Nikon D60 use of Display to take pictures rather than view finder

Hey there,

The circular thumb pad on the back will set the display to single or multiple, or with histogram. Just press the upper edge or lower edge of the circular button to find the one you want.

Press up/down on the multiselector to cycle through the available views of your picture.

The D60 won't save pictures anywhere other than the memory card. If you can playback your pictures by pressing the playback button (marked with a right-pointing triangle), then they are saved on the card.

The display on the back is for the menus, reviewing pictures already taken, and shooting information. The D60 works as SLRs have worked for half a century: you use the viewfinder to compose your picture. The LiveView feature is a recent development in digital SLRs. Nikon introduced it into their cameras with the D3 and D300. The D60 is designed as an introductory model and lacks this feature. Sorry if that wasn't the answer you wanted to see, but there it is.

The D60 works as SLRs have worked for half a century, using the viewfinder to compose photos. Only recent dSLRs provide the Live View capability, allowing you to use the monitor for that purpose. Nikon introduced this feature with the D3 and the D300. Currently, the least-expensive Nikon with this feature is the D5000.

What you're describing is a feature called "live view" (or more accurately "live preview"). It enables the user to treat the LCD like a viewfinder to compose shots just like on any digital compact camera.

Although many newer digital SLR's now have live view, the D60 does not so you cannot achieve what you want. All that the LCD is for is to view photos already taken and to provide camera menus and information in all other modes. Composing the images before pressing the shutter is done solely via the optical viewfinder.

That's normal for the D60. It works the same way SLRs have worked for half a century: you view and compose through the optical viewfinder, then snap the picture. The D60 lacks the Live View feature of more recent dSLRs; the LCD (not LED) display on the back is for menus, settings, and reviewing pictures after you've taken them. It is not for composing and framing your pictures.

I don't believe there is. Nikon call it Live View in other models, but its not mentioned in the D40 user manual.....

here's the full manual, if you'd like it.
http://safemanuals.com/user-guide-instructions-owner-manual/NIKON/D40-_E

The D60 does not have a Live View capability. The monitor is used for shooting info, menus, and image reviews. It cannot be used to display the image while shooting. You must use the viewfinder for that, unless you connect the camera to a computer using the Camera Control Pro software from Nikon.

It's normal.

The Nikon dSLRs have various LCD display modes, and one of them is called "highlight clipping warning display". Basically, when you set your LCD display to "highlight clipping warning display"(it's the mode right before the "histogram display"), it blinks white/black wherever your picture has blown highlights (i.e. where your picture is overexposed)

A histogram display is very helpful in telling whether you've got the exposure right, but to it isn't adequate by itself. With digital cameras, it's very important not to blow-out the highlights in a picture (they're similar to color positive film in that respect), since once you hit the maximum brightness, the image just saturates, and any highlight detail will be lost. A histogram display does a pretty good job of telling you how the image as a whole is doing, but what if there are just a few critical areas that you're worried about for the highlights? If only a small percentage of the total frame is involved, it won't account for many pixels. That means any peak at the "white" end of the histogram graph would be pretty small, and easy to miss (or just plain invisible). What to do? The folks at Nikon recognized this problem some time ago, and so have provided another special display mode on the D60 (as on most of their dSLRs) that they simply call "highlights," accessible via the Playback settings menu, under "Display Mode." This mode blinks any highlights that are saturated in any of the color channels. It does this by taking the nearly-white areas on the LCD and toggling them between white and black.

You don't. The D60 doesn't have a Live View capability.