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Canon 7D Mark II Menus: Shoot

Lesson 14 from: Canon 7D Mark II Fast Start

John Greengo

Canon 7D Mark II Menus: Shoot

Lesson 14 from: Canon 7D Mark II Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

14. Canon 7D Mark II Menus: Shoot

Lesson Info

Canon 7D Mark II Menus: Shoot

Okay, time to dive into the menu. Everybody just take a stretch. I need to stretch here because this is this is gonna be a long ride, folks, we're going to be in the car for a bit on this one. We're going to be going through the menu and there's a lot of things in the menu is we go through here just keep in mind that you don't need to know everything in the menu. I kind of divide things up into three different categories. The first category are things that I don't need to worry about, things that just don't concern anything that you do in photography and there's going to be plenty of those there's going to be another group of things that were going to encounter that you're going to go low, let slip it here, let's, flip it here, let's, make an adjustment and then you're done with it, and we can get those as we go through the menu system and then there's a third category where these air items that we're going to want to come back to and there's going to be a great way to come back to the...

se things in a very easy manner. So let's, take a look at our menu system because it is broken into different parts. We have different tabs on our menu, so first off we're gonna hit the menu and then we're going to see all these different tamps that are going to break up all the menu items into pretty logical category shooting auto focus playback menu custom and there is also a special one for the movie mode that we will also be talking about and having built this class or classes like this for a variety of different cameras, I can honestly say that this is one of the best menu systems out there granted, we have I don't know it's something in the range of one hundred twenty five items in here you got to organize them, you've got a list um, you gotta put him someplace and they do a better job than I think anybody else does of organizing them. So one of the things that's cool about this menu is my menu where you get to save many of your favorites. Now on past canon cameras you got to save I think six or seven items of your favorite six or seven items that you would normally go to in the menu isn't canniness and added added a new feature this and they now have my menu taps so you can have an entire tab full of information of things that you want to get teo and so we'll talk more about this as we get into my menu, but it's no longer limited to six or seven, you can now have words of turned member how many I think about twenty different items on all of your different taps? I think actually even more than that, but you can have many, many different tabs organized in grouped as you wish, so let's get into this a little bit now as faras navigating around these tabs if you want a page from the left to the right, you will use the top dial of the camera, so go give that a try and then if you use the back dial that's gonna allow you to go up and down on the individual items in that particular menu and if you're in the shooting mode and you say you know what I quickly want to get to the set up mode, you don't have to turn that top dial to the right a dozen times. What you can do is hit the cue button and it will automatically jump you from one tab to the next. So between these three dials to dials on a button, you should be able to navigate to anywhere you want in the menu system in a matter of just a few seconds, which is a nice feature to have once you get used to it and learn those buttons and dials now having the control on the top of the camera, the mod ill is very important in except accessing the information on the menu if you have your camera in the eight plus mode which is the scene intelligent mode I told you at the beginning of class there are some child safety locks that are turned on that don't allow you into all the features that you might want to get into so you can only get into a few mode so you're going to want to have your camera in any of them or manual modes and this is everything from program to the custom moans this will allow you full access into those modes and then there is video video has its own separate mode and you have to be in the video mode in order to see that so we will talk about that as we get there now we are going to go through this menu in a very logical orderly fashion so what we're going to do is we're going to start on the left and just work our way top to bottom and left to right so if you want to get into the menu play around with those dials get used to following around and I'm going to be going through making recommendations and explaining what each of these different features air for and how you might want to set it up for different types of photography so first off most importantly great place to have it is image quality and this is where we have the option of shooting raw or j peg images so in this way we get to choose either we're shooting the raw original information from the sensor which is what the serious photographers like or we're getting a compressed, simplified jpeg image which is smaller and file size and very easy to transfer anyone who shoots really serious photography is probably going to want to shoot raw. However, if you shoot a lot of sports, those raw files really add up in size when you are shooting a thousand photos a day and so a lot of sports photographers will be shooting j pegs in this camera I know that I will in many cases just because I end up with so many files it also allows your camera to shoot and process those images to the memory card a little bit faster so you may need to do some controls some adjustment of the picture controls to get the jay paid looking the way you want it to straight out of the camera so one of the things people have confused me too a little live demo here on this hit my menu button and turn on the menu here get over to the image quality mode dial up to this and so now that I'm in here how do I set this what's going on? Well the top dial sets the ross eddie and I can either set it to do know ross or a regular rock or a medium or a small rock and if I turn the back dial, I can change what size of j peg that I'm shooting so if I want, I can shoot raw and j peg at the same time and you can actually see appear in the line of information raw and j pick and if I said, you know what? I just need a thumbnail j peg, I could shoot a really small j peg let's see what small three small three is super small seven hundred forty pixels by four hundred and eighty pixels and you can see different sized j picks, and now the number in the bracket is how many pictures you're going to get on that memory card so you can see right now I'm going to get eight hundred and fifty eight images and what if I just shoot raw? Now I get a thousand ninety seven what about a medium wrong? Thirteen twenty two, nineteen o three with a small role what if I didn't shoot ron? I only shot j peg. Well, there I met seventy, eight hundred. This is more than ten thousand, and if it could read up to a higher number, it might give us that number. In fact, let me see if it does. If you remember the other way to see how many pictures was info info and down here on the bottom well actually did I change? I didn't keep the changes I think I just looked at the changes but I didn't actually make them so I'm going to set it to s three and I didn't press ok, that was the mistake I made so now I'm gonna press ok? And now I'm gonna press the info button and now it says nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine so it's going to be something greater than that? But I do not want to shoot this camera in small j peg, so I'm gonna go back and set it to raw and no j peg and that's my standard setting that I would normally shoot with. But for a lot of sports photographers, I know you're going to want to shoot jpeg from time to time just because it's going to ease that workflow burden so as we go through this class up on screen, you're going to notice my recommendations my general recommendation for an average user is going to be in gray for more advanced user it'll be in red and this is the same way that I listed on the outline. And so if you have downloaded the pdf that comes with the class, you will have the settings for every different menu setting in here that I think is a good starting point I'll be honest with you folks, this isn't how I set my camera I've wanted to tweak it a little differently than I think some people might want as a good starting position so this is just simply a good starting position you are going to tweak it and adjusted and you're going to totally own it and make it your own and this is just a good place to start so let's continue on into the menu next up we have image review so after you take a picture do you want to see it on the back of the camera? A lot of people like this to confirm that they're getting what they thought they were getting if you press down on the shutter release halfway you will not see this at all and so if I'm shooting sports and I should've burst of pictures and I just wanted to keep shooting all I do is just leave my finger halfway down on the shutter release the beep is the little bb confirmation that you have not the right focus I find this a little disturbing especially when you have a large group of photographers all focusing at the same time also find it could be a little distracting or annoying for subjects that you're shooting so in general I think it's best to turn off a soon as you figure out how your camera focuses and when it focuses and be using the auto focus signals in the viewfinder to figure out if you're in focus or not shutter release without a card it's strange wording, but what this basically means is if you forget to put a memory card in the camera, it won't allow you to take a picture if you turn this off, and so the only people that turn this on, or people who work in camera stores who want to show what this shutter sounds sounds like when they don't have a card in the camera, so safe is to turn it off. Len's aberration correction now, this is a little bit of our first rabbit hole it's, a menu that leads into another menu, and there are three different options we have in here that are controlling lens quality issues, peripheral illumination, chromatic distortion and excuse me, chromatic aberration and distortion so let's, look at these one at a time. Peripheral illumination is a darkening of the corners of vignette ing and some lenses, all lenses that are fast and all lenses will have this to all lenses will have a problem with this to some degree. And so, in this case, it's a pretty heavy vignette ng on the edges. Kanan knows how bad of a netting their lenses have, and they can automatically fix them in camera for you so that you don't have that problem, and this may seem like a great idea until you realize that you actually like vignette ing on some of your photographs whenever I should people photographs I'm often adding a bit of a netting to keep your eyes drawn to the center of the frame or away from the edges of the frame. And so this is something that isn't really easy to choose on and so I tend to want to disable this let the lens do its own thing if I want to brighten up the corners later on I can always do that in some sort of software program next up chromatic aberration chromatic aberration weird words right chromatic means color aberration ghostie okay, so in this image you can see that with this very bright background the colors around the being on this building our color ghosting is going on and so the cameras no how bad of color ghosting or chromatic aberration any particular lens has and can automatically go in and fix it. Now you can also fix it in a variety of photo programs out there. So this is not something that's impossible to do later on but so far I have yet to meet a single photographer that really likes chromatic aberration as faras that's my style I have a lot of images with chromatic aberration cause I like the look on it where some people have a lot of very heavily vignette and images that is mohr of ah a real stylistic choice that some people make, but not so here. Pretty much everyone wants to have this fixed. Well, I'm going to recommend and enable here enabling it. We want it to work next up distortion. Let me flip back and forth between these two photos, and you can see that the earth is a little distorted here. All lenses have some distortion to them. Wide angle lenses typically have a little bit of barrel distortion that you can see in this example, and in general, most people don't like distortion on their lenses unless they purchase a fish islands. That would be a one exception to the rule. And so, most of these things, I want to fix peripheral elimination. I'm going to leave that on disable a ce faras my recommendation, but the other two I will leave on enable now, before we move on, let me go back to the raw on j peg issue and deal with this for a moment. If you shoot raw, these things don't matter. The camera is not going to make any adjustments on your raw image. If you shoot a raw image, the camera takes that original raw information and that's what it keeps. If you shoot a j peg, then it will turn on these features and make that fix in the camera, so even if you plan to only shoot raw this camera I would get it set up the best you can in case you do happen to turn the camera into j pick at least it'll be set up the way that you're supposed to have if you are shooting in raw you can always go in and fix these things later on if you put him in jail peg you can probably fix them but it's always better to have the original information so if you are going to shoot raw not super important to adjust these exactly as you want him but better to have him write than having wrong next up flash control and this right here this one little item could be a whole class unto itself may be it deserves to be so this is a bit of a rabbit hole that goes into another and goes into another and goes into another and it just keeps going and so let's jump into the flash control a little bit so we don't end up in a new menu titled flash control the first item is firing the flash if you wanted to you could disable the flash so that it could not physically fire until you came back here and turn it on so most people I want the option of being able to turn it on and firing next up how does that flash meter and put out its light source the evaluative metering system here, as opposed to the average alternate option, is going to be the general more accurate system in most situations so that's, where most people are going to leave it. When you have your camera in the aperture value mode, how do you want the shutter speed to be set? Do you want to let the camera figure it out, which it usually does a pretty good job? Do you want to set a very specific shutter speed, like one to fiftieth or something else like one sixtieth? You can do it in here if you want, and so, for the basic photographer, auto is going to be perfectly fine. The big question is, is how often do you use aperture priority and use flash? There are some people that are gonna want to be able to set a slower shutter speeds, so you could set a shutter speed, for instance, like one sixtieth of a second. Next up is the built in flash settings, and this is our next rabbit hole that good dives into the next menu, so let's dive into the built in flash settings menu. First up is the flash mode. There are three options on how you can have the built in flash fire. The first is e t t l, too, which is a really complicated, complicated way of saying automatic this is where the camera figures the power of the flash out and figures pretty much everything out for you. Another option would be manual. We'll talk about that in a moment as well as multi flash words firing full of many strobes in the one shutter speed that you were firing. So within here we have shutter sink mode, and this is something that I talked about briefly earlier. The two options we have our first curtain sync and second curtain sink for most types of photography. First curtain sync will be perfectly fine, but for certain types of action photography second curtain sink where it synchronizes the flash in accordance with the second curtain as it's closing, it'll do a better maur, aesthetically pleasing job than the first curtain sake exposure compensation. This is something that we talked about before, where you could power the flash down a little bit from its normal setting, and this is where I like to leave it down by about one stop the wireless function. This enables the camera, with its built in flash to wirelessly communicate with other cannon brand flashes or compatible flashes, and one option is to disable this feature, which is where it's normally going to be left. Another option is to do a power ratio between the built in flash and the external flash. You could have just power the external flash or it could have them both fired completely together, essentially at the same power. And so if you do select these, you're going to get a different symbol in there and that's going to change the whole menu system for you. And now, once you've selected the fact that you're using a wireless flash system, you could choose different channels there's going to be four different channels in case you had four cameras or there was four photographers, all wanting to be doing flash photography in a nearby area, you'll be able to go in and change your flash exposure compensation right from the camera without walking out to the other cameras, and you'll be able to change the power ratio between the built in flash and the ad on flash. So very good for portrait photography, because you're able to make all these subtle power adjustments right in the camera. So if you disable the wireless flash and it's going to kind of kick back out of that and go back into the regular flash mode, and if you go up to the tl and you wanted to change it over to manual flash, you wanted to control the camera, or at least the flash power manually, you could do that, and the manual power will start at one to one full power, and then we can go into half power quarter power on down to one over one hundred twenty eighth power so if you want to just a little bit of flash coming out, you could do that. You can synchronize the shutter here with the first curtain or second curtain samos the topics we talked about before and the wireless function probably going to be disabled here, but you can go in and you can manually control it with other flashes as well. And for photographers who are going to be in a fairly controlled environment, this is going to allow you to make very specific settings on each of your flash unit so that they're firing a consistent amount of power in the t t l system. It keeps adjusting according to how much reflection and what the final photos look like, and so, for the more serious photographer, they're probably going to want to use this manual mode and do some testing. The final option up here is in multi flash, and this is where the camera will fire multiple flashes during one longer shutter speed period of time. First thing that you'll need to do is adjust the power of the flash it's not going to be able to fire at full power multiple times. Very shortly it's just too much power so you have to power the flash down in general the more you powered down, the more flashes you'll be able to get in the faster recycle rate you'll be able to get which is the next option the frequency how many times per second do you want the flash to fire and this all depends on what type of special effects mode that you want to try to put the camera. You can also restrict the flask to onley firing a specific number of flashes you can do it anywhere between one and thirty or an unlimited number of flashes in the camera, but for the most part you should probably just go back up to flash mode and change it back over to its standard uh t t l firing and then you can back out of this and go back up to flash control and we can continue on our way in this menu and one of the options you have his controlling an external cannon flash that's attached to your camera and doing it from the menu system within your camera. Now all of these things could be done on the flash unit itself, but sometimes it's c easier to see in the back of the camera and so you'll be able to go through all of those controls as well as controlling all the custom functions that are in those external flashes and that is just the first page of I don't know how many pages there are here, so shooting menu number two starts off with exposure compensation and this is the exact same dial that we were using in the beginning of the class when we were making our pictures a little bit lighter or a little bit darker. What this adds into the mix is a b stands for auto exposure bracketing so let's talk about bracketing for a moment bracket e is the shooting of several photos where each photo is a slightly different exposure either lighter or darker. Traditionally this has always meant a three stops our excuse me a three siri's of photos one stop lighter normal and then one stop brighter but now we have much more control and we khun ad in five shots we could do seven shots or if we only want to do two shots one normal and one that's a little bit brighter and one that's a little bit darker we can do that as well. We can do this and add exposure compensation and make everything brighter or everything darker in the camera so you have a lot of different options so you can use this with aperture I value time, value or program I think its best work with aperture value this works very good for landscape photography where you have chosen a certain amount of depth of field and there is usually nothing moving in the frame this is very difficult to use bracketing with anything that moves because you obviously have to take several photos and things will move from shot to shot so just works better with static subjects and so aperture value tends to be the best mode for that it's certainly my favorite for doing any sort of bracket siri's and you can control the number of bracketed shots by diving into the custom one exposure bank which we will be doing very shortly so that is exposure, compensation and exposure bracketing all built into the same mode. Next up is our s o speed settings now on the top of our camera we have our s o button, which is where it's going to be the easiest to change our s o speed but here is where we can change the range of the speeds selectable by going in and adjusting what's our top and what's our bottom speed and I generally recommend trying to let those be is why does they khun b I don't like shooting at fifty one thousand I don't think it's very good quality but I don't want to be restricted from going there if I think that I need it for some reason the auto range is very handy for people who want to use the auto eso function where the camera will figure out the for you and so if you said I don't want the camera to shoot at anything over sixty four hundred, you could put sixty, four hundred and is the limit on the high end and that's going to prevent the camera from ever going there now the way that the camera adjust the so is it looks at your shutter speed and tries to determine if that's an appropriate shutter speed given the lens that you have on the camera and if not it's going to send you into a high rise. So so just as a for instance I have a thirty mil it's thirty five millimetre lens in my camp if I was shooting in the programme mode or aperture priority let's just say the programme mode and my shutter speed was a sixteenth of a second that's great I can handle this lands at a sixteenth of a second down at a thirtieth okay that's right on the teetering brink but if I get down to a fifteenth of a second cause it gets darker out the camera's going to want to boost the s o up to handle on tee. Give me a faster shutter speed so I can better handle the camera at a sixteenth of a second rather than a thirtieth of a second and so what this camera does that previous candid cameras have not done is it now gives us an auto option for the shutter speed so that if we stick on a sixty millimeter lands or one hundred twenty millimeter lands for five hundred millimeter lands, the camera consents oh, you've got a longer lens on the camera I'm going to set a faster shutter speed but what we can do we can further tweak it in this menu that you can get you called the minimum shutter speed and you can set it at auto where it just simply looks at the camera's focal length and basically matches that in a shutter speed. For instance, thirty five will give you a thirtieth of a second hundred millimeter lands will give you maybe a hundred twenty fifth or ninety eighth of a second, but in this new option you can manually tweak it to go a little bit slower or a little bit faster then you're given lens and so if you knew that you are really steady and hand holding you might go to the minus side by one or two notches. If you knew that you needed faster shutter speeds in all cases, then what your lens river the focal length of it had on it then you could tweak it up a little bit to the faster side in general I would leave this at zero to start with but it's a nice option for those who do use auto esso to kind of tweak the camera to give you a faster shutter speed or slower center speed, depending on your needs and all of that is buried in the so speed settings. Next up is the auto lightning optimizer, and this is where the camera likes to go in and just the exposure that you shot. Now it's going to keep the same shutter speed, an aperture that the camera has selected for it. But what it does is it takes the image it typically tries to lighten the shadows and tries to hold back the highlights from becoming overexposed. And while this is all well intentioned and so forth, I prefer to just leave this turned off. If I want to make an adjustment to my image, I will do it better than the camera does, because the camera has kind of a standard fixed that it does to it, and I prefer to adjust it according to each individual image. If you shoot raw, it doesn't matter what you said here, it's not going to do anything if you shoot j peg it's going to mess with your images, and you may not be able to correct for it the way you want, teo, because it's already made those changes and baked him in, as we like to say in here, and so this is something that I would generally leave turned off. Next up is our white balance and we did see are white balance before it was up on the top of the camera. But we're gonna have it again here just because we want to have everything here. And so this is also where we can go in and set our custom white balance or said an exact kelvin temperature if there was a specific temperature that you wanted to put in one of the options that I mentioned is thie custom white balance. And this is if you were in a situation that had strange lighting and you wanted to make it correct. So what you do is you photograph a white sheet of paper, and then what you need to do is you need to go here custom white balance in the camera and your camera's going to say, is this the image that you want to calibrate toe white, four words to that effect, and you basically say yes and it's going to figure out what color the light sources so that you can take clean white pictures of white pieces of paper? And so then what you do is you go upto white balance and select custom white balance, so you got to go through a little bit of a step process, too, to get this registered in the camera and then have custom white balance selected on top of that if you wanted to use the standard settings in the camera, for instance, the tungsten or the fluorescent settings and they weren't quite to your liking, you can go in and adjust them by going into the setting here and you can make them more green or blue or amber or magenta, and you can tweak them as much as you need. Teo, I don't recommend doing this unless you really need to do it it's not something that I needed to do generally not going to be important for anyone that shoots raw because you can adjust white balance later on, so we're making our way through this almost through the second page. Next up is color space. This is the range of colors that you are recording. The camera comes dissident set by default to s rgb and this is not the largest color gamut possible. What you want to be able to do is or what you can do is go to adobe rgb, which is a larger color gamut it's also what you get inherently when you are shooting in raw images, so I recommend shooting adobe rgb it's going to give you a wider gamut of colors that will be a benefit if you are ever printing your images or really getting into the details of the making them very large in size, the rgb does not have his many colors and he's gonna limit what you can do with him it is perfectly acceptable for online usage of images so if you're just going to post things to facebook and put him up on your website srg b is going to work fine but I think a lot of us wanna have the largest color gamut possible to shoot with so adobe rgb all right moving on to shooting menu number three so our third tab in the shooting menu picture styles there was a button on the back of the camera that did this but we can also do it in here this is also where we can go in and start customizing are settings and so if you'll notice that the info button allows you to go down and set the details so let's do a little live demo on this one so let me get my menu turned on and navigate my way too our picture style so we're a picture stiles and I'm going to hit the set button and I can choose any one of the motes I want down here but I could go down to the user settings and whips I gotta press the info button for the detail set so I'm gonna press the info button up here and now what I can do is I could come down and say you know what? I want greater sharpness in this image or I don't want it sharpened as much I want to change the contrast, I can have it mohr or less, and I can create essentially what are known as my own profiles. Maybe I want a little bit more saturation on this. I want to adjust the color tone a little bit, so this is something that I can't recommend where you should set your camera. This is personal preferences on how you like your images toe look, but it is something that you can go in and customized let's go back up back out of this by hitting the menu button, and so one of the interesting options is monochrome, so you can go into monochrome let's see, we can also hit info set here we can adjust the sharpness, and in case you're wondering yes, you can have too much sharpness. The camera over sharpening images doesn't necessarily look good. Give it a try, and you'll see what I mean. It adds a little bit of halo around certain objects you've got to be careful about over sharp indeed your images there's a kind of a nice in between setting, which is usually towards the middle. If you want to shoot black and white and have mork contrast the images, you can add that in right here at the camera level, once again, for those of you who are going to shoot raw this isn't really that important it does impact the images that you see on the back of the camera it impacts the j pegs that you kick out of the camera, but for the most part I don't play around in here that much I'm pretty fine just leaving it on us standard setting right in the middle so that it's fairly consistent and easy to work with later on so that's just a little extra on how that works in the camera all right moving on forward next up we have long exposure noise reduction and this is something that we're going to talk about very similar to another one in here so we can disable it weaken let the camera automatically use it if necessary or we can turn it on when you shoot with a shutter speed of longer than one second this is that's considered a long exposure the camera was gonna have a problem with noise this has ah there's a variety of reasons why this happens. One of the reasons is that the sensor heats up and doesn't do real well when it's left active collecting light for a long period of time and in this case high noise is going to be the result of your images and it doesn't look real good so the camera knows that this is a bit of a problem and has a little software fix in hand automatically fix the problem with its built in noise reduction, the handy thing is is that it does a pretty good job automatically. The bad thing is is that if you know what you're doing, you can fix it better than the camera can and so this is going to be kind of one of those two full recommendations for the basic user you could leave it on auto and it's not that big a deal if it doesn't pretty decent job, but the more serious photographer is probably gonna want to turn this off because they're going to want to be able to do this type of control by hand on the picture as it needs it once again this is another image manipulation mode it doesn't matter if you have this set if you're shooting raw images camera is not going to add this to any of the raw images that only does it to the j peg images same thing goes with high esos with higher s o s you're going to get noise as well the basic user is probably just going to leave this on standard and be satisfied with the job the more serious photographer is going to want to turn this off and do it themselves. The raw photographer doesn't have to worry about this because well you're getting the rye image in all these cases highlight tone priority we saw this very briefly when we did the menu section of thie viewfinder and in there there was a d plus it stands for dynamic range this camera has an option for going in and tweaking your image is once again this is for j peg users not for raw users and what it does if you will see the difference between the photo on the left and the photo on the right we have lost the highlights in the photo on the left they've been blown out and so what highlight tone priority does is it holds back the highlights what it isn't doing in reality is it is under exposing all of your images and then it brightens them up so long is not too brighton or over brighton the highlights so this is something that looks like it's a good idea but I don't like it for the main reason is that you can no longer shoot it s o two hundred on the camera excuse me you can no longer shoot it s a one hundred you have to be at s o two hundred on the camera and so it's just kind of playing games behind your back in order to help you get the right exposure once you understand and are able to get good exposures on your own, you're probably not going to need this once again this is something that is not impacted too for those shooting raw images it's on ly for those shooting j peg images dust delete data dust on the sensor is one of the most annoying things on a digital camera. So if your images looked like this, you have a terribly dusty sensor, one of the options you have if you want to use the cannon proprietary software for browsing and looking at your images after you've taken them. What you can do is photograph a white sheet of paper, and that will show you where all the dust iss the cannon software will then be able to map out where all the dust specks are clone over them and eliminate them from the final photograph. And so it is a way of letting the camera automatically clean that up. The problem is, is that you do have to use the cannon software in order to do it. Next up is multiple exposures, and this is the ability to shoot multi multiple images on one piece of film, as they say in digital. This used to be kind of a fun little thing to do with film cameras, where you would shoot several exposures without advancing the film. And then we got away with it in the first years of the digital camera, and then they added back in, and it seemed kind of foolish to have this in a camera because you could do it with much better fine tune control in photo shop with layers but there is a reason and an argument for doing it in the camera, and so in here, there's going to be a multitude of different control settings for how you want to shoot your multiple exposures. The first option is just do you want to enable it or disable it? And one of the options is on function control priority or on continuous shooting, and this kind of depends on if you are planning to shoot one of these shots or to shoot him on a continuous basis when you put it into the continuous shooting, the camera is a little bit gear for continuous multiple exposure shooting of a moving subject and sew it changes some of the parameters that it collects the data and shows it to you so that you can shoot mork quickly if you want to do it most of the time you're going to just turn it on function control priority this gives you functions and control with each a set of double exposures that you are doing now. One of the advantages of doing this in camera versus doing it later is that you're able to utilize the entire frame because you can actually see how images are lining up, so in this case are one space needle wasn't enough, I wanted to add and make more of them, and I was able to very carefully line these up so that they didn't overlap and that is something that would be difficult to do. Just shooting individual images on their own without may be a really good grid screen in there, but it was very handy being able to see that in person as I was shooting the pictures. One of the options is too average or do an additive when it comes to the multiple exposures. If you're going to shoot multiple exposures, you're going to be adding up exposure time and if you don't make any compensation it's just going to keep getting brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter and so that's the additive, the averages where the camera will go in and automatically average things out and adjust the exposure for yourself. So for the beginning, photographer who wants to get into multiple exposures somebody who doesn't have a lot of experience doing it, I would probably recommend average because the camera will just figure out things for you. But for the more serious photographer you're going to probably want teo select additive here, and you're going to want to carefully figure out your exposures because you may want one exposure to be brighter or darker than another, and that gives you the individual fine tune control where you get very specific control of the exposure of it, you'll be able to shoot anywhere from two to nine exposures to create one final frame and one of the options that you can do is to save all of your source images which is really need so that if you mess up and you didn't do it right but you want to take all those individual images and work with it, work with him and photoshopped you could do that as well or you could selected to just give you the result depending on what your needs are so there could be a lot of fun in here it's not something that many people use on this camera and so it's just one of those other areas to let your creativity run amok finally in here we have our hd are remote hdr stands for high dynamic range it is frequently used by landscape photographers who are dealing with issues of bright light and shadowed areas and they're trying to get it all into one shot and so it's been a very popular mode and not saying that everybody likes it but it's been very popular to talk about some people like hdr photography. Some people don't there's a lot of different controls in here like we have in the multiple control do you want to shoot one? Do you want to shoot a serious of these and so adjusting the night dynamic range? We're goingto have disable hdr which is where you would normally leave it it's disabled then we have the option of otto plus one stop plus two and plus three stops then we have different effects that you can choose we have the option of continuous hd yard is this something that you want to just do once or you want to be doing on a continual basis because if you are going to be shooting all day doing this, you don't want to be having to jump back into the menu to turn it on every time you need it. There is also an auto image a line that would be for people who are hand holding their camera. If you're on a tripod, you would probably want to disable this because what it's going to do is you'll see here in a moment is it crops out your image just a little bit? You can also save your original images here, so if you're shooting raw images or j peg, you can save them and let's take a look at some of these rhymes so first off I wanted to shoot a scene that could be could benefit from hdr down here a gasworks park we've got these colored machinery items and some of them are in kind of dark shadows and I want to lighten them up and it's at least bright, cloudy out and so that's kind of at the top end of what we want so this is what a raw photo looks like let's do it in a one e v and you'll notice the difference let me jump back a slide and notice how the camera cropped in because it's in the auto image of line and it thinks that I'm handheld even though I'm not and it wants to crop in and you lose a little bit of your wide angle needs and at one e ve I am not noticing much of any difference if I go to to evey there's a little bit of difference and I'm noticing a bit more at three v so the hdr effect in this camera is very minimal it's very very lightweight in my opinion and so what I did is I went back to my raw image and then I just simply adjusted it the way I would normally in a photo program if I wanted to lighten up the shadows and I was able to do more than the camera did in raw and so I gotta be honest with you, I don't really see the point of raw in camera so all I can say is try it out see if it works for the uses that you have planned for it. My guess is that if you do want to shoot with hdr, you're probably going to want to shoot a bracket siri's and use another program like photo maddox to assemble your images next up is shooting menu number four first off here is red eye reduction this is something I like to leave disabled because it's kind of an annoying lamp that turns on in the front of your camera can be distracting to your subjects. It may help a little bit on red eye, but to be honest with you it's not really powerful so I think you're better off fixing red eye in post uh may take a bit more time to fix an individual I but you'll be able to do a much, much better job of it for the first time in a canon camera we have an interval ometer interval timer in this camera this is something that you had to buy the extra remote for the fancy interval ometer to get on a candid camera but now we could do it in camera how do you do it? Put it in here enable it hit the info button and then go in and set the interval between the number of shots and the maximum number of shots and so interval timing will give you a time lapse image and so here's a time lapse I shot this is using a motorized slider and so that's what helping in the movement of it but it was shooting a picture about every twenty seconds in this case and roughly about the same in this case here I am using a panning back feature and this is just basically a ken burns effect or a slight zoom back in post so I captured the higher resolution image and then it just simply zooming back in the image as it plays out. So those are a couple examples of an interval timer in use very handy great great way of showing motion and change in many different locations next up is the bulb timer you recall that on the top of the camera you have a be setting for bulb you can either use the cable release or you can come in here and you could set shutter speeds ranging from one second two I believe up to ninety nine hours although I think it would be very foolish to do a ninety nine hour exposure it's not going to be good on the sensor probably most of your bulb exposures are going to be between one and fifteen minutes for the most part okay, we're going to talk about flicker again anti flicker shooting so before we saw in our view finder and option for a warning when we were getting flicker and it was simply a warning you get the warning, you don't do anything about it, you're still going to get a flicker which is going to be slightly adjusting the exposure of your images if you do want to enable this, this is where you need to do it, you need to come into your cave your menu and enable this now the reason that I do not recommend enabling it to start with is that it well, slightly slow down the shooting process because it's waiting for the peak of these lights in their interval, it's going to slow down that ten frames a second to maybe nine or maybe eight? I haven't tested it, but it it's going to slow it down just a little bit and it's going to delay the timing of the shot a tiny bit, and if you don't need it, you shouldn't turn it on. If you need it, you should turn it on it's pretty clear, and so that's. Why I prefer to have the flicker turned on in the viewfinder as a warning toe, let me know when I need to come here and turn it on. Next up is mere lockup, so let me go into a special explanation of why you need mere lock up. So in an slr, the lit the lens, the mirror needs to get out of the way so that light can get through the lands to the sensor because when that mere goes up, it causes a vibration in the camera that causes the camera to move right when you are trying to take a photo, and that doesn't work out well, because that means you're gonna have a blurry image because your camera's moving so this is going to be a problem usually when you're on a tripod at a kind of slow shutter speed if you put the camera in the mirror lockup mode and ideally you would be using a cable release he would lock the mirror up with the first press of the shutter button. You would then let the mere go up it's going to cause the same vibrations it would always cause let those vibrations settle out and then you press the shutter release a second time to take the picture while the camera is perfectly still on without any movement going on and so it's a very good technique for landscape product photography, architectural photography, anything where the camera is on a tripod. This is not a problem with the camera held hell handheld in most any situation as an example I was down in yosemite shooting this photo of a tree and I examined the results very closely on the back of the camera and I thought to myself, my lens does not seem very sharp something's going wrong here and then I put my camera in the mere lockup mode and got the second shot and you can see how much sharpness difference you get with mere lockup off and on now the place that you need to be worried about this is in and around one eighth of a second I call this the vibration zone you don't need to worry about it at one hundred twenty fifth of a second it's far too fast it's not gonna be a problem, you don't need it at slower shutter speeds either anything below about two seconds it's just not necessary. All right let's jump into the next menu which is all about live you functions and so are live you features in here first off if you don't like live you, you accidentally hit the button and you go into live you you don't like to be able to do that, you can disable it, most people are going to find it useful, so you're going to probably want to leave this turned on next up when the camera is in the live you mode, we talked about the different three different focusing systems that the camera can use, we have faced tracking and we have two different boxes, either a big box or a small box. I'm recommending flexi zone a f the smaller of the boxes. This gives you more discreet control over what the camera is focusing on, but there are good reasons for any of the other modes as well test amount see how they work for what you do continuous autofocus is where the camera will continuously auto focus when it's in live you mo now this is a great way to where your battery down this's not what I would recommend in most situations it does not do a good job at following fast moving action, so this would be a terrible way of focusing on sports. Photography is trying to put your camera in live you and so sports photography and live you might be good for getting an unusual point of view for one shot here or there, but it's not good for getting a continuous series of pictures because the continuous auto focusing it's not that it's not accurate it's just not fast it's not nearly as fast as the standard system in the camera. If you want to have a grid displayed on the back of the camera, you can sometimes this helps out, as I mentioned before, for composition reasons or for architectural or leveling the horizon there's a multitude of different types of grid patterns that you could put on there and it's just simply what's shown to you on the back of the camera and you'll see this option again in a few different areas in the camera. This one is in live you you can change the aspect ratio that you're shooting it now the camera's sensor is three by two in its aspect ratio and most people want to capture everything that their sensor has to offer. You can, however, capture an image in a different aspect ratio if you know that you needed at that size at a later date and you want to compose it in camera in that way and this camera will actually mask off the other areas so that you can see exactly what that final photograph will look like. But for the vast majority of us it's going to be a three by two exposure simulation, this is where the camera is going to simulate the final exposure in the back of the camera, and I find this very helpful in getting the right exposure. The person who wants to disable this is the studio photographer who is hooking their cameras up to strobes or flash equipment. This does not work well if you were adding flash because simulating what the exposure is is not easy to do when the exposure is different when the flash is actually firing, so for the average user enabled is good, but he do a lot of flash or studio work. Then you would want to disable this and were quickly on to the next and final tab in the shooting menu. Silent, live view shooting. So when you have the camera in live, you no and you take a picture, the mere is already up and it's ready to start shooting a picture, and so one of the options is mode one and mode to, which uses an electronic first shuter kurt the advantage of having elektronik first shut our curtain is that there is no movement and your camera is perfectly still. So there are some people who do very high magnification photography, whether it's astronomy type work or macro photography work where they don't want any vibrations in the camera at all. And this is one way of getting a camera that is, has virtually no movement at all in it at all. The only movement that's happening at that point is the aperture closing down. If the aperture is that something less than maximum aperture, the downside to mode one into is that the flash will not trigger. So if you are doing studio photography or working with flash in any way, you do not. I want mode one in mo too. But for most people, I think mode one is going to be a natural good moto have. If you are working in a studio, you'd probably want to disable this particular mode. Metering timer. Pretty simple. How long do you want the cameras? Mita ring system to stay on. The longer you leave it on, the less battery life you'll get. But it's more convenience. Eight seconds is a pretty good tradeoff for most of us.

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Bonus Materials with Purchase

Fast Start Guide

Ratings and Reviews

Kanoelani Patenaude
 

I am a pro photographer in my dreams, where I know the in's and out's of my camera; however, reality proved differently, as real life would tell you, I was a deer caught in headlights just looking at my new 7D Mark II. I am a photographer enthusiast without the skills, but a lot of love for the moments one, or the profession/hobby of it can capture. I mostly shoot my husband, friends, and community surfers in the lineup, and of course, my children, who rarely sit still. Thus, I switched from Nikon to Canon, venturing on the 7D Mark II for the grand reviews of how stellar of camera it is for action shots (surfing, and kids, this was a no brainer). That said, and overwhelmed with the way beyond my skill set, but noted desire and aspiration to grow, I made the purchase, and sought help rather quickly as I wanted to feel confident with what I was utilizing to capture the best memories possible. I came into this CL course knowing the "on/off" button, and "auto" shoot mode. I came out of the course feeling like the pro in my dreams, and ready to shoot manual. John's teaching style is on point, and his detailed visuals are a huge plus. So impressed, I purchased, John's photography starter kit, and was even more blown away. My first shots post that course, I thought were great for my first educated shoot, and shockingly, I even received and email from one of the sponsors of the surfers I captured, asking if they could use my image for their sites and publications. Not bad for a newbie. Though, my intent was never a business purpose, I did not know if I should charge a small fee, or give it for free. I don't mind free as it's not my business, yet I don't want to ruin it for any photographers in town doing the same thing that are charging. Perhaps another course to help me with that. I highly recommend courses by John Greengo! Thank you so much, John!

user-cfdd6e
 

I bought my 7D Mkii the week it was introduced as an upgrade to my old 20D. I immediately noticed what a huge step up it was and to be honest was a little overwhelmed by all of the options and customisations available. In the year I've owned it I've managed to pick up a lot but I still felt there was a lot in there that I wasn't making the best use of. John's course has filled in the missing pieces and I now feel a lot more confident that I will be able to get the best out of this amazing camera.

J.R. Link
 

John's coverage of the Canon 7D Mod II was excellent. It helped immensely in understanding the myriad of choices available in this camera. I would recommend this course to any user of the 7D Mod II. camera. The only comment I would make is that it might be helpful if John didn't assume that we all are sports photographers. Some hints for other types of photographers would be a great addition to an already excellent course.

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