Nikon D300 Complete Manual page 429

is often useful. Even with only one eye looking through
the viewfinder our brain is trying to evaluate the scene
three-dimensionally, which can trick you into seeing or
not seeing subtle issues. Caveat: framing works best when
hooked to a larger HDMI display.
• Check focus adjustments. Rather than take a series of
photos with various AF fine tune adjustments and then
download them to your computer for interpretation, you
can usually "field adjust" focus by iterating changes and
evaluating them immediately via Live View. Caveat: again
you're relying upon a small screen, and you'll be zooming
in a lot to make sure you're seeing enough detail.
The list of useful Live View possibilities is actually quite long.
I'll leave it to you to decide when and how to use Live View.
The key point is that you can get more detailed feedback on
what the sensor will capture before you tell the camera to
take a picture. So ask yourself this question: what do I need to
know better before I snap my photo? Your answer to that
question is likely the thing you'll use Live View for.
You'll note that I didn't put "Check exposure" in my list of
primary advantages. That's because Nikon left out a key
element that would help you do that: histograms. That's right;
on the D300 you can't see a histogram while in Live View
mode (you can on the D3). Nikon says that's because the
D300 doesn't have enough computational horsepower to do
so in real time (which implies that the D3 has a faster CPU or
more bus bandwidth internally). The problem, then, becomes
the fact that the color LCD isn't calibrated. It's very easy to
have it set wrong (indeed, the default setting is too bright),
thus impairing your interpretation of "correct" exposure. So
the one thing that I'd caution against doing is relying upon
Live View to pre-evaluate exposure. You're better off just
taking a sample shot, looking at the RGB histogram for it, then
deleting that shot after tweaking your exposure for the final
shot(s).
To use Live View you must set three things:
Thom Hogan's Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
V1.02
Page 429