Working with menu navigation and factory defaults

There are a lot of settings on your camera, and if you've been shooting with it or just fiddling around with it, there's no telling how it might be configured right now. To make sure that your camera matches mine, we're going to now reset it to the factory defaults. This feature can be a handy thing to do if you ever sell your camera. I suppose you could also do it if you just get the camera so messed up that you can't figure out why it's doing a particular thing, but at that point I would encourage you to really try to figure out why it's doing what it's doing so that you can understand it better. Think of reset as kind of a nuclear option.

Note that when we do this reset we are not going to end up resetting the clock. Your D800 is blistering with controls, yet still, there are some features that you can only get to by accessing the camera's menu system. You get to the menus in your camera by pressing the menu button. The menus on the D800 are divided into categories, and you can see those categories over here. Each category's title is up at the top. So here you can see that I am in the Playback menu and these are the items in the Playback menu. There is actually a scrollbar over here, so I can see that there are more items that I'm seeing on this one page.

I can navigate the menu items using the multicontroller, and go up and down here. If I go to the left, it will take me back to my categories so that I can go to a different category of menu, and then hit the right button to get into that category. If I want to access a particular menu item, I can just come down here and hit the right button again and that takes me into the items that are accessible from that menu. When I want to accept an item, I can either press the center button here or press the OK button. Those two things are the same.

I can navigate back up a level at any time by pressing the menu button. So in that case, I didn't actually make a change because I never hit the OK. Half-pressing the shutter button will get me out of the menu system, and that happens almost instantly, so you never have to worry about being in the menus and not being able to get a shot if you need to. If something comes in front of you that you need to shoot real quickly, you can just half-press the shutter button and you're back into shooting. There are a lot of options and parameters that you can set on the camera. So if you've been fiddling with it at all, we're ready to switch it back to the factory defaults.

On the D800 you do that by pressing two buttons on the outside of the camera simultaneously, and they're keyed to each other with this green dot. So if I press the Quality button here, which has a green dot, and the Exposure Compensation button, which has a green dot, and hold them both down, that's going to give me a factory reset. The way that I know that it's happened is that my status display is going to flash. So watch what happens as I press these two things down. Blink, okay, and there is my factory reset. I would recommend doing that right now. You've just seen me do it on my camera.

If you do it on yours then we'll know that our cameras are in sync with each other, and you'll have an easier time following along. If you'd like to know what those factory default settings are, you can find a list of them starting on page 193 of your D800 manual.