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Shooting Menu Pages 5-6

Lesson 21 from: Canon EOS 77D Fast Start

John Greengo

Shooting Menu Pages 5-6

Lesson 21 from: Canon EOS 77D Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

21. Shooting Menu Pages 5-6

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu Pages 5-6

Alright, shooting menu number five, the interval timer, this is where your camera will shoot a series of photos that you can then later piece together and compile in a video program of some sort. And so, you get to choose how many photos and the interval between the photos. And so a couple of little time lapses. This one I put on a slider so it's moving from side-to-side, so we get a little bit of extra movement in there. Photos were taken about every 10 seconds. Another example, in this case, photos were taken about every five to ten seconds. The little zooming effect that you see was done in post-production in a video software program. And so, it can be a lot of fun doing interval timer work. It's kinda the opposite of photography, where photography is one moment in time and this is a large series of moments over a period of time, compressing time in a different way. And so, being able to get in here and control this, you hit the info button and then you're gonna go in and control ho...

w long the interval is between the shots and then how many shots are actually shooting in there. And so, let me just show you how to do this one real quickly. So, I'm gonna dive into my menu system. I need to go to page five I believe. The interval timer, I'm gonna hit the set button in here. I want to enable this, but I want to set the information in here, so I'm gonna go into info detail set, so I can either hit the info button or I can use the touch screen on the camera. And in this case, I'm gonna shoot a time lapse series right now, but I don't want to waste your time, so I'm not gonna do very many, so we'll do an interval of, let's see, two seconds between shots and then we want to go down to the number of shoots and I'm gonna shoot five shots. So, I'm gonna shoot a very short time lapse right now. And then we're gonna hit OK, and so the camera is all set up to shoot intervals. I'll press half way down on the shutter release. I will then press all the way down on the shutter release. (camera clicks) There's our first picture. (camera clicks) Second. (camera clicks) Third. (camera clicks) Fourth. And our fifth shot (camera clicks) for our very short time lapse. And so, normally when I'm shooting time lapses, I prefer to shoot around 300 shots, cuz that compresses to about 10 seconds of video. And so, 300 to 400 is a nice short time lapse if you want to get into playing around in the world of time lapse. So, this is what is called the interval timer and there is something you're gonna see in a little bit and I know there's a little bit of confusion, or at least I think there is, because I get confused. There is something else called time lapse movie and the difference between the two is the interval timer gives you individual photographs that you need to work with later on. The time lapse movie creates time lapse right in camera and you have a finished product and it's nice having that finished product to see exactly what you got right then and there. The problem is if you need to work with them on an individual frame by frame basis, you don't have all that information and it's much more difficult to work with. And so if you want a simple time lapse, you can go to time lapse movie, which will be in the movie menu on page five, so we'll see that coming up in the next section. Next up we have the bulb timer. We talked about this a little bit earlier in the class when you have your camera in the manual mode and you set your shutter speed slower than 30 seconds, it goes all the way down to the bulb mode, where you can program in the exact amount of time that you want the shutter to stay open. Now, I will warn you that leaving your shutter open causes it to work very hard and typically you're not gonna get good results off of a digital camera with the sensor left open for more than 10 minutes. In fact, it could be dangerous trying to leave it open for a significant length of time. It may also depend on the ambient temperature, whether it's warm or cold, will also cause a problem in the image quality or any sort of stress that the camera is undergoing. And so, this would be perfect for two, three, four, five minute exposures, but I would be careful going too long. I don't have a specific number as to where it gets to be too long. The longest bulb shots that I have done have been in about the seven to eight minute range. Anti-flicker shooting, so this is dealing with lights that flicker and fluctuate in their brightness over a very short period of time. So, fluorescent lights flicker at either 100 or 100 hertz per second, so if you were to measure the light, the brightness is going up and down, up and down 100 to 120 times per second. Now, this camera fires at six frames per second, so where are these six photos gonna fall on the brightness scale of these lights? Well, it just kinda happens to be wherever it happens to be and what would may happen, and this happened in a real-world shooting scenario with me, I was shooting gymnastics in a large gymnastic arena that had flickering lights and I had my camera set to five hundredth of a second, f/2.8, a particular ISO and the images, some were brighter, some were darker, and it was really frustrating cuz I would have to go back and edit all of these images to adjust them to make them the correct brightness. So, this camera has a flicker reduction system built into it where it can recognize the flickering light and it can just delay the next photograph a fraction of a second to the next peak of the fluorescent flicker, so not only are they consistent, they're at the brightest level. And so it makes consistent photos possible under flickering lights. And I encountered that here in a, it was a bicycle tunnel that had a light that flickered and so you'll notice in these first four images, let me go back and forth and see if you see a brightness difference between these images. And these were all shot in manual mode with the same shutter speed and the same aperture and there's a big difference between images two and three. That's just the light flickering, that's not me or the camera's problem really, that's just the light flickering. So, when you turn the flicker reduction on, it's gonna be nearly perfect, it may not be identical, there's a little bit of a difference between two and three here, but very, very subtle difference. And so, this just makes life much easier to shoot with under these poor lighting conditions. And so, I would recommend for most people, leaving this turned on. The aspect ratio of the sensor in this camera is a 3:2 aspect ratio and if you want to get all the information off the sensor, you leave it at 3:2. If you have a different need, you need a wider image as far as in its aspect ratio, you'd set it to 16:9. If you want somethin' a little boxier, 4:3. If you want a true box, a square, you could set it to 1: and it will show you the cropped frames, either in the live view screen or with those crops in the viewfinder. So, live view shooting is when you hit that button just to the right of the viewfinder. Some people hit that button and they don't want to use live view, so you can disable that button and prevent it from being turned on. And so if you don't use live view, you could disable it if you want to. There is a secret sixth button here, but you have to have your camera in the live view mode, so if you hit live view and then hit the menu button, you will get to the secret sixth menu here. And so, in order to do this, let me just show you real quickly on my camera. If you hit the menu button, you'll notice that we only have five pages of information in here, right? Now, if we hit live view, and now we hit the menu button, we have our magical sixth page there. And so that's how you get access into that, you have to be in the live view first. Okay, so, in live view, you can choose the focusing system. Now, we talked about this earlier, we did a little demo on the face and tracking one. Smooth zone is a nice large area in the middle, if you want to be very precise, you can change it to the live 1-point. So, this is in the quick menu, it's also buried here in the menu as well. Using the live view screen, do you wanna use the touch shutter? Do you want to be able to fire a picture by just touching the screen on the back of the camera? A lot of people like to be able to do this, you can enable it, if you don't like it, you can turn it off. The metering timer just tells the camera how long it should take before it shuts down, and so if you wanna leave it all a little bit longer, so it'd give you more time to work with the camera, you can set it to longer time, if you want to save battery life, you can set it to a shorter time. Using the live view monitor, you can turn on a display screen, a grid, and this can help for leveling the horizon, architectural work, or just compositional work.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Canon77D Recommended Settings
Canon 77D Slides

Ratings and Reviews

Nikita Sokolsky
 

Must have for all 77D owners. Thanks, John!

Dara Pkyprek
 

Hello, is it hand-on practice or just show how to use the menu in the camera, plz B.R Dara

John Greengo
 

Student Work

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