I recently just got the Nikon D3300. This is my first DSLR camera that I bought to film short movies, reviews, and photography.

The first thing I did when I received the camera is charge the battery, which took about 1-2 hours. After charging the battery I put it in the battery slot, which is located on the bottom of the camera. After that I turned on the camera using the ON/OFF switch located on top of the camera around the capture photo button. After turning it on you are greeted to a tedious settings screen asking lots of questions, it’s just a huge waste of time in my opinion. After getting through that, I was greeted by a menu screen which I simply bypassed by moving the dial which has many options (18 to be exact). This dial can be explained by a simple YouTube search.

After that I was frustrated because I could not find out how to record videos, I kept holding down the big silver button (the picture button) thinking it would record but that didn’t work. It turns out that the record button is a whole different button located right next to the silver button.  After that I was greated to a super unfocused screen I didn’t know how to manual focus the camera. It took me a while until I found the M›A switch on the camera lens itself. After that I pushed the i button and changed the auto focus to single servo focus and face which is the best for recording faces.

After I was done with that, I put the SD card in computer (if you don’t have a SD card slot in computer get a SD to USB converter). I edited the following clip using iMovie and this is what came out as the final product.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSjOrIvfM7Y

I enjoyed this camera a lot and I recommend it.

Editor’s Note: The Nikon D3300 is the primary camera that is used to film our tech videos on YouTube.com/TechInformUS. If you’d like to see more video from the camera, check out any of the videos that we’ve posted there.