Toggle Your Nikon Z9, Z8 Shooting Settings with a Button

There’s a trivial-sounding feature that can be accessed only through assigning a custom control called “Recall Shooting Functions”. This feature is available on only a few Nikon ‘pro’ models, beginning with the D5. This is in fact a major and wonderful feature. In this article, we’ll explore just what you can do with this capability.

Recall shooting functions feature

On many ‘amateur’ Nikon bodies such as the D7000 series, they provide a dial with user settings called “U1” and “U2”. With these settings, you can switch most of the camera shooting configurations by merely rotating the dial. This makes it trivial and fast to switch between things like manual landscape settings and automatic sports shooting. This is an awesome feature that I love.

On the top-end Nikon pro bodies, they instead have provided the tedious ‘settings’ banks, which are then sub-divided between “photo shooting menu banks” and “extended photo menu banks”. I have always hated this scheme, but have had to live with it.

“Recall Shooting Functions” has changed that. Now, you can merely assign a button that you press to toggle between two independent sets of shooting features. If anything, this is even better than having to rotate a dial to use the “U1” and “U2” shooting setups. Your eye doesn’t need to leave the viewfinder to switch between two camera shooting identities, as long as your finger can find the assigned button.

A word of caution, though. There are many actions that will ‘cancel’ the recall feature, such as cycling camera power. If this happens, then just press the “Recall Shooting Functions” assigned button again to re-activate the settings.

First, let me explain how to configure this feature.

Locate the ‘Controls’ menu

F2 Custom controls (shooting) menu

Pick a button to assign the feature (video record button)

Select the “Recall shooting functions (hold)” option

Pick the options to save (screen 1)

Pick the options to save (screen 2)

Pick the options to save (screen 3)

Note that there are many functions that you have the option of saving for recall, such as the White balance and AF subject detection options. In my own selections, I decided to not save the White balance (no checked box) and I did decide to save the AF subject detection options (checked box).

For convenience, you can just select “Save current settings” to save all of the present camera settings for each menu option at once.

Sample setting: AF subject detection options

Since I did decide to save the AF subject detection options, I pressed the right-arrow and was presented with the screen shown above to select which option I wanted to save (Auto).

The “Video Record” button

As shown above, I decided to use the Video Record button for assignment, because it’s easy for my finger to locate it while looking through the viewfinder, and it doesn’t affect video recording, since this Recall feature is only used while shooting stills.

Sample shooting setup BEFORE pressing button

Shown above is the shooting screen before pressing the assigned Video Record button. This screen shows that I am in “people detection” subject detect mode and 5 fps, for instance.

Sample shooting setup after pressing button

Note above that after pressing the assigned Video Record button, I got switched into Recall Shooting Functions mode. The subject detect mode is now “Auto” instead of “People”, and single-frame shooting is selected instead of 5 fps. Also note the icon that indicates that Recall Shooting Functions is active. This icon is displayed in both the rear LCD screen and the viewfinder.

Get used to confirming that the little Recall Shooting Functions icon is displayed, since several camera operations can cancel this mode. This icon gets displayed even when you choose a display mode that doesn’t show any other viewfinder information.

Summary

You can’t save and toggle all camera shooting settings this way, but at least the most important features can be saved.

Try out this feature. I bet you’ll decide that it’s the superior method to swap out shooting functions when you don’t have time for wading through those irritating Shooting Menu banks.