New to Canon R7

MarshallG wrote:

Distinctly Average wrote:

MarshallG wrote:

You’ll need to walk through these settings using a YouTube video or someone with some experience. Of course, you don’t just want to enter the settings, you need to understand them.

The Canon setting menus go from left to right. There are tabs with subgroups beneath them. The last tab is a Custom Menu tab, which you add individual items to for faster access.

The summary of what you want to do is set the camera to shoot RAW or cRAW images at a high frame rate with continuous autofocus. Canon calls continuous AF “Servo AF.” They just recently introduced a feature called “Continuous AF” and you do NOT want that; it’s for video and it will kill your battery.

So you want Servo AF and you generally want to use Eye AF, configured to track Animals not Humans. So we tuck the “Human/Animal/Objects” setting into the Custom Menu area, in case you want to photograph a human.

There is an AF menu area which lets you configure an AF “Case.” This takes some time to set up and get comfy with; it pertains to how “sticky” the autofocus is on a subject and whether it tries to guess where the subject will go next. Long discussion possible there…

With the camera set for Eye Detection AF, what most action photographers do is reconfigure the Shutter release button so that its half-press is only a Meter On, and NOT Meter/AF On. There is an AF-On button at the top back which you’ll hold down to start and stop Autofocus. And there’s a menu where you configure all that.

Next to the AF-ON button there is a * button, and you’ll configure that button as a custom AF-ON which uses object detection instead of Eye Detection. Let’s say you’re in the forest and you see a pretty flower. Your camera won’t focus on it correctly because the flower does not have any eyes to detect. So you nudge your thumb over to the * button, hold it, and standard AF starts up, like your old Nikon, without the Eye Detection.

One other thing: For the very fastest frame rate, and silent shooting, you can configure the camera for fully electronic shutter. Most people don’t use this mode, because on R7 it produces rolling shutter effects which distort fast-moving wings and legs. Instead, set up Electronic First Curtain Shutter, which is electronic shutter to start the exposure but a shutter curtain ends the exposure, so no motion is recording to the sensor while the camera reads out the sensor. This is another item I keep in the Custom Menu, in case I want a perfectly silent shutter.

That should get you started.

I think a lot still do use ES., It is more of a case of learning when it might fail. Even then it is sometimes better to have failures with some good shots as the tracking is easier in full ES, at least it is easier for me with many subjects.

Look, you can argue that every setting I recommended should be done the opposite way. Of course. Canon didn’t give the camera settings which don’t work. You can use the camera any way you want, that’s for sure. But for a first time setup I do not recommend electronic shutter, because it can produce very noticeable artifacts. Besides that, 30 fps is a lot of images to cull.

I partly agree. I use ES at 15fps for starters. For tracking fast subjects, which most newcomers will be doing at a far from optimal distance, ES makes things easier. In the past we had the excellent OVFs which made seeing subjects most of the time easy. The problem I have with ECFS is the lack of dark frame insertion and that makes tracking more challenging for most. This is a known effect, it is why in cinema there was a shutter, and why now dark frames are inserted. Depending on the background of course, ES is not really an issue if birds are not filling the frame. It is all personal preference of course. I just think is is easy to learn a camera compared to learning the subject. For me, ES gives the best view of the subject.