My ultimate goal is to help you take better photos. But don't be fooled. I prefer the top dial to change aperture and the rear dial to change the shutter speed. With my 7D Canon I need to know suggestions/settings ? Info button until shooting information is displayed on the LCD screen. Custom White Balance unless you want to set custom white balance with a gray card, skip this setting. All it does is slow everything and clog your hard drive, unless you're printing 10 feet wide. The settings that you have recommended and the rationale for them appears to suit me down to the ground Thank you. Open up the cheat cards in Adobe Reader, you can download it for free here. ISO setting you're comfortable with - 200 is good, but can go higher. Go to the AF menu, fifth item as shown, and scroll the highlight down to the bottom. Thanks for sharing! Any suggestions on how the Banks can be set-up so that autofocus area modes can change with the changing of the Banks? One of the biggest frustrations for most people is investing hundreds of dollars in a camera and feeling overwhelmed by the learning curve and underwhelmed by the results. Once again, these are settings that work for me and they might not necessarily suit your needs. So, its absolutely worth learning the details of AF-On and practicing with it for a while even if you plan to keep half-press autofocus enabled. Whether this is worth keeping half-press autofocus available is up to you, but I at least recommend familiarizing yourself with back-button focus if youve never used it before. JPEG files can look perfectly good unedited, but theyll quickly start to show compression artifacts as you edit them more and more. Image Quality: RAW I always recommend to shoot in RAW format. The Canon 7D Mark II has a built-in mode to set a specific timer in bulb mode, so you do not need any remote shutter release to be able to shoot for longer than 30 seconds. No matter how rushed you are, you should be able to capture good, sharp images of birds. ISO Settings: 100-6400 (13 increments), expandable to 12,800 Continuous Firing Mode: 8 fps Recording Format: JPEG, 14-bit RAW Metering: 63-zone evaluative, 9.4% partial, 2.3% spot, CW Power Source: SLB-1674 rechargeable lithium-ion battery Estimated Street Price: $1,699 Contact: Canon USA, (800) OK-CANON, www.usa.canon.com The touchscreen is very helpful for accessing menus and fine-tuning focus in Live View. I want to keep the entire range for ISO selection, so I leave it at 100-16000 range. Gain a basic understanding of how to setup the Canon EOS 7D Mark II Digital SLR camera to capture birds in flight in this video. Clean manually this is different than the above options, since it is used for manually cleaning the sensor. For Macro Photography 6. File name: IMG_ you can set how you want files to be named. I set mine to only remember the focus point. The Canon 7d Mark II shoots at up to 10 frames per second. C3 - cluttered or 'dirty' background. I love the Canon 7d. Different cameras meter differently so you might need to experiment a little. The second DRIVE * AF button is used for setting different drive and autofocus modes. It also makes it easier to reduce noise if you were shooting in low light conditions very common in bird photography. For C2 (landscapes), I have Auto ISO turned off, ISO 100, Exposure mode set to Manual (M), Drive set to Silent Single Shooting, AF mode set to One Shot, AF point selection set to Spot AF. With this enabled, I can quickly choose between different AF areas by pushing the lever down. : Disable only relevant when shooting flash. Download the PDF to your Amazon Fire. Would you recommend spot metering as a norm? WB Shift/Bkt. Case 5: For erratic subjects moving quickly in any direction if a bird is perched and you are anticipating it to fly off. Canon EOS 7D Mark II: . Jason Polak is a bird and wildlife photographer from Ottawa, Canada. Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. For moving subjects against a dirty or cluttered background, then the settings change again. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. Manual Selection: Single Point AF - Any of the 19 AF points can be selected when shooting in Program (P), Shutter Priority (Tv), Aperture Priority (Av) or Manual (M . 10 Must-Use Bird Photography Camera Settings for Beginners 5 Camera Settings Every Bird Photographer Should Know 1. Auto rotate: On (middle setting) rotating vertical images in landscape view makes them appear much smaller. The only setting I do change is in Playback Menu 2 Image jump with rotary dial. #2 - So many autofocus points! When you get back home, you realize the shots are blurry and overexposed and worse, the pictures have just enough detail to identify the bird as a Far Eastern Curlew, a species youve been trying to photograph for years. You should have the option to open the file using the Adobe Reader app, which will also save it for future reference. Here is how to do it on your Canon 7D Mk2. Most modern birding lenses are sharpest at or near wide open, and I would not want to lose sharpness not to mention the shallow depth of field I like by letting the camera stop down to something narrower like f/11. Print or save to your phone. 65 in all. To simplify matters, I have created the following table. Here are my Nikon camera settings for bird photography: Camera Mode: Aperture Priority with aperture set to maximum aperture (wide open). My Custom Settings put you in control, so that the subjects are bright and colorful. : EOS iTR AF: ON leave this one ON. Dust Delete Data this is used for removing dust in images if you have dust particles on the image sensor. And, its increased my number of keepers ten fold. I already have a decent set of Canon lenses up to 300mm, and a Sigma 50-500. Burst mode or high FPS mode instructs the camera to keep taking shots as long as the shutter button is held down. Thanks for your support! The rate of shooting is typically between 10-30 frames per second if you have a camera geared toward wildlife photography. Some people have reported that the problem gets better after a firmware update, so you might want to try that if youre in this situation. Imagine that youre on a beautiful beach and you see an unusual bird fly towards you. For BIF use 9 point, for static birds use single point (centre). I have now been using my 7D Mk 2 for 6 years with varying degrees of success. This was never an issue for me using standard DSLRs until I dove into extreme macro photography and 10x magnification. My recommendation would be to read Chapter 3 in the camera manual to understand what each autofocus setting does in detail. Case 1: For subjects that change speed and move erratically I found this one to be the optimal default setting for bird photography. Once you set appropriate settings for a given scenario, you can save them in these two modes. Case 4: For subjects that accelerate or decelerate quickly when camera to subject distance changes fast, such as a bird flying towards you. Matrix/evaluative metering is usually the most advanced and hands-off metering system on a camera, but I tend to prefer the predictability of spot and center-weighted for my bird photography. Multiple exposure: Disable this is used for creative photography when stacking photos on top of each other. JavaScript is disabled. The Cheat Cards are organized into a single PDF file, which can be printed or viewed on many different devices. DOF preview button: Depth-of-field preview I dont particularly use this button, so I leave it at its default setting. Here they are, to the right of the flash hotshoe: Lets go through each of these one by one: Since this is a high-speed camera for fast action, I set mine to High-Speed Continuous Shooting when photographing wildlife. File numbering: Continuous I want the camera to increment file numbers even if I change the memory card. The reason why this can be worthwhile is that some birds have very small spots of bright feathers, and the camera may suggest different exposures based on which direction the bird faces, when youd rather the exposure settings remain constant. Since the goal of this article is to provide recommended settings and not particularly focus on what each camera feature does, I am not going to spend a lot of time explaining why I chose a particular setting. In other words, it is the best AF system available today! With birds in flight, Im almost always at 1/2500-1/3200 for larger birds and 1/4000 or faster for smaller birds. Nasims article on Autofocus Modes can introduce you to some of the different options if you arent already familiar. 1. Seriously! From here, you can override the top buttons easily by simply using the multi-controller on the back of the camera. Key Bird Photography Equipment: Lenses Bird photographylenses are not cheap and can cost upwards of $7000 USD. I have illustrated this post with some high-quality wildlife images taken with the EOS 80D by Brendon Jennings, of Kariega game reserve. Register settings this will allow to save your current settings to C1, C2 or C3 shooting mode. Highlight alert: Enable this will show the blinkies when there is overexposure / loss of highlight data. In practice, as long as I have easy access to a dial to change the exposure compensation, I find Auto ISO to work well. If you want to preserve the battery life, you can turn this off as well. In other words, it is the best AF system available today! : Auto switch card once the first card fills up, it will overflow to the second one. AF point selection is now on single point mode. Try shooting your 7D at its M (8MP) or S (4.5MP) settings. So, -1 is my recommendation here.2. This is a great feature for fast action, such as flying birds, although the benefit was somewhat mitigated by relatively small buffer capacity. Read more about Nasim here. Perfect example is a bird taking off in your direction, going very fast from stopped to flying speed.3. Canon EOS 7D Mark II Manual Mode Settings* (Settings for Birds in Flight Photography) Shutter speed: 1/2000 - 1/5000s Aperture: f/5.6 - f/6.3 Focal length 400mm Auto ISO 400 - 3200 AF Mode: Zone / Wide Zone AF Cases (1 / 2 / 6) AI Servo / 10 fps multi-shot Handheld Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L USM Lens Settings (for Birds in Flight Photography) His career as a mathematician led him to move to Australia in 2016, where he started seeing colorful parrots. Release shutter without card: OFF you do not want the camera to fire without a memory card, in case you forget to insert one. HDR Mode: Disable HDR only relevant when shooting in JPEG mode. To get a little more focal length, a 1.4X teleconverter can be used with the 300mm lens to bring the total reach to 420mm. Picture Style: Standard does not matter for shooting RAW images. Newer mirrorless cameras often have animal eye AF modes that actually do work for birds, so I suggest experimenting with those. Birds In Flight Settings For Canon 7D MKII | BirdForum Welcome to BirdForum, the internet's largest birding community with thousands of members from all over the world. Select AF area selec. If you are a JPEG shooter, leaving these on will reduce, Flash control: Only applies when you photograph with flash, External flash func. This tutorial describes the best settings to use, and why. It is a very good illustration of an AF system that can keep focus with quickly accelerating or decelerating subjects. If your shutter speed is risky, you will increase the probability of getting at least one sharp shot if you take a series of multiple photos in a row. Most of EOS R5 Features with Lower Resolution (Imaging Sensor and EVF) and Price, Oustanding AF System, Up-To-40 FPS. AF point disp. This article has covered the most important settings for bird photography such as shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and metering modes. For example, I specified a huge range for perched birds because different species behave differently. f/5.6, f/8; set the ISO so the meter on the right of the viewfinder shows around +1 and 2/3 or +2 on the sky in the direction you expect to be shooting; Id like to have Single Point autofocus for perched birds (Bank A in my case) and Group autofocus for BIF (Bank B in my case). As explained in my. The new AF system of the Canon 7d mark II is inherited from the Canon EOS 5d mark III and the Canon EOS 1DX. So much to keep track of and Safety Shift can help ensure accurate exposure. Date/Time/Zone: make sure to keep the date and time zone settings accurate. If you want to understand and use the camera to it's fullest potential, then this is the . I recommend a starting value of 1/800 for slow-moving birds. Ive contacted Canon and they feel there is nothing wrong! Canon 7D is the best non-professional Canon body for bird photography, it has highly customisable AF system, fast frame rate (8fps) and good image quality. Bulb timer: Disable disabled in all normal modes, so you can only activate it when you select B from the PASM dial. Some species do not do well around the 1/400 speed. The other solution is quickly switching to aperture priority mode and setting your widest aperture, at which point the camera will set base ISO and a good shutter speed. 1/1600, 1/2000; set the aperture to the widest that works for DOF, e.g. Bird Photography Tutorial 4: Camera Settings. White balance: AWB Just like ALO, white balance setting also does not matter, as you can adjust it later in post-processing. This article has covered the most important settings for bird photography such as shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and metering modes. Image review: 2 sec I leave this at 2 seconds. 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