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Top Deck: Flash

Lesson 7 from: Canon T7i Fast Start

John Greengo

Top Deck: Flash

Lesson 7 from: Canon T7i Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

7. Top Deck: Flash

Lesson Info

Top Deck: Flash

We have a hot shoe on the camera as well as a built-in flash. There is a button on the side of the camera for when the camera is in a mode where you would manually pop the flash up. Once the flash is up, the second press of the button would enter into the flash mode, so that you could start changing the flash mode. Let's talk a little bit about some of those flash options. Flash is a great way of illuminating a subject that is relatively close to the camera. So for portrait photography, if you want to add a little bit of fill light to the portrait, then it's a great tool. It's nice to have a little catch light in the eyes. It can be very effective, even on a cloudy day, or excuse me, a sunny day. A sunny day you're gonna end up with a lot of shadows and this built-in flash can fill in those shadows, provided that your subject is not too far away from the camera. The flash has a limited power so they do need to be within about 10 feet or three metres to be highly effective. There are a ...

number of flash modes that you can adjust between, for instance, you can have a red-eye reduction mode. There is a more complicated wireless off-camera multi-strobe system, that we're not gonna get totally into in this class. That's kind of its own class on its own. Fill Flash is where the flash fires even though the camera doesn't think it needs it, you wanna add a little bit of fill to it. Slow-Sync allows you to use a slower shutter speed, so that you can blur the background, or you could see a little bit more ambient light in the background. 2nd Curtain Sync synchronizes the flash firing with the closing or the second shutter. You can get some very interesting results with subjects that are moving quickly, in that regard. Now, whenever you're in the flash mode or you have the flash popped up, you will have a top shutter speed of 1/200th of a second. That is the top sync speed mode on the camera. If you do want to get into the flash controls, we will be talking more about it when we get into the menu section. Shooting menu number two, there is a lot of flash controls for controlling the built-in flash, as well as the off-camera flashes. The built-in flash on this is not real powerful. It has a guide number of 12, which you will see as we introduce these other flashes here, is relatively low. There is a very small 270EX which is a bit more powerful. I don't know that I would recommend it, just 'cause it's not that much more powerful than the built-in flash. The next interesting flash is the 320EX. This one's kind of interesting because it's got a hot light on the front of it for shooting videos. So it's a little bit of a fill light for shooting video as well as the normal strobe light. I think for most people who do a lot of flash photography with this camera, you would probably be most interested in the 430EX III-RT. This is a good intermediate-level flash, it's quite a bit more powerful, you can bounce and is size-appropriate to the camera. If you do want the top of the line flash, that is going to be the 600EX model. This is gonna offer radio triggering and a much more powerful flash, good for repeated flashes. This is something that a professional wedding photographer might use, for instance. On any sort of flash that you add on, one key tool that I like, is the OC-E3 cord which allows you to take the flash off the camera, about 3 feet, but still maintain all the communications so that all of the automatic firing, all the automatic control for power is still happening. You don't need to set-up anything fancy. You just plug it in: you can use it with a bracket, you can use it handheld, for portrait photography or close-up photography. It's a very, very, handy tool. Alright, so I think that covers us on the top side of the camera, except for this one little dot over here, which is our Wi-Fi signal. We're gonna talk about Wi-Fi as we get more into the menu system of the camera, but when we do have the Wi-Fi activated you will see that light activated to let you know that it's on. Normally, I don't like to leave it on 'cause it wastes a lot of battery power, but we'll talk more about that in the second half of the class. And then we do have our focal plane indicator. If you ever needed to know for some technical reasons the distance from your subject to the focal plane, that is where you would measure. Perhaps for some high magnification microphotography or in some sorts of cinema lenses you may need to make that measurement. But most people will never need it, but that's why it's there.

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CanonT7i Recommended Settings
CanonT7i Slides

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