I. Menus and shooting information | Nikon D5100 guide

The MENU button is the obvious way to open the camera menus, at the D5100 the only one. Use the arrow keys and OK button to select menu items.

The zoom out button with a question mark displays help texts for menus when a question mark is visible at the bottom left of the monitor. 

There are two options, but you can have only one of them at a time:

• My Menu is a menu that you can populate with up to 20 of your most frequently accessed menus in any order.
• Recent Settings is a menu that always contains the twenty menus you have used most recently, sorted by the order in which they were last accessed. Hence it is constantly changing.

No matter what you choose, the lowest menu item is always Choose tab to switch between these two options.

I prefer My Menu. Once you get to know the camera, there will only be a small number of menus that you use regularly. It can save a lot of searching and clicking to arrange them here once.

Filling My Menu happens as follows:

• Scroll all the way down, to Add items and select what you need.
• When all your favourite menu items are there, you can use Rank items to move them in order.

The Shooting menu and the custom settings menu have a Reset item at the top. This resets only the respective menu to Nikon's default values. There is no factory reset for all menus on the D5100.

What | Shooting information are

• a set of important camera settings such as aperture, exposure time and more displayed on the monitor, matching what is also displayed on the LCD.
• additional settings that the D5100 displays at the bottom of the monitor, and which you can change there more quickly than via the camera menus.

How | There are three ways to show and hide the shooting information:

The i button on the back | It is the best choice because a second press opens the shooting information for changes and because it works also in live view mode.

The info button on the top | This button switches the shooting information on and off – unless you have your D5100 in live view mode. Then it will change the additional information on the camera monitor.

The setup menu Auto info display automatically displays shooting information when you release the shutter button, provided you don't touch Nikon's preset On there.

What | You can display the shooting information with a graphic illustration of exposure time, aperture and ISO or with plain figures. The information content is identical.

Where | In the setup menu Info display format.

What | The settings displayed at the bottom of the monitor can be changed directly, provided the camera mode allows it. Only in P, S, A, M you can change all of them.

How |

• When the recording information is displayed, press the info key.

One of the settings appears highlighted in yellow.

• Use the arrow keys to the right of the monitor to select a setting, the OK button opens the corresponding camera menu to make changes.

If any of the shooting information is marked yellow, there is a question mark at the bottom left and you can call up a help text by pressing the zoom out button. Some are useful, some only repeat only what you already see.