Having just received my new body - well, camera body, but we live in hope - I find that though it delights me, it also has the capacity to annoy.

My problem with it is the huge AF Outline line which encloses the area wherein lie the different af points. This, I find, is rather intrusive and also partly foils the effectivenes of the grid which can be switched on as an aid to aligning shots: it doesn't show within the AF Outline zone, which seems daft because that central area might well contain verticals that require attention.

My question to the team is this: has anyone found a way to switch the AF Outine line OFF? FWIW I think it should be a switchable function in exactly the same way as is the grid, but I am beginning to fear that it´s a permanent gig!

Any advice on how to solve this - other than to ignore it - would be most welcome.

Rob C

Congratulations, Rob, on your new camera purchase. I haven't used my D700 for a while now. Been busy building a new house. The tiling of laundry, bathroom and kitchen was included in the contract but not the rest of the house (don't like carpets). I'm now busy tiling my concrete slab, so no time for photography. The money I save by doing the job myself will buy a couple of new lenses.

The AF outline on the D700 was never an annoyance to me. It's seems quite unobtrusive. I don't know if there's a way to remove that outline, but it does serve a purpose, at least for me. I use just one AF focus point to avoid accidental misfocus. That single focus point can be moved around the viewfinder, using the 'multi selector' wheel with one's right thumb, but moved only within the area outlined.

Thanks for the response, Ray.

I hope you don't run out of patience before you run out of tiles! I'm doing the shutter varnishing at the moment - need doing every year - and what with the smell of the varnish and the fact that all that stuff was totally neglected last year because of my wife's illness, this current job is awful with the heavy and sticky deposits from the salt air, plus the general dust that flies in to Spain from the Sahara and falls as brown rain. Actually, the cleaning and preparing is worse than the painting on of the varnish itself. Most places here don't have carpets, other than dangerous small ones that slip and slide over the tiles, but we had them fitted because the reality of Med winter is not the reality of the brochures: we can burn three tons of wood in a cold winter and about one-and-a-half during a mild one - and that's apart from the huge electricity bills I generate to survive...

Regarding the af zone outline - I hadn't realised that the single af point could be moved about like that - I'd thought it had to be selected from a menu, would take forever and be relatively useless; as you describe, it could be anything but useless! Thanks for the tip, once I work out how to select such a function without screwing up something else!

Rob C

EDIT: I hadn't realised you were also a Nikon user - thought you were exclusively Canon! Also, I hope you are good at laying tiles: a pretty skiilled job!

I am a Canon guy, Rob, but I couldn't find a satisfactory wide-angle lens for my Canon bodies. The Sigma 15-30 was okay on cropped format, but hopless in the corners of full frame. The Canon 10-22 is plain too soft, despite my getting the best of 3 lenses which I tested in 3 different countries. Wide-angle primes are too inflexible for my style of photography. The Nikkor 14-24 is just right. The D700 is also a substantial upgrade to my 5D. I particularly like the auto-ISO bracketing whereby one can select a shutter speed and aperture and get a series of different exposures to achieve the optimal ETTR; and of course I also like the lower noise and higher DR, compared with my 5D.

I can manage the skill of laying tiles. All one needs is a good sense of perspective . But I never intended doing this work. I got a good quote for the job, but it hadn't been made clear in the verbal quote that it applied to a tile-size limit of 400mm. I've just learned that big tiles are more difficult to lay than small tiles. The labour cost per sq metre rose from $25 to $60 for the 600mm porcelain tile I had chosen after shopping around for the best bargain. Alas! It's a very tedious job. However, after the cost of adhesive and the hiring of a tile cutting machine, I expect to save at least $5,000. The imperfections that I see from the close perspective during the job will never be noticed by others .

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Ray, you've got to keep this thread alive: I've discovered more in a couple of posts than the manual, thick as it is, has tempted me to seek! Well, you'd hardly seek what you didn't know existed, I suppose! The defence rests.

Ciao

Rob C

The Nikon manuals are absurd. They're like reading phone books, except that phone books usually have a special section for important things like police and fire. With their small type and boring layout and impenetrable indexing, I guess they're the reason that some publishers make a living rewriting them. Thom Hogan http://www.bythom.com/ sells e-books that you could download from Spain, and that are really good, if also very long. But, he has lots of examples instead of what is essentially a long list of functions in the Nikon guides. They're worth getting, IMHO. His D700 book is currently being revised into a second edition, and won't be out until mid-October.

Thanks for that tip, John. If it's not too expensive I'll be getting Thom's revised D700 guide in October. Having become accustomed to Canon's arrangement of buttons and functions over a number of years, the D700 causes me a bit of confusion now and again. I'm also a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of buttons and dials on the D700 body. I once counted 30, then did another count and arrived at a figure of 32.

Thanks John - I'll have a think about that. I wonder if it is as simple as the guides being bad: I think there is the added problem that I am not a good learner from the manual format. Show me how to do something and I probably grasp it, but reading about it goes in one eye and out the other, so to speak.

In this case, at least the D700 manual is in English because I bought from London; the D200 manual, on the other hand, is in Spanish because the camera was bought here.

There are some tutorial videos on the Nikon sites - if you can find the right ones - but the opportunity is somewhat wasted in that there isn't enough depth to them. Perhaps they could supply how-to videos with their cameras; ironic, really, how the manuals were almost unnecessary in the days of the film bodies but now you can hardly start without one. Progress, I guess.

Ray - I think the button count is part of the general problem with digital stuff, not only with cameras. It is all designed with a very fresh young mind as user. Was a time I learned about mobile 'phones and how to work them from my grand-daughter; she's now seventeen and starting in university but, believe it or not, she refers to her young sister for current advice - she's fifteen! Hmmm, what chance I?

The answer with these cameras, for me with my mind laden with film baggage, is to learn how to use them as manual cameras as much as possible. As only one of my optics is an af lens anyway, not too difficult to live with!

Rob C