V1.02
Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
Page 579
Dynamic AF area
Holding
the
Fn
button and turning the
Rear Command dial sets the Dynamic
Autofocus area size
None
Holding the
Fn
button and turning the
Command dials does nothing (but
pressing the button by itself may do
something)
Recommendations:
1. Welcome to the crazy mother lode. If there’s any Custom
Setting options you want to spend some time studying,
this one and the next two are the ones. This is a bit like
having programmable function keys on your computer
keyboard: each of us will approach these three options
differently, but we’ll all find it useful. I’ll only touch on a
few of the possibilities.
2. First, don’t change from the default without understanding
what you’re giving up. Because the D300 no longer has a
button dedicated to bracketing, they’ve wisely assigned
bracketing as the default for the
Fn
button. If you set
something other than the default, you need to set one of
the other buttons so that you can still bracket!
3. The
FV lock
option is interesting because the preflash
occurs before the mirror goes up on the D300. There’s just
enough of a pause between the preflash and main flash
that you might get “blinkers” (people blinking in reaction
to the pre-flash). If you do, this is the solution: press the
Fn
button to get a flash reading and then shoot away; the
camera won’t preflash again until you press the
Fn
button
again to restore normal preflash. (Note: the flash has to be
in a TTL mode for this to work; other flash modes don’t
preflash!)
4. I tend to use matrix metering most of the time, but every
now and then I find myself in situations where I want to
check areas of a scene with the spot meter. Now I can do
just that without changing the Metering Method dial on
the back of the camera (where I might accidentally leave
it in a wrong position). By setting
Spot metering
for the
