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Lesson Info

AF Area and Quick Controls of the Canon 7D Mark II

So continuing our tour of the camera we have something new on this camera let's all welcome the area selection lever which I will now call the lever okay so this little lever on the back the camera if you just press it it doesn't do anything but if you do if you press it in the focusing modes that we were talking about it will switch you from one mode to the other for instance from one point two five point two nine points but you can go in and customize this and you can have it do it just without any other restrictions you can have it set to do something else on the camera let me see if I can give you a live demo here so let me get back camera all lit up here and so if I wanted to change the focusing modes I'm gonna press the focusing button here on the camera now normally how I've done this in the past on the seventy and the five d mark threes I would press the function button on the top of the camera to change our focussing point selection but now I can come to the back of the camera...

and I can it's a spring loaded switch and so I can switch it like this but normally this button this doesn't do anything at all I have to press the focusing button on the back of the camera and then aiken do this now if in case you're wondering, I can't push it and go the other direction, this is a one way street you've got to go one way down this but that's the same appearance. I don't a lot of people really like the style back here, I find it a little bit harder to get to the button on top is just so clearly delineated from everything else around it. I prefer this one, but you have an option if you like the thumb one go for it, you can then reprogrammed the mostly function upon top to do something different for you. And one of the options in this is that you can get it to change that focusing mode automatically and let me just jump in and do that real quickly. I'm not even going to talk about what I'm doing, and if you want to pay attention and do it yourself, you can on I'm looking on screen where's my lever gonna go this and I want it to change, okay? So that is direct area right there. Maybe it was in that mode, but we're not seeing it on the back of the camera, and so if I turn this on, I don't have toe press any button I could just start changing it, let me take a look in the viewfinder and it does automatically just change it in the viewfinder I have to show it to you on the back of the camera in order to see it I have to press this button to show it to you in the back of the camera but now I can change without pressing any default buttons and so very nice little customizable button welcome edition welcome to the canon family you knew lever awkward name so we just call it the lever okay we have our silent touch pad before he talked about that for recording volumes in the movie mode the little access lamp will turn on when the camera is recording information to the card I've also noticed it turn on and off when I am hitting the shutter release on the camera toe wake the camera it's just it's kind of it's mode thatit's working on something we have our ambient light receiver in the back of the camera why do we need to know how bright it is behind the camera this is to adjust the brightness of the lcd on the back of the camera one of the recommendations I'm going to make in the menu system is turning off this sensor so that your your lcd on the back of the camera is consistent in its brightness no matter how bright or dark it is if you were going to judge exposure by the lcd which is not the best way the judge exposure but it does work quite well in many situations you want tohave consistent results on the back of the camera on dh that ambien just does not help out because it starts changing the brightness as light levels change the little holes down on the bottom left is the little beep beep for the audio confirmation of the focusing, which I like to turn off. We have another little speaker system up here, and this is where the movie sound comes from. When you record a movie, you can play it back and listen to what you recorded. We have a multifunction lock, and what this loch will disable depends on what you program in the multi function lock options off this, you could have it turn off the dial on the back of the camera, a little joystick, the lever or the dial on the top of the camera. So let's say you went to a really important sports event, and you knew that you needed to shoot a five hundredth of a second and have two point eight the whole game never change it don't want to bump it. I don't want any chance of going wrong. You could go in and lock everything so that you can't change shutter speeds and apertures while you're shooting and for a photographer who might have two or three cameras banging around their neck. This might be a nice feature because it's really unpleasant when you pick a camera and you start shooting it and you realize that it's somehow inadvertantly jumped three or four jumps on one of those dials and you are now getting the wrong exposure so there's a number of sports photographers that really like that option on the camera and you can choose exactly how many things it locks up all right? So let's jump into the quick control and the quick control is a shortcut to a number of features that we're going to see again in the menu system so we're not going to dwell too long on this for the most part we've either seen and talked about the feature or we're going to talk more about it in the future this is the the queue I call this the quickie mart you know you think about the big grocery store that has everything and this is just a little place where you can pick up a few chips and a drink and a few small things and so this is just those little things that you might want to get out right away so hit the cue button we also can see this if we hit the info button the correct number of times in the top row is our basic shooting information we're not changing anything here we're just looking at information that we have already set someplace else on the camera next up, let's move down the line because once you hit the cue button, you will be able to navigate around the back of the camera a little bit so we have our exposure compensation. Now you will see this in the viewfinder, you will see this on the top deck of the camera, but this is an additional place that you can see it. We talked earlier about our flash exposure compensation, as I said, I like to lead this at about tl minus one for flash photography for people, photography. Next up is our custom controls you saw me a moment ago diving in to control this, and this is where we can go in and set the parameters of many different buttons and dials on our camera to customize them at the end of the menu section. We're going to see this again because this is once again it's in the menu section it's also in the quick menu, and I'm going to go through about when I have about eight different customized, special customized modes that you should know about that you may want to give a try, depending on your type of photography, so we'll cover that more thoroughly in the menu section. Next up, we have more items, some of which we've seen before picture stiles remember where we saw picture styles before we already talked about it think about it. Where did we see it? Button on the back of the camera that looks like a paint brush. This does exactly the same thing just allows us to see and work on the exchange of the back of the camera with it. We saw and talked about white balance before there's a button on the top of the camera that does this but sometimes your camera's on a tripod high up and it's a lot easier to work on the back of the screen. We do have the option of going in for white balance correction let's just say that you are working under tungsten lights that are of a slightly different color temperature than what cannon has programmed in under tungsten lights. You can go in and tweak it and adjusted for the type of settings and conditions that you are in. And so if you are shooting j pegs and you really need to get the exact correct color in camera, this is a great way to tweak what cannon or has already in there to make it fit exactly what you were doing. Auto lightning optimizing. Now this is the first time we've seen this. We will see this again in the menu, but I will explain it a little bit more thoroughly right here, so let's take a look at a photo and this photo suffers from the fact that there's a a lot of information being lost in the shadows in this photo, in my opinion would look better if we lightened up the shadows. The auto lightning optimizer will automatically do this on your j peg images not your raw but on ly you're j peg images you don't go in and well typically lightens up the shadows it will often hold back the highlights from getting over exposed and so this might seem like a great idea. Well, I would like it to fix all my images that would be great. The problem is some images looked better with mohr contrast and you don't want toe lighten up those shadows so it depends on the type of photo that you want to dio and I think it's probably better to leave this disabled and if you do want to go in and lighten up the shadows, you could do that later and so for most people, I think disable is a better option, but I can understand there are scenarios where some people are going to want to go in and change that next up the auto focus mode hey, there was a button on the top of the camera that did this well, this is a place for you to see it on the back of the camera same thing with the meeting duplicate place second place we'll see it a third time too on the drive mode, on the cameras. So there's a button on the top of the camera. That does this so there's. A lot of duplication of the top of the camera button, so that you could work with the camera in a different manner. Now we get to something new again, the recording function in cards selection. So you can see whether you have one or two cards in the camera and what type of files you are recording to each of those individual cards. And we're going to be able to have better control of this by going into our menu system. But this is a good, quick reference as to what is going on on our camera. And so that's. Just kind of a nice little reminder of what's going on.