Lessons

Lesson Info

Canon 7D Mark II Menus: AF1 - AF5

All right, time to dive in to the auto focusing control so these are going to be fine tuned, confusing strange little controls that are not in a lot of the other cannon cameras most of these are in the five day mark three most of these air all in the one d x as well. First page on this is the different case scenarios that cannon has built for you for different types of sports and action focusing and it looks at different types of sports and breaks them down according to their type of movement the way they interact with other players on the field or in the view, you might say how fast objects are moving, how fast they're accelerating, how fast they're changing from one focusing point to the next case one is just your general multipurpose city and then as we dive in each case is going to slightly tweak the movement of the tracking sensitivity the acceleration and deceleration tracking as well as thie auto focus point switch switching between these and so each of these has a variety of di...

fferent sports that are kind of similar in the way that the action moves. And so it's probably most important to understand what each of these three options are doing and if you need to tweak it for the type of sports that you are doing so let's talk about each of these three options the first is tracking sensitivity the first question is, if you are focused on a subject and something new comes into the frame and interrupts comes between you and your subject, how quickly do you want the camera to switch over to it? And don't be too quick to say yes? I wanted to switch over really quickly. What if it's a referee? What if it's somebody who just happens to be walking by in front of you? How quickly do you want your camera to jump to that person rather than the subject that you were focusing on? And this depends on what type of sport you're in, how much interference you get and how much you want to stay on your particular subject. Some people they don't care, they just want a photograph who's ever in the front of the group there's a lot of factors that play into this. The next option is the acela acceleration and deceleration many objects are moving at about the same speed the whole time. If you're shooting in indy five hundred type race, the cars are moving very, very fast the vast majority of the time, they're not going from zero up to two hundred miles an hour and then back down to zero on a frequent basis, but if you photograph a soccer match or football, players are stopping and starting very, very quickly and so different types of sports require slightly different algorithms on how the camera focuses on that type of subject and tracks that action next is how much a subject moves from one focusing point to the next focusing point in the frame so subjects that are erratically moving from side to side a lot of field sports where players have a lot of movement they're going to be switching from one focusing point to the next and the camera would like to know how quickly to expect an object when it's moving from one place to the other and so you can go in and you could tweak all of these parameters along with the case settings that they've already given you. So if you said well, case three is pretty close for what I'm doing, but I would like to adjust it because my sport that I'm shooting is just a little bit different you'll be able to go in and make those adjustments with the cameras, so let me we do a live demo I wasn't planning on doing and let's hope I can figure out how to do this all right? So let's get over to the auto focus section and I can select one of these cases and let's d'oh let's do our soccer player here sub for subjects that are accelerating or decelerating very, very quickly so if I want to get in here it says info for help so I compress info on it tells me a little bit more information there is a scroll bar we're not going to read through this right now but we have that option we can also hit rate for detail setting so if I come over here to rate I can now come into the tracking sensitivity I can hit set and I can increase or decrease the tracking sensitivity in this particular case by minus one or plus too so let's just say I left the slightly more responsive than the standard scenario I could come down to acceleration and deceleration and on this one I just have the option of zero one and two I could to say go down to zero on this one and auto focus point switching I'd say I bump it up one so you can see on here you can clearly see the ones that I have chosen in white and the ones that are a little bit darker that we're kind of the inherent default settings and so case four can really be anything I wanted to be it does not have to be for subjects that accelerate or decelerate quickly I could just make it whatever I want it to be unfortunately I cannot change the name of that so I'm going to go back and I'm going to switch these back to their default settings so let's back out of that and back into the keynote so very customizable system but stay tuned lots more coming up in this autofocus section next up moving over a tab page two in auto focus aye aye servo first image priority all right so when you have the camera in a servo and this is the continuous focusing mode do you want the camera? Do you want your picture in focus? Yes, of course we all do but we also want to get the picture taken and this allows you to kind of tweak the balance between requiring the camera to be perfectly in focus and just get the shot if in a warning a lot of people will think well, of course I want my pictures in focus I don't want the camera to take it out of focus picture well what if your cameras a little too fussy about determining perfect focus you won't be able to fire the camera at all and so this is kind of ah it's a little bit split right now it's allowing the chairman of focus trying to let it do a really good job but when it gets pretty close it allows you to take a photo which means from time to time you will get an out of focus sports photo it's a very common occurrence folks happens quite frequently the cameras trying its best it's very hard to photo focus on erratic moving subjects so if you want, you can tweak it but I think it's good just to leave it right there in the middle. Now you can come in as faras the second image and you can say no, I need this one more and focus or I need that fire the shot right away and so you could go more to the speed side or more to the focus side in general, I would highly recommend just leaving this in the middle continue until you can identify a specific problem that you are having related to this so it's uh, it's just one of these tweaks that I would imagine ninety eight percent of the people are never going to make in their camera it's probably not necessary, but for those two percent you can get in there and tweak it and fix that little problem that issue that you're having with the particular way that you were shooting whatever it is that you're doing so not very much in that page. So we're moving on to page three deals with one shot focusing and this first deals with elektronik manual focus. So when I focused this thirty five two lands if I turn it here on the side let's see, can we do the overhead shot through the overhead shot because you can actually see the focusing you see that, uh, distance scale when I turned that is actually focusing the camera even if I turn it off when we turn the camera off I am still focusing the lens now there are a few lenses on the market area few that are true elektronik focusing rings which means when you turn the camera off they don't do anything at all. Most of their cameras have a physical connection to the camera so as an example you can see that we have at s t m forty millimeter the fifty millimeter one point two and some of the super tele photos have elektronik focusing rings and this controls the operation of those focusing rings because what the camera could do is it khun completely disconnect those focusing rings from the camera for instance, you could turn those focusing rings and nothing happens at all and so it's only in a few lenses that have these elektronik focusing rings and so you can just customize it if you want here and so for most of us you're not even going to have to worry about it uh at all the autofocus assist beam firing on this this is something I highly recommend disabling this is where the camera will use the built in flash to feira siri's of short bursts in order to illuminate your subject so your camera can focus which means it will be able to help your camera focus under very low light conditions but it will be very distracting to anyone pointed generally in the direction of the camera. Uh, this is almost like throwing a flash grenade out so that you can focus and see what's going on it's it's very disruptive, and I have found that the camera focuses so well at its evening minus three, focusing if you know how to point your focus points at subjects that have good contrast, you will rarely ever need this. And so I highly recommend during this off because firing those flashes just doesn't work well for me. If you have an external flash. One of the interesting op is that you can use is the internal built in infrared light on the flashes that's why the front of them are read what they do is they send out an infrared beam that we have a hard time seeing with our own eyes. We can see it, but it's not as easy. The camera can pick on up on it very, very well. However, I don't much care for it because if you were going to be photographed number situations where I would be photographing a speaker at a podium in front of a large crowd and you would have this grid pattern of red lines on them while you're trying to focus on them. And it's disruptive to them, and it doesn't look very good at all, and so it's something that you can either use or disable in this menu system as well. And I think if you are careful about the way that you manually careful about the way you auto focus or go into manual focus, you can achieve very sharp pictures without using either of these assist options. One shot autofocus release priority. Normally, your camera is in a mode where it must be in focus for you to take a picture when you are in the one shot mode. Now we talked about something similar, but that was thie servo mo this is in the one shot node, the camera's, normally in the focus priority mode, which means it must be in focus, and this is the way most people prefer their camera in that type of mode that it must be in focus. If not, they'll have a moment or two to be a ble to refocus and check the focus to make sure that it's, right it's a little different scenario than working with sports photography onto the next tab in here auto focus for len's drive went a f impossible, so if you own one of these big white guns of lenses, one of the problems is that if they have a hard time focusing and let's say you're focusing on a bird that's forty meters away and has a hard time focusing on that bird. What will happen is that lens we'll continue to search for that bird all the way back down to its minimum, focusing distance of maybe three meters and that's a lot of travel and a way out of focus picture. And so in cases with those big lenses it's often good to turn this off, so a soon as it starts to lose what it thinks is in focus, it stops focusing now for your normal lenses. It's not as big a deal because the lens throw is not nearly as bigas on these big lenses, so it's kind of a special case for, I would say, three hundred millimeter and up lenses. The camera has sixty five focusing points, and if you don't use all of them and you would prefer to have fewer once because you know that you only need to get to a few different ones, you could reduce the number of focusing points. It means you'll be able to more quickly navigate from left to right and around the different images a f area selection mode. This is where you get to choose all those different modes that we went. Threw in detail and checked off in the class, and there may be some in here that just don't apply to your type of photography or ones that you just don't use very much on you, khun just uncheck all the ones that you don't get, and that means you're not going to have to click pass them time and time again if you know that you're not going to use him, I think inherently it's best to leave him all checked off that weigh their options while you are learning your camera, and then you can figure out what you don't use and then turn him off f area selection method. All right, so normally how do we change focusing points? We have to check press are focusing button in the back of the camera, and then we can either press the in function on the front of our camera or we can use the lever in the back of the camera. One of the options is that if we want to, we could use the main dialled in the camera, and some people don't like using the main dial some people do, so if you do want to use the main dial, you can turn that on here as an option in the camera next up orientation linked auto focus point all right, so this one is kind of interesting and fun. Orientation linked a f point is very interesting little option that I very much like in this camera, so let me show you what's going on with this all right? So imagine you have chosen the focusing point's kind of on the upper part of the frame and you've decided to go from horizontal to vertical what happens? Well, now they're on the left side of your frame rather than on the top of your frame and that's what happens when you choose the same option it's the same no matter where your camera is tilted, the other option is let's say we choose the top here and as you rotate the camera, it knows that you've rotated the camera and what direction so you have separate set of focusing points determined on whether you are shooting horizontally or vertically and I found this very handy when I am composing an image and I want to go back and forth between horizontal and vertical, but I want to keep my subject in relatively the same position within the frame even though I'm using different compositions and so you could do this for the focusing points as well as the focusing area depending on your choice, which is why there's a few different options here so I have a very, very big fan of the separate focusing it may not always be right for everyone, which is why they do have the option for same, but I like this separate option it gives me very good composition control when going back and forth between verticals and horizontal sze generally I like it to keep the same focusing pattern, but if you want to change your focusing pattern along with it as well, that is also an additional option when switching back and forth between horizontal and vertical. All right, initial f point servo a f all right, folks, we're gonna hand out a special creative live fast start award, right? This is the most confusing item I have ever read in an instruction manual. I read it last night to review for this class and I read it four times I like it still doesn't make sense that I wrote the class on it so I would like to read to you what the instruction manual says because I know you will never read it yourself okay we go you can set the servo a f starting a f point for when the area selection mode is set to the auto selection sixty five point a f now did everyone get that? What this means is if you are in a I servo to start with, which is thie continuous focusing system and you switch into the sixty five point focusing system which is the all area, there are three options of what can happen at that point first option, which is easy to figure out, is auto. The camera just looks in all those sixty five focusing points and decides where it wants to focus. Another option is that you can tell the camera, I always want you to start focusing on the left or on the right or in the middle, and whenever I go to the sixty five point focusing in a I servo always start on this particular point, and that is what we would call the initial point. There is also something else called manuel don't write me a letter about confusing names, right cannon in manual let's just say that you came from one point focusing and you've selected in area far on your left, and you switch over to the sixty five point focusing, and you choose initial it's going to take that focusing point and apply it to the sixty five focusing points. And so it all depends on how often you switch between a standard set up for a single point or the nine or the five point any of those groups into the sixty five as to where they the initial starting point is going to be so once again, the initial obstinate option, the sixty five point a f has its own manually selected starting point that you choose you've probably chosen ahead of time manual option is the same point that was chosen in the other mode that you were just in. And the third option is auto, where you just let the camera figure it out for you. Hopefully, that is slightly better, which is not a very high bar to set when it comes coming out of the instruction manual. So that's, what that isthe next up is auto theft point selection. Eos f intelligent tracking mode. All right, so first off, before we didn't talk about this when you are focusing with this camera, there are all sorts of computer programs that are running that are trying to figure out where is the subject? Okay, where is it now? How fast is it moving? How fast is it changing? How fast is it moving? Left and right. And how much is it tracking? And where should I put the lens next for the next photograph and that's already happening. Now, with this new system called the o r this is an intelligent tracking system where it is using additional information. It is using facial recognition. It could be using color information, trying to track and figure out what exactly your subject is. Because we still don't have a camera that we can, I say that's my subject right there. That one jersey number nine follow that jersey, no matter how many players it weaves in and out, we don't have that ability. All we have is there's an object over there that we're trying to track, and this is trying to add another layer of information for it to track on and it's it's a little bit of mojo, magic mojo, it's not completely clear on how it's doing this because it all happens very, very quickly and some p people are going to find this works for them and some people are going to find that it doesn't work for them. I have seen that it has the potential for being really good, but it is still a little inconsistent. And so it's not something that I construct strongly recommend at this time. Most professional photographers that I know of are not using this mode because it's not as reliable as the system they are already know and it's a little bit the devil you know versus the devil you don't know and this is the devil that a lot of people don't know because it's still fairly early on the canon eos one d x has this technology and there are plenty of people who own that camera that don't use it and there are probably plenty of people who do use it and do like it. And so this is another one of those experimentations, and I'm sorry that I can't just tell you it's great and it's terrible, it really depends on how you shoot what lenses you shoot your style of shooting the sports that you're shooting. It depends on some things I think it's worthy of a test, and so I think it's worthy for you to go out there on a camera this sophisticated don't expect to get it right the first time out there you're going to have to probably go out and shoot whatever sports or action that you do several times, tweaking a few parameters don't change everything all the time, change a few one time, figure those out through the next couple, figure those out and work your way through it. And this is one of those ones to put on the check list to see if it works for you, because it's not that it just does or doesn't work. It depends a little bit on how and what you shoot, as I say, so this could basically be enabled or disabled. My my initial thought is that if you know what you're doing in sports photography and you know how to point the camera and track your subjects, you're probably gonna want to turn this off if you're a little bit newer to sports photography, you might turn it on it might be able to give you a little bit of benefit of being able to track a little bit better than you could on your own yes canada question yeah john we had a question that had come in from maroon who was asking about the car and he said that he read that in a review that we might that he might need to to whom it so I'm seeing enabled disable is there any like turning on off? Is there any kind of tuning? There is no riel tuning of this and one of the things that I unfortunately I'm not one percent certain of is if you were to go back into the case studies if any of those would impact this in any way in theory they shun it because I think those are just dealing with the focusing points and this is dealing more with the information from the focusing points and so I don't know of any way to really go in and find tune this it is, you know, it's looking for specific information and it's trying to recognize faces as I said before and I mean it's called intelligent tracking but we don't know how intelligent it iss and so there's really not much we can do to control it other than turning it on and off sounds like something to go like you said and go test out and play with dependable upon what you're shooting yeah, I mean, the test that I didn't have time to do that I would love to do is is have someone running straight at the camera and then have somebody cut in front of them like somebody you know either another runner cut in front of them or just weaving in front of them does it stay on that subject that we had intended on? But you know, that's going very on whether you're shooting ice skaters that are going back and forth or soccer players that criss cross in front of each other just so many combinations that it's hard to say give a flat out this is how it works best here if if I did a sports photography class on football, I could tell you it either works in this scenario or not, but there are actually football photographers who will have one set up for kickoff return versus defense because players are moving in a different fashion in those scenarios well, I'm with your you shoot a lot of track and field so that would be an interesting place are running so so that would be an interesting place to test it tio yeah, so each of them were different thank you all right, okay, so moving on and we are on page five manual autofocus point selection pattern okay, this is a lot of words to describe something very, very simple so let me do it visually, which is a lot better way of doing this okay imagine you have selected the far right focusing point and you now want to go to the far left what do you need to do? Well, you go to the little joystick and you go click click, click, click, click all the way over to the left side or if you turn this on, you can click to the right side and you can wrap around the backside and instantly end up over there. This is kind of the wormhole technique of moving from one place to the other, so this is a little bit more convenient in continuous, so I highly recommend that a f point display during focus. I'd mentioned this briefly when we had talked about the focusing points there's a lot of different ways that you can view you're focusing points for instance the second option all focusing points are turned on all the time, which is way too cluttered of a screen for me. The next option is it's on before the auto focus and after it's achieved auto focus, the next off option is on ly when it's focused and so if you don't like all these boxes in the frame all the time you could turn them off in various places in fact, you could turn off all your focusing points and if you just happen to let's say you only focus in the middle of the frame and you don't need a box to tell you you can turn off all those boxes and make your screen completely clutter free so take a look at the different options you'll probably figure out pretty quickly which one looks good in the way that you type a shoot in the way that you shoot viewfinder display illumination so the focusing points the way they are displayed to you will change according to the brightness levels that you are experiencing so if you under our under bright light conditions it will show you your focusing boxes with a black outline as it gets dark your camera will show you these focusing boxes in red and some people don't like the red there some people really do like the red and so one of the options is auto where it automatically switches back and forth if you want you can leave it on or you can leave it off all the time and so when you dive in here you'll see the auto option which means it switches back and forth between red and black you can leave it on all the time, which means they're red or you can leave it off where there are black all the time one of the other things that you should always keep your eye on is the bottom of the lcd, because it's giving you information about other buttons that may give you further options. And so in this case, if you'll notice the info button, have some help and the cube button allows you to adjust the auto focus point during a servo that's, the continuous focusing system. And so if you have the camera in the s a I serve a focusing system, do you want them toe light up or not? There are many people who don't want the clutter in the frame, so they say non illuminated. There are other people that want the feedback about what focusing points are you choosing in order to focus, in which case you would choose illuminated? And so this is a menu within a menu slightly buried. This was something that wass I believe, not available in the original five d mark three before they had some firmware updates on it, and then you could do it in there. So this is something that this was a request. People complained, cannon responded, and it is now here is an option that you can turn on and off the f status in the viewfinder we talked about this when we were doing the viewfinder. And there is a little auto focus symbol that will turn on in the bottom right of the viewfinder that will let you know if your camera is in focus that same there's also the dot in the bottom which will let you know now the big old a f is a little too big and blocking in the viewfinder so I'm not a big fan of that particular one but the green dot down below is a perfectly acceptable way just as a little little noticed over there that yes you are in focus a f micro adjustment all right so for those of you that have cool lenses meaning fast lenses andy let's see a seventy two two hundred two point eight two hundred two point oh three hundred two point four hundred two point eight five hundred four six hundred four hundred five six one thirty five to fifty one for all of those fast lenses you have to be really accurate in your focusing and cannon does their best to calibrate everything so that things are focused perfectly but every once in a while just do too subtle tolerance differences and mismatches between cameras and bodies your camera might continuously front focus which means focus in front of your subject or focus in back of your subject with back focusing by subtle amounts of quarter ranch a half an inch but in general if it's a problem it's going to do it consistently so if you could consistently have out of focus pictures, keep those out of focus pictures around and try to figure out, are they front focusing or they back focusing? If so, you can adjust your camera right here in the micro adjustment. The way that you do this is you get your focus target, you need to measure whether you are actually focused in the right area, so you need another measuring device it's at an angle so that you can see if you're focused in front of or behind your subject. If you want to do this in a really official sense, there is a lens alignment chart that you could bye at popular photography stores, you focus on the chart on the left, and then you look on the right to see how out of focus you might be. Now, if you're a bit more on the thrifty side, you can use anything else. I use a ruler and a yardstick, so I'm going to focus on the ruler, which is standing vertically, and I'm going to check my distance on the yardstick, which is at the angle and here's. What photos from the camera look like you can see where they're of yellow aero is is where my camera achieved the sharpest focus, and at zero setting my camera was very subtly front focusing. So if I put it at plus ten it's a little bit back focus, so what I'm doing is I am going to change this and probably adjust this camera to a plus five setting or so and so in order to do this, you are going to need a set up of gear, your camera, all your lenses, you need to take really sharp pictures, so you're going to need a tripod cable release, and then you'll need a target and a measuring device. You want to shoot in shallow depth of field, highest quality possible. Lois eso you want to have any vibrations, and then you're going to want to manually unfocused the lands focus and then let the camera focus it on the target, make sure there's no movement and then take the picture and the cameras have good enough play back that you don't even need to download the images, you can check it out in camera. And so one of the techniques that I did and I might actually do this live in my upcoming mastering the lens class, but when I do my focus adjustment, what I will do is I'll have a cable release on my camera and I will unfocused the lands, and then I will let the camera focus and take a picture, and then I'll do it again. And test ix, I want to see if it's consistent, but then I'm going to take the lens that I'm gonna turn it the other direction I'm going to focus, and then I'm going to turn it the other direction, because if I'm focusing let's, say from here to here, the lens going this direction versus the lens coming this direction to focus might have a different air, and so I'm going to shoot four photos to see if it's consistent in one way. What I'll find is that out of those four photos, they usually end up in the same spot, but sometimes they're a little bit off, and if they're consistently off, then I will go into the micro adjustment and I will make an adjustment. And so let me actually show you how I have my camera because I have micro adjusted this land selection. Let me show you one more thing on the keynote first before I get there, so if you do turn this on and you go in and you micro adjust your lenses, you want to probably do this by land's not all buy the same amount it's extraordinarily rare that all of your lenses would be the same amount off in the same way keep your eye on the bottom of that menu because you see where it says info register that is where you can go in and had specific information about that limp so let's take a look at the lens that I have on here now it's turned the camera on and let's go to our menu I'll just go to the quick menu so I can quickly jump between the camera and f modes and this is at the end of it so I'm gonna go to the playback then I'm gonna come back a moat to the micro adjust I'm going to go in on this and it knows that I have a thirty five f too attached to this and it is currently at plus seven because I've gone in to check the camera and I know that it's not quite perfect but if I wanted to hit info I can go in and I can now tweak this image to anyone from minus twenty two plus twenty now what is plus twenty and minus twenty mean I have no idea it's just twenty notches in one direction or the other now let's suppose I was a very unusual jewel person and I owned two thirty five millimeter f two lenses I'm going to hit info here because you see how it says info vue lands info I could add in the serial number of this particular lands because the other thirty five f too I have has a slightly different focusing issue with it and I want to correct that one so you could have many different lenses even of the same focal length same aperture same siri's and fix each of them individually so I'm going to hit menu to back out of that I'll hit menu to back out of that and menu to back out of that so that is a f micro adjust and it is something that I do anytime I get a new lens it is something I do anytime you get a new camera and it's a pain in the butt because even though I've done it several times and I think I'm pretty good at it it's still takes like an hour by the time I get everything set up I get it lit and I should test shots and they do an unfocused focus and you go through the whole rigmarole don't try to do it in fifteen minutes you won't do a good job just give yourself a little bit of time to do it but it can help and if you have like that eighty five one point to linz and you haven't done this and you've been getting out of focus pictures, you can fix it that it's one of those things that that just needs to be done that's part of the protocol of having a really high end piece of equipment now who needs to do this? I think anybody who has a lens that is to eight or faster in general should do it. It doesn't hurt to do it on any leads. You have it's, always nice to have a really dialed in tight. I have tried to micro adjust, for instance, ah, one hundred to four hundred, that has an aperture of five point six, and I guess the blends just looked like it was fine, because it just wasn't shooting, that it doesn't shoot that shallow depth of field. You don't notice it if it misses the mark by a very small amount, so that's, where you're going to notice it and that's when you need to do it.