DSLR it’s not like one of the high-end cameras but like just to give you a little insight I’m right now I’m really content and happy with the camera when I got it I was in Entebbe which is a city in Uganda and so the very first test I had was at a restaurant which was next to the lake so there were so many Birds there I’m primarily a Wildlife Photographer so there were so many Birds there it was really interesting to see how the camera would perform now the one thing that I didn’t know I had to do was set the AF tracking, it came with Auto on it wasn’t like a Single-Point AF or Multi-Point so I had to change that, I had to learn the hard way that I had to change that before I use the camera so the first photos that I took were a little bit rough I mean it was hard to focus because it was in auto focus the camera chose different subjects and I mean when you’re photographing Birds you need to have almost like all the control that you can get especially if they’re perched or even in flight so the camera action costs about eight hundred and forty six dollars on Amazon eight hundred and fifty dollars on Amazon something like that so the features it’s an APS-C sensor camera which means it’s cropped if you’re like an enthusiast for a while then you know the difference between a Full-frame camera and APS-C sensor camera, Medium Format cameras this is an APS-C sensor camera which for wildlife is a good thing because you get extra reach it’s 24 Megapixels which is good because most cameras actually from Nikon are dropping in resolution they are 20 megapixels and all that so this is refreshing it’s the 24 megapixels you can actually tell you can see when you zoom in to a really good photo you can see the quality I mean it’s an entry-level DSLR and I won’t stop mentioning that but you can see the quality and it’s really really good it has a 3.2 inch display it’s a vari-angle touchscreen which means you can tilt it and turn it not in all directions but in most directions that make sense to a Photographer or a Film Maker and it’s a touchscreen which is really good so you can control focus and all that and settings, some settings can be hard with buttons. This has been really important because I actually never thought I would use a touchscreen camera my touchscreen devices are very the list is really small and I’m just glad that it grows I mean the Cameras, touchscreen cameras are really good thing to have I haven’t had a moment where I accidentally touch this or that I mean it’s been made in a way that, maybe I haven’t I’ve just been lucky but it’s been made in a way that works that I have not had a moment where I touched the wrong thing or when I don’t want to touch anything so that has been great when I need to change settings it works really great I just swipe and scroll. Adjusting ISO and exposure compensation, it’s been really smooth with the touch.
I like how my images look on the display the videos look on the display they look really really good at some point it can actually be deceiving because there’s been photos that I’ve taken and I look at them and they look really sharp they look really good and then when I go back home and then I put on the computer they look kind of smooth you know so don’t like take one photo like advice right now don’t take one photo and be like oh it’s really good let me just stop there you know unless it’s really really undeniably good but if you have some little doubt then take more photos because the screen I feel like it’s a good thing but it’s also a bad thing so it’s really good it can be deceiving at some point it’s great enough when the Sun is directly up I live in Kampala, Uganda so there’s a lot of Sun a lot of the time so it can be hard it for sure it looks better than my smartphone my smartphone is kind of old but like I can see really well and I can’t say that I’ve bumped up the brightness of the screen to the full but it looks really great I haven’t you know like worked, tried so hard to see when the Sun is out there you can move it up or move it down wherever you want that’s really good you can check in the settings. You can record video at 1080p at 60 frames per second I tried out the video features and it was really good but you know Nikon is not the best with autofocus so if you’re gonna record yourself or record things that require autofocus then I think you’re out of luck because Nikon does not perform the best in live view mode. If that’s something that you’re strongly interested in, I suggest looking elsewhere because the Nikon D5600 will not provide that for you. My last trip was through Southwestern Uganda, then into Rwanda and then into the Democratic Republic of the Congo and I shot some videos while I was there I’ll show those as well so now the difference is I’m holding the camera and I’m controlling the focus so it’s one of those things where like it will be as good as you are you know and even though even then you can actually see a little bit of like, it kind of like jumps a little bit when it’s good it’s really good but in terms of autofocus and all that then I don’t think you can rely on it that much so if you are solely like a filmmaker then probably try other options maybe a Canon because right now I’m shooting on a Canon 800d it’s in auto servo mode I think it’s just autofocusing on my face so if I move around like this it’s actually I hope you’ll be able to see it but like on my on the screen it has a little tiny square that’s following my face
so I hope this is now with Nikon you would not be able to do this Again, if you’re interested in video autofocus and if you’re going to do self filming like vlogging and all that stuff maybe you can set it right don’t move around too much don’t put things that are going to require autofocus then maybe you can work with it otherwise maybe look elsewhere Canon, Sony, something I don’t know. oh it has Wi-Fi Bluetooth this is probably not new for most people but I don’t know where my phone is I’m charging the camera has bluetooth and Wi-Fi I tried using that for SnapBridge which is there App, you can use it as a remote control on your phone like right now if I was filming myself or taking self-portraits it is really good I haven’t really taken any photos with it yet first of all it’s not like a smart phone that you’ll just or a laptop or anything like you’ll just click on the notifications menu and disable Bluetooth or Wi-Fi it’s kind of a lot more complicated you’d have to go into the settings and then disable a bunch of things. It takes a lot of battery power like if you’re in a remote place and you don’t have a lot of like outlets then you probably don’t want to have Bluetooth or Wi-Fi on because – trust me my friend it takes a lot of power. The battery life is not the best because before this I was shooting with the Nikon D7100 and it perform really really well we could actually shoot for like maybe two days not like 24 hours 24 hours but like over a period of two days and we didn’t really need to charge so we’d go to a park and you know there is like not so many outlets you’d have to charge at one single spot and I take a lot of photos actually. I’m a firm believer of like you take as many as you can you’d rather have a lot more than you need then have little you can always delete, you can always back up, you can always use them for different purposes sell some, post some, I don’t know but I take a lot of photos like yesterday I had a portrait shoot and I took over nine hundred photos and it just it was a few hours and I took about nine hundred photos and I just I have a lot of work to do delete, edit and all that but you’d rather have a lot more than have little.
I can’t complain about it because I mean you know what you’re getting it’s not like a high-end camera the performance will be different of course and the form factor I mean look at this look at it it’s really really small I have a big lens on but like it’s really really really small so there are limitations, of course, you cannot have incredible battery life in a small body I mean take Mirrorless cameras, for example, they are really small people love them for that but then their performance in terms of battery life is nothing compared to the DSLRs so if you’re going for a small camera know what you’re getting it’s not gonna last like days or anything so just don’t expect, don’t expect. So the battery life is something you need to be like you get into it knowing you’re gonna get this camera you’re not gonna get days of battery life you’ll have to charge at the end of the day when I was climbing Mount Nyiragongo which is an active volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo I had to be really careful I made only a few clips for the video that I’ll edit and then upload. I took only a few photos because I was trying to preserve that battery for the actual star of the show which is the volcano, the crater. I had to think ahead and prepare for that so I did that and the camera it actually died in the night after I got like a few amazing photos of the like the light the glow, it was really amazing so even with it dying on me I didn’t feel bad because I know exactly what it is I mean don’t expect too much the things I’m really matter I know battery life matters a lot they didn’t lie about it they won’t lie about it you can’t expect crazy performance because even the high-end cameras, the D850 and all that, they need power grips as well at some point so with SnapBridge do not leave it on if you’re gonna use it make sure you disable everything that’s connected to wireless connectivity once you’re done using it because it’s gonna take so much power out of the camera that if you’re using the camera for actual photography forget when you turn it off and just like to keep it somewhere but like if you’re moving, like imagine you wake up and you take a self-portrait and then you leave it on, use your phone as a remote control you leave the connectivity on on the camera it’s not gonna last because it’s working down there, it’s working within itself to try and backup these photos send them to your phone try and find the connection with every Bluetooth devices around it so imagine all that work The time-lapse feature unfortunately I won’t have like a great video to show you
I did not really know that much about making time-lapse videos so I did not make a great one and also again I was preserving battery so… but one thing I can credit the camera for, it is really simple like I found my way really fast I didn’t stress too much. The timelapse stuff I’d never done anything like it before with auto mode or manual mode never but I managed to do something so if you’re someone who enjoys learning then you can find your way around the camera really fast it’s not stressful at least it wasn’t for me so yeah that’s a plus for the camera and for Nikon for building something so user-friendly. It has this kit lens, it’s the, I already told you about it the 18 to 55-millimeter lens It’s F3.5 to 5.6, it’s called an AF-P Nikkor 18 to 55-millimeter one-two three-point five two five-point six G it’s it’s an app-c sensor kind of lens so this won’t work on your full-frame body if you’re the kind of person who has two camera bodies one is full-frame and one is aps-c then don’t get these kinds of lenses because this will only work for one camera one of your cameras which is the APS-C sensor camera so if you have a D850 and a D7200 and you have this lens then it will not work on the D850. Some people have found ways of making things like this work but I don’t know they’ll be a vignetting around the photos there are so many crazy things that happen so don’t think the head so this just came with the camera so there’s no big loss and I don’t have a full-frame camera yet it works really well for now for video works really well, for wide-angle shots it works really well. It’s not the best thing that will ever happen to you but it could be if you want it to be so yeah you know it comes with the camera so… It has vibration reduction and image stabilization built-in so that’s a plus that’s really good Speed, the camera is really fast, it’s not as fast as the other cameras, like the D500 or the D5 it’s not as fast as them but it’s as fast as can be for the price as fast as can be of the range. I haven’t missed so many moments of impact, when you’re photographing Birds or even People, you would want to capture moments now with birds the one time that I actually miss something that I would have wanted to have that I intended to have in the shot but I did get was I was photographing a Pied Kingfisher, if you can google it Birds are interesting. I wanted the moment of impact like when it because they fish, they go up in the sky look down into the lake or the water body that they’re flying over and then they spot Fish and then they just dive right in, they’re kind of like Ospreys so they go in and they just take the fish so I wanted that moment where it was just like between the water and above the water but like I just kept on shooting and I thought I had, I believed I had the shot but then when I went back I did not have the shot, but I had one before right before and then one right after but nothing in between
so yeah you’ll miss a few shots if you’re the kind of person who wants to get the moment like the moment of impact things you can’t control but you want them to be there you might miss a few of them because of the speed yesterday when I was doing a Portrait shoot we wanted to get this shot of the hair flying up, we got a really nice one I feel like that’s a little bit more controlled because it’s a portrait thing I had a really bad experience with the ISO performance, we went to a place a snake park of the rescue snakes and reptiles it’s called the Reptile Village actually so the had Egyptian Cobras and Forest Cobras, so the light was really really not the best and now I didn’t even know again but these are things you should think about change the Auto focus point selection I prefer mine in single point change the ISO settings because mine was locked in auto and I had some of the worst photos in terms of noise the camera just kept on bumping up the ISO to 12800 and there was so much noise in these photos, I was kind of depressed and right there right like I was like what’s going on, what’s going on? I was kind of freaking out then I remember Oh My God I looked at the screen and it’s a 12 th… What? ISO? Then I just removed it from auto and then I put it at 400 and the photos became better for sure they became better so these are things you need to think about it’s not the camera’s fault because I mean what that is auto mode supposed to do? So those are things that I was kind of at fault with, I was not informed well enough so if you’re thinking about getting this camera and if you’re watching this video this means that you’re trying to get research now if there’s anything I haven’t covered in this video then find out more, prepare yourself, change the autofocus points, change the ISO, change all the things that you will learn in this video and in all the other videos that you want to change before you go out to shoot otherwise you’ll be disappointed. There’s a microphone jack so you can plug in a microphone a Lavelier or Lapel microphone or any other microphone that is compatible and you can record audio straight into the camera which is really important otherwise you would have to record with external software and then you have to edit in post and sync everything which is what I’m going to do now not looking forward to it but you know there’s no headphone jack this is an entry-level DSLR you know they kind of want to entice you into buying their high-end DSLRs so if I was recording video then I would have to transport this video,
first of all I would have to make a test video then put it on my laptop and then watch it with earphones or headphones to see if the audio is great that is really bad so if you’re a filmmaker or a person who does video consider something with a headphone jack although it won’t end your life if you don’t have a headphone jack. Shutter speeds range from 30 to 1/4000th of a second. The highest I think I’ve ever gone is 1/2000th of a second and that was on a D800, maybe I’ve gone higher with this I don’t know if I would need to because the last trip where I got to use this camera I wasn’t in a place where there were so many birds that were flying around or things like that where I needed so much speed probably went up to 2000 because I wanted to but I didn’t really need to. The default dimensions are actually six thousand by four thousand which is really good for print and all that also 24 megapixels is great the resolution is really good I do not see any over-processing, in the in-camera JPEGs there was not too much sharpening or anything so that was something that was enjoyable. So you can have 24 megapixel large photos ,13.5 megapixel medium photos, or 6 megapixel small in-camera JPEGs and then you can also shoot it RAW and that’s what I’ve been doing the whole time ever since I got it except for the shoots that I do like at home like oh I see something at home and then I just take out the camera I just do JPEG fine, but for the real work the wildlife photography like on that trip, I shot you in RAW and JPEG fine I use a 64 GB card so that means I have about 1,100 images now if I just shoot JPEG fine I have over 3,000 images if I shoot RAW I have something in between there whenever I wanted to minimize or preserve space I would just shoot raw because the in-camera JPEGS can be really good but I prefer to shoot in RAW because I get more control, in the end I get more control, so you can shoot 12 bit lossless or 14 bit lossless in RAW the file sizes are about for me the average file size with the raw files, they’ve been like 25, 26 megabytes and then the JPEGS they’ve gone up to 15 and the final product which actually depends on how you edit can be like 20, 19, 17 I’ve had images like that. So the camera isn’t weather sealed that means you have to be extra careful when you’re taking photos of waterfalls because you know what Falls can be crazy we can’t shoot in the rain things like dust and all that you have to be extremely careful some people don’t mind other people mind something I certainly mind about because I mean $800 you know you have to take care of it so…
I don’t know if you’ll be able to see but it has a deep grip yeah there it has a deep grip that at first it was actually really hard for me to get used to it’s crazy it’s actually really small and kind of short so it made my hand hurt at some point especially when I made it single point AF because you have to hold it here and then move this finger you know move the AF point up and down and all that there’s no joystick on this camera so don’t expect that oh yeah the buttons are really impressive I mean this the dial wheel it’s not I hope you can hear it’s not so soft that you will keep scrolling you know and just put in wrong settings you can feel kind of like pressure-sensitive right I don’t know if I’m allowed to use that right now you can feel it when you’re moving it and my favorite thing about Nikon cameras is this, the on/off switch it’s like you’re holding the camera you just turn it on, turn it off right there you don’t have to look for a button or whatever you know with just one hand you can start shooting right away so this is always a favorite of mine and if they switch it then I might switch. The shutter release, the button is here the record button for videos here at the Live View mode everything is just like in the right place I think the zoom in, zoom out. You can also zoom in on the screen because it’s touchscreen so you just pinch to zoom the playback is placed in the best place the info button is there as well the menu button beside the FN button which is assignbale uh by the way this is really cool you can assign a button here on the camera to do whatever you want so I have mine set to change or the focus points so I can switch between the single point F and the auto or group that is also button down there for changing the way you want to shoot I don’t know how to call this which can shoot a single photo or continuous bursts and all that if you change that there there are many buttons here there’s a flash trigger there Sorry if this review is not what you were looking for I felt like it was really important to review the camera based on how I found it how I felt about it as opposed to what’s written about it by company or anything I enjoyed using the camera thoroughly would I prefer a NIKON 850? Yes! Always! Any day! But this is what I have it’s what’s affordable and it’s great, it’s working really great for wildlife for portraits for nature shots landscapes and all that I’ve loved it I’ve taken some great photos. If there’s a choice between this and the D7100 I would go with the D5600 because it’s modern there’s some new features and all that. While the whole SnapBridge thing is taxing on the battery life, it’s still important and, I think it’s something I want to try and use more for self-portraits yeah there’s more bang for your buck in with this camera and I can’t really say I hate it and I cannot tell you not to buy it unless you really want video and you really want autofocus in Live View mode then maybe look elsewhere but if it’s stills and video that you can control on your own manually then good you can this is a great camera to have.
