boat, which is what you state attracted you to taking the shot.
I also find myself thinking that, if you wanted the guy in the context of the boat in the context of the canal and bridge, you would have been better framing it so the boat was more “embraced” by the banks, which should have led in from the bottom corners. Here’s a very crude mockup of the kind of framing I was thinking of (please ignore the overscale boat)
Well, you did ask for feedback and said we could do want we want with it
Well, yes, that’s what I read into it. As to whether it is wise to use both, I wouldn’t like to say. I never use Active D-lighting but do use highlight led metering for concerts and other stage work where spotlights are in the shot.