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Button Layout: Top Deck

Lesson 3 from: Canon 7D Fast Start

John Greengo

Button Layout: Top Deck

Lesson 3 from: Canon 7D Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

3. Button Layout: Top Deck

Next Lesson: Button Layout: Back

Lesson Info

Button Layout: Top Deck

We're going to do is we're just basically going to go around the entire camera and talk about everything that's on it, so to start with, we're going to start right on the very top of the camera. Uh, canada has repositioned the on off switch, so when you stick it on, uh when you turn your camera on one of the things that's going on it's, the camera is automatically doing a sensor cleaning in the camera. It's got a pco electric element that ultrasonic lee shakes dust off the sensor because one of the big problems on the early digital cameras was little bits of dust getting in whether that's from changing the lens or actually from internal components within the camera, it will occasionally come off and get sucked back in and get up on the the sensor and dust on the sensors of specific problem, and I do have a slide on how to clean that as well. But it's got a good automatic censor cleaner, and I found it's very seldom that that any dust results on that sensor uh, when you turn it on and o...

ff and so it's a very good system. Next up we have the mod dial. Now this is the biggest, most important dial button on the top your camera and this is really about setting shutter speeds and apertures and how you were going to be using your camera so let's, go ahead and take a closer look at all the different options on this model because knowing what they are is really important because you're probably just going to pick a couple of these to work with. First up, we have the full auto mode, and in the full auto mode, the camera is going to pick out shutter speeds and apertures and it's going to do a whole bunch of other stuff that you may not want if you were gonna hand your camera to your friend or your uncle or someone like that, who doesn't know howto work your camera, this would be a safe mode to put it in because they're not going to be able to dive into certain menus and make changes on your camera that you may have made. But for any serious photographer, I think it's a shame when somebody has a camera of this level and they haven't in the green autozone, you know, it's had this super high performance car, and they haven't, you know, in automatic, they never they never go faster than forty miles an hour in it, and so I don't recommend this mode. There are just too many child safety locks on the other features of the camera, and one thing that's, just really annoying to me is that the the flash is constantly popping up when you want to take a picture, and so I hate that, so I would avoid that at all costs. Next step is a mode called c a this is for taking pictures in california. Just kidding. Uh, cia mode is thie creative auto mode, where it's, a very automatic mode that allows you to get in and creatively make some minor adjustments. This is for people who have not taken this class and want to try to learn how to use the camera. I would say generally avoid it, there's a lot more that you can do once you get into some of the other mountains. Next up, we have the programme mode p stands for program, which means the camera's gonna control shutter speeds and apertures just like the full auto mode. But now you start to have some control yourself. So if you put your camera into the p mode, the first major change that you could do is by using the main dial, which is up on the top of the camera by the shutter release. You can change your shutter speeds and apertures in unison. Your camera is kind of working both of them together to make him balance out the correct amount of light, so if you're walking around on vacation and you see a picture you want to take and you have it in the p mode you can just put the camera to your I press the shutter release and you're going to get a reasonable shutter speed an aperture now if you decide at that very moment oh this is something that's happening pretty quickly I would like a faster shutter speed you can basically just flip that dial a little bit in one direction and you kind of have to play back and forth esta which direction it goes and you could get a faster shutter speed if for some reason you said oh I would for more depth of field you could just turn it the other direction and this is one of those things where you might want to take a photography class if this isn't making sense we don't have time to go into that here that's like a whole other half our segment on shutter speeds apertures in depth field and so forth but as long as you know what you're doing there this is a quick and easy mode to go to use that with now the problem with this mode is that if I am taking a portrait of somebody say I pulled somebody side I'm going to get their portrait and I have gone to shallow depth of field and I'm shooting pictures and I put the camera down for a moment while I re adjust something and then I pick the camera back up again the camera's going to reset back to us default setting and this is kind of irritating anyone who has something specific that they're wanting to dio, and so the programme mode works good for quick shots that you're going from shot to shot, where they're all different, but when you're engaged in a specific activity, you're going to get tired of resetting your camera, and so I wouldn't recommend it for more serious photography. But it's, good for a quick and easy photography now, while you were also in the program meld, your camera has a very cool dials on the back of the camera that we have yet to introduce, but it's the big dial on the back of the camera, and this allows you to change the exposure? No, as I said before, the cameras figuring out shutter speeds in apertures and it's, figuring out the amount of light when it's doing those calculations. And so let me show you some pictures that provide a little visual example of why you might want ah, brighter picture or a darker picture. Sometimes when you take a picture over a very contrast, he seen you thinking, well, maybe it should be a little lighter, or maybe it should be darker, or maybe there's something you're going to be doing with the group of images that you want, all three of them together. So by dialing the back of the camera, you could go to the plus too make it brighter you could go to the minus side to make it darker and you can go much further than one step you could go up to three steps in either direction and so while you're in the p mode, you have a lot of control lt's with those two dials that are very close to your fingers right there. And so the programme mode is a nice quick easy mode for that now the exposure level indicator that you will see in the viewfinder if you hold it up to your eye, you can adjust that thumb wheel on the back and you can see that indicator go from the middle up to the plus side if you want it brighter, we're down to the minus side, you know, if you wanted something a little bit darker, you could do minus two thirds, but normally you're gonna want to leave that indicator there in the middle and every once in a while somebody who doesn't know what they're doing with their camera will leave it off to one side and all their pictures or too light or too dark and that's what's going on now you can also see that indicator in the top of your camera as well as you can in your viewfinder and so just kind of make sure that's zeroed out most of the time that's not where all your pictures should be but it's a good, safe starting point. All right, next up, tv. Not for taking pictures of the television. It is time value. This is where you get to have control over the shutter speed. And so now the main control dial up on the top of your camera is in specific control over your shutter speed. Now the back dial remains operating the exposure compensation so you, khun, make your pictures lighter or darker on the back of the camera or you could've just shutter speeds on the top of your camera and it's an effective mode but it's not my favorite mode. I think a much better mode is thie aperture value mode and so let's go teo aperture value on our cameras. Now the top dial in our camera has changed from controlling shutter speeds to controlling apertures. This is our main dial on the camera. And so if you want to change your aperture value to a wide open setting for low light or shallow depth of field that's gonna be one direction, you're going to go the other direction for more depth of field. And so you have very specific control over your aperture now, like in time value in this case, when you make a setting with this maine control, dial, it stays there until you change it, you can turn your camera off, you could turn it back on. One of the great things is that you can switch lenses if you have two point eight set on this lens and you switch lenses it's going to be two point eight on that lens that you put on, provided that it has a two point eight aperture, and so if you are engaged in a little bit more serious photography, you don't have to reset your cameras much in this mode, so I like the aperture priority mode, and when I'm just kind of walking around, I'll probably leave it set it to eight or f or just because I can quickly pick it up, and I'm going to get a somewhat reasonable stutter speed with whatever I s so that I have set at that point so that's, a good basic system to have set for your camera. Now, when we switch to the manual mode switch our cameras to the manual mode now are two dials have kind of changed a little bit. Our top dial is going to control the shutter speeds and are back dial is going to control the aperture so you can sit any shutter speed you want, you can sit any aperture you want, you can take a picture. Now, whether it comes out properly, well, you're gonna have to look at the exposure level indicator, which is your light meter and there's a good chance that it's off to the minus side because chances are you're probably inside watching this and it's a little bit dark, and so what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to change either the shutter speed or the aperture to get the indicator more towards the middle of this meter. Now, I don't know if it should be in the middle where you're gonna take your picture, but that's a good place to start. It might need to be a little bit to the minus side if it's mostly a dark subject or a little bit to the plus side, if it's ah, brighter subject, and so I'm going to take my camera and I'm going to set my aperture because I have a two point eight lands. I'm going to set it to two point eight, and I'm just going to set mine up and I need let's see what we need for a shutter speed. I need which one sixtieth of a second in order to get a proper exposure, and this is how you would manually set your camera for shutter speeds and apertures to take a picture, and this is really nice because these settings never change. Jin you once you have them dialed in, they're going to stay there until you physically moved the dials on the camera. And this is where a lot of professional photographers work because they will do a few test shots. They'll get things dialed in properly and then their set and they're done. So if I was going to go shoot, say, a basketball game, I would take some pictures during warm ups and I would figure out what shutter speed an aperture I want. And then I would leave it dialed in, and I wouldn't make a change for the entire game. And so that's, how I would shoot a lot of sporting events and that's how I work in a lot of other types of events as well. All right, moving on up the dial, we have b which stands for bowl, which is actually also a manual mode as well and what it is this is a very special shutter speed, and the shutter speed is as long as you want to leave your finger on this button right here. So the shutter is open right now and it's going to stay on until my finger comes off all right, not a very effective technique. Right now because I'm moving the camera when I press the button on it and it becomes much more effective when you use a cable release and so there are cable releases and I'll talk about which ones are available in what they can do when we get to that section where they plug in on the camera. And so it is comes from an old term of horror, a bulb release that had an heir bulb on old cameras where you squeeze the air and it pushed a pin and it opened the shutter and it stayed open as long as you had your hand squeezing on this bulb and that's where the term bulb comes from and then finally above that we have c one c two and see three these are custom modes that you get to dial in on your camera. There are is you will see by the time we get done with this menu city, there is a lot of different ways to set this camera on sometimes when you're in one shooting mode in order for you to change the camera overto another type of shooting mode there's four five eight ten things that you need to change on the camera and if you have something that you really enjoy doing let's say you're a bird photographer you love shooting pictures of birds, you're gonna find there's going to all this customization that you want to do with your camera and when you go from a standard nature shot to a bird shot, you have to change all these things that it takes you too long and the birds gone and so what you would do is you would program in everything that you want we're going to talk about this when we get to the menu system, but you would set your camera up exactly the way you want for bird photography and then you would tell the camera to basically memorize all those settings into the c one c two or c three settings and so I have a few favorite modes that I've kind of set in here for different things that I like to do. I'd have one for kind of basic photography where I could just throw it really quickly and it's it's kind of like program, but I've customized to the way I like it to work and then I have another one for more landscape photography uh, so you can customize it toe whatever needs that you have on your camera and so that's the model and so I'm a big proponent of manual aperture value and the custom notes all right, next up the hot shoe on the cameras so this is where we can mount various devices now one of the things is on the newer, candid cameras they actually haven't over ring seal around the top of the flash. So if you get one of the cannon flashes that also has theo ring seal on it, it's a very weather sealed area when you mount that flash on there. So let's, talk about some of the cannon flashes that are available. Now. This camera does have a built in flash, which is kind of a nice emergency flash it's not the greatest lighting device in the world, and cannon makes a siri's of flashes and the smallest, the two seventy is not going to be that much different than the built in flash, so I can't say that I would highly recommend it for most people. Now they do make one called the three twenty, which is kind of unusual because it hasn't video light in it. So if you shoot a lot of video and you want to add a little bit of fill light to your subjects, eyes that are pretty close to you, so this is gonna be good for people that are maybe within eight feet. It can add a little bit of fill light to the eyes and bring a little bit more life to the face. So if you showed a lot of video, that might be a nice little light to have next up the four. Thirty e x version two is a really good flash for this camera think its an intermediate level flash it's goingto have bounced capabilities on it, it's going to have quite a bit more power than the built in flash and so it's one that I would highly recommend the five eighty e x two used to be the top of the line flash, and it would be something that you would want to have if you were, say, doing wedding photography or event photography where you're shooting a lot of pictures of people and you need fast recycling times. You're shooting large groups, so you need to cover a large distance it's going to be quite a bit more powerful than the four thirty it doesn't also has some special effects modes, which are kind of fun with a repeating flash and cannon just brought out a new flash called the six hundred e x artie and this one ads radio triggering, we're probably going to see the five eighty disappear at some point in the six hundred will become the sole one, but if you don't need the radio, triggering the five, eighty would be nice. Now radio triggering allows you to take the camera or take the flash off the camera. And fire it remotely. Now you could do that with the four thirty and the five, eighty. The problem is is in order to do that, you have to have this flash in camera, communicate with the other flash and there's a slight delay and there's some little flashes that go on and it's limiting over the distance it cant go through walls. Eso it limits where you can set the flash up so professional serious location photographers that are mounting lights in different areas like those radio triggers, they're just ah, more solid connection between the camera and the flash. Now, with any one of these, one of the things that you might want to consider getting is thie off camera shoot court. This allows you to get the camera off camera so that you could say put it on a bracket, which will allow you to keep the flash above the lands because you want to keep the flash above the lens for more natural lighting, and with a good bracket, you can turn the camera vertically or horizontally and keep the flash in the same position and in order to keep this automatic flash system working between them. You need to have a solid connection and that's the cord that you would want to happen, it's about three feet when you stretch it out in length. So it's, just a cz long as you can normally get a arm out there to hold the flash. Now the camera has a sync speed, which is a maximum shutter speed that you can use with the camera and it is one, two hundred fiftieth of a second, so you can't go faster than that if you were manually setting oh, shutter speeds! And so I decided to do just a little test so that I could show you what happens when you set a faster shutter speed and you can see very clearly here, especially in the far right at one four hundredth of a second, what happens is the flash fires as soon as that first shuter curtain is all the way open and what's happening at four hundred of the second is the second curtain is starting to close before the first ones, even all the way open. It's basically a strip of light being scanned on, and you can't fire the flash and you can see even at three hundred twentieth of a second, we're getting a little clipping down at the bottom, and so your flash is not gonna cover the whole area. So one, two fiftieth of a second. Now there is a special exception that you could go higher than that, but it's more a feature of the strobe light, and we're not going to be getting into that. You do have to have a special light to get above that. However, if you're a portrait photographer, if you're a studio photographer, you're working with studio strobes so these air lights that you would plug in their non cannon flashes that you're going to plug into your camera. There is a slightly different shutter speed that you need here one two hundredth of a second. Uh, these lights tend to be a bit more powerful. They tend to stay on a little bit larger longer, and you get a little bit of clipping on the shutter on the image at two fiftieth of a second. So you're gonna want to dial your camera back at least two two hundredth of a second to be really safe, you could go back to one hundred twenty fifth of a second and so that's only for people who are using these big studio strobes. And if you are, you know you are because they're big, expensive things that you played your camera into, but just be aware of for all sorts of studio work, alright working our way around our camera, getting over to the top right hand side, we have a row of four buttons and we're going to start on the left, and each of these buttons has little words or symbols down below it. And they are dual function buttons, which means they to two different things, depending on what dial you work with this button. So to start with, if we press that button, it'll stay active, I believe for about six seconds, and then it will revert back to kind of the normal status. So you have just a relatively short period of time to start turning the main dial on the cameron. What this controls is the media ring system. The way the camera reads light your camera reads light in four different ways. Evaluative, partial spot and center waited. Now, if I had to choose a choice for most people, I would probably choose evaluative. What it does is it breaks the scene up into thirty five zones and then analyzes the differences between those owns and comes out with one good average. In general. It does a darn good job, but some people prefer a spot meter because it's very precise. If you were going to do eh porter of a person, you could take a skin reading off of their cheek, for instance, and you could get a very accurate reading. Perhaps because they're against a white wall or they're wearing black clothing, and that would narrow down where you're getting the light reading, but for general, a general start, I'd probably leave it at evaluated next up when you press that exact same button, but you turn the quick control dial, which is the big dial on the back of the camera that's going to control the white balance so let's, talk about white balance for a moment, it's amazing that when we see things, our eyes and our brains work together to automatically color correct everything we see. The problem with the cameras is they see things how they really are, and sometimes when we're working under unusual lights like tungsten or fluorescent lights, there's, a slightly different color cast going on, and so your camera can go in with the white balance, and you can change the color temperature that your camera records and so ideally, if you're working under a cloudy situation, you would set your camera too cloudy, or if you're under tungsten lights, you would set your camera two tungsten to get proper lighting. And so if you're getting orange pictures from your living room, it's, because your camera's white balance is set incorrectly, and so there are these six settings for basic situations that you would encounter. Now beyond the six we do have some other further customization that we can do is well, and we'll learn more about this as we get into the menu system, we have a kelvin setting where if we wanted to, we could go in and dial in the kelvin temperature. Does anyone here in here know where kelvin temperature guys in the video might? Because they have to deal with the color temperature of the lights in here? Uh, it's probably pretty close to daylight because we do have some window light in here, and I think they have some some external lights that are pretty close to daylight, so it's probably around that five thousand fifty five hundred rage, but if we had a specific number let's say we ran a home business where we photographed jewelry and we had a particular lamp that we use once we figured it out, we could just dial that in with our kelvin setting and have it perfect every time we shot those types of pictures. All right? If you don't know what it is and you would like to set your camera up to be perfect for that situation, what you would do is he would photograph a white piece of paper and you would set a custom white balance for that white sheet of paper because the white sheet would reflect the color lights and you would do this and I will show you when we get into the menu section in the second half of this class where you would do that, and so you photograph a white sheet of paper and then register it with the camera and then final choice is auto white balance, and, uh, you might know me as the non auto person. I don't like a lot of auto things on my camera. Uh, but this is kind of my one exception to the rule. I don't mind auto white balance for two reasons. Number one on the white balance does a pretty good job, and so most of the time, it's, quite accurate, the second thing is, is that I shoot raw, and we're going to talk about ron j peg and a little bit, and if you shoot wrong, this is something that you can fix later on without any damage to your photograph. If you shoot j peg, yes, you can perform fix is not as many fixes, and you are damaging the photograph to a small degree when you do that. And so if you shoot in raw it's not quite as important to do, but if it is off, if you're not getting good color, I would recommend changing your white balance so that it looks good in camera as you're shooting it. And so that is white balance, so I would probably set my camera auto white balance if you weren't really sure what you were doing next. All right? The next button over is our auto focus and derive, but so if we press that button and we turn the main dial on the camera, we're going to be able to change the focusing system. Make sure this is working in mind. There we go. So one shot, eh? I focus and a servo on your cameras, so most of the time I would leave it in one shot. But there is a big difference if you are shooting sports and action in one shot, let me explain a little bit how it works there is going to be focusing points, and we'll talk more about focusing points. But what happens is the cameras lens will focus on an object and it's going to stop once it achieves and figures out where that object is. It stops now in a I servo it's going to stay on that subject and it's going to track him back and forth. And so if you're shooting a soccer player running at you, you don't want to focus on the player and have it stopped as it runs closer to you. You want to have a track that subject and this is a this is a big deal for sports photographers, and if you're not getting good sports pictures, this is a very likely reason is that you need to have your camera in a servo now there is a mode in between these two that's called a I focus artificial intelligent focus and the cameras trying to figure things out for you. I'm not real happy with the smoke because it's a little unpredictable as as to what it's going to do? I've tried to use it for sports, but sums time it stays locked on on a still subject and I'll go out of focus pictures, so what I recommend for most people is leave it in one shot for basic photography and move it to a I servo for sports photography the second half of this button, the drive portion is the drive mode on the camera, and so this is what's controlling what happens when you press the shutter release down? Does it take one picture or does it continuously shoot pictures? And so we're gonna have two different continuous modes? We're gonna have three frames a second, so let's here with three frames a second sounds like and then we can change this changing on the drive mode here to the high speed motor drive where we could get eight frames a second and I will mention there's, a few things that can happen on this camera that will slow it down below eight frames a second, so you're not always going to get eight frames a second. It depends a little bit on shutter speeds, some focus parameters and as well as the amount of light it's hard to get eight frames a second when it's really, really dark? Um, but eight speed, eight frames per second is the top top frames per second. Now we also have a self timer, a ten second self timer so you can put it on a tripod or iraq get around and get a picture yourself. We have a two second self timer, which I love uh, when I'm working on a tripod and I'm too lazy to bring out the old cable release. I can put it in the two seconds, get my hands off the camera and the camera fires without any vibration at all. Now, when you are in the self timer modes, it also activates the wireless remote control feature on this camera, which you do have to purchase this little twenty five dollar accessory. The rc six uh, you can then fire your camera remotely and this is a inexpensive way for you to get in the picture and give you more than ten seconds to get in the picture. Kind of the problem with the remote is that its line of site it's like a tv remote it doesn't work as well under bright sunlight and it has a pretty limited range of fifteen or twenty feet so you can't be a hundred yards away and firing your camera you need a radio trigger or something fans here in order to do it but for anyone who wants a a simple small remote that's gonna be a good basic one for you all right next up the third button over is thie so button and this is controlling the sensitivity of the sensor now the standard setting on this if you could call it that would be s o one hundred it's kind of the base level it's where you would get the best image quality on the censor all right and so in general I would leave it at one hundred that's a good starting position a default setting on your camera is to put it at one hundred if you change it to two hundred makes your sensor twice his sensitive to light we do start having problems when we take this to extreme so when we get up to thirty two hundred sixty four hundred it does start getting lower quality we get what's called noise it kind of looks like grain from the days of film and in this camera I think it's quite good up to sixteen hundred thirty two hundred little marginal and sixty four hundred is definitely kind of well now some kind of special notations on the so is that there is a high setting at twelve thousand eight hundred and in order to get to this you have to turn a feature on in the camera now it's very rare that you would ever need to shoot pictures with this setting on it but I like to keep it turned on just in case there's a ufo it's nighttime and elvis is getting off the ufo I mean I would much rather get a slightly grainy picture of elvis than a blurry one and so it's better to have that slight option so I'll tell you how to turn that on in the second half the class now the other option is auto eso and once again I'm going to go back to not liking the auto section once you get into photography once you understand how to manually work your camera and understand what's going on you're gonna want to have control of the so you are not I'm going to want to have auto sl for instance your camera has no idea whether it's on a tripod or not and you're trying to do a slow shot of a river flowing and that water movement the camera if you believe in the auto eso is probably going to change the risotto a different setting that wouldn't be appropriate for that situation and so for anyone who has a little bit of knowledge, I would encourage set in it at s o one hundred to start with and then bump up as you need two with lower lights and faster shutter speeds. So make sure my cameras at s o one hundred, at least for now. All right, next up, the back side of this is exposure compensation. And so if you remember exposure compensation from before, it works very much like that. Only this has to do with the flash. Now, this controls not only the built in flash, but any cannon flash that you add on to it. And so let's, take a closer look as to why you might want to use flash exposure compensation from a technical perspective tt l, which stands for through the lens automatic flash kicks out what it thinks is the right balance of light and often times for people photographs, which is what we often use the built in flash for it kicks out a little too much light. And so what you want to do is you wanna power down the flash a little bit and what I recommend for a lot of people, if you plan on doing people photography with the built in flash, is dialing that down to minus one and just leave it at minus one generally it's better in flash photography to hit very softly with the light toe under do it rather than overdoing it overdone flashes obviously look bad uh and so depending on what the person is wearing with the background is the tl flash can really overexpose things in this particular situation I prefer tt l minus two but I think detail minus one is a good starting point and then occasionally you may have to go down further and so if you own a seventy like I do I would just leave it at minus one and know that you can bump it up if necessary but it's better to under do than overdue on the flash all right and so that's the flash exposure compensation now obviously out in front of the camera we have our shutter release and it's a two step device so when you press halfway down it does I guess three three big things number one it wakes the camera because your camera wants to go to sleep to conserve battery power so pressing this halfway down well, first wake the camera it will perform a light reading check the light levels and it's gonna automatically focus if your camera is in the auto focus mode and so these are all things that happened with the halfway press and of course will press all the way down to take the picture now this camera has a shutter durability rating of one hundred and fifty thousand cycles and this is one of the ways that they rate how durable hammer is is by how many shutter firings the shutter unit is deemed to be good for and it's one hundred fifty thousand ah lot of basic consumer cameras are fifty thousand some of the better ones are one hundred thousand now the absolute top of the line cameras are closer to two hundred or two hundred fifty thousand so it's on the middle toe upper end of that durability scale next to that we have the m function the multifunction button and this button is going to do a number of things the main thing that you're going to be using it for is to change your focus point selection we're going to be getting into that in a few minutes here but you're going to be selecting either a single point or a group of points with this button but it will also according to how you customize the camera I could do something called flash exposure lock where you do a pre check with the flash to toe lock in a flash exposure and there is also a pretty wild level system in here that will show you in camera as you were looking through the camera and tell you how to tilt the camera to make it perfectly level whether you're shooting vertical or horizontal which is one of these cool, customized features that you could get into this camera. Next up, we have a little light there, which is kind of nice when you're operating at night. You don't have to bring a flashlight to see what's going on in your in your viewfinder, so just hit that and it turns on a little light in the and the lcd panel there. Now in the panel itself are a lot of functions that are going to mirror these other button changes that you make, but in the upper right hand corner, there is the remaining shots, all right? And one of the irritating things that have bothered a lot of people is that when you stick in a really large memory card, for instance, right now, I have in here a thirty two gigabyte card, and my number that I get is nine hundred and ninety nine. Does anyone else have nine hundred and ninety nine shots in here? Well, basically, that means I have more than nine hundred ninety nine shots and it has bugged a lot of cannon users. Why can't they just add another digit? Why don't I know how many shots I'm really going to get? And there is a secret way that most people don't know about how to tell the shots, and I'm going to reveal that in a few minutes here. On how to tell them so that's. One of those things that most people don't know how to figure out. But we're going to let you know here, and I believe that it's, a little mystery phrase there's little indicator in there. It tells you how good your batteries are, so you keep track there there's a better place in the camera, though there's a little funny mark kind of on the back of the camera. It looks, I don't know. Does that look like a u f ell on maybe that's, where elvis is? Uh, this is the focal plane of the camera, sometimes for scientific purposes they need you need to measure the distance from your subject to the focal plane on the camera and that's right in there where the sensor is. And so, as I say, it's, it's, highly unusual that you ever need to use this, but for scientific purposes it is there for a very, very good accuracy.

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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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