Setting up the Canon 2000D / T7
The Battery
The first thing you need to do is to fully charge your battery. Everybody wants to put the battery on and take pictures straight away, but you should really fully charge your battery first. By fully charging and then draining your battery as you use it, use extend the life of the battery. It only takes three or four hours. Then put the battery into the camera at the bottom of the camera. If you look at the battery then you see that there are electrical connectors on one end and there is a Canon logo on the battery, so to put the battery in properly, you have the connectors facing the camera and the logo facing you and it will go in. Like most modern batteries it will only go in one way so if it doesn’t go in very easily then the chances are you have got it in the wrong way around. When it goes in it will click with the clip at the bottom that keeps the battery in and when you want to take the battery out you just undo the clip and it bounces out
The Memory card
The second thing to do is to put in your memory card. Most professionals tend to use SanDisk memory cards because they will offer a lifetime guarantee for the card. It is worth bearing in mind, though, that they will not replace the content on the card. So if you’ve got a 16 gigabyte card and you’ve got 10 gigabytes of information videos and stills on it and then it becomes corrupted they will only replace the card. It really is essential to have somewhere where you can keep these pictures and videos permanently and safely and that usually means an external hard drive. Like the battery, the card has electrical conductors and it has the logo on the front and if you put it this way so that the logo faces you and it goes into the little slot above the battery then you can just slide it in.
Attaching the Lens
The next thing you need to do is put on the lens. The Canon 2000D or Rebel T7 is an APS-C camera which means it is a crop frame camera. There are two types of 35mm DSLR camera – full-frame or crop frame. The Canon EOS 2000D is a crop frame camera which means that the sensor is slightly smaller and cheaper – and so are the lenses. However, it can still take professional quality pictures and videos. This camera will take either EF-S or EF lenses but the recommended lens group for The Canon Rebel T7 is the EF-S group of lenses. When you change your lens, try to keep the camera tilted so that dust and dirt can’t drop into it. This is because the sensor inside of the camera is very sensitive and if it gets dust and dirt on it then it will damage the sensor and affect your pictures and your videos. It is also incredibly difficult to clean. So when you change lens try to do it quickly. On the side of the lens you will see a white square and if you look on the mount ring on the Canon T7, you will see a white dot. You just need to marry those up and turn the lens clockwise until you hear them click together. Once it has clicked it means it is fixed onto the camera and because it is an EF-S lens it is now able to communicate with the camera and so it will help with autofocus and auto exposure.
The Menus
When you want to go into the menus in the camera it is very important to make sure that you are on Manual Mode and the reason for that is that when you press menu button, you get all the menu tabs going across the top. If you were on a different semi-automatic or a completely automatic option then when you press the menu options you don’t get all the tabs going across the top. When you switch on your camera for the first time the screen will ask you to set the date the time zone and the language. The date and time information will be added to the metadata for each image that you shoot. You can change these details by using the cross keys and pressing set. Once you have set the time and date you can set the date format either the UK version or the US version. Oonce you have chosen the one you want you press that again and then you go on to daylight saving time and you go on to the time zone and region once everything is correct you can just press OK. If you want to go back at any time to change the time the date or the language you will find them in SETUP TAB 2.
Format your Memory Card
If you have a new card or a card that you’ve taken from a previous camera, it is really important to format it so that the card and the camera will work together. The way you do that is by pressing menu button and then go to SETUP TB 1 and here you can see the option to format the card. The important thing to remember here is when you format the card you will lose everything – even pictures and videos which you may have protected will be deleted. So you must know that everything that is on the card has either been copied or is something that you don’t want before you format your card. But if you are happy to do that then you click OK and it will format the card and prepare it for use by this camera.
The Dioptric Adjuster
The next thing to do is to look through the viewfinder and to see if what you can see through it looks sharp. If you don’t have 20/20 vision or if you wear glasses then even though the autofocus on the camera gets the picture absolutely sharp, when you are looking through the viewfinder it may look out-of-focus. By using that dioptric adjuster, which is right next to the viewfinder eyepiece, you can change the focus setting to match your eyesight. But remember that if you have the lens on autofocus the camera will automatically focus the image even if it doesn’t look sharp to you.
The Monitor Brightness
If you find the brightness of the LCD monitor either too bright or too dark then you can change that by going to SETUP TAB 2. Click on LCD brightness and choose to either make it brighter or darker. However do remember that the optimum setting for checking exposure on the live view screen is level 4.
The Auto Off Setting
There is nothing more irritating than the camera switching itself off when you are still trying to compose a picture. Whilst it helps to save the battery life it can interrupt your train of thought and slow you down. You can change the length of time it takes for the camera to turn off by going to SETUP TAB 1 and choosing AUTO POWER OFF. Here you see you will have a choice between 30 seconds and 15 minutes and you can disable it completely if you choose. I find that setting it to one minute is a good compromise.
The ISO Setting
The ISO setting manages the sensitivity of your sensor to the light coming into the camera. The Canon T7 will be on auto ISO setting to begin with which is very convenient in most cases. However you will want to control this at some point – not least because the ISO setting has a direct impact on the quality of your image. It is easy to control the ISO by using the Cross Keys. Press the top one labeled ISO and the ISO options will appear on the LCD screen. As a rule of thumb ISO 100 to 400 is suitable for sunny or bright light, 400 to 1600 for overcast or dusk and 1600 to 6400 for low-light and night-time shots.
File Size and Compression
The next thing to consider is the file size and compression ratio the Canon 2000D will shoot a 24 megapixel file and that is a very high quality image. The JPEG compression rate will decide the quality of the image when it’s stored on your memory card and also how many images you can save on your card. obviously it’s best to choose the best compression rate to make the choice go into SHOOTING TAB 1 and go to the top choice which is image quality. I prefer to choose large file size and best compression quality.
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