New to Canon R7

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.

Good stuff Marshall thank you.

I took the camera out in the field yesterday and was able to figure a few things out.  Some of the things I had set I thought would work but in the field not as well and some things I thought would be cumbersome quickly became second nature.  For example, I did learn that subject tracking is not a good idea when taking macro photos of wildflowers.  Focus box kept jumping off.  I assigned tracking on/off to the star button and that fixed the problem.  I also set focus peeking on and focus aid on and used manual focus for most of the macro and close focus shots.  That way I could focus on specific parts of the flower.  I learned I do like manual focusing with the R7 a lot better than I did with the D500.

I saved a few different types of settings to C1, C2, and C3 so that I can have a baseline and try different combinations of things quickly.  I think I like spot AF, Animal and Eye tracking.  I like one of the back buttons to switch from spot to full screen AF (I may try different ones to see what works better once I get out in the field more).

I set the Depth of Field button on the front to a multi select where I can press the button and with combination of dials change AF mode, Metering mode and drive mode quickly without taking my eye off the viewfinder or remembering which area they are located.  
I have a couple frequently used settings in the My Menu section.  I pretty much copied what I had on the D500 for now.

Now just spend some time in the field trying different things until I land on a combination that seems to work.

Thanks,

Jeff