Lessons

Lesson Info

Set Up Menu Page 1 (Wi-Fi)

Next up is the setup menu, and this is gonna control a lot of the basic features of your camera that you're gonna leave setup in one particular way. It's how you like to have the camera set up. There's a few options where we'll come back to on a regular basis. The first option is when you store photos on the card, what memory card do they get stored in? You could have two different memory cards if you want. If you only have one memory card, you could create a folder for your personal work and one for your business work, and then you could select which folder you wanna shoot to and which folder you wanna play back images. That way your two sets of images, which have very different types of photographs do not get intermixed and potentially when you're doing printing or slideshows or showing images to clients or family members for instance. The file numbering system is automated. It starts at 0001, counts up to 10,000 and then resets. If you would like to have it reset automatically on th...

e next time you use the camera you could set it to auto-reset, but normally it's gonna be fine on continuous. As a bit of a tip, I would recommend whatever program you use, it's wise to rename your files once you get them into your computer, because if you shoot with this system long enough you're gonna end up with a lot of pictures with the exact same file name to them. And so that's a good practice in the long-term maintenance of your photographs. For rotating, you can have it rotate in the camera and on the computer, and it's always nice to have it do it on the computer because that way you don't have to flip all your vertical images back to vertical when they're on the computer, but it's not a great thing to flip it on the camera. I like to just use the "on" computer option, because when you shoot verticals it's gonna be able to show you the entire vertical image on the whole LCD screen, so you'll see your image bigger and easier, and I like images that are easier and bigger to see. Formatting the card is something that you should do on a regular basis. Whenever I have downloaded my memory card, I've backed it up and I've got two copies of it, I'm gonna reformat my memory card, put it back in the camera and reformat it then so that when I go out in my next shoot, I have maximum space available on that card, and the card has been cleaned of all of the photos, the file directories and everything else that's on that card has been cleaned up. And that's gonna lengthen the lifespan of that card. I think I've only had maybe one card break or wear out on me in all my years of shooting, and that's because I format on a regular basis. Now, this camera also has another little checkbox here for a low-level format, and that just gets rid of even more stuff, so I usually do a low-level format on a regular basis on my card. And I do that fairly safely, because I do have my images backed up in two copies before I do that on the camera. Alright, wireless communication. So you can have your camera communicate with a smart device, typically a smartphone, and you can use your camera for shooting. You can use your camera for pulling images off of the camera so that you can send those via whatever system that you want from your phone. So let's take a look at the different WiFi settings. We do have a couple of different menus to dive through on the camera in this case, and so first up we have WiFi settings. In here we have the WiFi option, which we can enable or disable. Now, I will admit I am a big fan of WiFi. I love when the cafe or the hotel has WiFi so I can hook up and connect up with the rest of the world. But when it comes to WiFi on the camera, it eats up a lot of battery power, and you gotta be careful about when and where you use it. So most of the time, the WiFi in my cameras is turned off unless I specifically wanna use it. And so that's why I'm recommending disabled. We're gonna actually turn it on and do a little demo here in just a moment, but normally I would leave it on disable. If you have an NFC connection that you use in a certain type device, which is a near field connection, just getting the phone close to the camera will automatically connect the two. You could have that enabled if you have that type of device. You'll probably wanna have the password required so that not just anyone can have access to the photos on your camera. And connection history will show you what you have connected up with on any particular device, and that's just kinda nice to guarantee that you're connecting up to the right device. If you need the address of your camera, there is gonna be the media access control address. Not too many people are gonna need this, but if you do need it, it's in there for you. And so that's the WiFi settings. Now, the WiFi function is how the camera connects up with other devices. And we're not gonna do all of these, but the camera can connect directly up with another camera. You could do a camera-to-camera transfer if you wanted of images. You can go to a smartphone, which is what we're gonna do here in just a moment. You could connect straight up to a computer so long as it's running the EOS Utility software. You could go to particular printers that accept WiFi printing, and you could upload directly to a web service through your computer as well, and I believe that's gonna go to the Canon web service. And so it's a little bit limited on exactly where it's going, so if you wanna upload to a common place like Instagram or Facebook or something like that, you're gonna wanna go through your smartphone to do that. So let's take a look at what it takes to hook this camera up to your smartphone. What I'll do is I'll walk you through the steps that you need to do, and then I'll do a little live demo and see if I can actually make it happen myself. So there is a bunch of things that you need to do, and you need to do some of them on your phone and some of them on the camera. The first thing you need to do on your phone is download the appropriate app from Canon which currently is the Canon Camera Connect app. And make sure you just get that downloaded, have it ready to go on your phone. Then on your camera you're gonna dive into the menu system which is exactly where we are right now in the menu system. Enable the WiFi. Now, there are some things that you only need to do the first time around, and those items I've listed in gray here. You'll need to register a name for your camera, and then you'll need to go into WiFi function and say that you wanna connect up to the phone. You want an easy connection. Then you'll note the password, and you'll say yes I wanna connect. And then you're gonna go over to your phone and you wanna make sure then that your WiFi is turned on and that it's looking at the signal for the T7i. Enter the password and then you can open the camera app and select the camera. And then you're gonna wanna need to go back to the camera to tell the camera that, yes, this is the phone and this is what I wanna hook up on. And then you can go back to your phone. I know, folks, this is a lot of steps. And then you can select the different functions on the camera, so if we can leave that up on the screen, I'm gonna pull out my phone and try my most dangerous demo of the day and hooking my camera up into the WiFi system. So let's first make sure that we've got the WiFi system turned on. So under WiFi settings, we are gonna change this from disable to enable, 'cause I wanna hook up to the WiFi system, and since I did clear out all the settings, I think I'm doing this the way you would do it normally from the first time. I do need to register a nickname, and that's fine. And the camera is saying I wanna call it the EOST7I, which is perfectly fine with me. You can change it to whatever name you want, but I'm gonna see down here where it says menu OK. I'll just the touchscreen on that one, and we're gonna press OK there. And so now we're basically ready with the camera and it's time to go over to the phone, so let's go ahead to my phone. And so what I'm gonna do on my phone here is I'm gonna go in and I've turned off a bunch of stuff 'cause I didn't want to be disturbed on this. So now I'm gonna go into WiFi and I am gonna turn on the WiFi, and I'm looking for the signal from this camera right here. And I do not see it yet. Let's cancel. Let's see. Come on. Turn it off and turn it on. WiFi can be a little bit troublesome. And I'm gonna go in and make sure that this thing is turned on. Register for a device, do not display. Okay, I think I needed to go through that little step there. And so, there is my password, but I do need to get to my WiFi. There it is. T7I-511_Canon. So now I'm gonna select that one, and now I need to enter this password. And so let me type this in real quickly. And this is a password that changes, so if you think you're getting my banking numbers right now this isn't gonna work out very well. And I hit join. And hopefully things will start clicking here. That looked pretty good. That looks pretty good. Let's get a check mark up here. So we've got the right WiFi signal now. So now I'm gonna close out of my settings and I'm gonna go into where my WiFi collection is and Canon Camera Connect is right here. Turn on Bluetooth to allow... Okay, I don't worry about that right now. So this is not really clear right here. It says Canon EOS T7i, and I actually just need to touch and click that. Now I need to go up here and hit OK. Yes, that's what I wanna do. And now I think we have our connection, folks. It's established, so good. I can either view images on the camera or I can do remote live shooting. So a lot of people like to use this for remote live shooting. So now you can see right here what the camera sees. And so what I wanna do is I am gonna go do a self portrait over here and I wanna make sure that I'm standing in the right location, so I'm looking at my phone. And let's see. See, I can clearly see that I am standing outside of the frame, so I can make sure that I'm in the frame over here and I know that I'm looking at the phone so I wanna look up and smile. Hey. Alright, so there is my wonderful photo. And now, if I want to take that photo and do something with it, let's go back in the camera app here, and let's look at images on the camera. So here are images that I've been shooting on the camera. So it's looking at the camera right now. Let's look at this image right here. Pulls in here. We can check. We can see it's nice and sharp. Yup. We're nice and sharp right there. Let's go ahead and download this image, and it is saving this image, going from the camera to the phone right now. And so it's now in my phone, and what I can do here is I'm gonna jump out and I'm gonna go to my photos. And guess what? It's right there. Last image I just took. Now, if I wanna send this off, I can send this off, and I can email it, message it, Facebook, Twitter, all that sort of stuff and do that from here. And so that's the basics on how the WiFi system works. There's more that it can do, and there is more in the Camera Canon Connect, and Canon has updated that software a number of times since they've been offering WiFi on the camera, but it is changing. Now one of the other things I did notice, if you wanna look on the top of the camera. We do have our WiFi signal turned on the camera. I don't know if you can see that. Let me just adjust this around here so that you can see it. You can see that's a glow right now because we have our WiFi signal turned on. I'm gonna grab my phone and see if I can disconnect from my phone and see if that light turns off. I've never experimented with this, but let's just see if I can close out of this program and cancel the Canon Connect, and it looks like it's losing the signal. And I think we're pretty much done. I'm gonna turn off my WiFi on my phone, and you can see it canceled the signal from the camera right there. So that's the basics on what you're gonna do with the WiFi. There are many more things, but I think a lot of people do like the remote shooting. It's really nice when you wanna get your camera in an unusual position and time the shots and see what actually the camera can see. And it's great for downloading images. And if you recall, on the back of the camera, there is a WiFi button on the back of the camera which gives you a direct shortcut access to the WiFi signal, so just by hitting that button, it automatically recognizes that I've already hooked up to my iPhone, and then you could go in and you could connect up a little bit more quickly. So the amount of steps that I went through was kind of a lot of steps, but that's just the first time through. Once you get that set up it's gonna be a little bit quicker and a little bit easier, and the WiFi system and cameras has been getting better and better over the years, and it continues to get better with the Canon lineup of cameras as well. So that is your WiFi remote demo. Survived another one. Whew. Always dangerous once to do. Some cameras and smart devices will hook up with Bluetooth, and so there's gonna be a whole bunch of very similar-looking functions with Bluetooth. One of the options that you do have is you actually have a Bluetooth remote control from Canon, the BR-E1, which sells for about $50. And this is gonna be similar to the infrared remote, but it's using Bluetooth technology rather than infrared technology to communicate with the camera. Some cameras will use Bluetooth, a very low-energy way to communicate. Doesn't have a huge range, so you can't get the camera too far from the phone, but it does work for those of you who do have the Bluetooth options in your devices. And so you'll be able to go in here and go through a lot of the same setups. I'm not gonna go through the full setup again with Bluetooth, but you compare and check and clear and see the address and so forth in all those Bluetooth options. You can just choose to straight send an image to the smartphone and so if you do have that all connected up, it's just a little bit shorter cut. If you're not shooting you just wanna send a particular name over. And then you could, of course, change the name of your camera if you want, if you have multiple cameras by the same name, or multiple versions of the same camera, or you just wanna have a unique name so that you know what to look for. And then if you wanna clear all the settings, you're selling your camera or you just wanna start fresh and you've made some changes and you just wanna clean the slate, you can clear the settings. Which is what I did before I did class, 'cause I wanted to start as if it was a brand new camera.