Canon 7Dii Focusing Tutorial Training | How to Focus | Overview  Review Tips Suggestions

So I've been shooting with the Canon 7D Mark II now since its release and I have to tell you it is phenomenal for three main reasons. Number one the coverage of the focusing squares is almost side to side in the viewfinder. I've never seen as much coverage on any other camera. The second reason is the 65 points are all cross type sensitive. This leads to greater precision and accuracy when you're shooting for sports. The third thing is the 10 frames per second. It is blazingly fast. It's like a machine gun. Combine those three things together and you have a phenomenal sport shooting camera. I've tested it out several times with both the Tamron 150 to 600 as well as the Canon 100 to 400. I preferred the 100 to 400 a little bit more but for sport shooting bang for your buck. I do believe this is the best sports camera in the world in terms of DSLR shooters. Very impressed with it. The focusing systems are hugely complex. In fact a whole page in the menu system is dedicated to different ways you can tweak it. We have three focusing modes, 65 focusing squares, and seven focus groups that I also refer to as clusters. Now if you are a pure beginner or an intermediate photographer who's just trying to learn how to focus the camera, I would recommend you go grab it and follow along. I want you to think of this in terms of the how, the when, and the where the camera is focusing. If you think about those three things this is going to be easy. Now the default focusing technique for most modern cameras is a half depression of the shutter button. So how do you focus? You push the shutter button halfway down. When you're ready to take a picture you push it down all the way. Pretty straightforward. Let's talk about the when, where the camera's auto focusing modes. There's three of them. We can cycle through them by pressing the second from the left button on top of our camera. It says drive AF and then rotating our primary selector wheel. The first one I want to talk about is one shot. This is great for portraits, landscapes, products, things that don't move because the camera is going to get focus lock. This is how we do it. Looking through the viewfinder I push the shutter button halfway down and hold it down and what you are going to notice is that we get a focus lock indicator in the bottom right hand part of the viewfinder. It's either an LCD icon or we can customize it to be a green circle which is typically more traditional. As long as we hold the shutter button halfway down the focusing systems will not change. This means we can move the camera around and we can take pictures. The focusing systems will not change on anything. Now this is useful for portraits because we can get a focus lock on our subject's eyes and we can move the camera or recompose it to make it more aesthetically pleasing. We'll be talking more about this in the portrait crash course but the I love about the 7D Mark II is you don't have to recompose that much at all because the focusing squares are everywhere. Next we have AI Servo. This is great for shooting fast moving subjects, sports, people running around, cars racing, birds in flight, children running around. This is a continuous focus which means as long as we push the shutter button halfway down the camera is going to be engaging its focusing systems. It is going to try to guesstimate the location of your subject from the time it goes from the halfway depression to when it actually takes the picture. So if you look through your viewfinder you will notice that with the halfway depression we do not get a focus lock indicator and in fact when we recompose the camera is going to focus wherever that square is. In this kind of a setup you cannot easily turn off the focusing systems for AI Servo. We'll talk a little bit more about that in just a minute. The third focusing mode is AI Focus. It is a hybrid between OneShot and AI Servo. It's great for shooting events. When I did a lot of wedding photography I would use it. It's awesome because the camera identifies whether the and in this case it would revert to OneShot or if it's moving in those cases it would go to AI Servo. Say for a bride walking down the aisle she's moving. Now she's stopped. Well now she's leaving the chapel. Now she's dancing. Now she's cutting a cake. Great for subjects that start and stop moving. So we've talked about the how. We've talked about the when. Now let's talk about the There are seven different groups of focusing squares that we can select. Now the default mechanism is to press the AF button top right hand corner of your camera. Press this first and then we're going to toggle this new rocker control on the back of the camera. So looking through the viewfinder I push the AF button on and then when I toggle this button we can see the different focusing clusters. Let's go through all of them real quick. Spot. Single square. We have our expanded which is five squares in a cross configuration. We have surround which is essentially nine squares. Zone which is 15 squares. Large zone in 65 zone. So let's take a look at the single focusing square. The one you're probably going to use the most. Now looking through the viewfinder you can notice that we have this square. If we want to change the position we push the AF selection button again and using the multi-controller we can move that square around. It's very intuitive. Any position you want on any of those 65 locations and when you're ready to take a picture halfway depression of the shutter button all the way down will take the shot. Now if you're ever focusing and you want to jump back to the center location simply push the joystick straight into the camera and it will pop right back. Now the cool thing about moving your focusing square is it works the same exact way for some of the larger clusters. Expanded. Surround. Zone. You can move each of those around through the viewfinder in the same way. But when would you want to use expanded surround or the zone modes where we have multiple focusing squares involved? It's a great question. The best time to use these is really for fast moving subjects that are very difficult to track. What we're doing is we're telling the camera to look in many focusing squares for an area of contrast. A bird in flight just about impossible to nail with a single focusing square. If you activate 9 or 15 well now we have a bigger group the camera can identify it then predict the focus and track it. You could take it. Typically that's when I would start using those focusing clusters. The single spot which is a micro square is going to be more useful when you have very shallow depths of field or maybe you're doing macro photography. Now the last two of these focusing clusters are really for pure beginners. We're surrendering control to the camera and we're telling it to focus on to the closest subject in either one of three areas or in the whole area. I never use them. Never would use them. Now there's actually a faster way to select your focusing squares and let's go ahead and set that up right now. You're going to press your Q button, go to custom controls, select your multi-controller and assign that to direct AF point selection. What this is going to allow you to do is to use the joystick directly. You no longer have to push this top right hand AF point button. Very handy. Another customization in the menu. Purple tab. Page number four. Third option there. Select AF area select mode. In here we can see all seven of our focusing clusters. I'm never going to use those last two so I'm going to uncheck them. Select okay and what this means is that when I cycle through my focusing clusters those last two options will never appear. When we go through the menu section later on in the video I'll be giving you some more suggestions and show you how to tweak your focusing systems. A lot to go into. One of the questions I often get from intermediate and advanced photographers is what about the times I don't want autofocus to be engaged. I just want to take the picture and push the shutter button down. The camera's going to refocus every time I get to that halfway depression. It's a great question. Probably the easiest most comprehensible way to do this is to simply turn your lens switch from AF to M. This has a time in place. I do it all the time in live view. I'll be showing you this later on when we talk about live view focusing. Sports photographers who are using AI servo have a very different problem. There are times when they need the fastest tracking servo mechanism and for a split second they need to turn it off. When they're using front button focusing this is a real problem and the way advanced sport shooters get around this is they go into their custom settings and they turn off autofocus for the front button. This is also referred to as back button focusing because we can still engage focusing with AF on. It gives complete control to the photographer when they want to determine whether the camera is focusing, push it down, or whether they don't. Just lift their thumb up. If you remember in the one shot mode when we push the shutter button halfway down the focusing systems lock and they don't change. Back button focusing allows photographers to be shooting on AI servo very fast and if for whatever reason their subject stops and they need to get a quick recomposition all they have to do is lift the thumb button up the focusing is now frozen. They can fire away. The camera will not refocus. It's a very handy technique if you do a lot of sports shooting. So I know we've talked about a lot of information here. We've talked about the three modes, the different clusters and squares, how to move them, we've talked about some of the customizations, some quick techniques for manual focusing, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you found this video helpful you're definitely going to want to check out my crash course on the Canon 7D Mark II. You spend a lot of money on a phenomenal camera let me show you how to use it to its full potential. You can order it from the following link.