You’re shooting at a family party and suddenly you see a perfect shot of grandpa dancing on the dinner table and grandma standing on the floor behind him with her hand over her mouth. You (being a well-trained photographer) glance down at your camera and realize that the f/4 aperture showing on the Control Panel won’t give you enough depth of field to focus on grandpa and still have a sharp image of grandma, who by this time is tugging at grandpa’s pant leg. With only seconds to spare you turn your Main command dial to the left. The D700 realizes that it is being called upon to leave snapshot mode and give you some control. It throws an asterisk up next to the P on the Control Panel LCD (P*) to let you know it realizes that you are taking over and, since you are turning the dial to the left, it obligingly starts cranking down the aperture. Six clicks to the left and your aperture is now at f/8. As soon as the D700 detected that you were turning the command dial, it started adjusting the shutter speed to match the new aperture. With only milli seconds before grandma starts dragging grandpa off the dinner table, you get the camera to your eye, compose, and press the shutter, and the D700 starts grabbing frames. You get 15 frames off in the three seconds it takes grandma to get grandpa down from the table.

Does that make sense? What you did in my imaginary scenario was invoke Flexible program mode in your D700. How? As soon as you turned the Main command dial, the D700 left normal P mode and switched to P* mode, otherwise known as Flexible program. Before you turned the Main command dial, the D700 was happily controlling both shutter speed and aperture for you. When you turned the dial, the D700 immediately switched to Flexible program mode, put an asterisk after the P on the Control Panel LCD, and let you have control of the aperture while it controlled only the shutter speed. In effect the D700 allowed you to exercise your knowledge of photography very quickly and only assisted you from that point.

When you enter P* (Flexible program) mode you control only the aperture, and the D700 controls the shutter speed. If you turn the Main command dial to the left, the aperture gets smaller. Turn it to the right and the aperture gets larger. Nothing happens if you turn the Sub-command dial. Nikon only gave you control of the aperture in Flexible program mode. Can you see why I say that Flexible program mode acts like A (Aperture priority auto) mode?

The reason I know that the D700 is actually counting clicks is that I decided to count along one day.

Here’s what I did. I set my D700 to P mode and got into a darker area where it was at maximum aperture. I then started cranking the Main command dial to the right, which should increase the aperture. Since I was already at maximum aperture, the D700 could not increase the aperture size, so it just sat there counting clicks instead. In order for me to get back into P mode, and remove the asterisk from the P*, I had to turn back to the left the exact number of clicks I turned to the right (up to 15 clicks). You can also turn the camera off or change modes to get out of the Flexible program mode.