Wildlife Photography Tutorial with the Canon R7!

this tutorial is made possible by milford photo the world's best camera store if you're passing through connecticut browse through their amazing selection of photography gear if you're shopping online their photography experts can answer your questions thanks milford photo maybe you're interested in wildlife photography with the canon r7 or any other camera the best place to start is at a bird feeder maybe even in your own backyard because wildlife photography is mostly about getting close to nature both emotionally and physically i'll go over the camera settings i'll pull out the big lenses but i want you to know that the best wildlife photographers can hear a murder of crows calling and know that they've found food or maybe they're warning each other about a predator they can hear a little chirp i know that there's a cardinal somewhere in a bush and that they should try to find it without that appreciation and understanding of nature it doesn't matter what your camera settings are or how much you spend on camera gear you just won't be able to get good pictures but the good news is when you start wildlife photography you will inevitably develop that appreciation of nature and that is my favorite thing about wildlife photography chelsea's going to cover flying birds in just a little bit but first i'm going to get you set up for perched birds which are actually a lot easier to do and require completely different settings so on my canon r7 here i'm going to hit the menu button and on the camera tab the very first page select image quality here we're going to tap c-raw and for jpeg we'll just press that horizontal line to turn it off what we've done is configure the camera to capture raw files raw files capture way more detail in the highlights and shadows than jpeg files do this allows you to more heavily post-process your images there are two types of raw file raw and c-raw c-raw is canon's raw file and it's just compressed so it takes up less space and in wildlife photography you'll find you can easily take hundreds or maybe even thousands of pictures so you're going to be really glad for saving a little bit of storage space next again in the menus we're going to turn on the silent electronic shutter on the camera tab page 7 go to silent shutter function and set that to on now your r7 shoots completely silently back in the dslr days when i was shooting with a canon 7d the shutter could be so loud that you would only get one shot of a purge bird because it would make a loud clank and the bird would immediately take off but the silent shutter i can stay at peace with the birds without disturbing them sometimes i can get dozens or hundreds of shots of a perch bird and then pick the one very best moment and i also love not disturbing the wildlife next let's turn on animal eye detect af hit the menu button go to the af tab and go down to subject to detect and select animals under eye detection select enable now in some circumstances not all circumstances the camera will actually detect a bird or other type of animal and if the eye is visible it will focus specifically on that eye especially when we start using big telephoto lenses the depth of field the amount of the frame that's actually sharp is so narrow that it's really really important to focus on the eye if you focus on the wing of a bird the entire bird could end up looking out of focus now let's grab the mode dial and set it to shutter priority tv in shutter priority you control the shutter value by using the main dial here next to the shutter button you can see i can quickly adjust the shutter speed by scrolling it to the left or right a good starting point for a beginner for perch birds is 1 500 of a second if the bird were to start flying you might roll your finger to the right and spin it up faster something like 1 2 000 of a second or if you're feeling confident and you want to get cleaner sharper images roll your finger to the left and use a longer shutter speed i often shoot at 1 250th of a second one 125th of a second or even all the way down to 1 60th of a second every time you double your shutter speed for example going from 1 to 50th to 1 125th of a second you're allowing the camera to grab twice as much light and that will drastically reduce the amount of noise in the image however keeping the shutter open longer gives the bird more opportunity to move or the branch to wiggle or the wind to move the leaves and that can reduce the sharpness of the image so you're trying to find the perfect shutter speed where at least some of your pictures are sharp but here's the thing you don't have to get all of your picture sharp you really only need one picture to be sharp and the r7 at least with faster shutter speeds is able to capture up to 30 frames per second so in a single second you could capture 30 frames and pick the very best sharpest one and then delete all the others so let's take advantage of that by using a slow shutter speed to improve the sharpness i'll show you how to select that continuous shutter now hit the menu button go to the camera tab page 7 and go to drive mode now select high speed continuous plus now when you take pictures you'll see a white box around the frame blinking really fast that indicates that you're taking pictures and the first few times you use silent shutter with 30 frames per second you're gonna end up with hundreds or thousands of pictures to go through it can be a lot so eventually over time you'll learn to kind of manage that and not overshoot now let's set the autofocus operation and auto focus points in the menu go to the af tab page one for af operation make sure that's set to servo servo means it's focusing continuously on potentially moving subjects while your bird might be perched using continuous autofocus is going to be more accurate because a bird that's on a branch is never actually perfectly still the entire tree moves in the wind and the slightest bit of missed focus can mean a blurry picture right under that is the af area select that and i use spot af spot af focuses on a very small part in the middle of the frame and you could adjust where it's focusing by touching the back of the screen or because your eye will probably be to the viewfinder you can use the thumb stick here to move it around but you don't have to move it around you can leave it dead in the center and if you want to recenter it just push the thumb stick here right in the middle and that will recenter it here's how we can avoid ever having to manually move that focusing point go into the menu one more time and on the af tab page one select subject tracking and then set that to on now whenever you half press the shutter to track a subject it will lock onto that subject and continue focusing on it even when you focus and recompose now if you see an animal put that focus point as close to the eye as possible half press the shutter and the camera will lock onto it now you can recompose so the subject isn't necessarily in the middle of the frame and the camera will stay locked onto it now our camera is set up perfectly for shooting perched birds but we don't want to have to go through that whole process every time we take pictures right so let's set custom settings to c2 on the mode dial to these settings i'm going to press the menu button i'm going to use the wrench tab page 6 and select custom shooting mode c1 through c and now i'm going to select register settings and choose custom shooting mode c2 and select okay now anytime you want to take pictures of perch birds i simply set the mode to c2 by selecting c2 we instantly restore all of those settings and we're ready to go now let's look at the cool stuff the big lenses that'll help you get better results if you got the 18 to 150 kit lens with your canon r7 that's a pretty good way to start wildlife photography zooming all the way in you won't be able to fill the frame with birds usually but you'll be able to get close enough that if you crop later you can get a pretty decent usable picture there is a few steps up that aren't too expensive though and if any of this gets too complicated you can always call the people at milford photo and they can help you pick the right gear for what you're trying to do i mean if you're in the connecticut area definitely go in and talk to the people there they're extremely helpful but if you're shopping online too these are people you can actually call and get to answer some questions for you so i'm going to show you a pair of lenses that are my favorite these are the absolutely amazing canon 600 millimeter f11 and 800 millimeter f11 and they're remarkably inexpensive for the results they produce but they're also extremely lightweight and very compact and portable they both have a trick up their sleeve and that when you stow them away they look like this but then you unlock this and pull it out before you shoot so you can see they actually become significantly longer now for your experience with camera gear you might have heard me say that they're f11 lenses in the dslr world cameras like the 7d the canon 90d they couldn't really autofocus with f11 and so you might think these don't work well but with the r7 or other mirrorless cameras like the r5 they autofocus fantastic now with the r7 in particular i'd probably mostly steer you towards this 600 f11 because the 800 f11 here is going to be very tight it's going to be very hard to find birds in the frame so you'll get great results out of it it's just especially for a beginner you're looking through such a narrow little hole that it can be really tough to line things up a few tips on using these especially with the 800 f11 the minimum focusing distance isn't that good you can't get that close to your subjects especially with small birds you might not be able to get close enough to focus on them and fill the frame there's an easy way to solve that and it's an extension tube you want to find a canon rf extension tube and put on 12 millimeters maybe 30 millimeters of extension and that will allow you to get close enough to actually fill the frame with the bird and if that doesn't make perfect sense to you again the people at milford photo can help you out using a slow shutter speed is also really key with either of these lenses because they're f11 they're not letting in a whole lot of light f11 is a pretty small aperture opening like that so the slower shutter speed is really going to pay off with good results use a slow shutter speed like 1 125th even with this 800 millimeter you can get it handheld and it will produce good results and just take lots of pictures take advantage of that 30 frames per second this is the canon 600 millimeter f4 and well it is huge and heavy this lens will run you about 13 000 and so as a result a lot of people rent them but i actually think they're a really good investment for serious photographers even if you're not a professional photographer you know you can pick one of these up from milford photo and they will retain most of their value for many many years so sometime in the future if you decide to move on to other gear you can sell it and get most of your money back they're the best you can possibly get now you might think it's only 600 millimeters that's the same as that other much less expensive lens that you showed me the difference isn't the focal length it's the aperture see this is an f4 lens while this is an f11 lens that means that this big boy gathers three stops more light or eight times more light than this one does that means you'll need eight times more light to get the same quality of images out of this and when you're taking pictures of birds which are often in the shade in the woods you don't usually have that option so you're going to produce much cleaner images with this but you'll also see the difference in the way the background is rendered this fast f4 lens will produce incredible bokeh that separate your subject from what is often a very cluttered wooded background that's why professionals and serious wildlife photographers will spend the extra money on something like this but don't feel like you need it from day one you can take years of developing your skill and that's going to make a way bigger difference in your photography you're going to do everything you can to avoid disturbing the birds both because that's nice and because you don't want to scare them away and miss your opportunity to get a picture so avoid direct eye contact so maybe turn your head and look at them in the periphery of your eye and wait until they're perched and you're ready to shoot to actually go in and take the picture quickly and silently you might also find that using a tripod helps you move less and thus disturb the wild animals lives now i find it easier to handhold especially with a nice small camera like the canon r7 but every time you see a bird you're going to end up picking your camera up like this and this big movement can startle the birds so if you are sort of camping out at a bird feeder for a while it might make sense to set it up on a tripod i will say that makes it much harder to find the bird in the frame because instead of just being able to move freely up and down and to the side you're now tethered to this tripod and you need to rotate yourself around the tripod anyway that's a trade-off that you might want to consider now let's go out to chelsea and find out how to take pictures of flying birds the first thing you need to do if you want to take pictures of flying birds is find birds and my suggestion is not to go looking for the most exciting bird but look for something plentiful and not afraid of humans so that might be pigeons gulls sparrows things that are common you might not think they're exciting but they're going to give you a lot of practice and they're going to train you how to find birds in the viewfinder and perfect your settings you can pick up this canon 100 to 500 at milford photo and i recommend this zoom because it makes it a lot easier when you're first learning how to find animals in the frame you'll notice when you're looking through the lens at 500 millimeters it's like trying to look through a telescope but if you zoom back to 100 you can get practice at finding things in the frame and gradually zoom in as you get more practice the next thing to consider once you find your location with animals is how to position yourself so you want your back to the sun because whatever you're pointing at is going to be illuminated by the sun you also want your back to the wind so this can be a little bit complicated birds like to take off into the wind think about it like this if you take off into the wind it's pushing your feathers back if you take off in the opposite direction of the wind it's blowing the feathers forward another more advanced tip for finding birds is to learn their behavior and their calls i can hear that there's a kingfisher over there but i also know that they're extremely shy birds if i go walking over to it it's going to fly away if i wanted to capture this bird today i'd have to go sit somewhere nearby where i didn't disturb it and wait until it got closer to me let's talk about settings because they're important with wildlife photography and they also can be a little bit confusing and complicated [Music] oh my god [Music] i can't find it but i can i know it's right there i thought they were shy but now i think they're just contrarian because i said he wouldn't come up to me and he does the first setting that i want to talk about is your image quality setting whether or not you're going to be shooting raw or jpeg and there are reasons my why you might want to shoot one or the other if you're going to be shooting in high contrast situations like birds flying against the light sky a dark bird specifically you'll want to shoot in raw because you'll be able to recover the shadows more and bring down the highlights better you don't have as much range for editing your photos in a jpeg file oh my god what the hell i'm just trying to pay attention to making this video and a kingfisher just dove closer to me than has ever happened in my entire life i'm shocked and appalled okay i'll keep going despite the heartbreak of a lifetime you might want to use jpeg if you want to maintain your high frame rate for a longer period of time because raw files are larger your camera will have a more difficult time processing them and so you'll start buffering sooner let me show you what i mean so you can hear it interrupting let's put it into jpeg mode and see what it sounds like it's not stopping oh so a little bit longer if you need to track action for a very long time consider using jpeg there are two settings that i like that i am not going to use with this camera right now and that is silent shooting mode because i'd have to use the electronic shutter and that would cause rolling shutter i don't want my pictures to be slanted when i'm panning and trying to chase a bird next let's talk about the mode i like to use shutter priority and that's the little tv right here and that allows you to choose the shutter speed and then the camera is going to figure out your iso and your aperture now i put it on auto iso so that the camera automatically chooses that and then the only thing i have to worry about is adjusting the shutter speed when i take pictures i typically like to start out at a faster shutter speed with flying animals so i'll start at 1 2 000 take some pictures and then check them and make sure there isn't motion blur if there's no motion blur but it's very noisy today there's not a lot of light then i turn my shutter speed down a little bit and i'll try 1 1600 and see if i can still freeze motion at that shutter speed you'll notice that different animals require different shutter speeds so a big slower bird like a heron or a canada goose i can typically get away with like even one one thousandth or one sixteen hundredth but if i'm shooting really small birds like swift swallows sparrows anything small and fast like that i wanna go one two thousandth or maybe even one twenty five hundredth to freeze the action one thing i wanna change is tony had you using this front shutter button but i want you to try programming these two buttons in the back to do back button autofocus and i'm going to assign them for two different scenarios that you're going to encounter in one scenario you'll have a bird flying across a very complex background like trees where your camera might not be able to latch onto it that single auto focus point will allow you to select exactly where you want it to auto focus in the frame the second scenario is going to be the second back button for autofocus and it's going to select a broader part of the frame in this scenario there will be a bird erratically flying on a plane background like the sky and you just want your camera to just lock on to anything for that we're going to program wide area af in the menus go to the custom camera settings tab page 3 select customize buttons scroll to the star button and select it select metering and af start and then press info for af area select whole area af and select the corresponding check box press menu to save your settings one thing you're going to notice when you hold up your camera is that when you go to focus it might be so out of focus that your camera has a hard time latching on and scenarios like that i want you to practice something called pre-focusing if you see a bird flying and you know approximately where it is first focus on something still near you like these grasses and then move your camera up to the subject and it will be more in focus making it easier for your camera to grab onto it at first it takes a little bit of work and practice but you get really good at calculating the distance of where the animal is and pre-focusing automatically i do it without even thinking now and one last really helpful setting and i love where canon has the setting this is the exposure compensation dial and i use this for white birds especially if you're looking at a bright scene with a white bird like an egret then you'll want to expose the picture for the subject so if it's a white egret you want to actually select the exposure compensation and bring it down a stop or two so that you're not blowing out the highlights on the egret and losing all of that information in the photo on your subject and it's easy enough for when you're done if you go back to a dark bird then it's easy to just reset it and the most important tip of all is to put in the hours in practice it's difficult to do it's difficult to get the bird in the frame it's difficult to figure out the right settings for every animal it just takes practice and if you enjoy it and just relax and accept that you're going gonna make some mistakes you're gonna get some blurry photos and then it's okay it's just a part of the process then you'll be better off just keep shooting keep taking pictures and keep practicing in the comments below tell us your favorite wildlife photography tips subscribe and enable notifications to see our upcoming photography tutorials and the next time you buy a camera gear support a small business milford photo by going to milfordphoto.com tony and chelsea whether you're shopping online or in their beautiful connecticut store the experts at milford photo can help you choose the perfect gear thanks for sponsoring us milford photo

Channel: Tony & Chelsea Northrup

Views: 163,112

Keywords: canon r7, wildlife photography, canon r7 lenses, wildife photography lenses, canon r7 review, bird photography, r7, eos r7, canon photography, canon eos r7, canon r7 buffer, canon r7 for wildlife photography, r7 perfomance, canon eos r7 review, canon r7 camera, bird photography gear, lenses for wildlife photography, canon mirrorless, canon eos r7 features, cameras for wildlife photography, eos r7 canon mirrorless camera, bird photography equipment

Id: f156nXkNp8s

Length: 20min 54sec (1254 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2022