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Button Layout: Left, Right, Etc

Lesson 5 from: Canon 7D Fast Start

John Greengo

Button Layout: Left, Right, Etc

Lesson 5 from: Canon 7D Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

5. Button Layout: Left, Right, Etc

Next Lesson: EF vs EF-S Lenses

Lesson Info

Button Layout: Left, Right, Etc

It's time to move over to the side of the camera so over on the left side of the camera are some kind of secondary controls and down there at the bottom is that unlabeled little black button which is called the depth of field preview button normally when you look through the viewfinder, the shutter the aperture is wide open so that you get a nice bright view and if you want to stop the lens down without actually taking a picture, you can press that button and here's a little video clip that I will actually play a couple of times so that you can see what's going on let me do this again so you can see the aperture closing down and you can see more depth of field uh with the depth of field that you were going to get in the picture now this used to be a big time professional feature to have on a camera and it's not such a big deal these days because we have a digital camera we can just shoot a picture look at the picture on the back of the screen, but that doesn't work under really bright ...

lights sometimes and so if you're out in bright sunlight and you're trying to really get a preview of what depth of field you're going to get, you can hold that down and you'll hear that little aperture closed down when you do that alright, next let's, go ahead and take a look inside the side panel of the camera. You see there's some little doors rubber doors had opened up and inside are some controls. So first off in here is thie pc synchronization, which is going to allow you to hook your camera to studio strokes. Remember, thie shutter speed that I write recommended was one two hundredth of a second or lower. If you're going to use, uh, strobe strobe units on it, then we have a microphone input. So if you want to hook up microphone for better quality sound for recording video and just a couple of quick microphones that I'd recommend that I think a pretty good sign heizer makes a really nice little m k four hundred sells for about two hundred bucks and road makes another nice one called video mike pro that sells for about two hundred thirty two hundred fifty dollars and he's going to get you much better quality sound than the monaural sound built into the camera. So these are gonna be stereo, so you have delson stereo sound as well as better quality sound. We next have r a v out, which is a little connection so that we can connect up and download to our computers. We have an hdmi port so we can hook our camera to a tv. If we wanted to do a slide show on it or see what our cameras looking at, we can hook up through an hd tv that way. And then finally we have a remote shutter release it's called a type in three it's, a cannon nomenclature thing and there's. A couple of different remote switch is that you can get from canada if you have basic needs, you just want to fire the camera without touching the camera. You should take a look at the rs eighty in three. This sells for about fifty bucks and gives you a nice cable release. Very solid shutter release for taking nature product photography, things like that where your camera's on a tripod. But for those who want a little extra, there is the timer remote control. Tc eighty in three sells for about one hundred fifty bucks, maybe a little bit less, and this is going to allow you a whole bunch of more options. So if you want more than ten seconds to get in the picture, you can give yourself a minute or two minutes. One of the best things that this khun do is set the camera for interval ometer work, and so if you want to take a picture every ten seconds, for a half an hour and then take all those pictures and combine them into one really interesting video. This is the device that you need in order to do that if you haven't seen this time lapse work, it's a lot of fun, go check out there's lots of great videos on youtube, all right, let's, switch sides and go over to the other side of the camera. We're gonna talk about the other side, which there's not much there, where the grip is for the camera, but this is where the memory card goes in the camera and the memory card in this camera uses a compact flash memory card, and when you get these, you're obviously going to be looking at the storage capacity of these cards and they have gotten quite big. You could get up to two hundred fifty six gigabytes, which is going to be in the tens of thousands of little jpeg images, maybe one hundred thousand little j picks, but for if you shoot a lot of video, you'd like having these big cards because you get a lot of anyone. They're one of the things you are also going to want to look at is the card speed, how fast the car it is if you are shooting video, you were generally gonna want to get what's called a u d m a card which is a faster card, it reads and writes the information faster to the car. Now some of the latest generations you deum, et six and beauty and may seven are the fastest cards out on the market, and they're not completely necessary for basic video shooting. But if you want to download your images really quickly, a two hundred fifty six gigabyte card could take quite some time to download the faster that card is in, the faster your card reader is, the faster you can download things, and so with one gigabyte, you're going to get around thirty seven raw images and you could just kind of calculate up how many images you're gonna get from there. So you're gonna shoot about three minutes of video high definition video on every gig that you have in your card cell along with those cards. One of the things that I would recommend, as I said before, is getting a card reader, and so if you have a desktop computer or you have a laptop that doesn't have a cf card device reader on it, which most computers don't, you're gonna want to look at one of these card readers and then there's a number of them out there this is one from lex are and one from sandis that I'm familiar with that I know are very good, these air going to sell for between twenty and forty dollars and it's a nice simple device they work on max they work on pcs they don't require any software you can switch him from one computer to the next they're portable that you could take him with you so they're great systems just to make things easier to work with for downloading next up let's talk about the bottom of the camera not a lot going on down there but there's a few things you should be a way where there is a little rubber gasket that you can pull out and this is something that you would use to hook up either eh? Wireless file transmitter the w f t e s a which is a wireless way for you to transmit images to a nearby computer and that's going to sell for about seven hundred bucks so it's not something that everyone uses but sometimes they use in news organizations in sports where they might mount a camera behind the back board and they want to get those pictures off during the basketball game so they can upload them to the website that's one of the way so you do it and it would plug in through that now the main device that a lot of people hook up with their cameras is the b g seven vertical grip it's the battery grip so if you want a bigger grip on the camera it allows you to shoot vertically so if you do a lot of portrait work let's say you shoot basketball or you shoot weddings where you're constantly shooting a lot of verticals this might be a helpful device for you or if you just have a really big hands it gives you a nice grip on the camera and so that's a nice device to have one of the options you can get for that if you're traveling in places that might be hard to get batteries you can get a double a battery insert for it that's the b g a m e six which sells for about thirty bucks so you can power your camera through double a batteries it doesn't last for long but you can power through doubles which are common all over the world next up the tripod socket on this camera is thie standard sized tripod so it's going to fit all the standard devices uh there is a serial number you're gonna want to record that for insurance purposes the battery compartment of course which is where you're gonna put your battery the cannon l p e six battery cells for about sixty to seventy dollars very good battery highly recommended the camera comes with the travel charger that we talked about they do have a car battery charger if you want to charge it in the car but I'll give you a little cheap hit for all you thrifty people out there you can get an inverter at a basic electronics store that you can plug in any battery charger, too, for probably less money than the car battery turns her on it. Work with multiple devices. If you're working with the camera and studio or in a scientific arena where you want to have constant power to the camera all the time, you don't want to rely on battery, you can actually plug it in using the unit, the k e sex unit, and so that could be useful for some things now, a lot of people don't know this, but there is a hidden battery on this camera. A second hidden battery. Do you all know about the second hidden battery? Well, if you open up your battery release, there is a little tiny time and date battery in there. This is what's coming, keeping track of the time and date when you take your battery out of the camera. And so this battery's gonna last for about five years and only sells for a couple of bucks. And so, after a number of years they use, you're eventually going to need to replace that battery because you're gonna have something that goes wrong with the clock. All right, let's, move around towards the front of the camera. What do we got going on in front of cameras? So, first off, we have the red eye reduction and self timer lamp. So when you go into the self timer mode, it gives you ten seconds, the light's gonna blink it to in the last two seconds. It stays steady if you have your camera flash turned on and the red eye reduction turned on. What happens is this turns on like a flashlight, which, personally, I find very annoyed. Uh, the problem that I also have with it is that it delays your shot by a few minutes. A few minutes, a few seconds. Excuse me? Eso it turns on it, tries to close the pupils I and get less red eye. There are other ways of fixing it later on. And I'll tell you how to turn that off when we get into the menu section. After that, we have the remote control sensor. Remember that little twenty dollar remote, but we can fire it from the front of the camera and that's where it kind of needs to hit. So don't put a piece of tape over that if you're using that wireless remote. In this shot of it you can see the mirror which is that reflex portion bouncing light upward to the focusing screen will have the cpu contacts these air just the contacts that connect up with the contacts on the lens gosh way too start hundreds of questions about one from k k j can custom and you be used for the video too I guess I would like to know what they want to customize about the menu and I I'm gonna be honest I'm not I'm not a hundred percent certain on that one okay yeah I have no I don't shoot a lot of video with my camera but I would imagine yes speaking of the baby asks can you shoot photo and video in the same card or do you have to reformat the card if you want to shoot video on it now you can shoot to the same card and so what happens like in the video that you saw me running out of the car to take pictures? I ended up with one video file and three individual raw pictures had my camera set to rock, so I ended up with four files from that so the camera only takes one memory card some of the newer cameras were taking two, but this one just takes one and it shoots him all on there and you'll see him as either dot jpeg dot c r too which stands for cannon raw version two or it's gonna be a dot movie file uh probably leash from india is wondering order the suitable situations to use the back button focus suitable situations well, one of the things is that I did not use this button to start with and I was kind of forced into using it and it took me a while to really get used to it it works really nice when you are shooting pictures and you want to recompose a photograph because for instance let's just say that I'm going to shoot a picture of russ and I'm going to get my camera set up in single point focus all right? So I'm going to focus on him now let's just say I'm using my front button focusing and I focus on him now he is in perfect focus but I don't want him in the center I want him off to the side so I'm going to put him off to the side and I'm going to think about things and now it's like go back up I've got to go back over to him focus and then come back over and shoot so I have to do this every time and there's a couple of different options I could choose a focusing point on the left or if I know russ is sitting there and I'm sitting here this distances isn't changing I would focus on him now the cameras perfectly focus for where he is and where I am I could come over here and just continue shooting and every time I press the button it's not going to re focus back on youtube on dso for portrait photography I think it's fantastic for sports photography I've turned it off because sometimes things happen really quick and you just grab the camera and sometimes it's kind of hard to press two buttons really quick so in sports photography I will sometimes turn that feature off and go back to this button so that it's always on the same trigger for general photography I kind of like it but I'm I'm a little bit wary of encouraging a newcomer to do it because oftentimes they'll just take a bunch of pictures and they wonder why all these pictures are out of focus oh I forgot to focus and so you really have to be up on things when you're doing it thank you the question from sam cocks and loveland colorado are all focused points equal are some better than others that is a good question I'll be talking a little bit more about that but uh they are all crossed point focus but the one of the better in the middle the very centre his extra good because it's a double cross so it's got a plus and an x which is the way uses to focus all right question from brian and quebec canada do you I need a certain moat a memory card to shoot video and when I shoot video the quality is really scratch and have a lot of noise in it uh scratching this really makes me if it's scratchy sound it could be because they're holding the camera and that microphone is right there and so if that's scratching sound I don't know what scratching video would look like that would be awfully strange but you will generally want a u d m a card it'll say right on the front of it you d m a and that's just a certain type of card and pretty much any card that you find in a camera store these days is going to have that it's the ones from five years ago when one gigabyte was a big card and so pretty much any of the modern cards are fine but we would be wary of very old cards okay? It looks like we've got this uh clicker working again and so let's see where we are our lens release yes so if you want aboutthe lens on an office that big old butt right there you've probably already figured that out and as we were just talking about the microphone is those three little dots right on the front and so be careful about you know, rubbing that and having a lot of hand movement when you're recording video now, this camera takes two different types of lenses. And I have a feeling that we're gonna be talking about lenses after the break. This takes two different types of lenses. F s lenses, which has a white square and e f lenses, which is a red circle.

Class Materials

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Fast Start

Ratings and Reviews

C.Welsh
 

Excellent class. Lots of great info demonstrated in a very easy to follow presentation. John is superb at slides, and little details. Thanks for a great day of learning. I love my 7D even more :)

a Creativelive Student
 

If you already shoot with a Canon that is not a 7D, a lot of it you may already know, but it will help you get to know your way around the 7D's features, such as its autofocus system which, with exception of the more recent 1D MK4/X and 5D MK3, is one of the most advanced in the Canon DSLR range - this means it can take a little while and practice to get used to. The course is probably best suited towards the beginner and possibly intermediate users - and maybe someone coming from another camera brand such as Nikon and Pentax, etc. More advanced users will find it basic, although there is some good information on how to set the camera up, and setting the more advanced custom functions. Conversely, this is not a workshop on basic photography, so a little basic photographic knowledge will help you understand the topics being discussed (but that's not to say that a beginner won't get anything out of it). At the time of writing this review, cL have bundled this course with another of John's courses, "Fundamentals of Digital Photography". So I would recommend you take advantage of this special price if you are starting out.

user-795fef
 

Very useful. Picked up some good tips even though I've had my 7D for around 12months. I feel a lot more confident in using the camera and love the back button focusing set up for when I'm composing images using a tripod. Love John Greengo's relaxed, unassuming style and his openness in sharing his knowledge and experience. GT New Zealand

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