R7 flight shots (1 Viewer)

[DJSikes]

I'm a retired newspaper columnist and I've always shot my own images for my outdoors column. After shooting a 7DMII for about five years, I'm on my second R7 and generally am happy with the quality of my images. The shutter crapped out (Err 30) on my first one. But here on the South Texas coast we have lots of sun and lots of white birds and black/white birds. I've used a variety of settings based on conditions. Any tips on how best to shoot great egrets and such on a sunny day? With any setting, I feel the need to set the exposure meter left of zero. The new FV setting tends to set the ISO too high.

 

[delia todd]

Hi DJSikes and a warm welcome to you from all the Staff and Moderators. Questions such as this are best answered in the relevant forum, so I've moved your post to the Canon camera section - no doubt someone will be along to help you.

I'm sure you will enjoy it here and I look forward to hearing about the birds you see around you..

 

[Mendobirder]

I'm a retired newspaper columnist and I've always shot my own images for my outdoors column. After shooting a 7DMII for about five years, I'm on my second R7 and generally am happy with the quality of my images. The shutter crapped out (Err 30) on my first one. But here on the South Texas coast we have lots of sun and lots of white birds and black/white birds. I've used a variety of settings based on conditions. Any tips on how best to shoot great egrets and such on a sunny day? With any setting, I feel the need to set the exposure meter left of zero. The new FV setting tends to set the ISO too high.

That's definitely a challenging situation but the R7 has settings you can adjust to help deal with it. I have mine set up so I can adjust exposure compensation with the front wheel while looking through the viewfinder. I have the view set to show what the image will look like, so it's immediately apparent if I need to adjust up or down, and I can see when it starts looking better. Also you can set a feature called "Highlight Optimizer" that will adjust exposure to reduce blown-out white areas (but it raises ISO a little).
I am usually in FV mode so I can adjust shutter speed and/or aperture as well. I leave ISO set at Auto, but you can set that if you want, or set a maximum allowable ISO.
Basically you can set up the camera so you can adjust anything as you are shooting, it just takes a lot of fiddling and practice to find what methods work for you. I've been using it for months now and am still learning how to use a lot of the features. The 7D was a much simpler camera.
With white birds in strong light I aim to underexpose, so there are few blown-out highlights, and then use Light EQ in ACDSee to adjust the resulting image. You can always increase the exposure in post-processing, but you can't get detail that isn't there, so underexposing is safer.